Comments on Those Humanities Ph.D.'s

• From a Humanities Ph.D.
• Posted by David Shupe , Chief Innovation Officer at eLumen Collaborative on November 11, 2009 at 8:00am EST

• It took eight years and sheer persistence to complete my dissertation and earn my Ph.D. in Religion and Culture. Discovering there were no academic positions to apply for, I became an academic administrator in increasingly responsible positions. When the strictures of academia became too confining for genuine innovation, I chose to be entrepreneurial and now lead a successful independent R&D firm creating an academic solution to the accountability/assessment challenge. The question is: in what study of Humanities Ph.D.s would my experience ever show up?

• not surpised about where they went
• Posted by MIS Prof , College of Business at southern teaching university on November 11, 2009 at 8:45am EST

• So ... many of them ended up in business, law, or academia. That doesn't surprise me. Those fields allowed them to get adequate financial compensation and/or have an influence on society. Seems reasonable to me.

• Posted by Humanities Grad Student at Top 20 on November 11, 2009 at 9:30am EST

• Interesting report. While I haven't yet read the book, it seems like the study suffers a bit from the myopia common to humanities PhD programs and students: only a tenure-track position in your field is a positive outcome of the grad school experience. To which I, and a number of friends dissertating at schools around the country, say "no thanks."

  I returned for a PhD after years of working in account and project management. The idea was to be a teacher. But teaching seems devalued in the profession while research of limited utility is awarded outsize importance in both tenure review and financial compensation. On the market next year I'll be looking for academic management and nonprofit jobs. Teaching jobs, I've learned, can always be picked up on an adjunct basis.

• wife
• Posted by Kevin Range , Asst. Prof. of Chemistry at LHUP on November 11, 2009 at 11:45am EST

• "so whatever the married men are getting in support from their spouses is not apparently duplicated."

  This maybe true. And I am very grateful for my wife's support through grad school and beyond. But I think the authors maybe neglecting the pressure husbands feel to provide for their families. I know that was an additional motivating factor for me.

• not again . . .
• Posted by PiledHigher&Deeper , Ph.D. at European on November 11, 2009 at 3:15pm EST

• I commented last month on the article, and I will do so again. The original article has the requisite anti-mail slant (what would higher ed be without such insightful and original positions comments?). And Sabine Hikel concludes that the bias against women is "really . . . not news." Here's the passage: "Men who are married when they start graduate school are more likely than single men to graduate and to graduate more quickly. Married women, on the other hand, had no advantage over single women, so whatever the married men are getting in support from their spouses is not apparently duplicated."

  I love the heavy-handed, feminist interpretation of the research data. What if the "support" that men are getting "from their spouses" is the PRESSURE to start paying some of the bills. It's about time the hubby get his nose out of the books and start and changing some of the diapers! I can't imagine there are too many mealy-mouthed wives who want to put their lives on hold in order to continue paying for their husbands' humanities habit. And even fewer are eager to be martyrs.

  When I was in graduate school and one of my male classmates got married, the running joke was, "He'll get his act together now" (wink, wink...). And, to nobody's surprise, the incompletes became a thing of the past, deadlines were met, GPA went up, etc., etc. Support can come either in the stereotypical nurturing, suffering way (but what an unabashedly patriarchal interpretation of a wife's relationship to her husband!), or in the form of the hard-working wife who keeps checking up on her husband to make sure he has the next chapter written so he'll have no more excuses for shirking his share of the domestic duties, especially if there are children. The wifely "support" (motivation), in my experience, is always what it seems. And real marriages tend to look rather unlike those than academic will often imagine.

  Show me the husband who would attempt to "support" his wife by peering over her shoulder ("You're STILL thinking about the importance of Rousseauvian thought in _Mrs. Dalloway_? Honey, how 'bout putting down the book and picking up the broom, for a change!"), and I'll show you a pig.

• well, DUH
• Posted by Melissa , ABD at UC system on November 11, 2009 at 4:15pm EST

• I sometimes wonder how the humanities ever gets anything done. This 'project' cost 85 million bucks, and they proved what? That money, while nice, isn't a cure-all? That grad students need clear objectives and guidance from their professors? That people who attend institutions filled with folks who are researchers themselves don't go into non-research teaching positions?
  Well, GOSH. I feel so enlightened. But for a tenth of that money, I could have come to the same conclusions. And then perhaps we could have done something useful with the rest of the money, like fund grad students who aren't at places with huge endowments. What a concept.
  Well, at least the results of this study will go towards the authors' publications requirements!

• in the report
• Posted by One of the guinea pigs , prof/admin at state u on November 11, 2009 at 9:30pm EST

• As one of the students in the Mellon report, I have to say that many relevant issues affecting progress towards degree was overlooked. I started out in one literature field for the BA and then switched to an entirely different language & literary field for the MA and PhD. Of course it took me 10 years from start to finish! And then I was also teaching full-time for two of those years, and having a baby for another. So then does that make only 7 years to degree? But the years that I did spend making the transition from one field to another made me very prepared and very solid to write the first book and the slew of articles that followed, tenure, and now the administrative work I'm taking on. The money doesn't seem wasted to me--but the notion that there is some ideal time to degree is fantastical.

