I attended an interesting dicussion today on the (controversial) MLA report advocating significant structural changes in humanities PhD programs. Don Bialostosky, chair of English, moderated, and the two featured speakers were Dennis Looney (now working for MLA) and John Stevenson (Grad Dean, Univ Colorado Boulder).
The report argues in fairly blunt language that the academic job market stinks and will never recover to its pre-crash levels, that 9 years to complete the PhD is way too long, that PhD programs have to move away from the model of "replication" (training students exclusively as research professors) to a model of "transformation" for a variety of careers, that the dissertation itself should be reimagined as more than just a proto-print book, and that single-author books should no longer be made the standard for hiring and promotion. Many of the changes advocated in the report (incorporating collaborative research and teaching into grad programs, emphasizing public engagement, revising traditional area coverage curricula) are precisely what HAA's constellations aspire to do. I was therefore surprised to hear that the report, released in Feb., had come under strong attack from several quarters.
I've attached my notes in PDF form but here are a few of the issues I found most interesting and perplexing in the discussion:
Reducing time to degree may be laudable, one person argued, but the reality of the job market now is that the most successful students are taking years of pre-docs and post-docs, dragging out the time they spend before they hit the job market so that they can beef up their cv's with publications and even a book contract. How is someone who steamrolls to a PhD in 5 years supposed to compete with them? I do know of many people who have used external pre-docs for this purpose, not to speed their degree but actually to lengthen it so they can work on articles and other projects. Postdocs do something similar on the other side of the degree. In other words, the incentive structure works against the goal it is supposed to be supporting.
Similarly, the incentive structure in research universities works against many of the report's recommendations. Scholars in the humanities who are doing the new sort of work that the report advocates, geared toward collaboration and public engagement, tend to land in nontenured jobs if at all. Value is still defined by the single-authored monograph.
Dave Bartholome of the English Dept made the interesting point that the problem of the "contingent" work force in academia is a direct result of the reduction of teaching loads for tenure-stream research faculty. At Pitt teaching loads for tenure-stream faculty way back when used to be 4-4 for everyone and were reduced first to 3-3, then to 2-2, to make increasing time for research production. His point is that we lack credibility if we lament the rise of the contigent work force when that work force arose to subsidize our own research time.
The MLA report is available here: http://www.mla.org/pdf/taskforcedocstudy2014.pdf
