I think a lot of us feel bad for the students who spent years in a PhD program who then end up facing a grim job market. It’s great to see academic departments recognizing that they need to limit enrollments to do their share in reducing the glut.
- If you are referring to their decision to go Test Optional, I recall a decently-lively discussion but not much “anger.” Posting a link would be helpful. My son was in the first class accepted TO and he and most others submitted scores. However, as predicted by some on CC, those who chose to withhold scores skewed toward the humanities. There are great arguments for and against the use of test scores that go well beyond UChicago’s realm, but the outcome specifically for class of '23 at UChicago was pretty good based on stats and anecdotes. My son is certainly impressed with the brain power of his classmates.
-The same probably applies to Black Studies! Most PhD programs seem to graduate very few in that field per year which should help with employment prospects. I’d have no problem if the English department were to do the same. However, while several humanities and social science departments at UChicago have been struggling to graduate the PhD candidates in a timely manner at UChicago - due, in part, to lack of job prospects in the nth year backing up the pipeline - English actually has done fairly well in graduating their students, as the graph in this article demonstrates. Perhaps Black Studies candidates will be moved along similarly.
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/10/24/uchicago-phd-policy-tradeoffs/
- Agreed, particularly at a place like UChicago. That isn’t what’s happening now, however. They offer approximately the same number of Black Studies grad courses as they did a few years ago. Approximately 42% of tenured/tenure track faculty are flagged as having expertise in this field, including a good number of the senior faculty! This is hardly a new area of research for a few innovators at the University of Chicago Department of English. Rather, it appears to be part of their efforts to hire more Black scholars/scholars of color, as their statement directly explains.
The department is free to set its own academic program. But in this case The English department’s academic program—setting curricular and investigative priorities and concomitantly setting priorities in student and faculty recruitment—-is plainly defined by, and emerges from, the department’s political stance and its views on moral and social issues. After detailing its academic program, the department rounds out its statement in the final paragraph by returning to an explicit declaration of social advocacy: “Part of our commitment to the struggle for Black lives…” Because, per the Kalven Report, the department should not be adopting a political stance or taking a position on moral and social issues in the first place, its academic priorities and program that flow from its political stance are, themselves, irreconcilable with the Kalven Report’s view of institutional neutrality. In fact, its academic program is merely a creature of its social advocacy. In short, the department defines its academic program and priorities according to a political commitment that it should not be making in the first place.
I found the following distinction helpful: A history department, say, could certainly define its academic priorities by privileging Marxian analysis. But if it said that because of its commitment to the workers’ struggle, and because it saw that struggle as just and the only path forward, it was therefore prioritizing a commitment to dialectical materialism in its curricular and recruitment decisions, then I would say that, plainly, the department’s academic program was an adjunct to its social advocacy.
As for the idea that Shakespeare and Chaucer don’t have to be “re-studied,” well, that’s a very un-UChicago notion. The idea that great texts endlessly demand new scrutiny is the basis of the Core.
@CheddarcheeseMN It is not the job of any university to stop students from studying subjects on the basis of current or future jobs. Never was, never will be. Might be a better job for the parents. LOL. But from the number of baristas, someone is likely not doing their job.
@JBStillFlying He should look at PPE, (called variously Philosophy, politics and economics) It enables a student to think in abstract terms, learn about politics within a framework and use economics and modelling to pull it together).
You realize that these are graduate students and that the university is specifically training them to be faculty members? Moreover, I hope that you realize that, unlike undergraduates, graduates aren’t accepted, taught a bunch of courses and sent on their merry way.
You also realize that these are women and men in their 20s and 30s, so why would you think that their parents would have any say at all?
Furthermore, PhD students don’t pay for an education, it is their department which pays the tuition, as well as a stipend or a salary. So It is not as though the student is paying the university for an education, and then it’s up to the student to decide what to do with the education.
