Tips for (humanities?) grad students: IHE article

[Caracal]

From the pie chart for "Broad Sectors of Employment", almost half (47%) show up under "4-year TT", which sounds great! Another 13% show up under "4-year non TT".

We inferred tenure status from the individual's job title.

The non-tenure-track designation includes all non-tenure-track faculty, including visiting professors, adjuncts, and lecturers with multi-year contracts.

According to that, for every adjunct there are almost 4 TT. Does that fit with the narrative on the adjunct "problem"?

When your assumptions don't match with the evidence, you might want to rethink your assumptions rather than just assume the data is bad. You'll notice that they do include a section for not found. That category probably does include some short term adjuncts, but that's only 7 percent of the total so it isn't going to change the basic picture.

Part of the problem is that you're assuming that because lots of humanities classes are taught by adjuncts, that must mean that most humanities graduates are becoming long term adjuncts. However, that doesn't need to be the case. Adjuncts teach more classes than tenure track faculty. The other thing happening is that most adjuncts don't adjunct forever.

It is true that the overall picture has gotten worse over time. In 2004-05, the percentage of graduates in Tenure track jobs is 52. In 2011-13 its 40. That reflects some deterioration of the market, although you have to be a bit careful. Visiting positions have become more and more common and some people jump around between visiting positions for a number of years. Not all of those people get tenure track jobs, but a decent number of them do.

However, you'll also notice that the number of people in non tenure track jobs drops off more sharply than the tenure track jobs the further back you go. Over time, people who can't get full time jobs tend to do something else.

Of course, non-tenure track isn't the same as adjunct. It includes visitors, as well as people in renewable contract positions.

[mleok]

But in the humanities, co-authoring with your advisor comes across as co-optation.

There's no discrete dataset that's the result of a defined set of experiments with a specified methodology that can be pointed to as, "they did this, I did that."

And in fact, those circumstances in which the co-authoring happens that I know of have resulted in the advisor stealing the paper and publishing it under their own name.

There's no lab system with payments and task descriptions to tie the student to the tasks they did, so there's no recourse (past the little slips with questions that Byatt describes in "Possession") to prove active involvement in the project, and the student is ripped off.

Naming them is seen as a courtesy, if indulged in at all.

That can and has changed in some circumstances, of course, but there are large swaths of humanities work where it just can't be done the same way the sciences do it. (And I've lived and worked on both sides of that mountain).

M.

I'm just trying to understand what incentives, if any, exist for humanities professors to do an adequate job at mentoring their Ph.D. students, particularly if these students are unlikely to become tenure-track faculty at other research universities.

The incentives are intrinsic, not extrinsic.

That's the basis of a number of the misunderstood differences under discussion here.

M.

To me, that helps explain why humanities Ph.D.s take so long to complete, because neither the department nor the advisor are truly invested in the success of their students. Relying on the kindness of advisors is at best unreliable, and does not comport with the number of high volume of humanities Ph.D.s that are produced.

[Caracal]

To me, that helps explain why humanities Ph.D.s take so long to complete, because neither the department nor the advisor are truly invested in the success of their students. Relying on the kindness of advisors is at best unreliable, and does not comport with the number of high volume of humanities Ph.D.s that are produced.

Departments are quite invested in the success of students. Placements of students are a big part of what makes a grad program highly ranked. Advisors have all sorts of incentives. There's professional prestige attached to having students go on to get jobs, and progress in the profession. Most of the people who get R1 jobs care about that kind of thing. There are also less noble reasons to want grad students to finish more quickly. A humanities grad student is a lot of work. I don't think many advisors want to have their students write endless drafts they have to edit for years on end.

If humanities grad students take longer to finish than in STEM, it may partly just be about the different nature of the work. I don't really know too much about dissertations in science, but a humanities dissertation is a several hundred page thing you have to write after you do a ton of research. There's a lot of room to get stuck.

I bet the major factor, however, is the job market. It is harder and harder to get a job without a degree in hand. When people get jobs while ABD contingent on finishing it tends to focus both the student and the advisor on getting the dissertation finished. If you don't get a job, the incentives can get muddled. Often, it is possible to get extra funding for a year or two through various sources, but only if you're still a student. If there's still a lot of work to do on the dissertation and you don't have a job that year anyway, what's the incentive to finish quickly?

[apl68]

But in the humanities, co-authoring with your advisor comes across as co-optation.

There's no discrete dataset that's the result of a defined set of experiments with a specified methodology that can be pointed to as, "they did this, I did that."

