Is The PhD Trap a Trap? (I)
Thomas Benton’s Chronicle article on the trap of academic life describes the hopeless professional situation of graduating Ph.Ds in the humanities accurately enough, but I agree with some of the more skeptical commenters that he overstates the structural or conspiratorial aspects of the problem. To summarize his depiction of the liberal arts Ph.D. as a professional decision: Getting a Ph.D in the liberal arts is the stupidest f***ing thing a person can do. Even with a degree from an elite program in hand, a new Ph.D. faces grim job prospects (stable academic jobs are wickedly elusive, and returning to the private sector leaves you at a disadvantage against the dumb undergrads you were justing giving B-minuses to, or so Benton tells it). But then Benton puts the pedal to the vaguely conspiratorial metal:
Most departments will never willingly provide that information because it is radically against their interest to do so.
And
Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students….
The implication is that graduate programs keep accepting too many grad students for financial reasons. This is a familiar line of argument by now. Grad students provide cheap labor, freeing up tenured faculty to do research and freeing universities from the budget burdens of replacing old professors. One of the problems with this line of argument is that it paints a picture of institutions so vested in these backwards practices that they will never change. But I think a key feature of the problem exists outside of this self-reinforcing circuit of material incentives and is thus amenable to the type of criticism Benton is leveling.
A big reason why academic departments maintain Ph.D. programs in the liberal arts and resist shrinking or eliminating them – beyond all the hard-headed talk about money – is that professors like having graduate students. A common selling point of jobs at “research universities” is the opportunity to “teach graduate students.” Why, given the low esteem in which we hold the sniveling grad student?
Because unlike a lot of faculty colleagues, graduate students are driven and eager. The dissertation process is a bitch, but it often forges real friendships, and who doesn’t want to be a mentor? Who doesn’t want a protégé? Graduate seminars let you teach within your deeper scholarly interests. This link between teaching and focused research can be enormously fruitful and satisfying and, for many academics, helps refresh interest in the teaching of more basic subject matter to much less motivated and sometimes downright dismissive undergraduates. For a lot of professors, the fond and fuzzy ideal of scholarly friendship is much more closely approximated with graduate students than with other professors. Removing graduate students from their professional set-up would perforce sever the link between their research and their teaching, deprive them of their most agreeable colleagues, and throw them back to face the undergraduates alone, as it were.I don’t want to idealize the grad student-professor relationship. In most departments there’s also a healthy commerce in resentment and contempt. But those students who reach their dissertation defense with a minimum of overt pathology and desperation usually have some good relationships to show for their effort. I want to toss the considerable human and intellectual satisfactions attaching to these things into the mix of “interests” Benton talks about, and suggest that he shift his aim from the quasi-conspiratorial “structures” that sustain superfluous graduate programs to the human relationships that grow within them. He complains about the radio silence that rises from professors when he issues one of his challenges. And it’s true. Academics are usually so voluble…. But maybe he, or the graduate students he’s looking out for, might get a better answer if he guided his critique towards the simple question, What would a real mentor do?
I was too dispirited by the 90 comments on the article to post there, but it’s worth noting that Benton’s claim about departments’ unwillingness to provide placement data is not quite right. Thanks to outside pressure, philosophy departments are getting quite good at providing data on job placement for their graduates, and the trend is towards better and better information. Of course, they don’t provide data on attrition, and a lot of us would like to see that, but it’s a far cry from the black hole Benton depicts.
— Justin · Feb 11, 07:12 AM · #
In addition to what you state, people that make a career out of teaching Subject X find Subject X to be fascinating and a worthy avenue of exploration for young minds. Nobody who got a PhD in 13th Century Finnish literature goes not think that a lot of people should be interested in 13th Century Finnish Literature and that lives would not be enriched by knowing more about that fascinating subject.
