Going for a Ph.D. in the Humanities?
December 18, 2009, 8:34 am
Posted by Cathleen Kaveny
You may want to rethink things, if you like food and shelter. Very, very grim report on how the recession is affecting hiring in the humanities.
on December 18th, 2009 at 9:59 am
It’s not unimportant to note that one-fifth of the available jobs in English departments are in the sub-field of “composition” — a sub-field that emphasizes strategies for teaching students writing, not teaching them how to read literature.
It’s important to note because students who enter the academy wanting to teach and research on the subject of literature will find that many of the available jobs have very little to do with literature at all.
on December 18th, 2009 at 10:54 am
I had occasion recently to look at Openings — the job listing for Religious Studies and related fields — and commented to some one that I came away from the experience with much the same feelings I had hafter reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: bleak. . . bleak.
on December 18th, 2009 at 11:05 am
I suppose it’s no comfort that the article equates “humanities” only with English departments, as if that were all there might be to the term. No doubt things are just as bad in the other humanistic fields as well, and I wonder how much better, if at all, art, music, history, philosophy, classics, and so forth, are doing? Not much, I imagine, judging by the example of religious studies cited above.
On the other hand, I bet that a field that trades in witchcraft and superstition (I’m thinking of economics, of course) is doing just fine.
on December 18th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Wow – that’s the first time in a long career I’ve ever encountered Economics Envy! :-)
on December 18th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Would a literature PhD who is unable to get a college faculty job consider taking a high school English (or French) teaching job?
on December 18th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Actually, Nicholas, I’m not sure how ironic you were being, but the job shortage is pure economics -supply and demand.
on December 18th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Not only are pprospects bleak, but I suspect that it is still the case that a gradute degree of any sort is a kiss of death in the job market.
When I finished myaster’s in the 50s I couldn’t get any sort of job for a year because I was “over-qualified”. I knew a young black man in the 70’s who searched and searched for any sort of job, but he too was over-qualified. He said he finally left the fact of his master’s degree off of his job application. When asked by an interviewer what he had been doing the previous two years (he had left that blank), he replied, “In and out of jail”, and he got the job.
on December 18th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Thank you, Cathleen Kaveny, for bringing this to our attention. This is extremely discouraging. Once you create this kind of deficit it is very hard to recover when finally there is, almost inevitably, a realization that a loss like this cannot be accepted.
I have lived only on “the edges” of academic life, but haven’t there been other periods over the last four or so decades when similar trends have ben noted, and then a recovery? I believe in my field, modern European history, this has been so to some degree. I am not trying at all to minimize this grim news, but just to suggest that a better time may return. Perhaps I am whistling in the dark, and this time round is far worse than anything seen before.
Is a “commercialization” of higher learning driving this trend?
on December 18th, 2009 at 11:54 am
In my own field, the non-profit housing sector, I look pretty favorably on applicants with masters degrees in the liberal arts. Most of my work involves organizing and policy advocacy and it is really important that the people I work with be able to write. A bachelors degree (from any school) gives no assurance of that and writing samples are unreliable. So, while a PhD would be overkill, a masters in english, history, classics, etc, would tend to make me give a resume a second look. Obviously, I look for a much broader skill set than basic literacy, and have had very good luck with staff with no college degree at all, but I do think a masters in a demanding subject area doesn’t hurt in a tight job market.
(Being that these are non-profit jobs, though, it still leaves you with the problem of meeting your food and shelter needs).
on December 18th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
FWIW – in the area where I live, parishes are staffed my lay ministers with masters degrees (or doctorates) whose salaries barely stretch to food and shelter :-(
on December 18th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Apropos to my previous comment: I have a friend who has spent a large part of her career in parish ministry. Her comment was, “Every time I get a new master’s degree, my saraly goes down.”
on December 18th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Would a literature PhD who is unable to get a college faculty job consider taking a high school English (or French) teaching job?
Jim,
If I understand it correctly, all high school teachers need to be licensed, whereas college teachers do not. So you would have to take the required education courses to become a high school teacher and then pass the appropriate exam in the state where you wanted to teach.
I suppose the situation is unfortunate, but on the other hand, I remember my own experience being just out of college and looking for a job (in 1970). I had a BA in English, and I came to New York with the idea of looking for a job in publishing, advertising, or radio/television. I went to one employment agency and the woman who was supposed to help me find a job ripped me up one side and down the other for having no skills. After a long tirade, she said, “I don’t blame you. I blame the schools.” In a way, she was right. If you want to get a job, you need marketable skills, and you need skills that are in demand.
