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Fixing the Humanities Ph.D.
An anonymous reader writes "A new report from the Modern Language Association focuses on the decline of Ph.D. programs in the humanities over the past several years. "These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you're unlikely to find a tenure-track job." According to the report, 40% of new Ph.D.s won't be able to find tenure-track jobs, and many of the rest won't manage to receive tenure at all. "Different people will tell you different stories about where all the jobs went. Some critics think that the humanities have gotten too weird—that undergrads, turned off by an overly theoretical approach, don't want to participate anymore, and that teaching opportunities have disappeared as a result. ... Others point to the corporatization of universities, which are increasingly inclined to hire part-time, 'adjunct' professors, rather than full-time, tenure-track ones, to teach undergrads. Adjuncts are cheaper; perhaps more importantly, they are easier to hire." The MLA doesn't want to reduce enrollments, but they think the grad school programs should be quicker to complete and dissertations should be shorter and less complex."
... Everyone goes to work and says, "What we need is someone who's spent the last 15 years studying Humanities. That will make filing these invoices sooooo much easier."
So 60% of phds gets a tenure position and they still complain? In Medical Biology less than 3% gets tenure
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
I think what they are saying is - this won't stop being hyper-competitive. Most will not end up getting that tenured professorship. But a reasonable period in academia of 4 or 5 years for a PhD should be enough to differentiate candidates and put them on that track or not, instead of leading people along for 7+ years before flushing them. Put the rest out of their misery sooner so they can go do whatever they are going to end up doing in industry.
They're more likely to your boss (or, more likely given your blinkered attitude, governing the welfare system you depend on) than waiting tables.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
You are exactly right.
There was a sad story on the radio the other day. A nice lady with a PHD in Art History was living in her car because she was broke and unemployed.
What struck me was how very _betrayed_ she felt. Here she had studied hard, gotten good grades, and had achieved the highest academic degree possible and yet the job she expected wasn't forthcoming. All her life she was told "you need a degree to get a good job" and she somehow interpreted that to mean that if she got a degree she would get a job. Her whole attitude was that she was all but promised a job, and that it was the university's fault that this job wasn't there, and that she should have been told by the university that there were no jobs in her chosen field "before they took her money".
She wanted to work as a museum curator, cataloging and managing the museums art collection. When asked how many such jobs existed, she was taken aback, as if she had never thought about it and then said maybe 10 or 20 in the entire province.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
It's certainly the best way to learn certain obscure languages. As a linguist working with several minority languages of Russia and languages of Central Asia, I am acquainted with hobbyists who took up an interest in one or another of these, and none was able to reach real proficiency without going through a university course in it at some point. Speaking a language to a degree sufficient for employment requires more than just buying a Teach Yourself book (which doesn't even exist for the world's smaller languages) or chatting on Skype with an untrained native speaker. It requires guidance from a trained instructor, and access to a wide array of publications (which usually aren't online and aren't even in English but in Russia or another scholarly lingua franca you must learn first) which give training both in grammar and in pragmatics/cultural background, and some sort of certification of skills.
Universities are ideal places for teaching the languages useful to the areal studies needs of a country's military or government. Even the US military's own language school (Defense Language Institute, where I learned Chinese many years ago) came to be structured according to a quasi-university model.