— Trumwill · Feb 11, 10:19 AM · #
There’s no reason to think that both explanations can’t be true. Departments do have an economic interest in the cheap labor they can extract from grad students, and their faculty do have an intellectual interest in having people around to mentor. It’s not like the market cost of grad student labor quadruples just because it’s fun to teach grad seminars. Perhaps these two forces work together to explain the market-glutting numbers of humanists.
— Noumena · Feb 11, 02:35 PM · #
Noumena – I set my distinction not at what I thought was more true but at what I thought was amenable to the sort of critique Benton was making. I also wanted to suggest that the false consciousness he’s complaining about is the result of real human dilemmas. Professors aren’t just part of the mechanism that “traps” graduate students. They’re also in a way in the same trap. They don’t want to face this stuff either, partly because they don’t want to lose the perks of cheap grad student labor etc., but partly because they don’t want to lose the intellectual and human benefits of having young acolytes.
— Matt Feeney · Feb 11, 02:51 PM · #
Beautiful and true.
I am so, so tired of people like Michael Berube and Andrew Delbanco and Stanley Fish “taking a stand for my interests” without bothering to consider whether I want them taking that stand. Delbanco, in particular, constantly goes around pretending to be advocating for graduate students, but does so in a way that is so dripping with resentment and condescension the insult is clear. The only thing worse than someone telling you that you are an idiot is someone who does it while claiming that he cares only for your interests.
— Freddie · Feb 11, 03:08 PM · #
There’s also the prestige factor. Having a graduate program or having a large graduate program is taken as a sign that a university is serious about research. At the posh private university where I earned my humanities PhD (just out of the top 10), the Dean told our department that we would be admitting 15 instead of 10 graduate students that year as part of his program to beef up the graduate programs. Ten was usually pushing it—we’d lose the very best to the super-top-notch programs, get 5 who could do solid work, admit 5 who probably wouldn’t get jobs. When word of 15 came down, faculty members were incredulous: “How can we admit 4 students to study this subfield when there were 4 jobs in the subfield last year and they all went to people from other universities.” Most faculty members don’t actually like to have students not get jobs since this looks bad on their own cv and in department politics.
The key point to remember here is that the market for graduate students and the market for tenure-track faculty members are driven by very different forces.
— Boz · Feb 11, 03:44 PM · #
I agree with Noumena. Professors could be genuinely fond of their grad students, while at the same time participating in a system based on cheap grad student labour. From the point of view of the student, the PhD trap is still a “trap” no matter how well-meaningly it is maintained.
And while professors might not be malign in their intentions – I agree that many of them are probably well-meaning – it’s not true that they’re in the trap themselves. The trap is an economic one: the professors are the lucky/talented ones who managed to escape.
— Mylne Karimov · Feb 11, 03:49 PM · #
I read the title of the post and all I could think about was this. Sorry, Matt. I’ll try to do better next time.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Feb 11, 03:54 PM · #
KVS – had I known about that video, I would have just embedded it and written nothing.
— Matt Feeney · Feb 11, 04:12 PM · #
I agree that the “cheap labor” argument is weak. But, continuing in the market framework, liberal arts departments do have a powerful incentive — both economic and otherwise — to create a significant oversupply of graduate students. It’s actually much simpler than cheap labor, and Feeney and some of the commenters touch on the reason. Basically, if there weren’t as many grad students, we couldn’t have as many liberal arts professors. Liberal arts professors help create a demand for themselves by admitting far more grad students than the market can bear. I’m sure they do it because they like grad students, and they like teaching grad students. But without grad students for the professors to teach and supervise (in highly inefficient ratios), we could get by with a smaller number of professors. We would only need enough professors to teach the undergraduates.
The decrease would be offset somewhat by the increased teaching load professors would have to bear. But based on my experience, research university humanities departments could probably get by with anywhere from 25% to 50% fewer tenure-track professors if there were no graduate students (You can quibble with these anecdotally educated numbers without negating my point). In a more efficient market, most universities wouldn’t have humanities graduate students at all (or maybe just a small handful per department), while a few elite programs would supply the trickle of demand for new professors due to turnover.
