There are no academic jobs and getting a Ph.D. will make you into a horrible person: A jeremiad. Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired? Such is the enviable life of the tenured college literature professor, and all you have to do to get it is earn a Ph.D. So perhaps you, literature lover, are considering pursuing this path.
Well, what if I told you that by “five hours” I mean “80 hours,” and by “summers off” I mean “two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning”? What if you’ll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you’ll mostly be using made-up words like “deterritorialization” and “Othering”—because, as Ron Rosenbaum pointed out recently, the “dusty seminar rooms” of academia have the chief aim of theorizing every great book to death? And I can’t even tell you what kind of ass you have to kiss these days to get tenure—largely because, like most professors, I’m not on the tenure track, so I don’t know. California Council for the Humanities. CFGE_report.pdf (application/pdf-Objekt) Bob Samuels: Rethinking the Future of Graduate Student Education. The recent Commission on the Future of Graduate Education report, "The Path Forward: The Future of Graduate Education in the United States," represents a perfect example of why you should not ask a bunch of business people and university presidents to plan the future of higher education.
While the overall message of the report is that that the federal government needs to pour billions of dollars into graduate programs to make America more competitive in the new global knowledge economy, this extensive study ignores most of the basic problems dominating graduate education in the United States. The report begins with an interesting analysis of the current state of the global economy: The manufacturing economy was built on the shoulders of citizens who had a high school education and who could rest assured that their livelihoods would be secure until they retired. The projection for postsecondary teachers is mixed. Survey on Doctoral Education and Career Preparation home page. The #alt-ac Track: 'Alternative Academic' Appointment. [This is a guest post by Dr. Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library.
(That's the Scholars' Lab to you and me.) Bethany blogs and can be found on Twitter. She's currently editing an open-access collection of essays by #alt-ac professionals and serving as both associate director of the Scholarly Communication Institute and vice president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities.] Instead, the #alt-ac label speaks to to a broad set of hybrid, humanities-oriented professions centered in and around the academy, in which there are rich opportunities to put deep—often doctoral-level—training in scholarly disciplines to use. If they are to serve us well, academic IT, libraries, publishing, humanities labs and centers, funders and foundations, focused research projects, cultural heritage institutions, and higher ed administration require a healthy influx of people who understand scholarship and teaching from the inside.
It's Your Duty to Be Miserable! - Advice. By William Pannapacker Every fall, during convocation, as we professors parade in our academic regalia, I am reminded of the march of the penitents in Bergman's film The Seventh Seal. It is not just the medieval ceremony; it's the reflexive small talk: "Did you have a good summer? " "Well, I got a lot of writing done. And you? " "Yes, I delivered a book manuscript, I'm waiting for decisions on two articles, and I taught three summer courses. " "That's too bad. As I eavesdrop on such conversations, I imagine them punctuated by the whish and crack of the flagellant's whip. Of course, I am a penitent, too. In that context, anyone who dares to publish an online essay in The Chronicle arguing that academics should be choosy about where they live (as Alexandra M.
"If you are a professor, it's your duty to be miserable. " Surely, the Catholic tradition of monastics and mendicants lies behind this tendency that I share with my profession, but there are other traditions at work here. Is Stanford Too Close to Silicon Valley? Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the “Stanford duck syndrome”: students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat.
What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley. Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. William F. Faculty Senate to hear report on reimagining undergraduate education.
L.A. Cicero A key recommendation is that Stanford guarantee that freshmen are exposed to a variety of instructional and learning styles so they experience new ways of learning that are a departure from their days in high school. Stanford University today released The Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford University, a comprehensive examination of teaching and learning that makes 55 recommendations to prepare students to face the challenges and opportunities of an ever-changing world.
The report by Stanford faculty members proposes structuring the breadth requirements – courses students take outside their majors – with a new "Ways of Thinking, Ways of Doing" approach that focuses not only on the content of a particular course, but also on the essential capacities a Stanford graduate should possess. The co-chairs of the Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES) – Susan McConnell, the Susan B.
Thinking Matters Other major recommendations 3 Stumble 588 Share. Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES) - Members. Skip to Content <form action=" id="cse-search-box"><div class="searchbox"><input type="hidden" name="cx" value="003265255082301896483:sq5n7qoyfh8" /><input type="hidden" name="ie" value="UTF-8" /><input type="text" name="q" id="search_string_web" /><button type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" class="search_button" >Search</button></div></form> Home The Report About the Committee Frequently Asked Questions Media Inquiries Contact The Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford University Download the report (PDF format).
