Ph.D. Octopus

by David (shameless self-promotion)

 In line with our series of three posts on affirmative action, I thought I would mention this cool new book that just came out called “Too Asian?” Racism, Privilege and Post-Secondary Education. The title is a response to Canada’s Maclean’s magazine article “Too Asian?” from 2010. It just so happens that I contributed the second chapter, “Asians and Affirmative Action on Campus: An Historical Canada–US Comparison.” That chapter came out of this blog post. Here’s the blurb on the book:

The now notorious Maclean’s article “’Too Asian?’” from the magazine’s 2010 campus issue has sparked a national furor about race in Canadian higher education. Since the founding of the federal policy of multiculturalism, Canadians have prided themselves on their ability to integrate diversity into a broader multicultural environment, but the often heated discussions about race point to fissures in this national project. This collection uses the controversy about the Maclean’s article as a flashpoint to interrogate issues about race and representation on Canadian campuses and what it means for students and learning across the country.

Anyhow, if you’re interested in buying the book, you can do so at this link.

by Afrah (the third in a series of three posts on affirmative action)

Affirmative Action got its start in the 1970s as a conservative program that had the support of the Republican administration of Richard Nixon. A combination of the civil rights movement call for change and black student led protest for increased access to majority white college campuses provided the context for the implementation of affirmative action. The purpose of the program was to increase the number of women and historically underrepresented minorities in employment and education. Despite the very auspicious beginnings of a policy that had liberal and conservative support, the backlash began soon thereafter. During the 1970s, the main criticism came from supporters of a so-called colorblind policy.  The current day post racial critique of affirmative action is colorblindness that has been updated and repackaged for the new millennium. Despite its seemingly neutral and laudatory goals, the true purpose of post racialism is to undermine a program that is essential for continued opportunities for people of color.

The 1970s laid the foundation to the eventual conservative political ascendancy that was deeply critical of the racial advancements of the civil rights movement.  The right was able to complete a bit of historic revisionism in embracing the “good” 1960s ideology of colorblindness. They shaped a new racial narrative by employing civil rights rhetoric to critique and attempt to dismantle a program that provided for racial progress. This sort of political positioning was a brilliant and cynical element of the conservative battle against affirmative action. They claimed the unassailable moral high ground while advocating for the policy’s demise. Read the rest of this entry »

by David (the first in a series of three posts on affirmative action)

Can both of these statements be true?

1) People of colour, women, the disabled, and members of the LGBT community face real, overt discrimination, along with structural inequalities through many or perhaps all stages of their lives, which hampers their ability to be admitted to selective schools and to compete in the academic job market.

2) Straight, white, able-bodied men are at a distinct disadvantage on the academic job market as compared to people of colour, women, the disabled, and members of the LGBT community.

They can’t both be true if we regard affirmative action the way president Lyndon B. Johnson did in his 1965 commencement address at Howard University. There, LBJ famously stated  “you do not take a person who for years has been hobbled in chains, and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair.”

This is philosopher James Rachels‘ position. Rachels argued that affirmative action was not about advancing the under-qualified over the qualified, but simply about fairness, about leveling the playing field. When Harvard admits a poor Black student with a 1300 SAT score over a rich white kid with a 1400, it does this knowing that the white kid likely benefitted from tutoring, a safe neighbourhood, books in the house, and all sorts of advantages that the Black student may have been lacking. Thus the Black students’ 1300 is worth more than the white students’ 1400. It’s only fair.

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by David

William Cronon

In this month’s issue of Perspectives on History, American Historical Association president William Cronon wrote an excellent piece on the need for professional historians to be trained for breadth along with depth, to be able to synthesize large amounts of material and ask (and maybe answer) big questions, along with the rigorous but narrow analysis that is typically embodied by dissertation research.

As an aside in this article, Cronon wrote “William James’s provocative 1903 essay, ‘The PhD Octopus,‘ should still be required reading for all scholars.”

Since that’s the name of our little blog, I tend to agree. And what exactly does “The PhD Octopus” say?