I do wonder how many people going for advanced degrees in the humanities actually have their hearts set on teaching at the college level and how many just want to be perpetual students. I would have loved to stay in college forever, which is one reason I decided not to go to graduate school. It would have been putting off getting a job.
I think a PhD in English may actually work against someone seeking a job in the “real” world. Employers will wonder why you spent all that time getting a degree that gives you no employment advantage.
on December 18th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I believe that the devaluation of the Humanities in our time is a symptom of a deeper cultural malaise. I am old enough to remember a time when learning was a value in itself, when a liberal arts college education was a kind of intellectual buffet where one “tasted” all kinds of new things — modern and classical languages, music and art appreciation, history, philosophy — that could be pursued later in life. I am always amazed at the number of professionals — notably doctors and lawyers — who are consistent supporters of the Arts and can be seen regularly at performances of the symphony and opera.
In our culture, colleges and universities — struggling to survive — are turning into what we used to call “trade schools”. …And we wonder why there is a lack of civility in discourse when our culture is feeding on a media which delights in “infortainment” where critical thinking is seen as unnecessary in the illusionary “no spin zone”!
on December 18th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Mr. Page ==
About the commercialization of universities == Alasdair MacIntyre’s answr is Yes.
In his most recent work, “God, Philosophy, Universities”, he says of contemporary research universities:
“Such universities have become richer and richer and richer and at the same time more and more expensive. They have become richer, becuase they attract massive funding and endowment from governmens, from corportions, and from individuals by reason of their place both in the overall conomic order and in the lives of students bent upon acqiring those qualities and those qalifications most likely to make them outstndingly successful. They have become more expensive because they charge what the market will bear. Research universities in the early twenty-first century are wonderfully successful business corporations subsidized by tax exemptions and exhibiting all the acquisitive ambitions of such corporations.k” (p. 174)
on December 18th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
I think if anything the problem is not enough commercialization in the humanities. If college professors, as a group, were more customer-focused, the demand would increase–as would their value to society.
on December 18th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Having returned to Catholic secondary education (teaching sophomores at a Jesuit high school), I see that there is a dire need for talented, creative, and passionate teachers at the grade school and high school levels. Perhaps some of these current grad students or potential PhD students will reconsider seminar discussions on Proust and will instead find excitement, somehow, in teaching a seventh grader or a sophomore how to write a topic sentence.
on December 18th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
<i)Jim Pauwels: Would a literature PhD who is unable to get a college faculty job consider taking a high school English (or French) teaching job?
David Nickol is right; most states require teacher certification to teach in a high school. But a literature PhD could teach in a Catholic high school or another private school. Private schools have the advantage of being able to hire the best candidate; they’re not limited to hiring only candidates with a piece of paper.
I’m someone who did the humanities grad school thing (MA in Theology from Catholic U). I taught religion in a Catholic school immediately after grad school, but when I decided to switch to public schools for the higher pay (and better benefits), I had to get certified, which meant taking online education courses (even the graduate level classes are no more rigorous intellectually than high school classes). And the state exams consist of three #2 pencil bubble tests. One is on liberal studies (math, science, English, history), one is on teaching, the other in a person’s area of certification. They measure maybe a 10th grade knowledge equivalent. And a person can retake theses tests until he or she passes. (A person is only allowed one failing attempt on the comprehensive exams at CUA).
My proposal: eliminate certification requirements that serve to push mediocre students into high school teaching and allow these unemployed PhD’s into the high school classroom while they wait for college positions to open up. But, alas, this means some people will go into high school teaching as a fall-back career (if anyone reads NEA or AFT newsletters, there is no greater sin).
I’d recommend reading Nicholas Kristof’s 2006 OpEd, Opening Classroom Doors
on December 18th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
I think it’s always been this way. My sister got a masters in philosophy and I got one in history – neither of us has ever been able to get a teaching job. I have a friend who just got his Ph.D in medieval history from Colombia University and he had to search very hard to get two classes to teach at two different colleges. To teach high school, at least in California, you need a teaching credential. To teach at a junior college, you need another credential, but that’s just one you pay for. To teach at a university you usually need a Ph.D.
on December 18th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
It seems to me there is a gross semantic problem with the term “college education”. PreWW II it used to mean for most Americans , I think, a certified level of learning that allowed you to get a job that paid more than skilled labor. Since most Americans at that times probably hadn’t even heard the term “Humanities” the Humanities were not included in their concept of a higher education. Only those who attended colleges with strong Humanities curricula understood something of what the term meant. This is why I think that people who attended a college with such a curriculum are the only ones competent to judge their value. But how ma y such people are there?
