Louis Menand and the American PhD problem

When reading magazines in the evening, I don't usually mark up articles with notes, highlighted sections, and other marginalia, but the most recent issue of Harvard Magazine features a book excerpt that absolutely warrants it.

The excerpt is from Professor Louis Menand's forthcoming book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, and examines various problems afflicting the American PhD system. I was skeptical at first (he presented some generalizations about advanced professional and liberal arts degrees with which I disagreed) but his arguments and use of educational data were ultimately quite convincing.

His thesis: The supply/demand equation for PhD students in the humanities and some social sciences fields has been thrown excessively out of whack since 1970 thanks to a number of factors, including a decreased need for specialists (not so many undergraduate English majors to teach now, compared to 40 years ago) and the near absence of demand for PhDs outside of academia in many fields.

Another problem highlighted by Menand is the huge amount of time that most graduate students in the humanities take to finish their degree requirements -- nine or ten is typical for an English major, compared to three years for a law degree. He writes:

"That it takes longer to get a Ph.D. in the humanities than it does in the social or natural sciences (although those fields also have longer times-to-degree than they once did) seems anomalous, since normally a dissertation in the humanities does not require extensive archival, field, or laboratory work. William Bowen and Neil Rudenstine, in their landmark study In Pursuit of the Ph.D., suggested that one reason for this might be that the paradigms for scholarship in the humanities have become less clear. People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization. Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark."

Menand's conclusions are ultimately quite logical: The processes governing the PhD system are inefficient, and society ultimately loses. Some of his quotes:

"... there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get."

And:

"The obstacles to entering the academic profession are now so well known that the students who brave them are already self-sorted before they apply to graduate school. A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out. The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals. Students who go to graduate school already talk the talk, and they learn to walk the walk as well. There is less ferment from the bottom than is healthy in a field of intellectual inquiry. Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep on its toes."

Finally, the excerpt reads:

"It is important for research and teaching to be relevant, for the university to engage with the public culture and to design its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in view. That is, in fact, what most professors try to do—even when they feel inhibited from saying so by the taboo against instrumentalist and presentist talk. Professors teach what they teach because they believe that it makes a difference. To continue to do this, academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic. That may be the road down which the debates I have been describing are taking higher education.

But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and research needs to be done, and how they might better train and organize themselves to do it. But they need to ignore the world’s demand that they reproduce its self-image."

Menand's concerns are valid. There absolutely is room for open thinking, improvement, and outright reform in graduate education, as well as in the dissemination and discussion of ideas and research.

At the same time, I have to wonder what sorts of marvelous research, insights and knowledge transfer would be stifled were the American PhD system mechanically aligned to the supply/demand curve. My bookshelves and hard drives contain some remarkable, thought-provoking works on the impact of printing on European society, the rise of virtual communities based on commercial videogames, and modern Chinese history that started out as obscure dissertations or post-doc research projects. Would such scholarship exist in a more rigid environment? I'm not so sure. While technology opens up many possibilities for independent research and publishing endeavors, the sheltering, supportive and serendipitous environments found in graduate school programs across the country are where the sparks of transformative ideas are more likely to be struck, fanned, and fed.