The university is investing a good amount of money in every PhD student, and therefore can decide whether a student can study a subject. Moreover, the Department, which is the entity which is providing the training and resources for the students have a vested interest in the maintaining standards in the field, and, more importantly, are interested in maintaining their own reputation. A department whose graduates do not do well on the job market does not have a good reputation. Academia is a small world, especially within a field, and people know which departments are producing faculty members or full time non-academic employees, and which departments pump out adjuncts who feed the academic gig economy.
So, yes, it IS their job to stop students from doing PhDs in fields where there are no jobs.
Most importantly, you seem to forget that the majority of PhDs are awarded by public universities, not by by “elite” private universities, and by a large margin. Of the 55,000 or so doctorates awarded in the USA in 2018 by non-profit universities, 15,674 were awarded by private institutions, versus 38,642 which were awarded by public universities.
Public universities have a mission to serve the interests of the state. Spending money providing training for people who will not get jobs is not a good way to spend taxpayers money.
So it definitely IS the job of these universities to "stop students from studying subjects on the basis of current or future jobs. ".
For me, it’s ultimately not about need or marketing–Universities and their students should be able to make their own decisions about these things.
It is about what is true. Is this statement issued by UChicago in announcing this policy true?
Are you saying these PhD degree seeking adults are not responsible for the decisions they make?
It seems pretty straightforward to research what type of job opportunities and historical job placement look like for a certain degree, and decide whether investing one’s time and money (no, all PhDs are not funded by institutions) in pursuit of that degree makes sense.
^ ^^ Again, UChicago does a pretty “good” job placing its English PhD’s, as evidenced by a marginally longer time to degree completion than peers. Of course, that doesn’t mean English PhD’s start at high salaries or even have top placement.
The humanities division posts outcomes data for each department. Here is English: https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/ProgramStatisticsHUMEnglish.pdf
For comparison, here is Philosophy which also happens to have a notably longer time to degree completion than peers:
https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/ProgramStatisticsHUMPhilosophy.pdf
(here is the link to access each department: https://humanities.uchicago.edu/about/phd-outcomes-data)
Looking at these stats, if I were Provost Lee I’d probably be more comfortable with the current numbers of English PhD’s admitted than I would with Philosophy PhD’s. I would probably cap the latter program for total enrollment, even in a non-Covid year. By the way, that is precisely what UChicago is planning to do for several humanities and a few social sciences programs. They’d prefer getting fewer, high quality entrants than several mediocre ones who would struggle relatively more on the job market.
The overall cap on PhD entrants due to Covid really can’t be viewed as a means of clearing out your PhD’s since no one is getting hired this year. This is a generalization but things have ground to a halt pretty much everywhere: no tenure granted, no new hires, etc. It’s a nightmare, according to people I know in academia who are in fields other than humanities or soft social sciences. I seriously worry about young people graduating from college and grad/professional programs being “the forgotten class” as Covid shut downs tank the job market for a couple of years, and then resume by skipping over the classes of '20 and '21 for later classes.
The Penn School of Arts & Sciences announced yesterday that they will pause admissions for school funded PhD programs for the entire SAS for a year due to the financial impact of the pandemic. https://www.thedp.com/article/2020/09/graduate-student-programs-canceled-upenn.
- Great question! It doesn't even need to be "true" - it merely needs to be something other than a set of uncritical assertions that read like they were composed by student activists rather than professors of "Life of the Mind." No one questions that the English faculty are very committed to the cause of racial justice. But they should be held to the same standard - coherent argument backed up by evidence - to which they presumably hold their own students.
Huh?
Writing that departments have the responsibility to stop accepting PhD students who will not be able to get jobs is not the same as writing that adults shouldn’t take responsibility for their actions.
It’s not an “Either-Or” situation.
However, while most adjuncts bear responsibility for their own situation, especially after being an adjunct for 10 years, PhD programs bear responsibility both for being major contributors to the problem, and for wastefully allocating limited resources. An adjunct bears responsibility for themselves, while a program bears responsibility for producing dozen of PhDs in an already glutted market.
