.
Isn’t this just a recent change? The other admits are from prior years.
Could be they have now just realized their past ways or areas of research need updating, to put it gently.
That seems like rationalization to me. It’s the equivalent of an undergrad school touting its 6-year graduation rate (and ignoring 4-year) bcos by then most/all of the grads have jobs.
And no, Chicago’s time to degree is not “marginally longer,” it’s much longer than its peers. Yale gets them out in 6 years, some in 5. Is the Chicago English PhD that much stronger/better than Yale’s?
https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/ProgramStatisticsHUMEnglish.pdf
- Potential departmental changes tend not to be sudden. External events might have presented an opportunity worth grabbing, but the statement didn't derive from a sudden "wokeness." Nor is this all that typical for an English department. It's just not typical for a UChicago academic department, is all.
Blue, you can check out the graph for yourself - here is the article re-posted. This is analysis from the office of the provost. Ivy+ peers get their English PhD’s out in a hair under 7 years; UChicago in a little over 7. A PhD isn’t exactly like a bachelor’s degree. Timing will on your topic, your advisor, whether you come in with an MA already, etc.
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/10/24/uchicago-phd-policy-tradeoffs/
EDIT to add: Don’t just look at the Ivy’s here. Some of the best English deparments in the country are located in public institutions; Cal Berkeley, for instance.
EDIT to add: Yale’s department is excellent - top 10. Chicago’s is a top 5, likely a top 3. But both are excellent, obviously.
I prefer official statistics when available over a student newspaper article:
2016/17: 8.85 years
2017/18: 7.75 years
2018/19: 8.25 years
2019/20: 6.5 years, but only 4 students graduated so far; the others in the cohort are still toiling away, so that number will quickly rise to 8+ (even accounting for COVID).
Again,
https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/ProgramStatisticsHUMEnglish.pdf
And a bunch of other things. But the fact remains that Chicago is slow to completion in comparison to its peers.
Yes, I’m well aware of Cal’s academic prowess. Back when the nrc was ranking PhD programs, Berkeley had more top 10 departments than everybody but Harvard. (Surprisingly, English was no longer one of them.) That said, do you happen to know Berkeley’s time to completion?
Besides Berkeley, Michigan is a strong public with a high-ranked English PhD program. They get their students out in 6 years.
btw: Stanford and Harvard also find a way to get their English PhD’s out in 6 years…Duke is 6.
Chicago remains the outlier in its peer group. Perhaps Marlow has some insights as to why that might be?
It will be interesting to see whether other higher education institutions in the US follow suit. Really not an if, just a when.
Bravo, Marlowe1!
@JBStillFlying , I admit - if that’s the right word for it - that I am reading the words of the statement as meaning what they say. However, I have a suspicion that there could well be silent abstainers. Perhaps that is what you are hinting at. Some of these must surely be students admitted in the less woke times of a few years ago. Still, some years ago I read through lots of course descriptions, almost none of which would have fired up the young would-be scholar I once was. Nearly every one of them emphasized this or that faddish deconstructive critical perspective. The chief medievalist marked out his own interests in queer and feminist critiques, the psychological analysis of the peculiarities of belief, and a host of similar social, psychological, gender, racial, and political themes. He made no mention of the Christian world-view or Christian texts. At the conclusion of that wordy salad of interests and themes was one word: Chaucer. Was the fancy intellectual verbiage offered as justification for the reading of a classic author? Or was the author an afterthought, a mere crouton in a soup of fashionable buzzwords?
@bluebayou , I haven’t been inside the belly of this beast for a long time and have no inside information. What I do have is perspective and, I hope, a love of the subject matter. I suppose I also have the hope that these old authors will continue to be read and taught in some fashion by people who try to understand them in the way they understood themselves. Perhaps that will now happen outside English Departments.
My read is that this is the first (woke) shot in the elimination of the Core as we know it.
- Here is the explanation of the English Department’s pedagogy and approach to research. While they have just recently updated/revised their website in order to provide these more comprehensive explanations, I’ve no doubt that this has been their approach for awhile. Not being a specialist in literary studies, I’ll leave to others to assess whether this represents a deterioration in quality or is merely “different” compared to more traditional approaches:
“Research in English used to be categorized by traditional field designations such as Renaissance or Victorian, but Chicago’s English faculty have always been more interested in critical inquiry (the journal Critical Inquiry was founded and lives here) than in working within categorical boxes. That exploratory ethos continues to unify us as a department and animate our research interests, which are otherwise various, even heterogeneous, and which are constantly evolving.