James began his essay by telling of a “brilliant” graduate student in philosophy who had been teaching English literature at another university when it was discovered that he did not have a PhD, the “three magical letters” that were a requirement for a teaching position at the university. When the department told the student about the situation, he returned to the Harvard philosophy department and wrote a thesis. Yet James, a member of that department and dissertation committee, noted that they could not pass him.

And so James noted:

Brilliancy and originality by themselves won’t save a thesis for the doctorate; it must also exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of learning; and this our candidate had neglected to bring to bear. So, telling him that he was temporarily rejected, we advised him to pad out the thesis properly, and return with it next year, at the same time informing his new President that this signified nothing as to his merits, that he was of ultra-Ph.D. quality, and one of the strongest men with whom we had ever had to deal. 

To our surprise we were given to understand in reply that the quality per se of the man signified nothing in this connection, and that the three magical letters were the thing seriously required. The College had always gloried in a list of faculty members who bore the doctor’s title, and to make a gap in the galaxy, and admit a common fox without a tail, would be a degradation impossible to be thought of. We wrote again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little anyhow as to one’s ability to teach literature; we sent separate letters in which we outdid each other in eulogy of our candidate’s powers, for indeed they were great; and at last, mirabile dictu, our eloquence prevailed. He was allowed to retain his appointment provisionally, on condition that one year later at the farthest his miserably naked name should be prolonged by the sacred appendage the lack of which had given so much trouble to all concerned.

This anecdote hits home because I’m about to embark on a college teaching job without my PhD in hand. Like many of my peers, I’ve had virtually no pedagogical training en route to my degree, except for learning by doing as a teaching assistant and as instructor in various courses along the way.

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by David

In a sense, the excellent Israeli movie Footnote tells a thoroughly Jewish, or even Judaic tale. The movie is in Hebrew and set in Israel. The plot revolves around two professors, a father and a son, at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Both are Talmudic scholars.

And yet, more fundamentally, the movie is universal, and not Jewish at all. The Israeli setting, the Hebrew language, is incidental. This is a story about family, and about academia. The language, setting, and the academic discipline are irrelevant. It could just as easily have been about literary scholars in France, or chemists in England.

Some might argue that the elephant in the room of this film is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel is able to make a movie that completely ignores the existence of the Palestinians, which simply provides more evidence of the power of the occupation.

I read this fact differently. I think it is the fulfillment of one kind of Zionist dream, specifically Theodor Herzl’s dream of Jewish and Israeli normalization. Herzl supposedly quipped something to the effect of: “A Jewish state would only be a normal country if Jewish street-cleaners and gardeners worked in the same cities as Jewish doctors, lawyers and businessmen, and when Jewish policemen arrested Jewish prostitutes.”

Well, there certainly are Jewish sex workers in Israel (though I don’t think they should be arrested). But my point is that movies like Footnote are evidence of the partial normalization of Israel. They provide a vision of what Israel might be, if the Palestinian conflict were resolved. A country like any other, with the ability to tell universal stories using its own language and cultural markers. It’s a vision I endorse, one that seems far away, but provides the occasional glimmer of hope.

In any case, the movie is terrific. It’s funny and poignant, with great dialogue and superb acting. The film is accesible to anyone, but it’s especially relevant for historians (as Talmudists, the protagonists are de facto medieval historians) and anyone familiar with archival research and the academic life. And this isn’t just my opinion: Footnote was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Go see it.

by Danny

Yesterday, I finished a first draft of my dissertation. This is not to brag or invite people to congratulate me (although, to be honest, I did briefly consider posting something about my finishing on Facebook, primarily to receive congratulations). What I want to discuss here is the deep ambivalence I felt/feel upon finishing. If six (!) years ago, you had told me that my dissertation’s first stage would end with a whimper, not a bang, I would’ve been surprised if not shocked. No matter what, I would certainly not have expected to feel, frankly, so ambivalent.

Now that I’m done, what do I have? A 600-page tome that needs to be cut down by at least one-third, if not one-half; a sneaking suspicion that few people will ever read this thing; and nagging questions about whether it was worth the time and investment, given the abysmal academic job market. This is not to say that I don’t love what I do, or that I regret spending my 20s studying a relatively arcane subject. It’s just to say that, surprisingly, I do not feel the sense of accomplishment I expected to upon starting this endeavor.