Colleges have consistently lowered such requirements, so that we are now in a situation where we have the blind leading the blind.
I recommend MacIntyre’s new book If you want to understand why the Humanities, especially philosophy and theology (which are about human valuees) are integral parts of an education that educates thee whole person.
on December 18th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
I advise my own children to study what they love in college. If they end up selling cell-phone service because those are the jobs that are available, so be it. But the pleasure and edification to be found in music or poetry or the medieval Scholastics is something that can never be taken away from them, no matter what life dishes out.
on December 18th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Mr. Pidgeon
If I’ m not mistaken, generally private schools, if they want to be certified, must have a very high proportion of certified teachers. Most want to be certified because colleges are looking for kids from certified high schools.
on December 18th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
As an addendum to my previous comment: I went into college without a clear idea of what I loved. I was so fortunate to choose a Jesuit university that required us to get at least a taste of a broad swath of disciplines in the arts, the humanities and the sciences.
on December 18th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Yes, most teaching jobs are in composition, and most of these composition jobs are adjunct positions, which pay a fraction of the salary a tenured position does. Tenured faculty love adjunct just where they are (more $$ for them!), and generally float the fiction around that if the adjunct were any good in their fields, they’d have tenure, too.
It’s been this way for the past 25 years. Is this news to anybody?
Meantime, I find this pronouncement truly astounding: “I think if anything the problem is not enough commercialization in the humanities. If college professors, as a group, were more customer-focused, the demand would increase–as would their value to society.”
How do we “commercialize” the humanities? Henry James action figures anyone?
How should college instructors be “more customer-focused”? I spend hours on lesson plans based on specific student needs and make countless appointments to help students individually–appointments that 50 percent of them don’t bother to keep.
Does demand for a thing truly increase its value or worth to society? I’m thinking of any number of gizmos and gadgets for which there is high demand. Let’s say those motion-activated singing trout that were so popular a few Xmases back. Their ultimate value/worth to society? Hmmmm.
on December 18th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
I think if anything the problem is not enough commercialization in the humanities. If college professors, as a group, were more customer-focused, the demand would increase–as would their value to society.
“The customer is always right” is the death of education, since in this case “the customer” is a callow youth who is almost surely wrong.
on December 18th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I didn’t read Mark’s comment as “the customer is always right” so much as “serve customer needs.”
Pile driving the fact that you think the students are callow and wrong into their heads is a sure way to get them to hate your guts and to hate your subject by association. But I’m sure F.C. didn’t mean to suggest that was a good way to proceed.
The challenge is persuading the “customers” into realizing that there’s more to being human than acquiring the requisite skills to make the most money possible in the shortest period of time.
Which, of course, underscores the fact that students no longer seek an education to become educated (knowledgeable, well-rounded, aware of the larger world), but to train themselves for success in a high-paying job. All institutions of higher learning have, to a large extent, become trade schools.
I suppose I’m guilty of accepting that reality all too readily. My kid shows a fairly high degree of verbal aptitude, and I’m already shoving brochures about high-tech instructional design programs at him.
on December 18th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Why are students looking to master a skill set like engineering, medicine, etc. required to attend a 4 year university, paying for Humanities courses they don’t need?
Typically, one is labeled a philistine for even asking this.
“Well roundedness”, or some such thing is usually the answer. But with ‘well-roundedness’ now priced around $200,000, whole classes of people are excluded from acquiring this intellectual/social characteristic (unless, of course, you get a scholarship which elevates you above your class).
If it’s important to know Shakespeare or theater in general (and I believe it is) then theater ought to be subsidized and made available to everyone. It can’t be good that even performance art can only be appreciated by those who have huge amounts of money and time.
My point is that a democratic society does not bottle up the humanities for the privileged few. Sadly, that’s what has happened in our society, and now even that academic bottle is shrinking. The humanities will be saved only when people realize their true home isn’t academia.
on December 18th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Jim P said: FWIW – in the area where I live, parishes are staffed my lay ministers with masters degrees (or doctorates) whose salaries barely stretch to food and shelter :-(
As Mother Church says when all else fails: Offer it up! If lay folk are “overpaid” there won’t be enough money for the rectory.
on December 18th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
I advise my own children to study what they love in college. If they end up selling cell-phone service because those are the jobs that are available, so be it. But the pleasure and edification to be found in music or poetry or the medieval Scholastics is something that can never be taken away from them, no matter what life dishes out.
