Tag: "academia"

The Humanities Ph.D.

Kaustuv Basu discusses an effort at Stanford to reduce the time it takes students to receive a Ph.D. in German Studies to 4 years. Spearheaded by former MLA President Russell Berman, a member of the department, the initiative seeks to shorten the time it takes for students to complete a humanities Ph.D. Essentially arguing that decade-long Ph.D. adventures are no longer competitive or realistic in the modern university marketplace, these ideas would move students onto one of two tracks–prepare for an academic or a non-academic job.

How would this be accomplished? First, departments would fund students throughout the year, including in the summer, when research often is impossible for lack of money. Second, it would demand professors work more closely with their Ph.D. students to keep them on track and not let people drift for years, as happens to so many Ph.D. students (including myself for awhile). Many other changes to the structure of graduate programs would be needed as well.

A few specifics:

“In anthropological terms, academia is more of a shame culture than a guilt culture: you may feel some private guilt at letting a chapter go unread for two or three months, but a much stronger force would be the public shame you’d feel at coming unprepared to a meeting with two of your colleagues,” he said. “It’s also ultimately a labor-saving device for the faculty as well as the student, as the dissertation can proceed sooner to completion and with less wasted effort for all concerned….” With frequent meetings, the students doesn’t lose time on “unproductive lines of inquiry” or “tangential suggestions tossed out by a single adviser,” Damrosch said.

A two-hour oral exam, meetings each semester with “dissertation-stage” students and their committee members, and clearer feedback for students are part of the graduate program in the comparative literature department now. “We also introduced a monthly forum for students to share and discuss their own work; and an ambitious series of professional development talks, on everything from article submission to dissertation planning to alternative careers,” Damrosch said.

The University of Colorado, University of Minnesota, and Harvard are also considering changes, with Colorado already beginning to implement a short Ph.D. in German.

I find all of these ideas interesting, thought I can see good arguments both for and against. I do like the idea of Ph.D. programs shepherding their students more effectively, reducing unnecessary obstacles, and thinking harder about careers. On the other hand, as Rob Townsend of the American Historical Association notes in the article, can fully formed dissertations be completed this quickly? That’s a good question; in history at least, I do feel the overall quality of dissertations would suffer, largely because students would have to commit too quickly to a specific track rather than explore the sources and literature and see where they lead you. Others in various tweets and Facebook posts noted that this might only increase the already high number of humanities PhDs since a 4 year commitment will appeal to a lot more people. Also, would splitting students into multiple tracks create a second-class PhD? Plus, it’s not like most departments are very savvy on non-academic careers for their students to begin with; after all, everyone in those departments succeeded in achieving an academic job. How well will they steer students into employment?

Obviously there’s a lot of questions that need answering. But it’s hard not to welcome the rethinking of the humanities PhD. I’d certainly be interested to see what people have to say in comments here, given backgrounds, experience, etc.

On Languages and Academic Gatekeeping

So I was in a bit of a Twitter argument last night with Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the Modern Language Association (@rgfeal) over the issue of humanities Ph.D. students reaching fluency in non-English languages. The MLA is now advising that English Ph.D. programs require “advanced competence” in at least one non-English language. This would be a higher level than most English (and history) programs require, which is usually being able to pass a translation test.

There are many good reasons to learn languages. I hardly need to spell out the multiple reasons why. And maybe, theoretically, it makes sense for English Ph.D. students to learn another language. I am unconvinced by the arguments laid out by the MLA, but OK, it’s not my field. For the history student, I argue that the need to learn languages should depend entirely on what you are studying. If you are a historian of Latin America, you definitely need Spanish and/or Portuguese, but maybe instead an indigenous language. If you are a U.S. historian who works on immigration or transnational issues, than you need to learn the relevant languages for your research. There’s no question about this. But I also question whether there is a strong reason that a Ph.D. program should require languages of students who aren’t going to use them. Instead, maybe they should have alternative programs of equal rigor that train them in the skills they need to be a successful job candidate in the 21st century.

