As The School of Humanities continues to evaluate its role in the social and academic community, we will be looking closely at the national dialog currently taking place among universities. The articles linked below provide insights into the important issues related to PhD reformation and modernization.
Articles
Kevin Gannon surveys the difficulties faced by graduate programs and students confronted with a changing job market. Gannon asserts the importance of modifying gradate curriculum and training to address the diversity of careers available to graduate students. He outlines a few programs leading this charge and argues that graduate programs face a stark choice: “Either retool graduate work to prepare students for a larger spectrum of employment, or see [graduate programs’] mission and relevance dwindle.”
This article by Leonard Cassuto engages one of the hurdles to reformulating humanities Ph.D. problems directly: culture change. He argues that generations of graduate programs have defined career success so narrowly (tenure track professorate) that graduate students have internalized a self-defeating narrative. Graduate programs cannot adapt to the new job market reality without first rooting out this deeply ingrained structural problem.
This article talks about the opportunities for PhDs in higher education administration.
This article asserts what many of us long observed: PhD programs increasingly fall short of adequately preparing students for a job market that provides fewer and fewer traditional academic careers. It then provides information about how the NEH Next Gen PhD grant is a national response to this deficit.
Beyond Faculty Careers: Can the NEH change the orientation of doctoral programs in the humanities?
This is the announcement of the NEH Next Gen grant. It is telling to note that this article, and the other communication currently coming out of the NEH, repeatedly refers to this process as “cultural change”. This is a helpful way to conceptualize this process and may be fruitful to use in group discussion settings and future communication efforts (this suggestion of baseline change brings to mind the current national concern about renovating flagging or outdated physical infrastructure, but in this case renovating the ‘soft’ intellectual, cultural, and educational infrastructure).
“Grants Seek to Foster a Culture Change in Humanities Graduate Education”
The following article does two things: it expresses the necessity of finding where PhDs land post-grad, and it provides some data about what professional sectors wind up absorbing PhDs. Tracking PhDs draws attention to the variety of job sectors that universities ought to keep in mind when structuring programs that prepare their students. This also identifies just how far universities must go to prepare students for 21st century careers – beginning with the basic step of keeping track of alumni.
Why Colleges Still Scarcely Track Ph.D.s
This article makes the case that grad students ought to be involved in directing their educations. The author suggests that, as it stands, grad seminars equip students with very specific skills appropriate for a future in academia, but perhaps miss the mark for careers outside of academia. The solution? Grant grad students access to the conversation.
Give Us a Voice in Our Own Future
This excerpt from Leonard Cassuto’s The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It was published last year on Slate.com. In the piece, Cassuto illuminates the problems facing graduate school, specifically, and post-secondary education, more broadly. He asserts that graduate school is built on a mission to train students for faculty careers that are dwindling in number.
He highlights a few issues that require attention. Graduate curriculum, including the dissertation, must be reformed to broaden the function of graduate school. Additionally, how a graduate school imagines and conducts itself impacts how undergraduate education is perceived and evaluated by the public. If graduate schools cannot forcefully assert their value and function to the wider community, then the community will; recent history demonstrates that the community has a dubious regard for post-secondary education, in general.
Is the university just a business that sells a commodity? If not, then the university must make the case for what it is.
Leonard Cassuto Our Graduate School Nightmare
(note: Cassuto will be on campus April 24-26, 2017. Check calendar for information)
This blog post comes from the MLA’s Connected Academics, a program funded by the Mellon Foundation to “support initiatives aimed at demonstrating how doctoral education can develop students’ capacities to bring the expertise they acquire in advanced humanistic study to a wide range of fulfilling, secure, and well-compensated professional situations.” The linked post provides graduate students with a functional template to use in evaluating their various skills – particularly those skills acquired in graduate school that may have wider functionality outside of academia. As a resource for what The Next Gen PhD project is attempting to accomplish, this post may provoke ideas.
MLA CAREER EXPLORATION ACTIVITY PACKET: SKILLS SELF-ASSESSMENT, JOB AD ANALYSIS, AND NEXT STEPS
This article details The Next Generation PhD project currently being implemented by the University of Delaware. This is of interest to us at UCI because Delaware is in the application stage of their process – one step ahead of our School of Humanities. Their experience is an instructive model. More than others, Delaware’s program puts an emphasis on community outreach, partnerships, and mentoring, as well as the digital humanities. They also maintain a strong focus on the public visibility of the African American community, particularly through their Colored Conventions Project. The development of their Next Gen project, as well as the coordination of its activities, is threaded through their Interdisciplinary Research Center.
Next Generation Doctoral Education at the University of Delaware
In this article, English professor and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. James Lang shares his reflections on what search committees look for in strong faculty candidates fresh out of their PhD programs. As the head of numerous tenure track search committees, Lang explains the importance of gathering teaching experience, no matter how small, the necessity of pausing one’s research activities to join committees, and the value of knowing the major teaching approaches in one’s field. This article is directed at PhDs produced by major R1 universities who may feel apprehensive about smaller teaching colleges.