I agree! I said above that I never found a job in the areas I studied in college (philosophy, art, and history) but I don’t regret a minute I spent in college – I loved it and it’s still a part of my interior life.
on December 18th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
It used to be that a Masters Degree was a great ticket for teaching even in college. Now all colleges require a PHD with the exceptions in theater and art. Which may be a way of acknowledging perhaps that talent does not always come with a phd. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to work on Microsoft and got his degree in 07 via the honorary route. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/032207-bill-gates-to-finally-receive.html
BTW, I never understood why people list honorary degrees as some kind of achievement.
on December 18th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
This is an interesting topic, and one I’ve been pondering since graduating from my master’s program. My MA is in theology, though I don’t work in that field, or even in the educational field at all, right now. (I thought I wanted to be a professor, but had a change of heart once I entered a Phd theology program.) Many classmates were also getting MAs and Mdivs and, like me, were lay students. I’ve kept in contact with some classmates, and very few have actually gone on to work in a theological field. I don’t know the particular circumstances involving each individual. But I do think there are very few opportunities for these people to gain employment related to their degrees. One lay student became a hospital chaplain. Very few went on to pursue doctorates. Fewer went on to teach in grammar schools or high schools. My hunch is that few people give much thought to what job a specialized humanities degree would gain them. Classmates spoke little about future plans. My takeaway is that advanced programs in the humanities ought to emphasize that these degrees are the gateway to a vocation. From a strictly fiscal angle, schools would be hesitant to take this route. They will necessarily have leaner programs. But they might gain more serious students and a more successful group of alums.
on December 18th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
The perfect solution: Get a humanities degree and enter the seminary or religious life. Positions are open, and God knows you’ll get to use every bit of your training. A religious life is one of poetry and history and literature and language and art, to name but a few of its expressions. And the Church will profit immensely. Indeed, priests and religious often seem to be the last true practitioners of the humanities, though not as much as before, I suspect.
on December 19th, 2009 at 8:05 am
I don’t know if it’s practical, but I’m thinking I might encourage my daughters to develop a skill with their heads and also one with their hands. Study philosophy, engineering, whatever, but also maybe master a craft whether it’s baking, electrical repair or hair styling. I think the combined skill sets might not only better pay the bills, but could be personally satisfying.
on December 19th, 2009 at 10:14 am
I think Brian’s comment is well worth considering:
“If it’s important to know Shakespeare or theater in general (and I believe it is) then theater ought to be subsidized and made available to everyone. It can’t be good that even performance art can only be appreciated by those who have huge amounts of money and time.”
Moreover, I’d suggest that associating the humanities largely with academia is a sure fire way to kill them in a culture like ours that is suspicious and dismissive of intellectualism.
Plug here for public libraries that keep people interested in reading and literature with book groups, author events, and the like.
on December 19th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Jean is correct that I meant being more customer focused in terms of serving the customer’s needs and listening to what he’s” telling” you, not that the customer’s always right. If he’s not buying as much of your product as you think he should, then either you’re not teaching the course in the way he can get out of it what you think he should, or you’re simply overestimating the true value of your product–never discount that possibility, hard as it may be to come to terms with. Actually, I think the customer, when it comes to a college education, is as much the parents of the student as the student himself. Unfortunately (just like health care), the payer for the services is removed the delivery of the actual product.
So, how can the humanities teacher tell if she’s being customer focused? Well, if you would change the way you act in the classroom should you know the parents were able to watch you teach their sons and daughters, you’re not being customer focused. If you see the classroom as a refuge where you can bully your students with your political views, knowing the power you hold over them by your ability to give them a poor grade, then you’re not customer focused. If when a student is struggling you reflexively assume it’s the student, and not your teaching ability, then you’re not being customer focused. If you see the classroom primarily as a means to your end (whether that end is research, honoraria, or whatever), you’re not being customer focused.
Moreover, if you have colleagues that fit the description above, and you do nothing to correct the problem, then please, spare us the exaltations of the teaching profession, since you are not interested doing what it takes to maintain its integrity.
PS Jean, if you do not see the Big Mouth Billy Bass for the exquisite piece of Americana that it is, then…well, you best keep away from my family room!
on December 19th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Mark, teachers may not have all the power you ascribe to them. They are like the rest of wo/mankind. Each is different with faults and virtues. I would hope that a teacher would teach differently if the parents were watching. Merely to avoid insanities from someone who has no idea what teaching entails.
