Contrary to public opinion, colleges and universities tend to be conservative places — with a small “c.” Academics may lean left politically, but they value their professional traditions and are wary of change, especially of the speedy variety. But graduate school is conservative even by academic standards.
Doctoral education has changed very little since the late 19th century, when it took on the structure and requirements — such as the adviser-student apprenticeship and the dissertation — that remain familiar today. The collapse of the tenure-track job market over decades called that apprenticeship model into question long ago. But universities at the top of the prestige ladder have been slow to acknowledge that most of their Ph.D.s won’t become tenure-track professors. Instead, elite institutions have long acted as though the winds of doctoral reform would never reach their altitude.
But change is finally coming to the elites — and the recent “Report of the Humanities Doctoral Education Advisory Working Group” at Yale bears striking witness to the shift.
It’s unusual to see “Yale graduate school in the humanities” in the same sentence with “reform.” The university stuck to tradition for a very long time. Even the 2008 financial crash — which sent an already bad academic-job market into free fall — didn’t immediately unstick Yale’s doctoral programs. But even before the Covid-19 pandemic further ravaged the workplace, the number of tenure-track outcomes for Yale humanities Ph.D.s had fallen low enough to provoke action:
According to the report, “fewer than half” of matriculated students were grabbing that brass ring.
The report proposes new standards, and advocates pursuing them through new practices. Some of the recommendations cover familiar territory, like doing away with the GRE for admission and supporting diversity through professional development. But other measures — such as a movement away from “the proprietary model of advising” and “an expansion of the genre of acceptable dissertations” (including different media, and collaborative projects) — would place Yale at the spearhead of current practice.
So would the report’s recommendation to emphasize collaboration rather than hierarchy. “The historic paradigm in which students are supplicant to opaque faculty governance is no longer tenable,” said Kathryn Lofton, dean of humanities at Yale and a professor of religious studies, in an email.
Perhaps most important, the report calls for a change in “the metrics” to “evaluate program success.” In other words, the tenure-track job will no longer be the only career outcome that counts for the university’s humanities Ph.D.s. Career diversity has come to Yale.
After more than a year of research and discussion by a humanities strategy committee, two Yale deans formed the advisory group in mid-2020. Lofton and Pamela Schirmeister, deputy dean and dean of strategic initiatives, headed a group of 10 faculty members. Two doctoral students — Maria del Mar Galindo in English and Carl Rice in history — chaired a parallel committee of 10 graduate students. The two committees met separately and together and submitted their report to the administration in early February, and it was made public later that month.
The report flags a disjunction between students’ career aspirations and their actual outcomes. “According to our survey of students,” the report said, “the majority identify securing a full-time tenure-track faculty position as their primary reason for starting a Ph.D. Yet employment outcome data provided by the graduate programs themselves suggest that the majority of Yale doctoral students do not land on the tenure track.”
The report presents career-outcomes data for Yale humanities Ph.D.s with exemplary transparency. It includes various tables, broken out by individual doctoral programs. The inclusion of student attrition numbers is particularly commendable, as attrition too often gets left out of assessments of Ph.D. outcomes. The university’s program in Renaissance studies, for instance, experienced very low attrition (just 12 percent, well below the national average), but only 14 percent of its students admitted between 2005 and 2010 got tenure-track professorships from 2012 to 2017. In the department of East Asian languages and literatures, 74 percent of admitted students wound up in tenure-track jobs during the same time stretch, with only slightly higher attrition (16 percent). But the East Asian program was one of only five (out of 20 surveyed) with tenure-track outcomes that exceeded even 50 percent.
The numbers add up to a demand that Yale change its humanities culture to match the reality that its graduate students already face.
That this report appeared at all is a sign that some change has taken place already. The report may be a blueprint for change to come, but anyone who has ever renovated a kitchen, let alone built one, knows that a blueprint doesn’t necessarily determine the finished structure. The report places the responsibility for this culture change squarely on the faculty — and rightly so.
