Thesis Hatement: Getting a literature Ph.D (2013)
slate.com
slate.com
English and humanities BAs are eminently hireable, as the author points out, but the academy has decided to so relentlessly overproduce professors as to make it untenable as a profession. 75%+ of humanities courses are taught by adjuncts and graduate students—and the graduate students are just adjuncts-in-training. The MLA recently had a big symposium about this, which concluded that there was basically nothing wrong, they should continue to train professors (and benefit from their underpaid teaching), and make more of a show to go on about jobs outside traditional academia (in museums? libraries? It's unclear). While the norms of the academy is that anyone who isn't a professor is a failure.
Source: I dodged this bullet.
They didn't go to top-10 Ph.D programs. They went to top-2 Ph.D programs.
If you're not getting a Ph.D from one of the 3 absolute best-regarded programs, the odds are just insane.
The university was an R2 (according to the Carnegie-Mellon Research classification) [0]; I graduated from an R1. Most my colleagues graduated from R1s.
I was very unhappy in my Midwestern University town and left my academic post (having declined to pursue tenure) to return to my native state.
Faculty at such highly-ranked research institutions use graduate students because such high-achieving graduate students
1. Are a pleasure to teach, able to understand the highly complex and intricate theories about literature and culture we faculty research.
2. Are able (and thrilled to teach the low-level classes (e.g. Composition) which we would rather not teach.
The lie many faculty tell themselves is that such students are apprentices to the profession. That lie has been called out for the last 20 years and is, slowly, being accepted by younger faculty at such institutions. The problem is that tenure, as the article mentions, is dying with the faculty when they retire and these tenure lines are being replaced with graduate students and adjunct faculty.
Tenure will not completely go away. It will simply be restricted to the R1s and R2s. Every other institution can expect their ranks of faculty to be poorly compensated and to have no job security.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_...
For my area (numerical linear algebra), the jump into doing what is essentially software engineering was a very straightforward one. In fact, most of the research that I had been doing was applicable in some way or another. For those in pure mathematics (Analysis, Algebra, Topology, etc.), I could see there being more of a hurdle.
Yeah. That's why I posted it. In 2012 I wrote my own version about why going to grad school in the humanities is a bad idea: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor....
When I started, in 2008, the market wasn't fantastic but wasn't as catastrophically bad as it's become. Fortunately, I now work as a grant writing consultant and do some teaching that's more for a change of pace than for serious, keep-your-head-above-water income.
-Max Planck
Academia is brutal, and grad school literally gets medieval on your __. In some fields though, (Biosciences in particular) if you want to be anywhere near R&D it's hard to be taken seriously and have a real career without one.
Source: I got a PhD, it wasn't especially pleasant, I don't regret it, but I'd definitely do it very differently if I got to go back in time.
Both myself and my partner from the same program have coveted positions in no small part because of this training.
That being said I went to a #1 program at UC Berkeley, did not even consider becoming a professor, and worked hard at technical skills in the background. I too would have failed miserably on the tenure track.
After coming back and visiting, I found the vast majority of professors shallow and self centered, coddled by positions that afforded them little to no emotional growth or challenge that is demanded of the rest of humanity.
If a literature PhD isn't going to land you a six-figure job then maybe it should re-calibrate its tuition and time expectations to be something that a professionally active adult can pursue simultaneous to their career.
Congrats on rattling the hornets nest!
Academics have the gaul to set up an extortionist racket, and then find someone else to pay the costs of running it!
Flipside is at uni, I found most students more interested in beer and parties and not much support outside of tutor groups. I.e. not much different from watching a bunch of videos and reading books, with a bit of a meetup now and then.
I am learning CS stuff online for free and because I can focus on the areas I am interested in, pace myself and not study for an exam it is much more fun.
Funny enough it would seem weird to people to take 2 years off work to watch youtube videos about CS but OK to do a masters degree. I guess the piece of paper is defintiely worth something.
You generally can't get a Ph.D. without conducting and then communicating original research. Watching videos and reading books might help with that but are not sufficient by themselves.
In literature you of course do have to read in order to do your research. But the hard part is not the reading, it is the originality. That's what you need an advisor, committee, professors, and colleagues for: to challenge you to prove you're not just reiterating what someone else already said.
Then maybe 2, 3, 4 generations in the future some bright spark in the middle classes will notice a lit degree lets a middle class kid social climb and hang out with the upper classes, the uni admins will notice they can literally charge the middle class kids anything they feel like charging just like medical, rotating the system back to where we are now.
When I was applying for academic jobs upon finishing my PhD, I said to one of my professors "every time I apply for a job, I feel like I have probability epsilon of getting it".
His response: "apply for one over epsilon jobs".
I told him I wasn't willing to accept such a large probability of not getting a job...
Those PhD selection committees and professors have an obligation to at the very least, educate students on the truth, much as a doctor must tell patients that smoking is bad for them or that they need to run more. What that exactly looks like, who knows, but it really feels ... scummy. As other commenters state, unless you go to a top 3 program, you factually have a 0% chance. Even then you have little hope. Where is the, pardon the pun, humanity of these professors? Who would want to be taught by such hypocrites that willfully ignore, and possibly make money off of, the lives of their students? It boggles my lesser mind.
So it took exactly a year to find that spelling mistake. That's kind of funny, in a sad way.
If it takes a long time, one of those values is low, possibly both.
It is a pity that this is missing in the HN title.
I find the (so it seems to me, anyway) diversity on HN to be a huge part of the appeal in reading comments.
Thoughts?
Thesis Hatement
Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor
Suggest new HN title: "A literature PhD will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor"
It wasn't difficult to see coming. Supply and demand; when one great professor can teach thousands over the internet, who wants to learn from a half-ass instructor (of which there are many)?
Teachers do add an extraordinary amount of value: if what you're doing can be summed up as a reading list and lecture series, rather than a conversational interaction and personal attention, then it isn't actually adding a whole lot of value to the instructional setting.
The problem is that while university teachers add can add huge amount of value, their profession makes actual teaching a chore to be foisted off on graduate students and adjuncts rather than a goal, in favor of really dubious publication.