Grants Seek to Foster a Culture Change in Humanities Graduate Education

From the start, Katja Zelljadt knew she didn’t want to be an academic.

She entered Harvard University’s doctoral program in history because she was fascinated with the past and had enjoyed her experience of working in museums in Germany. But she kept her nonacademic career goal mostly to herself because it was assumed, she says, that she and her colleagues would become professors.

So Ms. Zelljadt quietly went to career-services workshops, held in a windowless basement room, where she and other Ph.D. students could explore careers outside of higher education. Staff members told attendees to keep the visits discreet, she says, for fear that their interest in nonacademic careers could hurt their relationship with their faculty advisers.

“I was doing something that was a bit countercultural, especially at a place like Harvard,” says Ms. Zelljadt, who earned her doctorate in 2005.

Like many doctoral recipients — half or more, by some estimates — Ms. Zelljadt charted a career path outside higher education. She eventually became director of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ challenge grants office.

On Tuesday, the endowment is announcing nearly $1.7 million in grants to 28 colleges to help them rethink how they prepare doctoral students for career paths outside higher education.

“If graduate programs wish to make a case for the continuation of graduate education in the humanities,” says William D. Adams, the endowment’s chairman, “they’re going to have to think about the professional futures of their students in entirely different ways. The future we’re accustomed to training them for is disappearing.”

The grants come as doctoral education in the humanities is facing pressure to change. Secure academic jobs are becoming scarcer in many fields, and many argue that humanities Ph.D.s are being overproduced.

With the grants, the NEH joins other groups like the Mellon Foundation and disciplinary associations like the American Historical Association and Modern Language Association in arguing that the response to the challenges is not to retrench but to instead broaden career options for doctoral recipients in the humanities. The groups aim to infuse money into new efforts to think creatively about how graduate programs can adapt to the reality of doctoral recipients’ career paths and start to prepare their students better for them.

Things have changed from a decade ago when Ms. Zelljadt earned her doctorate. Graduate programs, slowly but surely, are paying more attention to the career paths of their doctoral recipients. Many colleges have created career services positions tailored for graduate students. The Council of Graduate Schools and many individual researchers are working on tools that would help programs better track where their Ph.D.s end up.

But change in doctoral education comes slow. Compared with undergraduate education, graduate education is more decentralized. The NEH, Ms. Zelljadt says, is hoping to foster culture change, to give an air of legitimacy to individual programs’ efforts, and to give them the money to experiment with new ideas.

Culture Change

Three colleges received “implementation” grants of $350,000 each to expand efforts already underway: Duke University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Delaware. Twenty-five others received $25,000 planning grants. Mr. Adams says he hopes some colleges that received planning grants will be awarded implementation grants in future rounds of funding.

Both types of grants, titled “Next Generation PhDs,” are part of $79 million in grants for nearly 300 projects and programs, including $20 million for higher education. Each Next Generation PhDs grant recipient has to provide matching money in an effort to ensure institutional commitment.

The colleges represent a wide swath of academe, from state institutions to elite private colleges. Ms. Zelljadt estimates between 200 and 220 colleges offer humanities doctoral programs; more than a quarter of them applied for these grants, she says, a sign that many colleges are paying attention to doctoral career preparation.

Some colleges hope to hire staff members who can help graduate students navigate careers outside academe. Many programs want to rethink their dissertations, arguing that the traditional book-length monograph may not be the best option for students who don’t want to land academic jobs. Others want to create networks of alumni mentors who have charted their own nonacademic paths.

At Florida International University, which received a planning grant, Kenneth Lipartito, a history professor, has an idea he’d like to try. He wants students to have the option of having someone from outside the university serve on their dissertation committee. This person would be from a sector that the student may work in and help the student think about techniques that might be useful in the field.

Mr. Lipartito recognizes the idea may be controversial among faculty colleagues who may worry that having non-historians would undermine academic credibility. But these are the types of conversations he wants to have in meetings over the next year in an effort to help change the culture around how his department thinks about doctoral training.

“Changing that culture is going to be the hardest part,” Mr. Lipartito says. “If a lot of your faculty still think nonacademic careers are second choices, it’s going to be hard to erase the sense among students that they should be thinking mostly about academia as the endpoint.”

The grant from NEH, along with the matching money, may help pay for a Ph.D. or postdoctoral student to coordinate campus conversations and efforts on doctoral career options.

But Mr. Lipartito, along with other grant recipients, say the money, in a sense, is secondary. Having the NEH support the effort, Mr. Lipartito says, makes it easier for him to argue to campus administrators that culture change is needed.

Skills Training

While graduate programs are paying more lip service to preparing Ph.D.s for careers outside academe, Mr. Lipartito says, aside from “some chin stroking and worrying” he hasn’t noticed significant change on the issue since he left graduate school 30 years ago. He’s hoping interventions by outside groups like NEH and Mellon can help foster change.

Mellon, teaming up with the American Historical Association, announced similar grants to history departments two years ago. The University of Chicago was also a recipient of that three-year grant, which it has used, in part, to hire a “career diversity officer” in the history department to help connect Ph.D.s with nonacademic jobs.

Starting next year, Chicago’s history department also will offer a course in which students work in teams to create podcasts, a radio program, or other programming meant for a wider audience, says Kenneth Pomeranz, a University of Chicago historian leading that grant.

Chicago will use its NEH grant, in part, to create a series of programs for all first-year humanities Ph.D. students in which they create development plans and start thinking about multiple career paths from the start of their doctoral studies.

The biggest lesson learned since the Mellon grant began, Mr. Pomeranz says, “is that rather than think in terms of preparing people for two distinct job markets — one academic and one nonacademic — we should really think of a big, diversified job market and skills that will help in either of those markets.”

Mr. Pomeranz touches on a theme echoed by many of the NEH grant recipients: Radical change is not needed. Instead, many say supplemental skills that make Ph.D.s stronger applicants for any jobs — the ability to work in teams and communicating effectively to general audiences, for example — should be embedded into doctoral programs.

“We really don’t see an antagonism between preparing people to make a difference outside the university realm and being effective scholars and teachers within it,” says Edward J. Balleisen, an associate professor of history at Duke.

With the grant money, Mr. Balleisen hopes to hire a staff member who would help connect students with internships and provide stipends for students taking such opportunities. As an example of the value of such an approach, he points to a student whose dissertation focuses on the prisoners’ rights movement in North Carolina. The student worked as an intern with a civil-rights group that focuses on prisoners’ rights.

The internship both had academic value, and gave “her experience in project management and writing for audiences that are essentially clients,” Mr. Balleisen says. “It set her up very well for great academic jobs but also nonacademic ones.”

Clarification (8/9/16, 10:54 a.m.): This article originally implied that all the NEH grants in question required recipients to provide matching grants, but only the Next Generation PhDs grants do so. The article has been updated to reflect that.

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.