Sounds like you’re angry at a few professors. I have my chosen few also. But save it for the bishops. They are the ones who really need to be reformed.
on December 19th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
I would welcome parents in my class. They might then understand that Junior’s grades tanked because he spends inordinate amounts of class time trolling Facebook, texting, and napping off his hangover when he thinks I’m not looking.
Yeah, we’ve all had the “This is ART; are you good enough to read it?” lit prof., though I’m not sure that I didn’t learn more from those I hated and feared. Not that they weren’t arrogant S.O.B.’s, but they knew their stuff despite their lack of people skills.
The prof who wastes time riding his political hobby horse and making grades contingent on agreeing with his viewpoints, is, I think, mostly a fiction, (though my nephew, a Baptist and future rocket scientist–really!–on a full ride scholarship to a school that will remain nameless, says academia is full of godless atheists who teach Greek drama which no Christian person should know about).
Mark, I hope you string twinkle lights on your Billy Bass like we do here in Michigan. I only have a motion-activated Santa that does a little dance to a Christmas version of “Shout,” but it’s hours of fun when we set it up and the cats happen to walk by and set it off.
on December 19th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
a more in depth article on same issue here. answers some of the comments, esp. notes that regarding supply and demand, grad programs are admitting way too many grad students and only half of them finish
http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy
on December 21st, 2009 at 9:02 am
What I have at least tried to do with my own children is to steer them to study what they love but not to lose sight of practical consequences. It’s perfectly fine to major in art history, for instance, but it would be more practical to combine it with a degree in economics, and to make sure that you are gaining some practical experience in a setting that you might actually end up working in.
The dearth of good jobs in the humanities has been with us for three decades, and scholars in the humanities have never lived all that comfortably. It would be better to see the last 50 years, like so much of American life, as something of an apex of achievement that was not destined to last. What HAS changed is, I believe, the sense of division between those “inside” the academy and those “outside” so that if you do not choose the lonely path of humanities as a mission your “access” to cultural goods is much lesser. Maybe this is the result of specialization, but I think it’s much more dramatic now than in earlier generations.
on December 21st, 2009 at 10:45 am
“What HAS changed is, I believe, the sense of division between those ‘inside’ the academy and those ‘outside’ so that if you do not choose the lonely path of humanities as a mission your ‘access’ to cultural goods is much lesser.”
Not sure I’ve understood comment this properly. I see the problem not as access but audience.
I can find stuff on Anglo-Saxon hagiography, which was my specialization in grad school, all over the Internet, stuff I used to have to travel to a big university library to find in books.
Spending an idle afternoon refreshing my memory about Sts. Guthlac or Aethelthryth or Cuthbert or Hild is personally satisfying, but finding anybody to share this info with is pretty much futile.
To some extent, academics have made this situation worse; if I could entice a wide swath of readers, I’d be scorned as a “popularizer.” Sadly, insisting that the only useful scholarship is the kind that only a handful of scholars read is what’s killing the humanities as a discipline.
on December 22nd, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Jean, maybe cross pollination between those inside and outside the academy is a better way of stating the case — there don’t seem to be too many people who care about those on the other side of the divide. I blame academics mostly, but in their defense I am sure they would point to how difficult it is to compete with cultural maw that seems to promote dumb, dumber and dumbest.
For instance, my kids and I watch the science show Nova whenever we can — which tries to “bring down” science to the realm of the popular and interesting while still being informative. And there are these companies that specialize in bringing college level courses and lectures to the lay public. So if I think about it I can find examples of this, but that’s what I am talking about — sustained interaction that makes academics less wonkish and circular in their habits, and the public at large more critical in their thinking.
on December 28th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
“If it’s important to know Shakespeare or theater in general (and I believe it is) then theater ought to be subsidized and made available to everyone. It can’t be good that even performance art can only be appreciated by those who have huge amounts of money and time.”
Some of it is subsidized, by corporate, foundation and government grants. Still, even productions and companies that receive these subsidies charge customers a multiple of what a movie ticket costs.
Television and mass-market films are such a superior economic model to live theater that live theater can’t compete. If you are a top-drawer actor or director, why do it for a relative pittance in the live theater if you can make a fortune doing basically the same work for TV or the movies?
We don’t need a grant to mount a production of Hamlet or Julius Caesar. We just need the requisite number of volunteers with time on their hands and the inclination. Of course, it would probably be pretty bad (basing that prediction on my own involvementi n the project, as I can’t act my way out ot a wet paper bag). If we want Daniel Day-Lewis and Meryl Streep to headline the show, we have to figure out a way to afford them. But even without them, community theaters all over the US still put on these plays all the time, and would love it if more of the community came out to see their shows.