Research interests, however, may be defined in a variety of ways and at various degrees of specification. For instance, a scholar such as Ken Warren, who has written a book on Ralph Ellison, could be said to be working within the American field, but also within the fields of African American literature and literary history. Visitors to this site may also have many interests, at many levels. They may want to identify the subset of faculty who are working in a specific historical period such as the Renaissance, on a particular object of study such as the novel, or on a specialized theoretical or methodological problem such as gender and sexuality. See the lists and categories below to help guide your search.”
https://english.uchicago.edu/about/fields-study
- Should anyone want to do a deep dive into what the English department teaches its undergraduates and graduate students, the course list for the past 4-5 years can be found here (select English over on the LHS and select quarter and year): https://coursesearch92.ais.uchicago.edu/psc/prd92guest/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/UC_STUDENT_RECORDS_FL.UC_CLASS_SEARCH_FL.GBL?& I've been undertaking this endeavor off and on for the past few months but haven't compared it to how other schools teach their students. I do believe that the course descriptions support the statement about "exploratory ethos" above. They typically revolve around a topic rather than stick to a set time period, genre, methodology or country of origin. Is this approach a poor way to teach English? Have no idea. I think, ultimately, that profs are generally given a lot of latitude in designing their courses and will probably teach their research. One expects that in graduate school more than undergrad, but that's what happens at UChicago in the College. By the way, this tends to be true in the History department as well, where even most of the Core-required Civ sequences will be at least partly focused on the instructor's research and will include contemporary methodologies and other more recent (trendy?) developments. The history major doesn't require large-lecture survey courses like you see at other schools (even top schools) but I happen to think that it's an excellent program of study for learning how to think and write critically in the field of history. My D - a history major - would have been very bored in a large-lecture survey course. The upside is that she was able to pursue her areas of interest and think and write deeply about them. The downside? She's never taken a course in, say, Asian or African history and probably knows little of those fields. That would have been covered in the survey course. Is that bad? We can debate that question for days.
- To @marlow1's point about lack of Christian world view or texts: I believe that bible-illiteracy, as well as illiteracies in many other areas including classical and Christian texts, is helping to destroy the humanities. The desire to blow away all the "dead white males" seems futile and risks further marginalizing the discipline as "irrelevant." I read a recent essay from a young college student who provided a very objective and critical viewpoint of why this is a bad thing: the level of ignorance actually slows down the pace of the course so that the prof. can explain where the reference or analogy or metaphor originates. Thankfully, UChicago provides a wonderful opportunity to explore at least some of the Western Canon via Hum and Sosc. A student can build on these texts. But even in his (literature based) Hum, my son had to point out a fairly obvious core Christian faith reference after the class took time pondering what it "meant to them." No one had a clue; they, including the prof, were ignorant of Christian theology (and they were studying the Divine Comedy!).* The second criticism mentioned in this essay was another problem suggested in that little example: when you are ignorant of the interpretations, you make up your own. That's just easier than doing the hard research to learn what the heck the author might have been talking about.** Now I realize that much of "critical studies" nowadays consists of "new and exciting" interpretations of old texts. But making up stuff is hardly critical or scholarly. At the very least, you have to be knowledgable of the what the reference MEANT before you can put a new spin on what it MEANS. That's called "understanding the body of work" and is true for every field - STEM, social sciences, etc. It should be true for the humanities as well or it risks becoming (further) irrelevant as a genuine academic discipline.
- Imagine being in a physics class where the prof has to slow it down in order to explain some of the core math.
**Imagine being in a physics class where the entire class makes up the core mathematical principles rather than being aware of the correct ones. It might make for exciting learning, but it probably won’t result in many advances in the field.
- I can see that interpretation from their statement; however, IMO their more immediate goal may be to generate interest for a Black Studies department that meets the university’s criteria for rigor and scholarship. Currently, UChicago is the only top school without one. It could well be the Provost Lee has given permission to recruit 100% Black Studies grad students in order to jump-start that experiment. We simply don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, as a poster or two has pointed out already. The Core already has a wide range of subjects one can study for Hum and Sosc; the College has added them periodically after the faculty committees determined that they were relevant and met the goals and objectives of these sequences. I highly doubt the long-standing traditional ones will be replaced as they are wildly popular. Unlike Yale, UChicago hasn’t canceled a popular course just because someone thought it was too “white, straight, European and male.”
