Is It Time To Close All But The Top Humanities Ph.D. Programs?

[dismalist]

iii is achievable only  by coordination, which is illegal, and for good reason.

Many if not most (or even all, I am not sure) English graduate programs have greatly reduced their intakes.

We are still producing more MAs and PhDs than we can accommodate professionally.

If each separately finds it in their own interests to reduce admissions, that's both fine and legal.

And it's not the "we" that can or cannot accommodate, it's the "they, themselves". Otherwise, we're back to the guilds.This may well be what some or even many want. Lovely, but only if one is a guild member.

[mamselle]

But we are literary and rhetorical scholars and creative writers.  I see nothing wrong with writing a grant for a social services entity or whatever, but it is really not what the PhD in English is for.

Um, the New York Public library has Writers' Rooms and access to all kinds of materials that many different English scholars and writers (fiction and non-fiction) use every year. To say nothing of the added resources in the nearby libraries in, say Columbia, Fordham, NYU, and all the museums (whose archives have early English books and manuscripts). You'd have to stay a week or two, minimum, to get all the notes you'd need; even if you only stay in the Amsterdam Ave. hostel and cook there, as I have, it costs money.

A friend working on writers in the Hundred Years' War, who came from France, ended up in England for a long time, and came back home, had to travel all over for material on her subject's English works. They do Chaucer studies as well, which mean visiting Oxford, Cambridge, and the BL, among others. They've had three or four trips that I know of, maybe more I don't. Even piggybacked with a night or two's coverage for giving a talk here and there, those cost money.

One person I know of is studying modern English translations of poetry, dance and music texts in colonial Spanish works (some of which also have Latin marginalia) and has gone to Peru, Mexico City, Colombia, and Seville. The thing has ballooned so, she's planning a book project. Obviously, those can't be done stateside, and require both dedicated laptops and video playback equipment, since those differ, and lodging, and transportation, and food, and....money.

All of those are grant-funded projects and all are English literature studies.

M.

[Wahoo Redux]

Sure, mamselle, lots of scholars make use of grant money----and I wish I knew a lot more about the practice. 

We do not need the PhD or maybe even want one to be a corporate grant writer, however.

[marshwiggle]

The big question is "by whom"?

• Should students research the job market before entering a PhD program to learn their prospects as graduates?
• Should faculty research the job market to give students realistic advice before they enter a PhD program to understand their prospects as graduates?
• Should institutions reduce their intake to match demand for graduates?
• Should governments and/or accrediting agencies reduce the number of programs to match demand for graduates?

While these are not mutually exclusive, human nature will make all of those groups point to one or more of the others and say "It's their problem."

Marshy, we go over and over this.  Your first two bullet points are reinventing the wheel.  Humanities  faculty have been doing this for decades.  We've had numerous discussions about those very things.

My point in making that list was that each of those stakeholders has a long-term interest in reducing the oversupply, but a short-term interest in maintaining the status quo. That's the problem.

Graduate students are often too starry-eyed and excited to be discouraged from pursuing the PhD.

The second two bullet points are what I thought was encompassed within the original question.

Even if there was someone with the authority to close a bunch of programs, (and as dismalist indicates, that's a bit scary since people in authority have no crystal balls and so often make decisions with very bad long-term outcomes), the process of figuring out how many to keep would be extremely difficult. (Do some programs only produce future faculty for lower-tier schools without their own grad programs? Or are some proportion of PhDs in each school required to be produced explicitly for that purpose?)

[mamselle]

Just to be clear/sure:

Are you both in the same country?

This could be a source of some of the static between you.

Maybe this has been asked and answered before, but I forget, if so.

Apologies.

M. 

[Wahoo Redux]

We're getting a bit lost in pedantics here.

The question is a hypothetical.

[mamselle]

No, different countries support education differently, and the costs and requirements for raising them press out differently as a result.

Those things are different enough to cause people to talk past each other because of the unexplored results of such assumptions.

So the answer could indeed--but may also not--be instrumental in sorting out some differences that seem to keep cropping up.

Where possible, I find it useful to know the stage I'm dancing on.

Discussions are the same thing.

M.

[Ruralguy]

I agree with Dismalist in the sense that if a program has the funding to stay open, then there's no compelling reason to close down.

But then that leads to its own set of questions. Why are all of these departments creating so many graduate students and getting the funding to do so if only some of the graduates are getting academic jobs, assuming that's a primary goal and metric? Are these programs for which student external achievement falls well below that of their advisers?

[downer]

Morality time!

Suppose, hypothetically, that a program attracted a good number of students, who pay out of their own pockets, and typically incur $60,000 debt to be part of it. Most if not all of these students hope that the program will improve their employment prospects considerably. Someone internal to the university looks at the data and finds that the program provides zero benefit in employabiity to the population who enroll compared with peers who do not go into the program but just go straight to the workplace.