Let’s take me for an example. I am, by training, an environmental historian of the United States. I work on loggers in the Pacific Northwest. Theoretically, it would be useful for me to learn Norwegian or Swedish, although I have not run across a single newspaper or diary in those languages in my research that deals with logging in any major way (there are some newspapers in those languages for urban communities and maybe there are a few tidbits in there, although urban newspapers from the region/period in English have almost nothing on what I am looking for). But it doesn’t matter because my school didn’t offer those languages. I took a couple of years of Spanish courses instead. I could have tested out but instead I wanted to at least try to learn the language. I did, to a limited extent, although it was always my lowest priority as a graduate student so I didn’t spend as much time with it as I wanted. I’ve since done a good bit of traveling in Latin America so my Spanish has gotten better over time.

But while learning Spanish is objectively good, was it a valuable use of my time during my Ph.D. program? No.

To be clear, I am absolutely not taking the position that U.S. historians who don’t learn another language should have it easier. I am instead arguing that Ph.D. programs ought to train students in the skills they need to survive in their field and on the job market. As an environmental historian, I wish I had been trained in GIS, biology, and forestry, rather than Spanish. That would be more useful for me. For a legal historian, training in intro law courses might be very helpful. For a historian of technology in the second half of the twentieth century, computing languages could be of great value.

And as scholars change, they need to learn new tools. I am throwing around different ideas for my next project (including one on breweries, urban change, and city environments that everyone says I should do but we’ll see). One strong possibility is to expand my discussion of logging to look at how the timber industry invests in southeast Asia after 1898. If I do that project, I will probably have to gain a working knowledge of Tagalog. And that’s great. That is a tool I will need.

So what is the nature of my argument with Feal? Her argument is, effectively, that, and I quote, “Because anyone w a PhD in the humanities should know a lang other than own.” Not good enough. She goes on, after I told her it wasn’t a real reason, “How about: because every historian in the entire world outside UK and its former colonies knows a lang other than Eng?” Well, maybe. Again, doesn’t this depend on your field? For me, while there are active environmental historians in nations such as India and Finland, most of their publications that I know of are in English. That’s not to say that maybe I shouldn’t learn Tamil or Finnish, but I don’t think those aren’t the languages Feal wants me to know. It’s French and German and maybe Spanish or Italian.

Possibly the crux of the disagreement isn’t about languages at all, but about what humanities do. After one of my responses, Feal said, “Following that logic, history should be a tool for work. There goes 95% of yr UG stydents!!”

Well, yeah.

History should be a tool for work. It should be a tool for the work of many of us. And our students are in fact leaving the history major because they don’t see it as valuable for their future. Holding onto the belief that people should major in humanities because they will be smart has its own value, but it’s also not enough to compete in the reality of the 21st century university marketplace, particularly among students with working-class backgrounds. We need to show our students that history does have concrete value for their future, including BUT NOT ONLY, that it will make them more educated and interesting.

The MLA’s stance shows a surprising amount of blindness to the realities of the modern university in multiple ways. Large Ph.D. programs in English often serve as cheap labor forces to teach intro writing courses that no one really wants to teach. Universities are pushing programs to be more integrated in market forces, not less. The idea of the multilingual humanities Ph.D. goes back at least to the German model of the late 19th century (as a historian, this is where the modern field starts so maybe it is even earlier), an elitist time when academics came from the upper echelons of society. We are today in a time of a rapidly transforming university where learning other languages has zero value to university administrations.

This additional language requirement is a way to reduce Ph.D. numbers that will have the effect of limiting the ability of certain people who came out of very poor public schools (like myself) to achieve the higher degree without a severe detour in my studies. And for what point? Just because we should? That’s not much of a reason to me. Yes, learning languages opens the mind to a new way of thinking, but that’s a relatively unconvincing argument to the Ph.D. student who will never use the language professionally, who has limited years of university funding, and who is not independently wealthy and can therefore tack on the additional years to their program in order to become fluent in multiple languages. Maybe the MLA wants to reduce the number of Ph.D. students and maybe that is a good goal in a time when it is very hard to find a tenure-track job. But I have strong objections to going about it in a way that totally ignores the political and financial pressures on modern higher education and on top of that adds pointless barriers that will exacerbate the already significant class divide in academia.

