Rebekah Kim

In 1981, Eriko Amino received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in comparative literature, writing a dissertation on medieval French literature. When all goes well, a doctorate marks the beginning of an academic career, but for Amino it marked the end. “When I graduated,” she says, “many of us did not find anything other than adjunct positions.” While a friend secured a teaching position in South Dakota, Amino did not want to relocate to a place far from a metropolitan center. Unable to find a teaching position near a city, Amino took a job at a bank. “The decision,” she says, “wasn’t a happy one, but a practical one.”

Almost 30 years later, Amino reflects, graduate school students face similar obstacles. “I have a friend, who is in his 30s, who received his Ph.D. in English from Stanford,” Amino says. “He sent out 40 letters in the hopes of finding an academic position and got no acknowledgment of a single one.”

In recent months, universities have cut faculty costs and imposed hiring freezes to ease the impact of the recession. The Modern Language Association’s university job listings in English, literature, and foreign languages dropped 21 percent in 2008, their biggest decline since 1974. Since May 2008, the American Mathematical Society’s job listings have dropped more than 25 percent. Yet universities across the country continue to award doctorates by the tens of thousands. Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alone confers hundreds of doctoral degrees every year.

Victims of bad timing, this year’s graduates will face a particularly tough job market. But the recession has only brought into starker relief the fact that job prospects in academia have been slim for decades. Today, less than 50 percent of all Ph.D. candidates will secure tenure, according to education writer Thomas H. Benton’s reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The rest must accept low-paying adjunct positions or—like Amino—leave academia entirely.

That many of those with doctorates cannot expect to find jobs in academia should be enough to give pause to anyone thinking about pursuing a Ph.D.—and that’s before considering the significant investment of both time and money grad school requires. The typical grad student—who will spend an average of eight years studying for a doctorate—will accrue $20,000 in debt in graduate school, on top of any undergraduate debt. While top private universities like Columbia provide students with grants and living stipends (at Columbia, a nine-month stipend comes to $22,500), they do not fund master’s degrees, which are now required for admission into many Ph.D. programs. Master’s tuition at Columbia is $18,000 per year, still a sizable chunk of change for any student.

Frustrated with a graduate school system that demands steep tuition but cannot guarantee jobs, Mark Taylor, chair of Columbia’s religion department, published a scathing op-ed in the New York Times last spring titled “End the University as We Know It.” In the article, Taylor argues that graduate programs have been abandoning their students at graduation—that schools fail to offer their students decent-paying jobs in their fields of study, rendering their years of arduous research pointless. To remedy this problem, Taylor wants to reinvent graduate education, so that doctoral programs teach students skills more readily applicable to the world outside academia. The response to Taylor’s article ranged from laudatory to vitriolic. Stan Katz of the Chronicle said Taylor’s list of reform measures was “a bewildering mélange”; Christopher Kelty, professor of anthropology at Rice University, called it “a plank out of the dying Republican Party’s tattered playbook”; and Daniel Drezner, who teaches international diplomacy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, labeled one of Taylor’s proposals “utter, complete, ridiculous crap.” On the other hand, Taylor says the article produced a significant positive response and that he continues to receive e-mails from current students, teachers, and former academics applauding his ideas.

There is, after all, something a bit odd about a rigorous program of study that trains students for jobs that do not exist. Graduate programs in law, business, and medicine prepare students for a range of lucrative, relatively plentiful jobs. When compared to these professional programs, which boast of placement rates above 90 percent, the state of graduate schools looks particularly bleak. At Columbia, for example, the law school Web site claims that “98% of the Class of 2008 was employed by graduation in a variety of legal fields,” and the business school reported that 92 percent of graduates in 2008 accepted jobs within three months of graduation. In the wake of the financial crisis, those figures will likely have dropped significantly, but there’s still a tremendous disparity between professional and non-professional programs.

Institutions like Columbia’s GSAS aren’t going to place nine of 10 graduates in relevant fields anytime soon. But if graduate school is going to remain relevant, reform—possibly painful reform—will be necessary.

F.or Taylor, that reform will require far more than minor tweaks or patches. It will mean overturning the graduate program as we know it. “Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs,” he writes in his op-ed. He calls for the elimination of distinct departments of religion, philosophy, or history, to be replaced with “zones of inquiry.” These zones would function as umbrella topics uniting students across disciplines—biology, sociology, political science, or physics.

“Think about it,” Taylor says in an telephone interview. “‘Moby Dick’ is one of the most important analyses of religion we have. Why is ‘Moby Dick’ only in the territory of the English department?” The key to his plan is eliminating barriers—among departments, genres, and subfields. “Webs, not walls,” he proclaims. “To bring the American university into the modern, global society, we need to move from a world of walls to a world of webs.”

These walls exist between and within departments. As academic jobs grow scarcer, scholars must look for their own narrow niches in order to publish unique work. Hyperspecialization, Taylor believes, atomizes the academic community, detracting from the quality and practicality of the research that is produced.

Contemporary Civilization lecturer Paul Weinfield, who received his Ph.D. in religion from Columbia in 2008, echoes Taylor’s view that fields within fields are little more than “smokestacks within smokestacks.”

“There’s a disconnect between the kind of research universities want and the kind of teaching they want,” Weinfield says. As a student, Weinfield specialized in medieval Iranian mysticism, but after graduation, he found that employers were looking for candidates with a broader body of knowledge. “After 9/11, religion professors have been asked to teach very general classes on Islam. But scholars are interested in conducting research on very specialized themes, research that doesn’t apply to undergraduate courses.” In his job search, Weinfield discovered there was minimal demand for his expertise. Most positions, he found, “required more of a basic knowledge of politics and current events than an in-depth knowledge of Islam.”

