Fabio Rojas proposes radical reforms to save the academic job market in the humanities.
Slash doctoral programs: Clearly, the persistent problem is a massive over supply of PhD’s in the humanities. … Increase masters programs: If we slash PhD programs, who will teach the masses? This is pretty easy – massively increase the MA programs. If people want to take an extra year or two learn some topic and “try out” academic life, why should we stop them? … Reclaim the Canon: Professional prestige is based on resources. What’s the one thing that the humanities is really, really good at and that no one else really does? The canon- and it should be what the humanities pushes on undergrads.He then goes on to claim that this approach has more general application.
any field that has a weak non-academic market could be helped [by] these recommendations (e.g., political theory): cut advanced training, get cheap labor in ways other than PhD programs, and focus on what’s absolutely vital.So do we have any political theorists with opinions on this? Or non-political theorists? I hear that the market is pretty bad in theory – is it as bad as in the humanities? If it is, would measures along these lines help?
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And who is going to organize this cut in PhD programs. Why should University’s care if there is an over supply if they benefit from the free labor. Pretty silly idea.
The suggestion to slash PhD admissions is much too general. The best political theory programs do OK placing people. Of course, the job market is worse than in other areas, but nevertheless if you go to an elite program and do well, you have a good chance of eventually landing a decent job. There is no reason, for example, to say that Princeton needs to slash admissions. They can place their PhDs.
On the other hand, there are many PhD programs in political theory that can’t place their students and have no real business graduating PhDs. For these programs to cut back to MA programs may well make sense.
It seems to me that we need to try to get prospective students better information about what they are getting into — especially if they are thinking of doing a political theory PhD in a department that is not one of the best in the country. To some extent, the web has made this easier as potential students often find the various job blogs and the like.
These things, however, mostly address the problem at the level of symptoms. They don’t address the real divisions in the field that generate the problems.
PhD programs should – in my view – do a better job of training their students to have some knowledge and understanding of what political theorists do. Maybe it’s a fantasy, but ideally this would mean having taken a course and actually read Rawls, Dworkin, Nozick, Waldron, J. Cohen, Okin, Goodin, etc. Some good programs already do this, but many don’t.
In any case, a discussion of the theory job market surely can’t be very helpful in the absence of a discussion of theory’s place in the discipline since what we think about the place of theory will largely determine how we ought to respond (or not) to the problems of the job market.
i don’t think it’s that silly. my department, for example, could staff all our TA needs with students from the PA school on the other end of campus, thus getting its free labor without having to offer grad courses (and whatever else it does for grad students).
having said that, i see no reason to limit this line of thinking to political theory. the problems such a proposal is meant to solve extend to the field of political science (and probably most social sciences) as a whole.
I ask this as philosopher. Are there many freestanding political theory departments that teach mainly political philosophy? If so, can’t that be done out of the philosophy department and have the political science department do more of the empirical work?
Fwiw, it seems to me that there are too many Ph.D. programs in philosophy.
Ph.D. physicist here.
The problem is that if you rely on masters degree students to teach, then you aren’t going to get “cheap labor.” Ph.D. students are willing to work for very cheap because they believe that it is part of the training process for bigger and better things.
If you try to get master degree students to teach you’ll run into the problem that without some hope of “bigger things” you just aren’t going to people to sign on, and the people that you get to sign on will demand more money.
Personally, I think that the solution to the problem of Ph.D. production is what the Chinese mandarinate did. Assume that people will *not* become a professor, and train academics to be “public intellectuals” and “community leaders” that professionals.
One thing that I find odd is how a sociologists doesn’t see the problem with having masters students teach courses.
In addition to the problem that it won’t save money, you run into huge sociological problems:
1) have instructors with terminal masters degrees completely destroys the status hierarchy in academia. Right now you have research universities whose teachers are Ph.D.’s or Ph.D. students, and community colleges whose teachers have masters degrees. Community colleges are cheaper, because they don’t have the research overhead. If you have research universities taught by terminal masters, then there is no advantage over a community college, so you will end up with students going to community colleges which will be able to offer higher salaries and lower tuition because they don’t have research overhead.
2) It completely destroys the sociological controls within academia. Ph.D. students can be controlled because the professors are able to grant and withhold status. Terminal masters students aren’t controllable, so they are likely to be much, much more assertive.
I think the basic problem is thinking of being an academic as a “job”. Once you set things up so that people must be full time academics, I think you end up with a system that is fundamentally unstable.
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