BloggEd, a really excellent blog by a family who are all involved in higher education one way or the other, has been talking about William Pannapacker’s Chronicle of Higher Education column that advises potential doctoral students in the humanities to avoid going unless they’re independently wealthy, have a partner that can support them, are exceptionally well-connected, or need the credential for some specific professional objective.
Pannapacker (writing as Thomas Benton) has been offering this advice for a while, and as someone who is known for saying that the short answer to the question “Should I go to graduate school?” is “no”, I’m generally in agreement with his skepticism about the prospects of aspiring academics.
There are valid counterarguments. One of the responses that BloggEd got was that every year, there are brilliant students who beat the odds and land a great tenure track position. I have some former students who fit that description, and in quite a few of their cases, I put aside my skepticism and enthusiastically suggested they pursue a Ph.D in history or anthropology. The problem with this thought is that every year, there are brilliant students who don’t beat the odds, and it’s not because they’re not brilliant. Or they win a consolation prize, which is one of the myriad really crap jobs in academia, whether that’s a bushel of adjuncting gigs or a poorly compensated, benefits-minimal position with a 5/5 load in a college or university whose medium-term survival is shaky.
Pannapacker suggests that when we egg on a student even knowing how grim the prospects are, we should have some responsibility for the consequences. Hence his view that the better way to show that responsibility is to severely constrict the numbers of students pursuing humanities Ph.Ds in the first place. Other critics worried about the situation tend to come at it from the other side and argue that something has to be done to increase the number of tenure-track positions or otherwise address exploitative labor practices in higher education.
I frankly don’t see much hope on either score, and it’s one reason why I’m happy not to be directly training graduate students. Constriction isn’t going to happen as long as doctoral students provide cheap teaching labor and as long as the only productivity metric used by administrations is high numbers of students trained.
Better employment conditions across academia aren’t going to happen unless there’s a serious reconstruction of the internal economies of most academic institutions. Magical thinking isn’t going to get us anywhere: you’ve got to find the money. That means doing less of some major activities, doing things differently, some change in the basics as they stand. It probably also means smoothing out the distribution of “better employment”, getting rid of 1/2 teaching loads at R1 institutions so that there’s less of a need to turn to adjuncts and teaching assistants, for example. But at most universities, that’s not really where the money issues lie.
The other problem is that the customers pretty much accept whatever higher education as a whole does. Unless the paying public starts demanding better value for their money, there’s little incentive to change. Students and their families presently tolerate institutions that are poorly attentive to teaching either because they don’t see any affordable alternatives for the credentials they need or because it takes four years before a student may fully grasp how they’re being short-changed.
So what is plausibly within reach of a professor who wants to try and at least chip away at these issues? Let’s stick to the humanities, and I’ll sing some songs that I’ve warbled here before. Whether they’re teaching graduate or undergraduate students, humanists have to provide much more resonant explanations of their value to students and to society as a whole.
It’s ok if some of that value comes from activities as ineffable as exploring the meaning of human existence or reading great novels. That’s not enough by itself, but value doesn’t have to be relentlessly reduced to practical utility.
But some of what we do also has to be practical, and that shouldn’t be difficult to offer to students at any level. Knowing history, for example, should give any professional some insight into how human institutions react to change, how to work with social structures, and so on. Studying the humanities should make someone more articulate as a writer and speaker. Studying culture should give future culture-makers ideas and visions, as well as techniques.
What won’t do is the proposition that the value of the humanities is defined by the standards of its disciplines, so that analytic philosophy or scholarly history or critical theory recognized as excellent by and within disciplines is tautologically deemed of value because it meets disciplinary standards. By now it should be clear that what the disciplines value is not self-evidently valuable to any one else, even to colleagues in other disciplines. The only way it could have remained so is for expertise to retain a kind of unquestioned authority protected by elites in power. Humanists have spent forty years trying to tear that down, and digital media have successfully completed that project.
What also won’t do is pretending that the humanities have a research project which is on par with that of the sciences. Humanists have research that matters, and write works that are important. But it’s not a mirror image of what the sciences are doing: there should be less humanistic research, more carefully composed, and it should almost always have a wider and less specialized audience in mind.
It’s within the reach of any humanist to make better arguments for the larger value of humanistic knowledge to society, to argue that a society that doesn’t take an interest in philosophy, in history, in culture, in language, is coarse and brutal and will wither in the long run, lacking any sense of why any activity is done or ought to be done. It’s within the reach of any humanist to try harder to make their knowledge have a more supple practical usefulness to a wider range of students and readers rather than those who already conform most to the mindset of academic specialists.
The bigger structural issues are beyond most of us, and at the moment, I don’t see any comprehensively great ideas out there about which direction higher education as a whole ought to go. So change what we can change and hope that does some diffuse good for the larger problems.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for posting these thoughts. Perhaps my concerns are overly narrow, but one aspect of the system in which we all toil that I find especially troubling is the constantly increasing standards for hiring, and then tenure. So long as institutions demand ever-increasing levels of scholarly production for job- and tenure-candidates alike it seems that we in the humanities are cutting our own throats.
