The crisis of graduate education and the academic job market is by now so much a subject of public debate that there is no need to restate its grim parameters. I cannot bring any new insight to the analysis of employment figures and Ph.D.-production rates. As a teacher of the humanities who is piloting a number of doctoral students toward a fogged-in future, and as chair of an increasingly demoralized department, I am concerned with what we, faculty members and administrators, can do to make creative use of the crisis.
The proposals made so far -- I have in mind especially William G. Bowen’s and Neil L. Rudenstine’s In Pursuit of the Ph.D. (Princeton University Press, 1991) and Louis Menand’s"How to Make a Ph.D. Matter” (The New York Times Magazine, September 22) -- tend to focus on speeding up the Ph.D.: Time-to-degree and completion rates are the main issues. Dissertations should be shortened and de-emphasized, according to Mr. Bowen and Mr. Rudenstine; they should be eliminated entirely, according to Mr. Menand. These and many other recommendations for reform seem to accept an Eisenhower-era model of efficient production, which worked fine at the time I took my degree (1965) but no longer seems relevant to the changing pattern of careers in academe, which are less likely to proceed smoothly forward to a tenured professorship.
Abolishing the dissertation -- or turning it into a shorter, more routine exercise -- won’t solve our problems. Anyone who has been part of a search for junior-faculty members knows that transcripts and letters of recommendation blur into generalized superlatives. It’s only reading the dissertation, or an excerpt (all you have time for, generally), that can tell you who is really a promising new contributor to intellectual debate. And the structure of the career lying before the new Ph.D. -- with its incessant evaluations for fellowships and promotions -- depends more than ever before on early publication of the dissertation-reworked-into-a-book, followed almost immediately by the famous"second project,” which many now see as the real separation of sheep from goats.
It’s a measure of the absurdity of the position we’ve got ourselves into that we define the dissertation as"an original contribution to scholarship” on the one hand and, on the other, try to produce Ph.D.'s in a lockstep quick-march. The result, as we all know, is not only too many Ph.D.'s but too many unread first books, followed by second books too often compromised by the competing pressures of full-time teaching and research. Maybe the solution is to be sought in the opposite direction, in an older model of more leisurely apprenticeship to the profession.
We should think about taking fewer students, keeping them longer, supporting them better, mentoring them more fully, and giving them ample time to develop truly original research agendas. Then we should make their entry into the profession more gradual: more postdoctoral fellowships to ease the transition from studentdom to full faculty status, with time to publish before taking on full-time teaching. There are lessons to be learned here from our colleagues in the sciences: Their Ph.D.'s rarely go straight into a full-fledged teaching position; they’re apt to have a year or two -- or more -- as postdocs before taking on the burdens of full-time teaching. When they are hired as assistant professors, they’re better prepared to face the impending hurdles of evaluation.
The sciences may point us toward other solutions as well. Consider how most universities conceive of graduate education in the humanities: two years of course work, generally defined as taking a certain number of graduate seminars -- complete with oral reports and term papers -- followed by preparation of some form of qualifying exam, followed by the search for a dissertation topic and the preparation of that opus. It’s a convenient and uniform system, one that produces transcripts and credentials. But does it really train young scholars how to undertake significant original research and how to transmit their knowledge effectively to students?
What if one were to break the mold of the classroom, at least part of the time, and try to replicate the model of the aspiring biologist working in the lab under the direction of his or her professor? Instead of simply taking courses, students might co-author essays with their professors, a form of collaboration common in the sciences. As well as working as teaching assistants for existing courses, students might, together with their teachers, plan, research, and choose books for a course in a given subject. Whether or not the course is ever taught, the experience could teach more about conceptualizing and transmitting a subject than would taking another graduate seminar.
Graduate students in the sciences are less alienated than those in the humanities largely because they know they belong to a community of researchers. While humanistic scholarship inevitably is more individualistic, it need not be so wholly “privatized” as it now is. One could find multiple ways to restore some sense of a common mission in the preservation and transmission of culture that animated the original humanists of the Renaissance.