And in fact, those circumstances in which the co-authoring happens that I know of have resulted in the advisor stealing the paper and publishing it under their own name.

There's no lab system with payments and task descriptions to tie the student to the tasks they did, so there's no recourse (past the little slips with questions that Byatt describes in "Possession") to prove active involvement in the project, and the student is ripped off.

Naming them is seen as a courtesy, if indulged in at all.

That can and has changed in some circumstances, of course, but there are large swaths of humanities work where it just can't be done the same way the sciences do it. (And I've lived and worked on both sides of that mountain).

M.

I'm just trying to understand what incentives, if any, exist for humanities professors to do an adequate job at mentoring their Ph.D. students, particularly if these students are unlikely to become tenure-track faculty at other research universities.

The incentives are intrinsic, not extrinsic.

That's the basis of a number of the misunderstood differences under discussion here.

M.

To me, that helps explain why humanities Ph.D.s take so long to complete, because neither the department nor the advisor are truly invested in the success of their students. Relying on the kindness of advisors is at best unreliable, and does not comport with the number of high volume of humanities Ph.D.s that are produced.

Can't say as I got the impression that my department was all that invested in the success of its students when I was one.  In principle yes, but in practice they had no problem with stringing you along for year after year.  If I hadn't finally given up on my PhD, I might still be there, ABD!

[apl68]

If humanities grad students take longer to finish than in STEM, it may partly just be about the different nature of the work. I don't really know too much about dissertations in science, but a humanities dissertation is a several hundred page thing you have to write after you do a ton of research. There's a lot of room to get stuck.

There's also, as noted above already, often such a ludicrous amount of literature in the field that has to be mastered.  It's hard to exaggerate just how much reading there is.  You have to learn to be a speed reader.  Plus serving as a TA to earn your keep if you're in a funded position.  One of my colleagues in our history PhD program was married to a medical student.  She used to speak wistfully of how much free time med students had.

[Parasaurolophus]

If humanities grad students take longer to finish than in STEM, it may partly just be about the different nature of the work. I don't really know too much about dissertations in science, but a humanities dissertation is a several hundred page thing you have to write after you do a ton of research. There's a lot of room to get stuck.

There's also, as noted above already, often such a ludicrous amount of literature in the field that has to be mastered.  It's hard to exaggerate just how much reading there is.  You have to learn to be a speed reader.  Plus serving as a TA to earn your keep if you're in a funded position.  One of my colleagues in our history PhD program was married to a medical student.  She used to speak wistfully of how much free time med students had.

Don't forget the time involved in learning one or more new lresearch anguages. (Obviously not the case for every humanities field or subfield, but it's true of lots!)

[marshwiggle]

According to that, for every adjunct there are almost 4 TT. Does that fit with the narrative on the adjunct "problem"?

Part of the problem is that you're assuming that because lots of humanities classes are taught by adjuncts, that must mean that most humanities graduates are becoming long term adjuncts. However, that doesn't need to be the case. Adjuncts teach more classes than tenure track faculty. The other thing happening is that most adjuncts don't adjunct forever.

But the point is, TT people are teaching a full load. Adjuncts are likely teaching much *less than a full load. So if there are 4 TT for every adjunct, then the proportion of courses taught by adjuncts should be tiny. That's NOT what always gets reported, so something is fishy. By that graph, the "adjunct army" is a myth.

(*From the stats that were presented here (or on the old fora) sometime ago, the proportion of freeway fliers teaching a bunch of courses at multiple institutions is small. Most adjuncts are teaching a course or two, i.e. significantly less than a full-time load. Even if they were teaching a full-time load, if there are 4x as many FT faculty, then less than 25% of courses would be taught by adjuncts.)

[Parasaurolophus]

A course or two a semester is a full load at most research institutions.

[mleok]

A course or two a semester is a full load at most research institutions.

And more importantly, teaching is only about 40% of the job expectation of a professor at a research university.

[quasihumanist]

A course or two a semester is a full load at most research institutions.

And more importantly, teaching is only about 40% of the job expectation of a professor at a research university.

And that's why research universities aren't hiring any professors, because they can't afford to subsidize all that research activity.

[Caracal]

According to that, for every adjunct there are almost 4 TT. Does that fit with the narrative on the adjunct "problem"?