— Jay Daniel · Feb 11, 08:10 PM · #
Liberal arts professors help create a demand for themselves by admitting far more grad students than the market can bear. I’m sure they do it because they like grad students, and they like teaching grad students. But without grad students for the professors to teach and supervise (in highly inefficient ratios), we could get by with a smaller number of professors. We would only need enough professors to teach the undergraduates.
I’m sorry, but that’s simply not true; your average large public university humanities professor might teach only one graduate level course every three years. Also, grad students take far fewer courses than their undergraduate counterparts. Graduate students represent a tiny fraction of the total teaching load of your average humanities department. I’m sorry, but you appear to have simply invented the perspective that undergirds your opinion.
— Freddie · Feb 11, 08:31 PM · #
Freddie @ 10:08: “I am so, so tired of people like Michael Berube and Andrew Delbanco and Stanley Fish ‘taking a stand for my interests’ without bothering to consider whether I want them taking that stand.”
What’d I do? Did I write an essay called “What Freddie Really Wants” at some point?
— Michael Bérubé · Feb 11, 09:42 PM · #
I’m sorry, but you appear to have simply invented the perspective that undergirds your opinion.
Freddie, I understand that you are currently a grad student yourself. I’m sure you have your own anecdotal experiences. Because of both, I can understand why you might argue with my comment. But the accusation you ended with above is further evidence (in addition to many other things I have seen you write in TAS comments) that you are also a pretensious ass.
In the humanities departments I am familiar with, there is typically 1 graduate course offered for every 3 or 4 undergraduate courses (or 20 to 25 percent). I did a quick search of course catalogs online at a few ACC philosophy departments, and this played out consistently (I excluded both undergraduate and graduate supervised research). Of course, those graduate seminars are also typically comprised of only a handful of students, as opposed to most undergraduate courses. While this point (and only this point) is somewhat more debateable, on observation and believe, each department typically has several tenured professors who also spend enough time supervising and advising grad student teaching, research and dissertations that they could teach an additional undergraduate class each semester if there were no graduate students at all. If you were not such an ass, I’m sure you would agree. Either way, your argument and your conclusion about my factual basis is simply false.
Law schools are an imperfect example of what humanities departments would look like if there were no graduate students. There are many similarities between the academic work of professors in several of the humanities — particularly philosophy — and law professors (yes, I’m sure people will be able to point out some important differences). But the ratio of tenured professors to degree seekers in each discipline is very different. At my research university, there was approximately 1 undergraduate degree granted for each tenure track professor in the philosophy department. The law school granted approximately 5 degrees for each tenure track professor. Both of these departments were highly regarded, but the law school was significantly more so.
One counterpoint that must be addressed is that most of the lower-level philosophy courses are taken by non-degree seekers; there is no significant corresponding set of non-degree seeking students taking classes at the law school. This is generally true among undergraduate humanities programs. However, these lower level courses in philosophy are much larger than any classes at the law school. The vast majority of non-degree seeking students taking philosophy courses are taking large lecture courses that can run to the several hundreds (e.g. Michael Sandel at Harvard). These classes would need to be taught even if there were no non-majors to teach. In other words, looking over a typical course catalog, it does not appear that non-majors create a significant need for additional faculty members. Certainly not to the tune of 5x the number of professors.
I loved my liberal arts education, and I understand why people want to go to graduate school in the liberal arts. But, at least with respect to graduate school-as-training-for-academia, the number of graduate students is deeply problematic.
— Jay Daniel · Feb 11, 11:08 PM · #
you are also a pretensious ass.
Which is why it’s weird people still tend to make this combox into the 24/7 discussion of Freddie; basic human psychology suggests that this is a mistake, if what you want is for me to go away. Right?
a few ACC philosophy departments
A truly unassailable display of empiricism. Philosophy departments are small, and teach few undergraduates; they also represent a particularly small percentage of the total professors employed in the humanities and thus are a very poor proxy.