My Dissertation

Perhaps this is just the nature of completing a project that you’ve worked on for so long that it becomes a part of you. (Though one would expect feelings of sadness, rather than ambivalence, if this were the case.) I mean, I’m impressed with what I’ve done, certainly, and think that I did produce some relatively worthwhile new knowledge. But I think the major cause of my ambivalence is the deep difficulty that I have/will have communicating my dissertation’s argument to non-academics. And this leads me to a question that has been talked and blogged about a lot in the past decade: the relationship between academia and the non-academic world.

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by Julian 

Is student loan debt a ticking time bomb? At $870 billion dollars, the money owed on student loans in the United States now surpasses total credit balances. In Canada, the average student debt for a university graduate totals $27,000. Two million Canadians now owe around 20 billion dollars in student loans. Growing levels of student debt in both countries represents part of a larger phenomenon of governments passing off educational costs to individual students rather than funding them as part of the public good.

While part of an international trend, I’ve witnessed how much response to these tuition hikes can vary from place to place. In 2005, I moved from Montreal to Ohio to complete a master’s degree. Even then, tuition rates were rapidly expanding at Ohio’s state universities. The apathetic response to tuition hikes that I encountered among students amazed me.  The reason for my surprise was because at that exact same moment in my native Quebec, over 200, 000 students had gone on strike. They had done so because the provincial government had cut loans and bursaries. Even with these cuts (which were unsuccessful due to student mobilization), Quebec tuition would still have remained about half of what it was in Ohio.

Today, the gap between the student movements in Ohio and Quebec seem just as stark.  In Ohio, average costs for state residents at the main campuses of four-year universities stands at $ 9,600 a year (a 56% increase over the past decade). Ohio State, which has increased annuals charges by 72% over the past decade to $13, 081, even warns its prospective students that they should expect to pay an additional 5% to 10%  every year that they attend. Three weeks ago, around 100 Ohio State students marched in protest.  In contrast, three days ago in Montreal, tens of thousands of students showed up for a demonstration that spanned over 50 city blocks. They were protesting the Liberal government’s plans to raise annual in-province tuition fees from $2,500 to $4,100 over the next five years. Since mid-February, more than 300,000 students have stopped attending classes to challenge this policy.

Montreal demonstration against tuition fees , March 22, 2012

Although many believe that college education is an investment into one’s future—which individual students should play a substantial role in paying back themselves—upon closer inspection the arguments for state tuition increases don’t sound very convincing. Increased fees deter financially disadvantaged students from applying to university, lead to worrisome debt loads for anyone whose family isn’t already well off, and neglect the obscene growth in administrative salaries at college and universities in recent years (which actually do waste money). They also tend to encourage the view that higher education is nothing but a commodity designed for individual advancement, rather than a system that promotes the common good through its original research and teaching.

In cases such as Quebec’s, the tuition increases also represent a drop in the bucket when compared with overall spending on higher education. The tuition hikes seem designed less to pay for needed expenses than to encourage the principle that individuals—rather than society as a whole—should bear the financial burden every time they use a government service. That is, in the name of austerity, they should get used to more regressive taxation.

As the size of student protests in Ohio and Quebec demonstrate, student culture matters in shaping responses to tuition increases. While the Canadian media has relentlessly reminded its readers that Quebecers pay less in tuition than anyone in Canada, they have neglected to highlight to that they also pay considerably higher income taxes in part because they expect more social equality. Since the late 1960s, Quebec students have launched a number of successful petition drives, strikes, occupations, and mass demonstrations that have helped keep costs down. This commitment to student solidarity helps explain why Quebec’s student debt load is by the far the lowest out of all of Canada. In Ohio, on the other hand, not only do you find a political culture that places less of a premium on social equality, but you also have a complex system of higher education that makes organizing protests much more difficult.

