The higher the Ph.D. unemployment rate, the more unconscionable it is to demand that all graduate students write the kind of dissertation best suited for research-driven academic jobs. Students need a chance to prepare themselves for the types of jobs that they are actually going to get, not just the one that graduate-school culture has deemed the ideal. We ought to be able to step in and do something. After all, the doctoral dissertation is actually relatively new in graduate education. Introduced in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe, it quickly became central—first over there and then here. The Johns Hopkins University, says the historian Roger L. Geiger in To Advance Knowledge, did more to standardize the Ph.D. in the United States than any other institution, not least because it awarded more of them than any other university during the formative decades of the 1870s and 1880s. Hopkins Ph.D.’s in turn became Professor Appleseeds, planting doctoral programs at public and private universities around the country. By 1893, writes the historian Laurence R. Veysey in his 1965 book, The Emergence of the American University, some amount of graduate work was required to win a permanent appointment at nearly every prominent institution. At the turn of the century the Ph.D. degree was usually mandatory. But the requirements for that degree have changed with the circumstances of the academic job market. When there were jobs for everyone, shorter theses abounded. When academic employment got more scarce, so did the quick finishers. The requirements for a doctorate have always been under construction. Literature departments have proved more willing than historians to consider alternative dissertation formats that might take less time to complete. (However, English departments have stopped short of endorsing Louis Menand’s radically functional suggestion that one peer-reviewed article substitute for the dissertation. Menand’s suggestion is an outlier that serves the salutary purpose of exposing some of the sketchy ethics underlying the current time-to-degree.) One possibility, advanced by the Harvard literature professor David Damrosch in 1995 and revived recently by current reformers, is to break the traditional monograph into a series of essays. The recent Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature offers this and other specific suggestions along those lines: An expanded repertoire of dissertation possibilities could include not only a suite of essays but also Web-based projects, translations (with apparatus), public humanities projects, and dissertations based in pedagogy. Such proposals expand what is possible for graduate-student work, but they also question the traditional idea of who a graduate student is. A more flexible view of the dissertation may expand our definition of scholar (and scholarship)—but it might also lead to the position that some graduate students are not scholars at all. We have to oppose a narrow definition of scholar. To do otherwise would show a lack of imagination about academic work, to say nothing of a lack of concern for its future prospects. In a landmark 1990 essay, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Ernest L. Boyer distinguished what he called the scholarship of teaching, the scholarship of integration, and the scholarship of application from the traditional scholarship of discovery. Professors have operated for too long as though discovery were the only kind of scholarship worthy of the name. Even academics who teach heavy courseloads accept the prevailing value system that places the scholarship of discovery (and the publication it produces) at the top of the heap. Under that value system, everyone should write the same kind of doctoral dissertation. Let’s question that assumption. We don’t need to scrap the dissertation, but we do need to look closely at its purpose. Our graduate students have been waiting—for too many years—for us to figure that out.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 21:01:01 +0000
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