Let’s look at English, at some big U’s in the Northeast, shall we? Take UConn, the public university of my home state. A quick perusal of their course offerings confirms that there are many more sections just of ENG 1010, the freshman composition course, than there are graduate classes. The same goes at the University of Rhode Island; although there is more than one class that satisfies freshman composition there, the same reality is true— far more sections that satisfy the freshman composition requirement than the total number of English graduate courses. The same at UMass-Amherst. (Make sure you look at number of sections and not merely number of different classes.) Indeed, it is not all that unusual for there to be more sections of 100 level classes than sections of all other levels of classes combined. Consider that fact for a moment. When you’re a school like Uconn, and you have some 20,000 undergrads, and they all are required to take freshman composition or else test out into a 200 level equivalent, those sections will dwarf the total graduate course load, where there is almost never more than one section of a given class, and there are perhaps a dozen classes offered total a semester.
History is likely to be similar; although a 200 level or similar history class may not be as near-universal a requirement as freshman composition, it is common for public universities to require all students take at least one history class. That is dozens and dozens of sections of undergraduate classes. Graduate numbers simply can’t compare.
I may be a pretentious ass, but I’m also right, on this issue. I can understand why philosophy would prepare you to think differently, but low-level undergraduate requirements push thousands and thousands of students into humanities classes when they wouldn’t otherwise take them. Dropping all graduate classes wouldn’t make a significant dent in the number of professors needed to run a university humanities department.
Quite the opposite! Universities require so much graduate student labor to staff many of these classes, as has been discussed endlessly. Those students have to take some classes. But they are on balance a huge net profit to individual universities and the university system as a whole. Season your distaste for me a moment and consider if you haven’t jumped to conclusions.
— Freddie · Feb 12, 12:11 AM · #
You mistake me, although I certainly understand why. This may be devolving into the overly personal for a blog, but I’ve been a TAS reader for a long time now, but only a recent, very occasional commenter. That entire time, you have also been a much more frequent commenter. I can’t speak for others, but on the whole, I am glad you are here and look forward to your comments. It is precisely because I find some of your comments so interesting and occasionally, even profound, that it’s frustrating when you act like a jerk. You’re obviously a very smart, widely read guy. Be nicer, and the world could be yours. That’s my two cents, and since you don’t know me at all, I understand if you discount that accordingly.
On the substance of your comment, English — which I understand is your field — is probably even more of an outlier toward dependence on graduate students than Philosophy is away from it. As you point out, most universities require every undergraduate who passes through their doors to take freshmen composition. I think it would be interesting, and much more sustainable, if universities hired working writers to teach those classes rather than using graduate students, but that would obviously work much better in some places than others.
I imagine that most disciplines in the humanities will fall somewhere in between your example and mine, with history and languages more dependent on graduate students and religious studies, classics, and other smaller departments looking a lot more like philosophy departments. A perusal of the course catalogs at the University of Virginia (convenient because they often list their undergraduate and graduate courses together) generally bears this out. See, e.g. UVA Religious Studies.
I’m willing to agree that English and History, because of general education requirements, depend on lots of instructors to teach low level classes to non-majors. They could accomplish this in different ways, but most universities rely on graduate students. For most other, smaller humanities departments, in which the ratio of professors to yearly degrees granted occasionally 1-to-1, and which also have close to the same number of graduate students as undergraduate degree-seekers, I believe that my depiction of what is going on holds up. And that’s enough from me on this topic.
— Jay Daniel · Feb 12, 05:34 AM · #
Freddie: I am so, so tired of people like Michael Berube and Andrew Delbanco and Stanley Fish “taking a stand for my interests” without bothering to consider whether I want them taking that stand. Delbanco, in particular, constantly goes around pretending to be advocating for graduate students, but does so in a way that is so dripping with resentment and condescension the insult is clear. The only thing worse than someone telling you that you are an idiot is someone who does it while claiming that he cares only for your interests.
