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The good faith graduate program
Kudos to Princeton historian and American Historical Association vice president Anthony Grafton for his perceptive and compelling "What We Owe Our Young: Honest Information about Placement." Grafton writes from the perspective of an established senior scholar who feels it is imperative for the discipline of history to build truth in advertising into its doctoral programs. Not to do so, he argues, is to collude in the unconscionable misdirection, waste, and ruin of not only intellectual talent, but individual careers and personal lives.
Grafton opens his article with a story that is well known to those familiar with the academic corners of the blogosphere, but ought to be more widely considered:
On March 23, 2004, a young historian announced that she would take down her blog, Invisible Adjunct. "Gentle Readers," she explained,A few months ago, I made a vow to myself that this would be my last semester as an invisible adjunct. Since I've failed to secure a full-time position in my final attempt at the academic job market, what this means, of course, is that I made a vow to leave the academy. Six more weeks of teaching, and I head for the nearest exit.
Many readers greeted this decision with dismay. Invisible Adjunct had won a wide readership with entries couched in precise and elegant prose, discussions conducted with a high degree of civility, a sense of humor that no experience, however depressing, could quite extinguish--and a sharp eye for the foibles and vanities of established historians.
In her mirror, I felt, I saw myself and other senior scholars from a new angle--and one I didn't like very much. For Invisible Adjunct devoted much of her space to arguing that senior historians have played an academic con game with their best students. They--we--portray history to vulnerable undergraduates as an intense, engrossing discipline. They--we--encourage particularly bright and engaged students to study for doctorates. Then they--we--fail, as we knew we would, to find tenure-track jobs for most of them, leaving them to scramble for adjunct positions in which they became, as she explained, largely invisible to colleagues and staff, even when students depended on them. The doctoral degree in history, as Invisible Adjunct and some of her favorite fellow bloggers, like Erin O'Connor and Timothy Burke, portrayed it, seems less a form of higher education than an attractive nuisance, an intellectual Greenland.
These critics of the established order have sometimes overstated their case. But in one respect in particular, they had, and have, a strong point. Every year, thousands of undergraduates across the country apply to graduate programs in history. Many, perhaps most, of them have mentors actively engaged in the profession, who can tell them a great deal about programs and professors, stipends and teaching requirements at universities from Connecticut to California. But what can they--what can I--tell an undergraduate who wants to know her chances of finding work in the historical profession if she obtains a PhD at Great Public I or Ivy II? What can applicants themselves learn from publicly available information about the usual outcomes for those who enter a given program? Note that any reasonable applicant should have two practical questions in mind, along with the more appealing ones about departmental strengths, library resources, and intellectual community: how many of those who enter actually end up with a doctorate, and what sorts of job do they then find.
Grafton goes on to conduct a revealing survey of the websites of a range of doctoral programs in history, noting which departments provide clear information about attrition and job placement, which departments offer distorted or partial pictures of these phenomena, and which ignore them completely. It's a telling list derived from a simple but revealing method of inquiry that could just as tellingly be applied to other disciplines that are known for their shrinking job markets and their increasing reliance on adjunct labor. English, in particular, would seem to be well worth the sort of scrutiny Grafton applies to history.
Via Cliopatria.
Posted by acta online at February 18, 2006 01:21 PM
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