The bottom line now is faculty buy-in. How Yale professors respond to the report will say a lot about its future prospects. In the area of advising, for example, professors are being asked to:
- Engage in “team-based advising,” including peer mentorship.
- “Schedule mandatory advising meetings at key moments in each student’s graduate career.”
- Develop “advising systems” that cross program boundaries.
- Include the career office in student orientations as “a partner to the tough work of thinking through multiple professional outcomes from the outset of the student’s education.”
This “more energetic advising,” as the report calls it, will surely necessitate some changes in faculty members’ individual advising styles.
It’s one thing for an administration to commission change from above and quite another to implement it on the ground. The report bills itself as “advisory,” but its advice is offered in pretty stringent terms: It’s “crucial,” the report says, “that programs begin immediately the work of planning reform.” To that end, the report continues, the dean’s office and the graduate school “request” that, in each humanities department, the chair and the director of graduate studies “submit a plan.” (The italics are mine.)
What if the affected programs decline this request? If a graduate program has “outstanding” student outcomes and low attrition, nothing will happen, Lofton said in an email. But if a program isn’t reaching those goals, she said, the graduate school will “reduce the number of admissions into the program, and ask the program to pursue reforms.”
In other words, if a humanities department doesn’t do right by its doctoral students, it will get fewer of them. “If a unit improves its culture, attrition, and outcomes,” said Lofton, “it can increase its admissions.”
So this is a “request” with teeth. Such administrative control departs from Yale’s tradition of decentralized graduate culture. The idea that graduate programs know what’s best for themselves is hardly unique to Yale, but the idea has a longer history at Yale — which in 1861 awarded the first Ph.D. ever in the United States — than at most other institutions.
Some faculty members tie program-level authority to academic freedom. Feisal Mohamed, a professor of English who recently moved to Yale, praised the report’s authors for facing the challenges of this “time of great uncertainty.” Mohamed believes that we “must change” the way we think about doctoral requirements. But he’s concerned that the report’s recommendations amount to assessment — and “coercion” — from the administration. “A department,” he said in an email, must be free to determine” its own requirements.
The coming regime, Mohamed believes, will bring “a spreadsheet benefit,” not a true change in educational culture. He suggests instead an overhaul of the funding model in which each student would receive six years of predoctoral funding and three years of postdoctoral support.
Mohamed isn’t alone in his concerns. His fellow Yale English professor Jonathan Kramnick called the report “a good-faith effort to tackle the employment catastrophe facing graduate education in the humanities.” Kramnick, who has written for The Chronicle on that subject (“How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring” and “What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers”), shares Mohamed’s concern about “hostility to departmental autonomy and self-governance.”
Other faculty were less wary — but not necessarily optimistic. “I really like the report,” said one humanities professor, who asked not to be named because she did not want to offend senior colleagues. “It asks the right questions” and offers a “good blueprint” for change. She hopes that “other universities take this lead.” But at Yale itself, she said she is concerned that her older colleagues — a group “invested in the idea of Yale” — may find its recommendations “too brazen.”
Another English professor at the university, who cited a similar reason for not wanting to be named, wondered whether professors “really will be able to impart anything about how to thrive in worlds beyond academia.”
Mordechai Levy-Eichel, a lecturer in political science and humanities at the university, likes the report’s recommendations, but he isn’t sanguine about their future adoption. Yale’s tenured professors, he noted, “have made it to where they are precisely because they’re generally not people who are likely to initiate these sorts of changes.” Said one graduate student: “I am not holding my breath.”
But the very public release of the report is itself auspicious. Yale did the right thing by publicizing it, not least because its acknowledgment of the dire tenure-track market and economic realities facing new Ph.D.s gives other ambitious graduate programs the cover to admit the same.
This kind of leadership can inspire other institutions to follow suit — if it’s sustained. Like the “city on a hill” invoked by fellow New Englander John Winthrop in his famous 1630 sermon, Yale’s experiment in doctoral-education reform will have “the eyes of all people” upon it.
