Heresy

[supergee]

Professor Timothy Burke blasphemes against the PhD dissertation.

Comments

[weofodthignen]

I have a number of disagreements with that. The preparation at the undergrad level, in the humanities at least, is constantly getting poorer; for one thing, the amount a student is expected to have read when they do arrive in grad school grows exponentially, while in fact they read less. Grad students desperately need the coursework years to supply these deficiencies. This is especially true if, as is increasingly likely, their research field is not so much a change of direction as one not taught at the undergrad level. This applies for example to my PhD field, Germanic mythology/religion. And it's increasingly the situation because of the requirement that the PhD be genuinely original work, which pushes a valid dissertation topic into the recherché (or in the case of bad dissertation supervisors lets the student work on something that has in fact been adequately covered - just in a foreign language or long enough ago not to be in modern jargon). The idea of assembling a digital archive for books is risible. Any librarian should be able to tell this guy how few things are available online and why; and I'm reading right now yet another book that arose out of a disertation involving years of painstaking archival (and in this case interview) research. It's the dissertation that should be placed online, as required by German universities. Dissertation =/= book. That equation is responsible for a good part of the psychological pressure that causes so many grad students to put off completion or never to complete. The audience is very specific for a dissertation, and the expectations should never be those of a publisher. Except in a country with a tradition of requiring actual publication, in which cases educated readers know what dissertations can be expected to look like and read accordingly. On what the poor sod is doing meanwhile - I see mention of work and teaching (and the teaching load is crippling in most institutions, higher than that for tenured faculty, especially once the person fails to complete and becomes an adjunct), but where's publication? The universities have decided they will only hire PhD's or AbD's with publications, and are sniffy about conference presentations since savvy supervisors have abused the conferences with hordes of their protégé(e)s. Essentially this has converted doctoral study into what assistant professorship used to be. The amount of time - and brown-nosing - required is impossible to over-estimate. Back to the dissertation, because this is what makes me feel he is terribly out of touch - in the US at least, the typical dissertation is never read. What people read are the articles, which typically constitute digests of bits of it (or even of the whole, written again and again in different guises).

Overall, this writer appears to consider we have too many PhD students. No, that is not the problem. The problem is that the locus of actual learning - in the humanities at least - as opposed to regurgitation has moved inexorably higher until it's now post-MA in most cases. Students who love learning are shed at each stage of this massive winnowing out process, so that we are left with the lucky, the damned, and the well connected. Part of the winnowing involves unprepared and slave-labor teaching, which perpetuates the decline of the academy as a place for genuine students (although by producing cookie-cutter instruction with neat lesson plans, it may serve fields like Business quite well, and that may be a substantial part of the problem). Part of it involves the sheer misery of the task of writing a dissertation all alone, with everybody and their uncle disparaging the task - as he does here. Do we want future professors who can write coherent prose and make a case, or do we not?

The Germans have a brutal system all of their own, requiring a second dissertation, the Habilitationsschrift, which is typically written while working as a docent (comparable these days to adjunct), in order to actually teach in a university. But at least that does give official approval to the pursuit of knowledge and to sharing it with the educated community. It says they care about what academics study and what they discover, rather than making it into a purely procedural roadblock. It also says they expect professors to be capable and have proved it, while increasingly the US system enshrines an attitude of contempt.

Have people like this guy even noticed the proliferation of self-educated enthusiasts posting online, who do not have degrees or do not have humanities degrees but are exactly the enthusiastic, enquiring, and reading people who would make good professors? Not all of them have been sidelined by family commitments or inability to master one of the freshman gatekeeper courses (although the math requirement would have ended my career if I'd been raised in the US). Some have just been driven out by the change in effective mission, including increasing numbers at the grad stage when they represent an already huge investment in time and money - the university's as well as theirs.

Bah.