• Posted by Literary Critic on November 12, 2009 at 11:15am EST

• For example, the belief that a humanities Ph.D. (unlike a social science degree) genuinely only limits students to careers as teachers is absurd. A teeny bit of time spent with Google and talking to professionals in various professions will reveal that philosophers, lit majors and their ilk end up in just as wide an array of jobs as social scientists. Broadcasting, life coaching, union organizing, the arts, and the non-profit sector are just a few places where humanities folks--Ph.D. in hand or not--end up.

  Show us the jobs in either academia OR outside it, these days--"in this economy"--for people with humanities backgrounds, especially outside the social sciences. All the non-academic job listings I've seen are either for entry-level positions requiring only a B.A. or they are mid-level people with 3+ years of experience and skills from some non-humanistic field (often stats or web design or with a specific industry) or they are for quite senior positions. I have yet to find anyone who actually wants to hire someone with doctoral-level training in literary studies.

  I find it all especially discouraging because, as Louis Menand has pointed out, it takes almost twice as long to get a humanities Ph.D. than it does to get an M.D. or a J.D.--yet those are fields in which compensation's relatively decent and job opportunities not at all as scarce. Not that anyone else pursues a Ph.D. in the humanities for the money, but then again one also doesn't expect to starve. After all, like Sabine says, "We're talking about humanities Ph.D.'s, here!"

  David Shupe, in comment #1, offers a somewhat heartening tale of success. What advice would he or others in his position give to new Ph.Ds trying to start out...especially now...outside of academe?

• tough love
• Posted by skyking , socnyc on November 12, 2009 at 11:45am EST

• I don't know if any departments studied do this, but why not have hard caps on the length of time you can stay? They talk about money (important) and the culture of academe, i.e., the ways that professors think about their students and time to completion (also important). But if you cut people off from funding and boot them out of the program if they get to, say, year ten? When I was in grad school a decade ago, my soc dept and the anthro dept did that, announced that those who were beyond year ten had to defend that year or be dismissed. Not surprisingly, a flurry of people who had been straggling -- some in year twenty! -- suddenly finished. Same stories -- adjuncting, working fulltime in other sectors, family, etc. But when they were told time's up, they finished.

• Damn, there was just too much information here.
• Posted by DFS on November 13, 2009 at 12:00am EST

• And I really wanted to chime in with my bona-fide comment about the value of a humanities degree.

  Then I read and agreed with the comments railing against the anti-male position obligatory in academia.

  Then I was offended by how some did not know that there was the obligatory Honey-Do List expected of us males, obviously passed down throughout human history by those damned females.

  But, nevertheless, I will go on to say that, even though I am an applied mathematician, and saw many marvelous things written about that over those classroom boards, the best classes I ever attended, where I actually did not expect to learn anything but I did so anyway, was from some black woman teaching Shakespeare, and from some white man teaching black history, both at an historically black institution.

  It wasn't just me -- both classes of students loved them as well.

  Long live the rest of academia!

• Humanities PhDs need not despair
• Posted by Sabine Hikel on November 18, 2009 at 1:45pm EST

• Thanks so much to all of you for your very, very interesting comments. I just want to follow up with my thoughts about humanities PhDs and what I've observed about their non-academic career trajectories. I, too, have observed job listings that reflect what Literary Critic writes:
  
  "All the non-academic job listings I've seen are either for entry-level positions requiring only a B.A. or they are mid-level people with 3+ years of experience and skills from some non-humanistic field (often stats or web design or with a specific industry) or they are for quite senior positions."
  
  This is, for many people, a serious obstacle--but it is by no means insurmountable. What it means is that people with humanities PhDs need to redouble their efforts and their creativity in carving out paths to a non-academic career.
  
  As in the case of David Shupe, the first commenter in this thread, this sometimes means going the entrepreneurial route. One small example: Dr. Kenny Mostern, who I intervied for my podcast series, started up this company: http://www.electionsolutions.com. He had been a professor of Ethnic Studies before doing this. I asked him out a "lit guy" like him ended up running a successful company that conducts elections for unions in California. It turned out that (in addition to tenacity, imagination and the support of his partner) volunteering for a particular public official shed light on this area of work.
  
  Whether you go the entrepreneurial route or not, volunteering can open many, many doors to humanities PhDs. and can give you the work experience and entry into an industry that is called for in job ads. For example, Paula Chambers, the English PhD who runs the WRK4US listserv, also told me in an interview that volunteering was the way she moved into the not-for-profit sector.
  
  I know some former academics who've also chosen to go back to school, to learn web design, information architecture, to get certified as teachers or, yes indeed, to go to law school. Those are also options for humanities PhDs (who aren't completely burned out or broke).
  
  Finally, I really can't emphasize enough the importance of networking. I interviewed another woman, Shane McCleary, for my podcast series who was ABD in art history who ended up in advertising because of her tenacity in getting out and talking to people. She ended up meeting with someone who decided to give her a break, despite her lack of industry experience. 15 years later, she's in a job she loves, with the income to allow her to visit art galleries around the world.
  
  None of these people did anything that was exceptional or that was beyond the limits of your average humanities PhD. Volunteering, going back to school and networking are all within anyone's grasp. Humanities PhDs may face a bit of a bumpy ride between leaving academia and landing in their first non-academic professional-level role, it's true. But it seems like a ride worth taking if it means finding a satisfying career.