Who Needs the Humanities at 'Start-Up U'? - November/December 2012. Stanford says everyone does, and wants to convince the world. Freshman Saya Jenks comes from nearby Menlo Park, but she admits to having initially misjudged Stanford when weighing college choices. She had the Farm pegged as an imperfect place for someone with her interests, which start with theater. When two friends who were a year ahead of her in high school picked the University for its humanities programs, her main reaction was skepticism. “I thought it was such an engineering school,” Jenks says.
Then came the revelations. First, she signed up for a live audition in drama as an arts supplement to her application and landed in front of Dan Klein, ’90, who teaches improvisation in the drama department as well as holding classes and workshops at the Graduate School of Business and the d.school. Photo: Glenn Matsumura 'THE HUMANITIES are of special benefit for young people searching to understand themselves.' -- Debra Satz, Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities and Arts.
International Relations, National Security, and Global Competitiveness. Debating the Value of College in America. My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience.
If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing. At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I didn’t regard this as my business any more than I had the social lives of my Ivy League students. I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?”
College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. I could have answered the question in a different way. Re-envisioning the PhD: Home. New Era for Ph.D. Education By Russell Berman (Inside Higher ED) Not all doctorate recipients will become faculty members, but all future faculty will come out of graduate programs. Do these programs serve the needs of graduate students well? In light of the rate of educational debt carried by humanities doctoral recipients, twice that of their peers in sciences or engineering; in light of the lengthy time to degree in the humanities, reaching more than nine years; and in light of the dearth of opportunities on the job market, the system needs to be changed significantly.
I want to begin to sketch out an agenda for reform. The major problem on all of our minds is the job market, the lack of sufficient tenure-track openings for recent doctorate recipients. One response I have heard is the call to reduce the flow of new applicants for jobs by limiting access to advanced study in the humanities. If we prevent some students from pursuing graduate study — so the argument goes — we will protect the job market for others. Rethinking the humanities Ph.D. The warning last year from Russell Berman, who at the time was president of the Modern Language Association, was apocalyptic: If doctoral programs in the humanities do not reduce the time taken to graduate, they will become unaffordable and face extinction.
Now, Berman has taken his ideas home. At Stanford University, where he is a professor of comparative literature and directs the German studies program, he and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford -- a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy.
The professors at Stanford aren't just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years -- roughly half the current time for many humanities students. The Stanford professors aren’t alone in pushing this kind of thinking. The Multi-Track Ph.D. - Do Your Job Better. By Leonard Cassuto The crisis in humanities graduate education is coming to an end. But don't take out the party hats yet, because the situation in the trenches hasn't improved much. Academic jobs are still few and far between, and graduate education remains on shaky ground both institutionally and socially.
Nevertheless, two generations of "crisis thinking" are finally giving way to the idea that we're not in a crisis—because no crisis would last this long. Instead we're confronting a new normal, and we have to adjust accordingly. The most recent sign of collective awakening is a white paper titled "The Future of the Humanities Ph.D. at Stanford. " The paper focuses on two of the most egregious shortcomings in humanities graduate education. In other words, graduate school needs to prepare students not only to be professors but also for other jobs—and the whole process needs to move a lot more quickly. The authors want to reimagine the whole graduate curriculum. What does that mean? Intellectual Entrepreneurs. The Future of the Humanities: A Think Tank. Don't make an economic case for the liberal arts. The liberal arts and sciences have no economic value.
Let me repeat that: none, nada. Taught in the right spirit, they are useless from an economic point of view. They are designed in fact to be downright wasteful. The liberal arts’ ancient roots, after all, are from a world in which a few free men had the time -- the leisure -- to engage in study. In a democracy, however, we cannot afford to leave the liberal arts to the elite. There is also a second tradition that we have inherited from the ancient world, one more closely tied to Greece -- and Socrates and Plato -- than to the ideal of the Roman free citizen. Of course, in reality, the liberal arts are economically beneficial. All of these claims about the economic value of the liberal arts are probably true, but who cares? Yet we continue to argue that the liberal arts should be defended for their economic value. If our only god is money, we live in a sad society. The way forward, then, is simple.
Anderson | Public Sphere Forum. Lisa Anderson, American University, Cairo Stephen Walt’s observations about the “growing gap between university-based scholars and both the policy world and the public sphere” echo, as he points out, many such laments in recent years, and much virtuous self-criticism in the academy. Political scientists (and area studies specialists) have been quick to castigate themselves about the irrelevance of their work and to worry about the growth of a competitive “alternate-universe” policy world of think tanks that seem not to share our high standards but nonetheless to enjoy the high regard among the public we think is rightfully ours.
Indeed, I have written some of these complaints myself.[1] We political scientists seem to be unusually voluble in sharing our pain at being spurned by policymakers whose heads have been turned by far less deserving pundits and bloggers. It is hard not to notice that this hand-wringing is becoming a feature of modern life.