How to Prepare for a Teaching Career
The Chronicle of Higher Education has produced this helpful manual for teachers and professors in search of ideas to enliven their classrooms. Some articles provide helpful recommendations to get students more engaged, and others talk about about the importance of starting with a good “hook” at the beginning of class and ending with a concise “closer” in the end. The information contained within is helpful for any of us who spend considerable amounts of time at the front of a classroom.
The Chronicle’s Best Ideas for Teaching 2017
Just how transferable are a PhD’s skills? This article describes one academic’s journey out of academe, the assumptions, the corrections to those assumptions, and the insights she grappled with along the way. The point is to know that, for those looking for options outside of the tenure track, the skills we acquire as PhDs are of value to the outside world. The task is to find the best way to frame and sell those skills to others.
Ph.D.s Do Have Transferable Skills, Part 1
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education first outlines the necessity of maintaining robust alumni networks. Ideally, these are alumni who have found careers outside of academia. The alumni can extend their expertise and professional connections to the grad students coming up behind them. The author then makes the case for integrating non-academic professionalization into grad curriculum.
How Administrators Can Help Prepare Ph.D.s for Nonfaculty Careers
In this interview, James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, makes a compelling case for integrating broader career professionalization into existing graduate student curriculum. He recommends combining 5 basic skills with curricula: communication, collaboration, quantitative literacy, intellectual self-confidence and digital literacy. Grossman argues that these skills will not only make better academics, but will also bolster existing skills that are often overlooked or taken for granted, making PhDs more competitive on a varied job market. He also addresses a few of the concerns central to faculty and administrative resistance, such as the fear that expanded professionalization will “cheapen” or “dilute” the PhD.
Helping History Ph.D.s Expand Their Job Options
In this article Kelly Anne Brown, assistant director at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, argues that universities must reframe their post-doc career data collection efforts. At present, Ph.D. career tracking data is often incompletely gathered, rarely analyzed and infrequently shared. Part of the solution, she says, is to reframe the charge as first, gathering numerical data to then second, uncover the personal stories of struggle and accomplishment behind the numbers. This requires asking tougher questions of the collected data (For example: “What transitional challenges do humanities grads face following graduation?” or “What difficulties do they face entering careers outside of the academy?”). Fleshing out data in this way helps make instructive narratives accessible to everyone from departmental administrators to incoming graduate students. The data would reveal as much about departments and programs as it would about the effort and achievement experienced by humanities graduates who have found fulfilling careers outside or alongside academia. The UCHRI’s Humanists@Work initiative is aggressively tracking humanities Ph.D.s across the UC system with a view to providing the narratives behind the numbers. As Brown says, if 50% of UC Ph.D. grads land positions on the tenure track, what are we training the other 50% of students to do? Reframing the task is how we begin to find out.
Beyond the Numbers: Plotting the Field of Humanities PhDs at Work
This article comes from Georgia State University, a fellow recipient of the NEH Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. grant. The piece is a synopsis of a workshop centered around humanities Ph.D. who have found successful and meaningful employment in business and technology. Some of the highlights include how and why to brand yourself, the importance of a more wholistic approach to resume writing, how to set a plan for yourself, and the realization that “many new PhDs do not know how valuable what they’ve learned in grad school can be.” If nothing else, the article can be thought-provoking and inspiring.
Humanities PhDs Discuss Making It in the World of Tech and Business
Reports
In this report,Robert Weisbuch and Leonard Cassuto summarize the contemporary history of efforts to improve Ph.D. education in the United States with an eye to the future. This survey of major reform efforts of the last quarter century makes evident a consensus stretching, sometimes surprisingly, across the arts and sciences. Such a consensus deserves consideration in formulating any new agenda. But in assessing why recent reforms were not more readily adopted by doctoral programs, we also hope to present lessons for more effective means to achieve the goals of that consensus.
Reforming Doctoral Education, 1990 to 2015 Recent Initiatives and Future Prospects
This report tracked 2,420 Stanford University PhDs (from across a variety of disciplines) to discover what general career sectors they landed in 5 and 10 years after graduation. The primary takeaway is that PhDs tend to migrate into business or stay in academia. Government and non-profit sectors certainly receive PhDs, but at much lower rates. The links below provide a PDF of the report and Stanford’s interactive online presentation of the data.
The Stanford PhD Alumni Employment Project
Interactive Stanford PhD Alumni Database
These data tables were compiled by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Humanities Indicators. Among the various types of data they provide, the tables relating to the career sectors of humanities PhDs is particularly illuminating. The primary takeaway is that postsecondary teaching, general education, management, library & museum work, and the arts & media fields tend to be the most popular recipients of PhD grads.
Occupations of Ph.D.’s in Humanities and All Fields Combined, 2013
Occupations of Humanities Ph.D.’s, by Gender, 2013
Occupations of Ph.D.’s in Selected Academic Fields, 2013
More to come…