Response to the "Responsive PhD"

Graduate deans should try talking to some graduate students before pronouncing on the future of graduate education.

By David Huyssen

In one sense, The Responsive PhD was long overdue. Stable academic jobs have been disappearing from the market for more than thirty years. As the AAUP reported last November in its Contingent Faculty Index, 46.3 percent of the teaching positions in American universities were part time in 2003, and another 18.7 percent were full-time positions ineligible for tenure. Graduate-employee and faculty unions have been decrying this trend for ages, but their protests have fallen largely on deaf ears, as university administrations have continued to replace tenured fulltime positions with non-tenured and part-time appointments. The Responsive PhD initially seems to engage this problem head-on. 

The solutions the deans propose, however, suggest that they believe the problem arises from unrealistic expectations among graduate students, not from university hiring practices. Rather than understand the current job crisis as the result of explicit decisions by university administrators to create many more low-paid, part-time teaching positions than fulltime tenure-track jobs (usually while pumping money into physical expansion and science facilities), The Responsive PhD treats the job market as a phenomenon outside the realm of influence or alteration, a problem to be worked around rather than confronted. The possibility that universities might attempt to figure out how to hire more full-time tenure-track faculty to keep pace with the swelling undergraduate and graduate-student population does not seem to have been seriously considered.

Find New Aspirations

Instead, the report focuses on how to tailor graduate education—indeed, how to tailor the aspirations of graduate students—to fit the existing job market. Its authors advise that “there are plenty of places to go if doctoral graduates are encouraged to interpret their abilities more knowingly. . . . [A]nd the new graduate school, working with the university career center, alumni office, and regional organizations and businesses,  can create this better map.” The destinations on this better map? The management consulting firm A.T. Kearney, Microsoft, and the National Park Service are The Responsive PhD’s most prominent suggestions. 

In other words, graduate students should accept the statistical reality that most of them will not succeed in academe and orient their ambitions and scholarship toward consulting, software companies, and the federal government. Moreover, graduate education should be altered to prepare graduate students more efficiently for these jobs outside the university walls. Get thee to the career services office! 

A friend decided to test The Responsive PhD’s theory, which specifically highlights Yale as one of three universities that “have created graduate career offices that, for a first time, provide expert advice to graduate students so that they can be more creative in considering their options.” She went to the Yale career services office and explained to its staff that her dissertation addresses the connections between imperialism, racial formation, and boxing. Her doctorate will be in U.S. history and African American studies. The staff told her to get in touch with ESPN. Any serious scholar might have recoiled at this suggestion, but it galled my friend all the more because she had left a job at an ESPN-style sports network before coming to graduate school. 

Her experience may not be representative, and perhaps her graduate education was simply too outdated by the standard of The Responsive PhD, but, then again, what would the “practical application” of a PhD in U.S. history and African American studies look like? What, for that matter, would doctoral training based on such a model look like? Even if you agree with the proposition that the nature of graduate education is the problem, wouldn’t reorienting doctoral training toward the nonacademic world of “practical application” seriously risk undermining the intellectual freedom and creativity of young scholars? I wonder how different my friend’s dissertation might look if she had, early in graduate school, embraced the goal of securing a job interview with ESPN executives instead of with the top historians of race and imperialism. Knowing her as I do, I know that changing her—or any graduate student’s—expectations and career plans this way would have required a great deal of persuasion. 

Give More Power to Deans 

The Responsive PhD and the deans who wrote it, however, are firm in their commitment to such a reorientation and clear about the first step toward accomplishing it: give graduate deans and central administrations more power. Although it “may appear at first bizarre or tautological,” the report explains, “every conclusion from all the reports and our attempts to turn the reports into action prove one thing: the PhD degree requires strong graduate schools and graduate deans with real budgets and real scope—a far stronger central administrative structure than typically exists at present.” This solution “would probably seem self-serving if it had come from the graduate deans who participated in the study,” Robert Weisbuch remarked in his Academe article, “but it came from administrators at Woodrow Wilson who managed the project.” 

What Weisbuch neglects to mention in his article is that several of those Woodrow Wilson administrators are themselves former graduate deans or other university administrators. Weisbuch, the principal author of The Responsive PhD, was associate dean for faculty programs and interim dean of the Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan before he accepted the presidency of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He is now president of Drew University. That the primary thrust of the entire document aims to consolidate power over graduate education in the hands of graduate deans—and let’s be clear, removing that power from departmental faculty—does not seem to indicate much strength in a countervailing set of interests or opinions. The deans seem to speak only to themselves. How strange, then, that when evaluating the “balkanized” nature of graduate education, The Responsive PhD states, “When a group, like an individual, speaks only to itself, it is a sign of dementia.” 

The report’s recommendations do not reflect the faculty’s investment in shared governance, nor do they take into account the interest of graduate students in developing professional and intellectual lives. Almost every graduate student I know came to graduate school to pursue a field outside the corporate environment with the hope of adding to the store of human knowledge and one day becoming a professor. What will graduate school look like when students arrive in their first year expecting to craft intellectual work that will buttress their vitae for private employment? Why, for that matter, would any sensible person choose to take the better part of a decade to get a PhD in U.S. history (my field) in order to become a global management consultant, even if the student’s graduate curriculum were oriented toward such a goal? It makes little intellectual or financial sense. PhDs in the humanities and social sciences—no matter how overhauled, streamlined, or managed recipients are for the “quality control” of their “human products” (to borrow The Responsive PhD’s terms)—provide little in the way of training for the nonacademic world that a BA or MBA program does not. 

Cheap Labor

What graduate students in the humanities and social sciences do offer, however, is a continuing supply of cheap teaching labor for universities that are depending increasingly on that particular commodity. If graduate students perform about 30 percent of the teaching labor on U.S. campuses (as they do, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics), university administrations have a vested interest in assuring prospective graduate students that getting a PhD is actually worth their time. Otherwise, the cheap labor pool will dry up. Alternatively, those graduate employees and their non-tenure-track colleagues who sustain the ever-expanding system of American higher education might organize to demand decent pay, benefits, and job stability for the teaching work they do. 

I have no doubt that the graduate deans who created The Responsive PhD project have only the best intentions for graduate students and the integrity of the humanities and social sciences. Their recommendations for graduate education, however, show little familiarity with the realities of graduate student life in the twenty-first century, and their methodology in arriving at their recommendations shows little evidence of interest in those realities. Most graduate students in the humanities and social sciences do not want to get PhDs so they can go into private enterprise. They hope instead to take part in the social mission of higher education in the United States, to teach the next generation how to think and read critically, to research and discover fundamental truths, and to become the most path-breaking, creative scholars in their fields. University administrators should be spending their time figuring out how to nurture those dreams, not how to reshape them to fit the needs of the market. 

David Huyssen, a PhD candidate in U.S. history at Yale University, is  a member of the AAUP’s Committee on Graduate and Professional Students and an organizer for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale. His e-mail address is david.huyssen@yale.edu.

 Printer-Friendly Page