Unlike with undergraduates, departments aren’t required to accept 300 PhD students from a given pool, no matter what the job market looks like, or what the student pool looks like. PhD students are accepted on an individual basis, at the discretion of the department, and there is no minimal number of PhD students that a department is required to accept at any given year.
Every PhD student is accepted on their own merits. If not a single person who is deemed to be “qualified” applies to UIUC’s, OSU’s, Yale’s, etc PhD program in English over a given year, then that year there will be no new PhD students. If there is no faculty member who is looking for a graduate student in a given year, there will be no new PhD students that year.
Moreover, many programs, even very well regarded programs, have used borderline deceptive practices to recruit PhD students. From claiming that there are plenty of jobs out there “if you’re good enough”, to “rumors” about massive retirements which are soon-to-come. The actual data has not been easy to come by, and too many senior faculty have been all too happy to claim that, despite the general job market “their” program has very high success rates at placing their graduates.
Things are getting better now in many programs (there are many with “warning labels” nowadays), but most new PhD students are not really aware of the dismal career prospects ahead of them.
Many sources still paint a rosy picture. In fact, according to the BLS “Overall employment of postsecondary teachers is projected to grow 9 percent from 2019 to 2029, much faster than the average for all occupations. Projected employment growth varies by academic field.”
So prospective PhD students are getting a LOT of bad advice and bad info.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/postsecondary-teachers.htm
PS. in programs in which funding for graduates students is plentiful, but jobs are few after graduation, like most biomedical sciences, the situation is somewhat different.
@mwolf Think you missed the point entirely. Phd students are not only getting Phds to teach. You will find them in corporations, working for themselves and working as consultants. Most people change their careers several times. And many Phds have a plan why they are pursuing that venue.
A lot of what you write is based on your own opinion, for example
“Public universities have a mission to serve the interests of the state”
According to whom?? How is that measured and by whom?
And you also wrote"
“Spending money providing training for people who will not get jobs is not a good way to spend taxpayers money.”
According to whom?
There are many aspects of education which are not related at all to getting a job. The original reason for public education, as you may/may not know was to teach people to read and write so that they could vote. Nothing to do with getting jobs. Now, I personally happen to be a strong supporter of public education and universities but I certainly don’t think that everyone who is a graduate would say the main thing education gave them was a job. There are so many aspects of education which are intangible.
I think you missed the tongue in cheek on the barista reference. Certainly, students should be making their own plans for further education. Sadly, many don’t and end up without a solid plan.
I’m with @MWfan1921 Students should be allowed to make their own decisions.
^ Usually the state charter specifies the mission of the state university system. YMMV, but the academic departments I’m aware of at our state flagship take in a similar number of PhD students as their private counterparts. However, state universities might have several additional departments, schools and colleges over and above those private schools, explaining the larger number of PhD’s granted. And of course, there are a lot of state universities.
What determines your employability is really reputation of the school more than being private or public. UC Berkeley, for instance, generates PhD’s who get hired by UChicago across many fields, including the humanities.
@Happytimes2001 Again, the issue is not whether potential graduate students should be allowed to choose whether to do a PhD in a field which has no realistic job prospects. The issue is whether programs should be allowed to waste their resources offering any student the opportunity to do so.
Accepting every PhD student who qualifies is not part of the mission statement of any university, nor is there part of any mission statement which requires even a minimum number of PhD students. An English department can decide whether it wants to accept 1, 2, or 35 PhD students at any given year.
I do not think that universities and PhD programs should be allowed to make the choice to accept more students per year than the number who will likely be able to find gainful employment in positions where a PhD is needed or at least useful.
It is not about keeping potential PhD students from making the wrong choice for themselves, it is about keeping the university from making the wrong choice for the university, the state, and the academic field.