Policy options:
1. Inform all candidates that the program provides no employability benefit, and see what happens.
2. Keep the data under wraps and keep the program open.
3. Close down the program immediately.
4. Change the program in the hope that it will start doing better with delivering on its promises.

Should faculty with a conscience insist that candidates be informed about the data before they apply to the program, try to close down the program, or get the program put on hiatus until it is improved? Should they refuse to teach in the program until they are sure it delivers a real benefit? Should they resign their positions and move to a more ethical university?

[dismalist]

Morality time!

Suppose, hypothetically, that a program attracted a good number of students, who pay out of their own pockets, and typically incur $60,000 debt to be part of it. Most if not all of these students hope that the program will improve their employment prospects considerably. Someone internal to the university looks at the data and finds that the program provides zero benefit in employabiity to the population who enroll compared with peers who do not go into the program but just go straight to the workplace.

Policy options:
1. Inform all candidates that the program provides no employability benefit, and see what happens.
2. Keep the data under wraps and keep the program open.
3. Close down the program immediately.
4. Change the program in the hope that it will start doing better with delivering on its promises.

Should faculty with a conscience insist that candidates be informed about the data before they apply to the program, try to close down the program, or get the program put on hiatus until it is improved? Should they refuse to teach in the program until they are sure it delivers a real benefit? Should they resign their positions and move to a more ethical university?

Good questions, downer!

The data cannot be kept under wraps. Bad news spreads.

Now if an individual program thinks it has better outcomes, in whatever dimensions, than other programs, it has an incentive to publicize the info. Then, if programs don't publicize outcome data, one can infer that they're below par!

[There is one B-school I know off that had a policy of not divulging students' grades, because many students wanted this. Well, the best students divulged their grades! Everyone else had to, for potential employers asked. The policy fell apart. (Cartels tend to be unstable.)]

All this suggests to me that there is no particular problem with the humanities. There is only the typical human problem: I want more! :-)

[Hibush]

Should faculty with a conscience insist that candidates be informed about the data before they apply to the program, try to close down the program, or get the program put on hiatus until it is improved? Should they refuse to teach in the program until they are sure it delivers a real benefit? Should they resign their positions and move to a more ethical university?

In a program like that, the faculty don't have a concience. They are not trying to run a graduate program, and don't care. If they did, their outcomes would be different.

In the US, we are constantly presented with opportunities to spend our money on ineffective things, or overspend for necessities. Fakes abound. Doing a little diligence before a major outlay of time and money is necessary in this culture. Not everyone is diligent, which is why exploitation is so lucrative. This model applies to graduate school as well.

There are some of the best programs in the world, there are lipsticked pigs, there are pyramid schemes and all the rest. Each sector has to deal with the reality that the others exist in a way that makes sense for them. For the good of society, it is possible to legislate or regulate so that some are less common. But that is not going to be a big factor in grad school.

[RatGuy]

I think we need to interrogate the assumption that there are very few humanities PhDs landing academic jobs. I think the reality is that there are few tenure-track jobs posted each year, but there are a glut of full-time non-TT positions filled. It's not like the only two choices are endowed chair and lowly adjunct. Indeed, even the "cancelled searches" thread points to a demand for PhDs in such positions, and there are plenty of squirrely reasons why a candidate may not get hired. It's not simply "there are far too many applicants / unemployed PhDs."

Yes, you're going to have that guy whose sole goal is to land a cushy professorship so he can have a nice office and bed coeds, and he'll bemoan the lack of jobs available. Left unsaid is that's the only type of job he'll deem acceptable.

I received my PhD in an English-adjacent field from a lower-tier regional university. The program's reputation rested on a long-dead literary celebrity, my cohort (of 9) wasn't really doing cutting-edge research. And of those nine, eight of us landed jobs with degree in hand. Within three years, all of us had full-time (non-visiting) jobs at universities. In the last ten years, that department advertises something around 85% placement rate for faculty and alt-ac jobs. And that's some podunk program as far as the other major universities in the area see it.

So for those graduate faculty on this thread who are lamenting that "very few grad students get hired," what's your department's placement rate?

[Wahoo Redux]

Colleges are closing and departments are shrinking, however.  We may have had placement rates in the past but that is probably not a good predictor of the future.

[kaysixteen]

What is your evidence that there are significant amounts of faculty (non adjunct) positions that these humanities PhDs are getting that are non-advertised?   Who's keeping track of such positions?   Alt-ac jobs do not count.

[marshwiggle]

No, different countries support education differently, and the costs and requirements for raising them press out differently as a result.

Those things are different enough to cause people to talk past each other because of the unexplored results of such assumptions.

So the answer could indeed--but may also not--be instrumental in sorting out some differences that seem to keep cropping up.

Where possible, I find it useful to know the stage I'm dancing on.

Discussions are the same thing.

M.