Whither the PhD?

As those of us who follow trends in academe may have read, Louis Menand's recently-published The Marketplace of Ideas takes to task the entire structure of the academy. And correspondingly, he critiques the PhD-getting process.

I haven't yet read the book--just the excerpts published in Harvard Magazine (the comments after the article are worth a read, too). The gist of it, very roughly:

It takes nearly a decade to earn a PhD in the humanities. Only about a quarter of students who start a PhD program wind up with tenure-track jobs. So why put students through such a grueling, penurious process? Does it really require nine years of training to become qualified to teach undergraduates?

Well, of course not. Here's what Menand offers instead:

"there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought. . . . And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction . . . . If Ph.D. programs were determinate in length—if getting a Ph.D. were like getting a law degree—then graduate education might acquire additional focus and efficiency. It might also attract more of the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having."

Related breaking news, from the Art History Newsletter: the College Art Association 's Online Career Center reports that job listings for art historians "declined 14.3% from FY 2008 (July 1, 2007–June 30, 2008) to FY 2009 (July 1, 2008–June 30, 2009) and are on track to decline another 36.9% in FY 2010 (July 1, 2009–June 30, 2010)." No one will be shocked to learn that at least one professional organization states part-time and adjunct positions increased during this period. The breakdown of CAA stats is here. (image source)