The Humanities in the University

Can I afford a Humanities PhD?

Recently I've been talking on the Internet with a bunch of not-very-gruntled graduate students, young faculty, and ex-graduate students (some of the sites are listed below). These conversations helped confirm my most recent decision not to go to graduate school, and also helped me with the mission statement for my schismatic website.

I have also come up with some tolerably pompous observations about "Humanities in the Contemporary University" which I am only too glad to share. (An earlier version of some of these same ideas can be seen here: Forget the B.A.)

A lot of people go to graduate school, above all in the humanities, who probably shouldn't. There aren't enough academic jobs for all the PhD's produced, and there really aren't fall-back jobs either. (For example, PhD's can seldom teach high school without additional training). The humanities is hardly a "practical" career goal for anyone, even for the successes, since for almost everyone the same effort would pay off better in some other career track (e.g. law). But for the non-successes (who are often extremely talented and capable people), a PhD is, from a purely practical point of view, an enormous waste of money and effort.¹

Unfortunately, the universities are heavily dependent on the stupidity of graduate students. In order to keep the research coming and to maintain the tenured faculty in the life to which they have become accustomed, it is necessary to have a large pool of low-paid graduate students and adjuncts to do the actual teaching. In a stagnant market, the overproduction of PhD's has made it possible to create a two-tier job structure manned increasingly by a new category of untenured faculty, who have no job security and whose pay and benefits are those of semi-skilled labor. These adjuncts are hardly in a position to do any research and mostly just teach.

It's highly unlikely that anyone ever went to grad school with the idea in mind of becoming an adjunct, and a fair proportion of PhD's aren't even able to get adjunct jobs. So it seems that either the universities are committing a kind of fraud, or else a lot of grad students are behaving like suckers. Grad school tends to be a bad deal.²

(I should back up a little here. My own doubts about graduate school come in large part from the way teaching and research are carried on there -- I develop this criticism more fully in the aforesaid mission statement. The grad-school worst case is the student who endures a lot of drudgery doing things he or she is not interested in, lives cheaply, goes into debt, and still doesn't have a career. For those who had enjoyed their time in graduate school, the impracticality of the program would not be such a terrible blow; though even they usually feel a bit miffed to find themselves thirty years old, in debt, and unemployed.)

The economics of graduate education are messy. Education is paid for by the government, the parents, various foundations and endowments, by the students themselves (in part by their low-paid labor), and by the undergraduate students and their funders. The beneficiaries are the faculty, the researchers, and the students themselves. One of the peculiarities of humanities graduate schools is that their main products are of interest only to themselves: new humanities research and new PhD's.

But the new PhD's, while potential beneficiaries of the PhD monopoly of college teaching jobs, are also effectively competing with their teachers for whatever jobs there are. This leads to tension when grad students and adjunct PhD's notice that some tenured faculty are either over the hill, or else are using their jobs mostly to finance a nice lifestyle while doing only the minimal research required to keep their jobs. (For some, scholarship is the reason they went into the profession; for others, it is just the price you have to pay for a cushy job).

So why do people go to grad school in the humanities at all? For almost everyone there is, initially at least, a fascination with the subject matter (though many grad schools do succeed in driving this out). Usually there is also a desire to stand in the place of the professor, whose job is fun and relatively easy, and who gets at least his fair share of respect and adulation.³ For many, the university is also an escape from the outside world, and often enough grad school is just a respectable way to kill time while figuring out what to do with your life. (Parents and other sources of cash are more likely to cough up for grad school than for a year on the beach in Thailand.)

The nub of the problem is that everyone wants to be a professor, but only a few can. The hopeful, doomed graduate students are propping up a system which, for most of them, will never work. The professor is a survival from a bygone day when cultured elites actual ran the world. Culture has always been a money-loser, but even a century or so ago political power was exercised mostly by people who had mastered classical languages and other genteel ornaments. More recently, only transient and unreliable subsidies from the universities have kept humanist intellectuals from descending to the marginal, semi-criminal status of the clerc maudit Francois Villon.

As for the world of today, the American university probably reached its maximum size some time long ago, and is already in decline; and given that the insurgent political movements of today (free-marketers and Christians) mostly hate the university as such, the situation is unlikely to improve.

Today's grad students are making enormous sacrifices in order to keep the humanities alive. For this reason alone they should be better appreciated, whether or not they ever attain success in the career world. Presumably a shakedown is in the works which will eliminate the bottom rank of humanities grad schools entirely, thus also eliminating many research positions. And while my own vested interest here is quite blatant, perhaps we can hope the reduced professions will then be a little more receptive to scholars and audiences outside the formal academic system.

Footnotes

1.Humanities PhD's are not only not prepared for jobs, to a degree they're disabled for the workplace. The work done in many careers involving verbal skills such as advertising, law, PR, and even journalism is actually opposed to the kind of truth-telling you learn to do in grad school. The more the university challenges the dominant commercial and bureaucratic order, the tougher a row graduates will have to hoe if they end up outside the university.

2. Someone I know believes that she was strung along as cheap labor for two whole years after her department had decided not to give her her PhD.

3. Yeah, yeah, not all professors are male. So sue me.

Sites discussing the future of university humanities:

Baraita; Easily Distracted; Philosophy.com; Invisible Adjunct; Hippo Dignity

So you want to go to graduate school (Benton)

Wilfred Cude: "The PhD Trap" (1987)

Interview with Cude

The PhD Octopus, by William James

Unionization of teaching assistants: Brad Delong rips Paul Kennedy

Alternative Career Paths: Theodore Streleski, Valery Fabrikant, and Gang Lu.