Rather, Ph.D. programs need to work with students to provide them the tools they need to survive in the 21st century marketplace, whether Hmong or GIS, French or advanced statistics. How learning German does that for a U.S. historian whose closest connection to Germany is distant ancestors/beer is completely unknown to me.

I am sure many of you disagree with me, but I do hope you can provide an argument that moves past gatekeeping.

The Ph.D.

Larry Cebula offers an argument we hear frequently: that no one should go on for a Ph.D. because there aren’t jobs. Cebula covers the basic points: delayed income earnings that will never pay off, massive debt, living in horrible parts of the country, etc.

It’s hard to argue against him. Like Paul’s many excellent posts on the problems with law schools that you have read here over the last few months, which I am going to force any student of mine who wants a letter for law school to read in exchange for the letter, it is probably a very bad idea to go for a Ph.D. in history.

But I hesitate a bit. I am a graduate of the University of New Mexico. This is not an elite institution. It is marginally a top-50 Ph.D. program. It has strengths in certain areas (Latin America, U.S. West, U.S.-Mexico borderlands) but you wouldn’t want to go there for anything else. Theoretically, it should be really hard to get a job with a UNM Ph.D.

However, every single person I know who was a serious student at UNM and who wanted to go into academia has a job. Every single one. Without exception (at least on the U.S. side of things). Almost all of these are tenure-track jobs with a few newer scholars presently in very fine visiting positions. And I know people from several other less-than-elite institutions who are doing very well for themselves too (Arizona, UNLV, and Nebraska come to mind). Those who chose to do something else other than academia have also succeeded in their chosen fields. So what’s the deal with this?

Just thinking out loud here because I’m almost positive no one has done any studies on this, I am wondering if there are not certain Ph.D. programs that are preparing people for the realities of the modern market more effectively than more traditionally elite programs. You might need that Yale Ph.D. to get that job at Brown or Vassar, but that’s not a lot of jobs. And people coming out of New Mexico, who have been forced to engage in public history just to pay their way through the last years of graduate school (I did historic preservation work at Los Alamos National Laboratory), probably aren’t going to get that Brown job. But we are getting positions of quality, including myself.

I don’t mean this to brag on my Ph.D. program (well, maybe a little bit). I do indeed think it’s a terrible idea to go get the Ph.D. in 2011, wherever it may be. But I’m also wondering if there are not better ways to train historians (and presumably students in other disciplines) that will make them more competitive on the job market as it now stands. Because I don’t think just writing a great dissertation and having letters from big-name professors and a big fellowship is enough anymore. I think you need to have real teaching experience, be able to teach online, have experiences that will resonate with the average undergraduate at your directional state school. You need to be flexible, do a lot of different things, and prepare for a world outside the academy. You’ll probably need those skills because you probably aren’t getting that academic job.

On the other hand, those very skills that have prepared you to do something else may also separate you from the pack in a traditional academic job search, as they have with me three times, and as they did with other people I know. In my case, that meant blogging, creating historical markers, doing some consulting work, etc.

No conclusions here, just some random thoughts. I’m not saying that less elite programs are by and large placing students at a greater rate than more elite schools. That’s probably not the case. I will say though that any Ph.D. students needs to be as flexible and multifaceted as possible and I’m not sure that traditionally elite Ph.D. programs are prepared to train their students in this way.

…..To ground this in a bit more hard evidence, 4 UNM Ph.D’s received tenure-track jobs in last year’s job cycle. That is more than some much higher ranked departments have placed in the last 5 years combined.

…..Roger Whitson has a really intelligent reply to Cebula, with specific recommendations to both graduate students and departments on ways to improve job prospects outside of the collapsing tenure-track market.