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/01/24/art-history-department-to-scrap-survey-course/
Imagine being in an English class at a top uni where an unqualified prof is teaching a core text. Seriously. Any respectable prof could/should/would have swotted up on the relevant bits before teaching Dante- even if they were a substitute teacher.
Every generation howls at how we are neglecting the classics, at how ‘modern’ trends are ruining the field, how in some other time it was qualitatively better. Every generation (generally rightly) mocks the extremists, the ones who go over the top- but the next generation moves it on, in the endless winnowing through which people hope to separate the wheat from the chaff. Expanding the canon of literature that is considered worth serious study does not take away from existing areas of study, and broadening the tent of scholars engaged in rigorous literary analysis only adds to the field.
Demands for more than just “dead white males” are not the same thing as a comprehensive “desire” to blow them all the way- and there are plenty of young college students who recognize that. And many profs are building courses that integrate all of those pieces into a bigger, stronger whole.
- Blue, I couldn't find Berkeley's time to completion and no statistics for Yale or Stanford other than "typical time to completion" verbiage. Perhaps I have poor Google-foo. I did find the Duke stats. Yale uses this metric which ranks UChicago ahead of Duke but behind Stanford at PhD programs for faculty at the top 30 grad departments (as defined by USNews).
https://www.jgoodwin.net/jobs/
https://jgoodwin.net/jobs/group.html
This is helpful, but selective. For instance, Yale (and others) might place many in the 25-30 range. UChicago might place more in the 1 - 10 range and send more to non-university research appointments. UChicago’s own five-year outcome is that 58% are in tenure/tenure track five years out. Not sure how that compares to Yale, etc. Or Cal.
- The graph I cited is NOT compiled by the student newspaper LOL. It's from the provost's office. This is the graph that Provost Diermaier presented when he announced that several departments would be capped for grad student enrollment. I do not know the time period or the exact peer group but I'm guessing the provost's office can do this analysis properly - ie, without picking and choosing a few schools.
- A review of cohort year for all 63 grad students listed reveals four poor souls still slaving away well past eight years. However, in terms of everyone else, the earliest cohort listed is 2014 - pretty much what you would expect given that we are six-seven years past that. There are six remaining in that cohort compared to the eight or so who enrolled. The other two bailed, as the English Department stats show (2/8 is approximately 13%). So I don't see a whole lot of 7+ year grad students "toiling away." Keep in mind that the grad school has actually increased enrollment in recent years so those four who graduated in 2019/20 might well have represented half the class, with the other half expected to graduate in 2021. that's what the historical numbers suggest. Now clearly, Covid might spike that number up as would-be faculty and post-doc appointments dry up, but that's true for everyone, not just UC.
- As to your second point, collegemom - I hope so. Based on genuine observation, it's not appearing that way. And then there is the English Department's actual statement which I invite you to re-read.
- As to your first comment: that Hum faculty member is a UChicago PhD grad in the humanities. Not sure you are familiar with the Core at UChicago: while there may be some English faculty who teach a course or two, that's usually not the case; hum faculty are usually teaching fellows, post-docs and other scholars who teach a required set of texts with limited ability to revise. That doesn't mean they are "unqualified" and our personal experience with two kids in the College would support the opposite point of view. Nevertheless, someone not trained in Christian core beliefs would have drawn a black at this small point (as this guy did) - I'm wondering if in your experience (assuming you are well-versed in the humanities) all your faculty or colleagues have been so trained and would have gotten it?
In my view, it’s about culture; graduate humanities departments are bestowing PhD’s on students who read the “old stuff” but don’t have the cultural competence to understand it in the original context. No one has to be “raised” in it but they should at least have that cultural competence. I’m sure UChicago would not be alone in failing there.
I have been both a teaching fellow & a post-doc and appreciate the point!
But your example was either a “small point” or it was “core” principles, as you used in your physics analogy. In survey courses there will always be many, many small points that are dropped (actually, in any teaching, really, even when the teacher is an expert!). I am a huge fan of the Core, and fully on-board with the merits of an education that at the very least flags to students that in Literature, History, Art, etc there is always context, and understanding that context is an important part of understanding the thing itself.