I do believe that there is some correlation between research activity and quality in the classroom, but I am firmly of the opinion that we have greatly exceeded that balance for most institutions. Writing for generalist audiences is discouraged, niche-argument articles and specialized monographs are prized, and all of this is produced only by stealing time away from the “burdens” of teaching and service. If I continue to ignore my students, and cede authority to administrators in the governing of my university, why should I be surprised when the budgetary axe falls more often on my head than others?
It is hard to make a case for the survival of your field, or even of the humanities in general, when every incentive you have forces you to engage in unrelenting “research” for the sake of your own individual employment. We in the humanities have exhausted ourselves so much that we don’t have the energy to drag ourselves out of the path of a steamroller we saw coming years ago.
I find Pannapecker’s suggestion of having a partner who can be relied on financially particularly interesting. One of my experiences in having friends who are academics is that academics tend to partner up, both because of inclination (you want to find someone as smart as you, for whatever values of “smart” you find important) and opportunity (budding academics spending much of their 20s in a fairly insular world where they don’t meet many non-academics). But two recently minted humanities PHDs on the job market together of course just experience an exponentially compounded version of the problems humanists have finding academic employment — to the extent that the insitution of the “partner hire” has come into existence just to meet this obvious need. If I were advising an academic on his or her love life, I’d tell them to go for someone with a portable career — a nurse, say.
I’m curious how all of these people who don’t get academic jobs (or good academic jobs) feel about their choice to go to graduate school: Do they regret it? Are they resentful of the forces that led them there? Do they look back on it as a worthwhile experience to have had before moving on to something else (even if they wish that something else were a tenure-track job in academia, and it’s not).
Partly I don’t have a good picture of the funding situation for graduate students in the humanities. (I would think it’s hard to look back on graduate school as a worthwhile experience if it puts you deeply in debt.) These discussions refer to them as “cheap labor,” so I assume they’re mostly paid (for teaching), but paid fairly little (whatever that means).
I guess a lot of that depends on just how pleasant or unpleasant the jobs that people get after graduate school are.
Re: David’s question. The horrible thing is that one says of people in that position – in what too aptly sounds like a euphemism for death – that they have “left the field.” Usually said at a conference in reply to “Do you know what X is doing?” So very often one doesn’t know how they feel – they have dropped out of sight, and the only people with whom one is ever in contact are the lucky ones.
David, I was a grad student in history ten years ago (before I, ahem, left the field), and my understanding is that things aren’t too different today: in my experience, humanities grad students generally don’t go into debt to pay for grad school, in the sense that people going to law school or medical school do, simply because there’s no expectations of a salary upon graduation that would pay those debts. Generally speaking, funding is available that will pay your tuition and provide you with a borderline-poverty-level income (I never made more than $15K a year when I was in school, and I lived in the pricey SF Bay Area); said funding is generally tied to teaching or other lower-level academic gruntwork. which is where the “cheap labor” comes in.
When I was in grad school, my roommate was also a grad student, but in chemistry, and the differences between our financial lives were interesting. When he was accepted into the chemistry PHD program, his department essentially committed to fund him for as long as it took for him to get his doctorate (within some reasonable but not particulary draconian limit). He knew up front how much he’d be making, and how often he’d have to teach. When I got in, I had my tuition waived for the first year and got a $10K fellowship to live on, but after that I had to apply on an annual or semester basis for new teaching jobs or sources of funding. In practice we both were living on about the same amount of cash (mine supplemented by working as a temp over semester breaks), but his academic life was much more secure because he didn’t have to scramble to piece together funding every few months. This was at UC Berkeley; not sure if things work the same elsewhere.
David, I just finished my PhD and am currently loading boxes in a warehouse (most of the adjunct positions in the humanities vanished in 2008-9, the Magical Year When Everything Changed). And I suspect that even if I completely fail in all job hunting (“leaving the field”), I still had an absolutely wonderful six years in grad school. I made good friends, I had fun, I learned things, and basically loved life. I also became a better person in general (nothing helps break you of being a full-of-yourself recent graduate with High Honors than being in a graduate seminar where you’re not even close to the smartest person in the room). Even things like racing to grade a hundred papers in two weeks were rewarding.
The only mildly frustrating thing? Finding out that the operative part of “Best research university in Canada” tends to be “in Canada.”
(And speaking of which, anyone here need an adjunct to teach on medieval or early modern Europe? Anyone?)
One thing I hear sometimes from folks I know who gave up on the academic job market is that they went to law school afterwards–but that was often people who had a spouse whose salary could help support a family and shoulder some of the debt load while the former academic did law classes. Some of the folks I know with language-oriented fields have moved into technical writing or translation work. This is part of what Pannapacker is observing about a humanities doctorate: it tends to be a lost opportunity cost because it doesn’t readily give you a leg up in any other profession besides academia, whereas a doctorate in economics or natural science has a lot of other potential high-value application. One of the things that comes up at humanities associations as a result is the question of whether there’s a way to manage doctoral education with an eye to a wider range of uses for that degree. But that tends to die a quiet death not just because many graduate professors are unprepared to teach to a wider vision of purpose, but because there isn’t much that a humanist can do better after six years that some people can’t do equally well without those six years. I can think of a few niches in business and government where people deal with (or ought to deal with) culture, but then you’d have to get the MLA, AHA, AAA and such out there willing to make the case for the superiority of their trained graduates for those posts and to teach them with an eye to that, which isn’t gonna happen.