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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Should We Be Talking about Louis Menand’s New Book?
Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas has come out and is generating a fair amount of discussion online. I found the excerpt from it published in Harvard Magazine interesting, particularly his emphasis on some of the indirect costs of professionalization. But the suggestions he made there about reforming PhD programs seemed at once wildly impractical and strangely dismissive of the content of humanities research--strange, that is, from someone who seems to have a fairly strong profile as a researcher himself. I’m interested enough, I think, to read the book and see what he’s really arguing for (or against, or about). The Valve seems like a place where a lot of people hang out who might have ideas about things like ‘reform and resistance’ in the academy. Should we have an informal book event of some kind? Perhaps just setting a date by which anyone interested will read it (in a month or so, say) and then we’ll have an opening post and everyone can jump in in the comments?
Comments
That’s an interesting argument, I just don’t know if I can get through an entire book devoted to the subject.
Well, so far it looks like I’d be talking to myself…
But the suggestions he made there about reforming PhD programs seemed at once wildly impractical and strangely dismissive of the content of humanities research--strange, that is, from someone who seems to have a fairly strong profile as a researcher himself.
Well, yeah. I read the Harvard Mag piece and a review in Slate and maybe something else, & I’m not inspired to read the whole thing. What sticks in my mind are two things: 1) we gotta’ cut down on the time it takes to get a humanities Ph D and 2) we’ve been done-in by our own self-perpetuating professionalism. On the first, way back in the late 1960s DC Allen chaired a committee that made the same recommendation to the MLA. I think it’s a good idea. But it also seems like a golden oldie that keeps getting recommended and nothing’s done so I can’t give him points for recycling it. And the too-much professionalism argument has been around a long time as well. What I want to know is how are the humanities disciplines any different from other disciplines on this point?
Re: I think it’s a good idea, that is, reducing the time to degree, perhaps it is an idea worth reconsidering under current conditions.
As for the professionalization point, I agree that other disciplines are also professionalized. I have some suspicions myself that the humanities differ in how well suited they are to this kind of treatment. We aren’t law or medicine or business, or for that matter, chemistry or sociology.
I expect a lot of the response to the book might be negative, from those inside the academy. It strikes me as important that a lot of people outside the academy like this kind of thing, and if we don’t put out counter-narratives because we consider ourselves somehow above them, then they sit around adding to the public discourse about us (those of us who are academics), as if they are authoritative. My own response will probably be mixed, as it was to the Harvard Mag article--but of course I have to read the book and see.
Care to say what you find wildly impractical and strangely dismissive? I’m not seeing either in my reading so far. Now the point Bill raises is a twist on that, maybe: namely, why is a frequent suggestion (shorten the time to a humanities degree) not only not adopted, but in fact, the movement in time-to-degree has grown steadily longer since it was first suggested? I’m only a little ways in, so I’ll be curious to see if Menand has a novel or generative analysis as to why this pattern is as it is.
Not to prematurely start the debate, but the whole “shorten completion time” argument is baloney. You can’t compare UK PhDs to American PhDs. In my experience, Brits with BAs in English have a wider, more comprehensive knowledge of the canons than Americans, who can chose from endless arrays of pointless “special topics” courses. So the American undergrad who jumps into grad school and writes on his recent topic-du-jour is going to be even more narrowly professionalized and specialized than he already is. We’d have to reform the entire BA/MA degree system in the US before we just shorten the PhD process.
Tim,
About what strikes me as impractical, here’s some of the older post of mine that I linked to above:
I was struck by Menand’s passing suggestion that “If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship,” but this seems to me another of those ideas about changing “the system” (not unlike the MLA’s call to “decenter the monograph” as the gold standard for evaluating tenure and promotion files) that can never be addressed on a local level and so may never be addressed at all. Which department wants to be the first to say that they will award a Ph.D. without requiring a thesis? For that matter, which department could make such a change in policy without losing their accreditation or funding?
These are practical problems, not principled ones, but they are substantial, aren’t they? I can’t imagine the process by which my own department could make a change of the kind he’s suggesting--our funding is keyed to the thesis requirement, in part because of requirements at the level of national granting agencies and so forth. There would need to be a huge shift in the conceptualization and operation of graduate studies across the country. This is not to say such a shift might not be good, or necessary. It just strikes me as something that’s easy to toss off as a rhetorical flourish but much harder to back up or implement.
The sense that he’s being dismissive comes, for instance, from the NPR interview quoted from at Historiann. He may have a point that the teaching many PhDs will eventually do won’t be at research universities, but is that the only reason they are training as researchers? Is there no argument to be made for the intrinsic value of that research, for instance, in terms of furthering our knowledge? Or what about the ways in which specialized research might affect the way people “teach poetry to college freshmen"--or the poetry they choose to teach, even?
However, as I say, I haven’t read the book yet, just the Harvard Magazine excerpt.
The time to degree thing is a false problem, I think. Your average Humanities PhD could finish in five years, easy—and for a combined MA / PhD (which is what most programs offer) five years is actually pretty quick since we’re talking about a year or so of post-grad course work, a few years of teaching experience, and a few years of original research for a monograph (many of which happen concurrently).
But people tend to stick around longer (into years six, seven, eight and beyond) because they can’t find a job at the end of year five. During these twilight years, a candidate will often not file a near complete dissertation since doing so will cut off a funding source. As soon as the PhD. candidate gets a job, or a decent post-doc, the dissertation miraculously finishes itself.
My prediction is that in the next decade or so, with universities cutting back Humanities departments, we’re going to see the average time to degree plummet to around five or even four years. Still, that isn’t going to solve the jobs crisis or the quality of work coming out of PhD programs, which are Menand’s real concerns. Instead, we’re going to get more and more grads squeezed into weird non-permanent positions with half-finished or rushed dissertations and with no PhDs.
As Marc Bousquet nicely illustrated with regard to History, none of these problems are supply-side problems, although that’s where Menand takes aim. Fix the jobs situation, and you’ll have people finishing their degrees as quickly as possible (you’ll also have them doing better, more creative, more daring, and more popularly accessible research, but that’s a longer argument...).
"Your average Humanities PhD could finish in five years, easy . . . But people tend to stick around longer (into years six, seven, eight and beyond) because they can’t find a job at the end of year five.”
For what it’s worth, this is not the case at my university. The course requirements (which take longer because of our teaching), comprehensive exams, and prospectus phase mean that it’s rare to finish in five years; just a couple years ago, before the process was streamlined (in response to budget cuts), it would have been impossible to finish in that time.
Of course, on reflection, we may be talking about different programs within the humanities.
My copy will be on its way to me soon, I hope. I’ll post some kind of “review” or response here in a while--let’s say, around mid-March, to allow other people who would also like to read it before joining in the discussion (and who, like me, have lots of other reading on the go) plenty of time. My own feeling is that it would be more productive to focus on his particular arguments than to kick the issues around quite on our own, but as always, the comments thread will be open to all.