Under the pressures of the"massification” of graduate education starting in the 1950s, we turned to curricular arrangements that made the research-institute model of graduate education, which entered this country with the founding of the Johns Hopkins University, too much resemble a specialized version of the undergraduate course of study. A redefinition of graduate programs and curricula that would abolish the notion of"course work” in favor of a variety of collaborative projects with faculty members might go some way toward restoring a sense of apprenticeship to the profession. If we could break away from our obsession with courses, grades, papers, and other measures of progress toward the degree, we might be able to redefine graduate education as a period of freer intellectual inquiry. The seminar -- no need to abolish them all -- might return as something closer to the scientist’s laboratory: a place where the search for truth was under way.
It’s perhaps a paradox that the sciences, far better than the humanities, have preserved, or renewed, the old-fashioned, somewhat medieval model of learning as apprenticeship: the novice learning his or her trade at the workbench with the help of a master of the craft. That is probably still the relevant model. Scholarship is a handcraft, after all, a cottage industry, something learned through patient imitation and tentative innovation, through stitching and unstitching. The goal is not replicating the work of one’s masters, of course, but learning the kinds of skills that enable one to go forward on one’s own.
A first result of instituting such proposals would certainly be bureaucratic disarray. How to track the progress of graduate students, when they weren’t being regularly graded in courses and subjected to other rites of passage? Even worse, how to define faculty members’"teaching loads” (a curious and revealing phrase) when they weren’t"teaching” in the accepted sense? Imagine a graduate program defined as a set of loose, informal apprenticeships and mentorships between students and faculty members: chaos and nightmare, enough to put several echelons of associate deans out of business. Graduate education as a free space of association, collaboration, and inquiry? Administratively unacceptable, surely. Such a model could work only by trusting that faculty members, given the freedom to rethink their roles as educators, could and would devise relevant forms of training.
These would need to include colloquia and workshops that help students think about the profession they are entering and the place that they may be able to make for themselves in it. By this I mean learning to contribute not only to the study of Romanticism or the Renaissance, but to the functioning of the university as well. Graduate students tend to be left in the dark about how universities function, how they are governed, the history that has shaped them, the constraints under which they labor.
Much interesting work has been done recently -- by such scholars as Gerald Graff, John Guillory, David Damrosch, and Bill Readings -- on the disciplines and how they evolved within the academy. There is rich material on the history of the modern university, from the Enlightenment onward, to explore. And the archives of most universities hold materials on the history of that institution’s departments and programs -- when they were founded, by whom, and why. These can be a source of reflection on how the academic disciplines came to be defined as we know them today, as well as a critique of their current form.
The point is that young scholars entering teaching positions in higher education will have to make their mark in creative dialogue and dialectical struggle with existing institutional frameworks and bureaucracies. New generations of scholars will need to argue the rationale for what they want to study and teach. Especially in the humanities, where we cannot defend what we do on utilitarian grounds, the argument for educating students in the aesthetic domain must be an ever-renewed enterprise. To put it most radically: Why was poetry ever given a place in the curriculum? While the guardians of the university rarely want to abolish poetry’s place entirely, they don’t necessarily want it large or important. Are we prepared, in the manner of Schiller in his great and still pertinent treatise on The Aesthetic Education of Mankind, to argue its necessity and to make this argument publicly, in terms that will be understood by budget-cutting administrators, hostile regents, and the public at large?
Graduate education in America is now a little more than a century old. It has received much less searching attention, many fewer proposals for real reform, than undergraduate education. In my experience, it is the most bureaucratized, lockstep, and unimaginative sector of the university. Since it’s clearly in crisis, let’s apply to it some imaginative rethinking. That thinking needs to be based on what we want our young academics to be: scholars and teachers who will begin careers in a variety of institutional settings with a sense of joy and empowerment.
Peter Brooks is a professor of humanities and chair of the department of comparative literature at Yale University.