Culture and institutions, of course, are malleable. Many in Quebec support increased tuition fees. Its student movement may very well fail to stop the current government’s agenda (as was recently the case in London). At the same time, they might help inspire others. My own, admittedly utopian, hope is that the activism in Quebec encourages students in places like Ohio (just as the negligible tuition fees in places like Norway and the Netherlands have motivated many in Quebec). As universities around the world consider abandoning their missions of serving the common good for the promise of neo-liberal economic efficiencies, the response should ideally be international as well. Indeed, many in the Occupy Movement have turned crushing levels of student debt into an organizing issue.  While I like seeing 100, 000 people marching against tuition increases in Montreal (or London), it would be a great thing to see in Columbus, Ohio too.

by Danny

This past weekend, I returned to my graduate school for the first time in over a year. It was a typical visit; I met with my advisors, said hello to colleagues, and stayed with my little sister, who—hilariously and weirdly—is now a first-year in the same program and department as myself. It was great to be back, see the old haunts, and walk around the (soon-to-be) alma mater. Thankfully, I’m very close to finishing my dissertation, and the questions I received mostly concerned the project. In speaking to younger years, I realized that the dissertation is a largely mystical product. It is spoken about as something tangible yet unknowable.

Alma Mater

For this reason, I figured I’d post a short list of tips that I’ve learned while writing my dissertation. I don’t mean to imply that everyone will find these tips useful, and I’m well aware that people have very different writing processes. But, I think any advice on the issue can perhaps help those who are beginning this arduous task. Some of these tips relate to picking a topic, some relate to research, and some relate to writing. I hope they might be useful to my colleagues in earlier years. In no particular order, here they are:

If you can, take courses related to your topic.

This is a semi-controversial tip, as one of the joys of graduate school is taking classes on topics with which you are unfamiliar and expanding your intellectual horizons. I very much support this. However, graduate school is also about pre-professional training, and getting a jumpstart on your dissertation by taking classes in topics broadly related to your interests is important for completing your dissertation in 5-6 years. Reading the secondary literature in your field will also help you situate your dissertation, important for both the prospectus and the final product.

Pick a topic in which you are incredibly interested.

You will probably be working on your dissertation for 3-5 years, so it is incredibly important to pick a topic that you can imagine reading, writing, and thinking about for thousands of hours. The last thing you want is to awaken in the middle of your fifth year, as you’re slogging through the Russian state archives, to realize that you don’t really care about the intersections between space travel and class in the 1950s Soviet Union.

Pick a topic that can be researched and written about in a timely manner.

Everyone enters graduate school wanting to write a dissertation like William Cronon’s Changes in the Land. Unfortunately, this is virtually impossible. In my opinion, it is much smarter to choose a topic that you know contributes to the literature, produces new knowledge, and can be written about in 5-6 years. In an era of dwindling funding, where many graduate students are unsure whether they will have funding after their fifth years, this is perhaps the most important rule. Having ambition is important, but it is unlikely you will suddenly revise the way we understand the French Revolution. For a first project, modesty is best.

An Object That I Have Not Used Once While Writing My Dissertation

Know your topic.

This is why taking courses on your topic is important. A dissertation is very time-consuming, and you don’t want it to be your sixth year when you realize that you really aren’t adding very much new information to the corpus of literature with which you are engaged. Having a good, general sense of where your work fits in will very much ease the writing of your dissertation. That being said …

Don’t feel compelled to know everything about your topic.

It is too easy to get distracted by the fact that, as someone who has spent only half a decade ensconced in your research field, in many ways you barely know the literature to which you are contributing. This is an unfortunate fact, and part of the reason why it takes such a long time to transform your dissertation into a book. However, you should be careful not to distract yourself too much with reading all of the secondary literature on every topic upon which your dissertation touches. Be familiar with these literatures, of course, but don’t go down too many rabbit holes. If you do, you’ll never finish.