Part of the problem is that you're assuming that because lots of humanities classes are taught by adjuncts, that must mean that most humanities graduates are becoming long term adjuncts. However, that doesn't need to be the case. Adjuncts teach more classes than tenure track faculty. The other thing happening is that most adjuncts don't adjunct forever.

But the point is, TT people are teaching a full load. Adjuncts are likely teaching much *less than a full load. So if there are 4 TT for every adjunct, then the proportion of courses taught by adjuncts should be tiny. That's NOT what always gets reported, so something is fishy. By that graph, the "adjunct army" is a myth.

(*From the stats that were presented here (or on the old fora) sometime ago, the proportion of freeway fliers teaching a bunch of courses at multiple institutions is small. Most adjuncts are teaching a course or two, i.e. significantly less than a full-time load. Even if they were teaching a full-time load, if there are 4x as many FT faculty, then less than 25% of courses would be taught by adjuncts.)

Those numbers vary widely by speciality and institution and the data isn't great to begin with because institutions don't share much info on adjuncts. You're also assuming that all adjuncts have doctorates, which is far from the case. Once you get out of big coastal cities, there aren't humanities PHDs under every rock. Exactly what's your theory? That the AHA did a fraudulent study? And your evidence is that it doesn't match your vague ideas about a field you don't know anything about?

[Wahoo Redux]

From where I stood we worked a lot harder in graduate school than people in a great many other disciplines.

One polly-sci fella was paid exactly the same stipend I was for holding office hours, answering questions if an undergrad happened in, and occasionally popping a grade on a bluebook test. I designed curriculum, graded papers with extensive comments (for as many as 40 or sometimes 50 students), held office hours, answered emails, dealt with my student's scholastic problems, and did all my own work, including writing an original dissertation. I also worked on the student newspaper then for the university PR department, taught at the community college, and sat on a hiring committee during this time. 

One physics fella taught a single intro class, thought it was too much work and hated talking to students, so he quit mid-semester and got a research stipend.  He also dated and dumped the girl I wanted to date. 

I had a neighbor, really nice fella, who was paid by Firestone to design a better tire-tread.  He got a PhD for that.

Me, I wrote a book to get my PhD, bottom to top.  My advisor was strictly awesome and we are still friends and exchange scholarship.  Certainly not every doctoral candidate was as lucky as I in this respect----but I wrote for the university PR department; I interviewed enough people to know that sometimes grad students more or less copied their advisors or spent all their time as their advisors' flunkies.  We really don't have that option, and that's one of the reasons it takes us so long----we actually have to do the work.

Always there's that Dunning-Kruger effect, right?

[Caracal]

There's also, as noted above already, often such a ludicrous amount of literature in the field that has to be mastered.  It's hard to exaggerate just how much reading there is.  You have to learn to be a speed reader. 
[/quote]

My preferred method of speed reading was to not read that much of the book...But yes, it is a lot.

[mamselle]

And, in the humanities....things...happen.

Like the sort-of specialized fellow (specific branch of music and dance) who was supposed to be my advisor, and got a serious illness in the beginning of my second year. I'd been made his TA, and ended up teaching one complete class, and accompanying (i.e., playing for) another, after the first two weeks.

I also had to take four courses of my own, because the previous year he'd approved me for fewer course hours than my stipend was supposed to have covered and I had to make them up the next year (I figured it out, no-one else did, late in the first year, and it was it re-set because it wasn't my error).

He was still sick the next semester, so I had to run another class and do still more makeup work of my own, again because of his errors the previous year. It finally came down to my taking two courses as planned incompletes and finishing them the next year, because it was just impossible to do it all.

In addition, due to his illness, he hadn't read any of the proto-thesis work I'd written, and was rude about issues related to differences in our teaching styles. (I'd been teaching and performing music professionally since high school, or I couldn't have stood in for him to begin with.) He didn't like the more organized way I ran class; it showed up his free-form, unprepared habits. Most of the students didn't want him back....I'm not making any of this up...and he didn't want to lose the position, so I had to both do his work--I was not paid for the extra time--and take grief from him about it, or lose my stipend).

I got a different advisor the next year, obviously, but it was never clear sailing, and all the shenanigans added years to my own time to completion.

Oh, the tales we could tell....
 
M.

[Wahoo Redux]

Once you get out of big coastal cities, there aren't humanities PHDs under every rock. Exactly what's your theory?

This is exactly our predicament.  Marshy cannot get his head about this somehow.

That the AHA did a fraudulent study? And your evidence is that it doesn't match your vague ideas about a field you don't know anything about?

Has never stopped him before.