Again,
Let is look at the Mission Statement of a large, well regarded public University - UIUC:
There are specific sections for Research, Arts, and Undergraduate Education. Training PhDs is not an explicit part of their mission at all. U Michigan has a similar statement.
Producing PhDs is only part of their mission so long as it contributes to their other missions.
What you are describing here does not sound like any PhD program with which I am familiar, and I am familiar with quite a few. It sounds like an undergraduate program or a non-thesis masters program.
A PhD student is not spending their many years in the program taking courses upon courses, sitting in seminars and discussing their new knowledge, etc. They are not “gaining an education”. In fact, they are already expected to have an education before they even start.
The vast majority of the time that a PhD student spends in their programs is spent working on their own personal research project. The year and a half of courses that they take at the beginning is almost entirely in topics and methodology that they require in order to do their research.
By the time a PhD students has finished their Quals, about three semesters into their 7 year PhD, their education is done.
More correctly - the only education that they are getting is a specialized education in how to become a researcher or a faculty member. This is not the same as “getting an education” in the sense that an undergraduate is getting an education.
The majority of the costs of this training is being borne by the university, and the university is not training them in order to “provide them with an education”, it is investing the time, effort and money to prepare them for a future as faculty, as researchers, or other jobs for which this training is required or highly advantageous. They are doing this for the benefit of the university, in one way or another
If the majority of PhD in a field are either not working or working in jobs that do not require this training, time, effort, and money is wasted.
An unemployed BA is not a waste of time and money for the university which was paid to provide them with that education. A PhD working part time as temp on a job is a waste of time and money for the university which paid for that person’s training.
Again, a PhD is not an education, it is training.
If medical schools bore the cost of the education of every MD who graduated, and that cost was rolled over to tax payers of undergraduates who were paying tuition, do you think that the medical school should still keep on training new doctors, if 60% of the doctors that they were training ended up working at underpaid contingent jobs at the fringes of healthcare?
Would you say that it should be up to potential applicants to this medical school to decide whether this medical school should keep on pumping out MDs, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, training people, a majority of whom never used their training?
Just to point out that all this comes down to in practical terms is that the 5 PhD places that the Department was prepared to sponsor for this cycle will be reserved for students whose research focus is “Black Studies”. They currently have 77 PhD candidates doing other research. They will re-visit what areas of scholarship they want to focus on next year.
For those who aren’t familiar with the process of applying for a PhD, there is no such thing as “the kid who just wanted to study English” at the PhD level. It’s “Nineteenth-century Transatlantic Literature” or “20th century & contemporary English and French poetry and poetics” or “Medieval Literature” (all real PhD candidates at UChicago atm). Who gets in is linked to the field of research in which they are engaged- and if you don’t think that there are politics on that you have never sat through an admissions review panel! (admittedly faculty politics, not national politics, but politics nonetheless).
And…
It does not specify the race of the researcher.
These 5 places will account for fewer than 10% of their PhD candidates
It is for this year only.
It is not the end of intellectual or literary life at UChicago as we know it.
^ Over the past four years they have enrolled an average of 10 per year, not 5. And the number has been increasing lately.
They are explicitly reducing their entering cohort to 5 students this year. instead of zero which is happening at other universities.
"“Currently, there are 77 PhD students studying a wide variety of disciplines within the English Department, and the department is admitting 5 additional PhD students for 2021. "
Some of you seem to be saying that this policy is no big deal and should be read as nothing more than a reasonable response to the disappearance of jobs, with Black Ph.D.'s being a special case because they are so highly marketable as universities everywhere move to increase the numbers of Black faculty. On this reading rather than follow the example of Columbia and close down entirely, the Chicago English Department has seized the opportunity to maintain its viability by the expedient of more intensely recruiting the only candidates whose degrees any longer have a practical value.