But: you don’t have to know each of the specific flower symbols to know that in Art there is an extensive lexicon of flowers, and that if you see a flower in (say) a Renaissance or Victorian painting it is almost certainly there for a specific reason - and you can look it up if you want to know more ("go look it up’ being the mantra of my childhood).
When I compare the Lit options available at the schools and universities that I know best and compare them to the ones when I was coming through, I can see arcs as a ‘new’ field opens, peaks, and then settles down into some degree of normalcy. Imo the Collegekids got the best of what I got, plus some great new things, and some not-great new things. And, some of the old stuff they got has improved since my time (eg, they got Seamus Heaney Beowulf!). I think I am just more sanguine than many of the posts in this thread that the sky is not falling, that the Good Ship Literature has weathered many fads and fashions and will keep plowing ahead- and that while making room for a bigger crew may make things rowdier and messier- especially at first, when the Old Salts adjust to the newcomers- overall it yields more hands on deck.
- Not sure that Chicken Little is applicable here, either. This is not the first time UChicago has dealt with alums and outsiders decrying the end of the institution as we know it because someone said or decided something. Whether this is different in scope from those other times remains to be seen.
- The example I cited earlier was a single reference but not an irrelevant detail. It was a point of discussion (but only one point of many that quarter). Now, core Hum isn't actually a survey class, and within the small-group discussion there will be plenty of opportunity for the students to learn from one another and even for the professor to learn a thing or two from the students. That should be expected. Completely agree that "look it up" is important to individual study and research and perhaps had the prof or someone looked it up in this case, they'd have been able to move the discussion on that detail to a higher plane rather than play guesswork. This is why competency and literacy in certain texts and cultures is so crucial to a fruitful inquiry. The humanities aren't an "exact science" but they aren't a "floats your boat" discipline either. Or at least they didn't used to be. By the way, I'm thrilled to know that you are a big fan of the Core, and I completely agree that there should be room for new methods and ideas - particularly at a place like UChicago. In the realm of ideas, the new and the old will naturally compete. It's supposed to be that way. In the garden of ideas, there are very few neat rows of bluebells.
Just pointing out that many in academia (humanities) believe the only way to approach and eventually understand a ‘foreign’ concept, culture, event, mindset, justification, etc, is to completely strip oneself of the preconceived notions, all the years of saturation in “our own” personal and cultural perspective. Limit value judgments. An exercise and not an easy one.
So, I do think some of our reactions to the Chi notice are based on our own comfort level with our own identities (most likely, the dominant demographics.) We don’t want to be confronted with the (fact) that, no matter how fair minded we think we are, our perspective is not the same as, say, a Black person’s.
Yes, a dedicated scholar, on a level of teaching, say, the Divine Comedy, at college level, should be prepared to discuss from all relevant angles and anticipate directions a discussion might take.
Unfortunately, our picture of the ideal versus what’s accomplishable, don’t always mesh.
- This is a fairly presumptuous comment, to put it mildly.
Two more articles/viewpoints, each with a distinct perspective.
Dershowitz (Newsweek): https://www.newsweek.com/university-chicago-requiring-loyalty-oaths-its-faculty-opinion-1532685 Focuses on the statement itself rather than the restriction to Black Studies and questions the impact it would have on academic freedom.
Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/16/university-chicago-english-faculty-prioritizes-black-studies-graduate-students-2021 Focuses on the restriction to admit Black Studies. The number is, indeed, 5 as others have pointed out, and this results from their funding model and the number graduated the prior spring (five in this case).
Thanks for sharing JB. the Dershowitz article expands on what Marlowe wrote up-thread, that it’s not so much the decision itself, which may be right or wrong, but arguably UChicago’s to make. It is the language of the announcement itself, and what the language implies. I would argue that what it implies is counter to many of the core principles of UChicago. I would argue further that the announcement letter is a mistake and an embarrassment to UChicago.
How could this have happened at UChicago?
Again, it’s not the decision itself, but the indictments of the announcement, which, if you believe them, would suggest that the English department is not worthy of continuing.
I have been an admirer of Provost Lee, but after this I am not so sure. Did she even know about it?