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by David

A Scholar Who Probably Had More Career Options than I do

I love the humanities. I love my discipline of history. I do intellectual history, meaning I use literary and philosophical sources as well. I love literature. I love philosophy. I love art and art history. I see value in studying the humanities for their own sake. I think teaching the humanities can impart important life and career skills, including critical thinking, clear writing, and logical argumentation. I think the content of a humanities education is useful too, and not just for cocktail parties, but for learning the lessons of history, examining moral questions, identifying the aesthetic value of cultural production, and appreciating peoples of different backgrounds.

Despite all this, I support (some) cuts to the humanities at the university level. Not because I want to. But because there is no real choice. Let me explain.

I’ve read a lot of articles about how shitty it is to be pursuing a doctorate in the humanities these days, but none on what that means for professors. Until now. This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a must-read for doctoral students and their professors. The gist: graduate programs are shrinking, and with that, professors have fewer doctoral students to train, thus damaging one major reason they became professors in the first place.

“The only place I can really use some of the research I have is at the graduate level, and now I don’t have someone to impart it to,” says Anthony Colantuono, an associate professor of art history at Maryland, whose department held a retreat this month to talk about how to maintain a vibrant graduate program while admitting only a couple of students a year…. ”You want to pass that on; otherwise it could be lost for good,” he says. With fewer graduate students enrolling, that loss is a real threat. “We are all terrified by this,” he says, “because as researchers we’re committed to graduate teaching.”….

The history department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison cut its new graduate admissions in half this past fall, to just 21 students. “Why train people if the outlook for professional historians is not nearly as good as it was five years ago?” asks Laird Boswell, director of graduate studies in the department….

[Frank] Donoghue, the English professor at Ohio State, has written a forthcoming article for the journal Pedagogy about the phenomenon. “The privilege of teaching a graduate seminar every year, or at least every two years, long ago came to become an expected perk of faculty teaching jobs at Ohio State,” he says. “It clearly can’t be anymore, but who gets seminars and who doesn’t has become an increasingly significant factor in faculty morale.”

This sucks. And yet, as the article notes, Penn State’s history department has come to grips with this reality and is adopting a new strategy in response. They’ve cut “entire subfields,” and are no longer accepting students pursuing 20th century US history, medieval history, or modern European history.

“This is the way of the future, and we’re way ahead of the curve here,” says Michael Kulikowski, chairman of the history department, which was featured at this year’s annual meeting of the American Historical Association as one of 10 departments doing innovative things. “People have been talking about the oversupply of unemployable Ph.D.’s in the humanities for several decades, and I think we’ve found a part of the solution. We are concentrating on areas where we can place students competitively.”

Furthermore, there are some graduate students who are ok with this, namely, the ones who still get in. I’ve been saying this for a long time, as a member of NYU’s proto-union, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, or GSOC, and at history department grad student meetings. The biggest complaint is always always always lack of money, be it summer funding, or money for childcare, or research, or dental insurance. Well if we had half as many history students, there’d be more money to go around, and all those problems would be solved. And there’d be fewer people competing for the dwindling number of jobs.

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by Bronwen

I’ve always been a huge fan of college towns.  I like the mix of ages, the vast array of cultural activities, the proliferation of coffee shops, the college green.  I was excited about the likelihood of a future spent in adorable college towns (think Williamstown, Massachusetts).  I imagined having a dog, a cute little house, lots of professor friends, and attending concerts and plays at the local artistic ‘spaces’.  Yeah, okay, it was an idealized vision, and definitely one in which I combined the charms with my own hometown (shout out, Collingswood, NJ!) with our occasional family trips to Princeton for a trip to the record exchange or a performance of Dido and Aeneas.  The campus novel did nothing to disabuse me of this notion.

Then, after my own time in college, I switched to a new vision of the ideal academic life: the city university.  I chose a city university for grad school and thought this epitomized the academic life.  Attending world class concerts and plays, going to art exhibitions, working in the hustle and bustle of urban cafes, taking public transport, and living in cramped conditions with 7.5 million other people.  The boho dream.

So it seems like I was perfectly positioned to enjoy whichever lifestyle my academic job threw up for me.  Except that cities are painfully expensive on an early career salary.  And no one warns you about commuting.  And now I’m in the weird best of both worlds/worst Read the rest of this entry »