Very good. It works as a devastating indictment of the leftwing welfare state.
— The Reticulator · Feb 12, 05:53 AM · #
Jay – Freddie’s point about the need to count sections rather than courses bears repeating. It’s not clear from the UVA link how many discussion sections there are for some of these religious studies courses. I doubt that “plus discussion section” means that there’s only one section per course.
There definitely are classics departments at some schools where very large enrollments (in the hundreds, even over a thousand students) in things like myth, Greek civilization, Roman civilization (that fulfil gen ed requirements of some sort) are one of the main things that the department uses to justify its existence. The TA’s add up very quickly. English may be extreme (I’ve known a case where freshman comp demanded so many TA’s that the English department hired grad students from other departments) but it’s not unique.
— Gavin Weaire · Feb 12, 02:36 PM · #
I doubt whether there is singular answer as to why there is an “oversupply” of humanities PhDs, since the variety of graduate programs would seem to make it very hard to generalize. It would not seem to be the case that an assistant professor of English at U of Mississippi has the same incentive/opportunity structure as an endowed chair of philosophy at Princeton. So generalizing seems a bit silly.
More importantly, though, I think Freddie has at least this right: why is this such a worry? Presumably the people going into these programs are reasonably bright, are capable of reading and doing research – and thus should be able to figure out that spending 8 years in a graduate program will provide them some, but quite slim, chances of landing a job at Southwest Missouri State (and then getting to work hard so that you can stay there the rest of your life). If you’d rather not do that, you can always do something else, right? So long as you don’t borrow oodles of money (and my advice would be to not borrow any money for a humanities PhD), no one is imprisoning you. So why all the bother?
— Bryan · Feb 12, 06:14 PM · #
Right. People like Benton presuppose that humanities PhD candidates are uninformed about the “real chances” of getting a job, and further presuppose that what these candidates will accept as success in the future is quite narrow. Now I can’t respond to that with anything but anecdote, but the humanities doctoral candidates I know are painfully aware of the job situation as far as tenure track jobs go. But many are at least somewhat sanguine about the opportunity to adjunct, or to teach at a community college; I know I am.
I also think that there is an overestimation of the opportunity cost of the time spent collecting the PhD. Yes, doctoral students tend to make very little money. But many people are making very little money and are also not getting a degree. Personally, I applied to dozens of jobs for two years before I started at my current program. The handful of offers I got would have paid me very little more than what I can make with a stipend and a part-time tutoring job working about 15 hours a week— and I would have hated doing them. I suspect the calculus is similar for many other candidates.
— Freddie · Feb 12, 06:58 PM · #
I agree with Freddie on almost everything, and Feeney’s is a necessary counterpoint to Benton’s overburdened bruxism (or brugmós, as Turnankle calls it). However, I cry foul on the issue of opportunity cost. For a dude, being poor through your late twenties, when you are at the peak of sexual desirability to both nubile floozies and prowling cougars — these are high costs indeed. Going out every night gets expensive.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Feb 12, 08:15 PM · #
Jay, I wonder if you’re on target about philosophy departments. Both universities I’ve been affiliated with, (Pitt and UNC) had more majors than professors, and teaching requirements that, either could not have been met by a smaller faculty, or would’ve required increasing the faculty if graduate students didn’t teach. And both universities have relatively low teaching requirements for their grad students. Of course I’m also not sure how representative they are in requiring all Arts and Sciences undergrads to do a philosophy course.
Another point: if people focus too much on English, that’s surely in part because English is the largest humanities graduate program at most schools. So it affects the largest number of graduate students. Of course, that’s a double edged sword, because I know that the English job market isn’t perfectly representative. From where I’m standing, it looks both a lot more sparse and a lot more capricious than philosophy.
— Justin · Feb 12, 11:46 PM · #