Sad as this is, it might be defensible as policy if it were not for the rationale offered in justification:
“English as a discipline has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction, and anti-Blackness. Our discipline is responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why… For these reasons we believe that undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty here and elsewhere…”
To be clear, it does not especially concern me that white applicants will be shut out for a time. Infinitely more disturbing are the reasons given: that the discipline some of us have loved and the books we have taken solace and inspiration from are rotten to the core, riddled with anti-Blackness, are nothing but apologetics for colonialism, a prop or a product of hierarchies of every imaginable malignancy. How did I miss that this was the effect of Henry James on a young James Baldwin, who formed his own exquisite prose style from that of the man he was not ashamed to acknowledge as “the Master”? And was it the anti-Blackness in Shakespeare that led Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to read the Bard’s works so laboriously and thoroughly? Did Ralph Ellison take nothing from Franz Kafka but the impression that the guy was a white oppressor?
For that matter, did any of us mere readers of whatever race take from the great writers in our language lessons only in hierarchical oppression? Somehow all that went over my head as I sat in those classes at the U of C contemplating the poems of Donne, the plays of Shaw, and the novels of George Eliot. The profs must have been tweaking all those stories, dramas and poems to give us the misguided notion that they were beautiful, moving, and even - horror of horrors - true. I missed all the oppression of it in those old profs, but it must be so, because this English Department says it is.
Of all the many irritating and simply false assertions in that statement what most saddens and dismays is the collective admission that we (no exceptions permitted) are all guilty of these thought-crimes. Loving literature for its own sake and not insofar as it supports a narrative of oppression sounds like it could get you in deep trouble in this department. Beware, all ye applicants of whatever skin color: You must despise literature, abjure it, promise to do better, give up all notions of beauty, form, and expressiveness and take to activist posturing. That may not have been what you glimpsed once in the power of great writing and what made you want to study English, but in this department it is the law.
It was once the policy of the University of Chicago to not only permit but encourage its individual members to take political positions of every stripe, make public statements, become activists on behalf of any cause. Except in relation to its educational mission the University itself did not make statements nor take positions. These were the Kalven principles, whose rationale was that all ideas and all positions, with some few exceptions, should be contestable, up for discussion, subject to analysis, this being the true business of a university. But when a University or department within it makes a political statement it thereby stifles further debate and renders dissent from the official line an offence. This is inconsistent not merely with the Kalven principles but with the educational mission itself.
In making the official collective statement above the English Department is effectively requiring all its faculty and students to embrace critical race theory. Where does that leave anyone, whether white or black, whether faculty member or student, who would wish to study and write about a classic author or period in a way that would not reduce the subject to a discourse on racial or related themes, no matter how far those themes were from anything the poor dead deluded author thought he or she was up to?
Perhaps this is a minor instance imbedded within the many wild and woolly events of this annus horribilis 2020. Perhaps it is no great thing that a few white students will be turned away from graduate studies at the University of Chicago. Perhaps, however, the statement is really signifying a more general turning - away from literary studies and the literary life itself. Perhaps it is a turn toward the final destruction of everything we know and love in our language. Is it that or is it merely the brief and transitory product of our fevered times? We need a Shakespeare for our own day to illuminate us.
Am I missing something? Where is the source from the English Department stating that they will only admit five? Also, just to be clear, the department currently lists 63 PhD candidates not 77. Not sure where @collegemom3717 is getting her numbers. (EDIT: found it; 77 appears to be the 2018-19 enrollment number. We are now in 2020 and that cohort has been included on the website). Of those 63, at least a few have listed areas of study falling within the spectrum described for Black Studies.
^^ @marlowe1, I’d pose a follow up question to your comments above: if the English department truly believed those things, then why did it admit so many who were interested in more “traditional” areas of research, a fact that is easily verified by a perusal of graduate student areas of research:
https://english.uchicago.edu/people/graduate-students
The department’s words are hostile to their existing students, unless the students themselves are merrily deconstructing traditional literature using the “new” methods.