In the 1990s, efforts at Georgetown University to start a doctorate in English fell apart because of concerns about the dim employment prospects for graduates. Today those job worries have only worsened, but the English department is now set to offer a new Ph.D., one that it says has career preparation at its core.
Faculty members who have backed the proposal call it the first English Ph.D. in the nation created specifically to train students for employment both inside and outside academe.
With academic jobs drying up or shifting away from the tenure track, Georgetown and other universities are looking for ways to help doctoral graduates expand their career opportunities, as well as to ensure that Ph.D. programs are relevant in today’s economy.
But such moves have triggered a debate within humanities departments. Indeed, at Georgetown the proposed degree has divided the English faculty, with opponents saying it cheapens the worth of a Ph.D. and questioning whether the prestigious institution should start a new program when the job market is so poor.
Caetlin Benson-Allott, an associate professor of English at Georgetown, supports the idea that Ph.D. programs need to respond to the times but remains unconvinced that the creation of this program is warranted.
“The English Ph.D. needs to be reinvented,” she said. But at Georgetown, “there was a lot of soul-searching and questioning about how one could ethically start a new Ph.D. program in this environment.”
A proposal for the program, which was passed in a close vote of the faculty in March and awaits approval by Georgetown’s administration and Board of Directors, would make several changes in the traditional English Ph.D.
It would require students to complete an internship related to the humanities at a nonprofit, business, or government organization. That could include working as a curator at a museum, teaching the history of law at a law school, or working at a local cultural organization, like the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Even before students were enrolled in the program, which would be capped at 12 participants, Georgetown would expect them to think about possible careers outside of academe, asking that they apply with a “plan of professional development in hand,” according to the proposal.
‘Multifaceted Experiences’
The program “will embrace from its inception the understanding that the future of the English Ph.D. lies in providing doctoral students with multifaceted experiences transferable to both academic and nonacademic careers,” states an overview of the proposal.
Aside from preparing students for careers, the program would include other ideas on how to reinvent the English Ph.D.
For example, it would aim to have students finish in four years by requiring a master’s degree to enroll and providing rigorous mentoring. Students would also have alternatives to the traditional monograph-length dissertation, including digital-humanities projects and collections of shorter essays.
The Georgetown proposal, which would be paid for in large part by a surplus of money from the department’s master’s program, mirrors recommendations made in a recent report by the Modern Language Association about ways to improve the Ph.D., which drew criticism from some graduate students and adjuncts.
Yet the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which supports humanities research, and scholarly groups like the American Historical Association have preached that woes faced by humanities Ph.D. students in the job market are not the result of overproduction, but of underutilization.
Other universities have also made new efforts to help humanities Ph.D.’s prepare for jobs. McMaster University, in Canada, and Duke University, for example, have hired administrators who focus on graduate-student career readiness, while at the University of California at Berkeley, students designed a conference called Beyond Academia, which attracted about 450 students this year seeking employment options outside of academe.
But the Georgetown English department is taking a more controversial route, integrating career preparation into the fabric of a Ph.D. program.
Kathryn D. Temple, chair of the department, said the idea that job-market concerns should keep universities from creating new humanities programs, even when student demand for them exists, is “elitist” and puts an English doctorate out of the reach of many qualified people.
“These students are all adults, and they know the state of the job market, but they still want a Ph.D. in English,” she said. “Who are we to tell them they can’t do that?”
Ricardo L. Ortiz, who chaired a working group that came up with the Georgetown proposal, said he understood the uneasiness about starting a program, saying Georgetown won’t know whether it is a success until it has produced graduates. That said, he argued that the plan represents the future of doctoral education in the humanities.
“Some institutions with existing programs are already trying to change their programs to look more like the one we’re proposing,” he said.
A Generational Divide
Opposition to the proposal tends to come from younger faculty members who have had firsthand experience with the recent academic job market.
Daniel A. Shore, an associate professor of English who has worked at Georgetown since 2011, and spent two years before that at Grinnell College, said looking for a job amid the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath was formative for him and his peers. His experience convinced him that now is not the time to start a Ph.D. program in English, anywhere.
Further, he said, the proposed program would represent an erosion of doctoral education. Adding public-humanities requirements, while still preparing students to be researchers and instructors, all while shaving years off the length of time earning a doctorate typically takes, means that students would be spread thin, and wouldn’t be as competitive for jobs with students from peer institutions, he said.
“What we’re planning to call a Ph.D. program is, in essence, an advanced master’s program,” Mr. Shore said. “It’s enriching people. It’s teaching them, which is valuable. It could potentially give people other career opportunities outside of the tenure track. But it is not accomplishing the job for which I understand the Ph.D. to exist.”
Despite such reluctance, Russell A. Berman, a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University who led panel that wrote the MLA report, said more faculty members were embracing the idea of career preparation beyond academe.
“It’s good for the humanities to have humanists in positions throughout society,” he said. “And it’s good for society to have people with humanistic training in all sorts of positions.”
Correction (9/15/2014, 5:11 p.m.): This article originally misstated the faculty rank of Georgetown University’s Caetlin Benson-Allott. She is an associate professor of English, not an assistant professor. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