When Weinfield was part of Columbia’s religion department, he didn’t perceive that the University was tending toward hyperspecialization. He was required to take a few interdisciplinary courses, including survey courses on both Western and Eastern religions, but he feels they fell short of their mission. The courses “were co-taught in a very fragmented way, and basically everyone sleep-walked through them.”

Cloistered in his own narrow subfield, Weinfield received little preparation for jobs in fields outside of academia. His specialization was “a real problem … more of a badge of one’s credentials than an actual skill set.”

Taylor believes his zones of inquiry would address the concerns of people like Weinfield. These zones, he says, would encourage scholarly collaboration and offer students a more practical education. Instead of studying religion, a student in Taylor’s university might study water.

Designed to address the problems of water shortage and management, a water program would incorporate scholarship from ecological, cultural, economic, and religious perspectives. By uniting disciplines for a practical common purpose, the university would bring scholars out of their bubble and provide them with the skills to join non-academic industries. That, at least, is Taylor’s theory. “In many areas, it makes sense to erode some departmental boundaries,” he says. “I think of zones like nodes—points of intersection between disciplines.”

Taylor has already implemented elements of his proposal at Columbia. Beginning this academic year, doctoral candidates in the religion department are required to take an exam in their choice of five zones of inquiry: time, space, body, media, and transmission. Body, for example, encompasses studies in neuroscience, biomedical ethics, and gender.

“What’s involved here,” Taylor says, “is a different vision of higher education for the global world of the 21st century. The current system is 200 years old and tied to outdated political, economic, and social structures. How can we create an educational opportunity that will prepare students for today’s world?” His proposal takes a stride toward solving the problem of employment for doctoral candidates by widening their skill sets and areas of expertise.

Taylor’s program is based on certain assumptions of what is useful or practical. But it’s also based on the philosophy that we can reorganize or re-imagine our systems of knowledge. “The way in which knowledge is structured is not set in stone,” Taylor says. “The world is not divided up into disciplines. Today, scholars develop expertise in a particular area first and then look at problems. But what if we looked at problems first and then figured out what kind of expertise we need to solve the problem?” Taylor wants us to view knowledge as cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and applicable to real-world questions, rather than contained within rigid categories. By considering solutions from a wide variety of angles, he insists, scholars will formulate more useful approaches to their fields.

Critics have pointed out some fundamental organizational weaknesses in Taylor’s plan. Should students in the water program be building bridges instead of civil engineers? Can students gain an in-depth knowledge of both environmental biology and the sociology of coastal communities in the same program?

David Bell, dean of faculty at Johns Hopkins University, wrote a response to Taylor’s op-ed in the New Republic the day after Taylor’s article ran. Deeming Taylor’s piece a “yawp of pain,” Bell’s article calls for further proof of grad schools’ obsolescence. He notes that competition for spots at top universities is as fierce as ever, and America remains the world leader in Nobel Prizes.

“Intellectual inquiry has its own logic,” Bell says in an interview. “The logic is often one of specialization. We’re not going to turn Ph.D. programs into vocational programs.” It’s conceivable to see how something like Taylor’s water program might provide jobs outside of the academy for sociologists or anthropologists. But as Bell himself asks, “What do you do with a field like classics?”

Taylor’s response to this criticism reveals the most radical aspect of his program. “I don’t think knowledge for knowledge’s sake is enough,” he says. “It’s only viable if someone else is paying the bill, and as we know, private patronage is drying up.” The only way we can continue to fund the humanities, Taylor argues, is to emphasize the broader societal contribution the study of arts and letters can make. And not every area of study can make a contribution. “We live in a world of limited resources, and not everything that can be done should be done. Some fields will emerge and others will disappear.” As Taylor sees it, no field is eternal and none should be. Classics may be among the disciplines that cannot justify their own existence.

As one might expect, professor James Zetzel, chair of Columbia’s department of classics, has a different perspective. “I would be very worried about an academic world which thought that ancient Greece and Rome should be the center of university education; I would be equally worried if they were banned as obsolete,” he writes in an e-mail.

Taylor replies that Plato and Aristotle won’t necessarily fall by the wayside. “Do you need a department of classics to study Aristotle?” he asks. Universities can still cover the canon—students will simply study the great thinkers in the context of different zones or themes, rather than as part of a curriculum structured by time period. In fact, Taylor adds, “when you only study Hegel in a contemporary philosophy class, you can’t fully understand Hegel.” A fuller understanding of Hegel, he explains, comes from examining his work from different perspectives and within different frameworks.

Still, he acknowledges that his system may sacrifice those areas of study that don’t prove useful. His university would only invest in programs that either contributed to contemporary problem-solving or aided students in the post-grad job hunt.

Others in the academy see Taylor’s reforms as impinging on the intellectual experience that graduate school is designed to provide. Kirsten Ellicson, who studies 19th-century French literature at Columbia, is due to receive her doctorate this fall. “I don’t think that it should be the mission of graduate programs to prepare us for jobs outside academia,” Ellicson writes in an e-mail. “They should continue to train us to think and do research, to become producers of knowledge—while also encouraging us, as my department has, to communicate clearly what we do to people in other fields as well as to people outside academia.” The Ph.D. program is not a means to an end but “an experience in itself,” Ellicson says. “At the beginning, what I knew is that I wanted to continue reading and analyzing literature, to push my reflection on literature farther.”

Instead of complete reform, Ellicson proposes that graduate programs reduce the time it takes to receive a doctorate. “The longer the program takes, the harder it can be to envision yourself, and the job climate, upon completion,” she says. “I do think that some departments could more rigorously push its graduate students to finish earlier, by providing more feedback along the way, by demanding regular exchanges between advisors and grad students.” A shorter Ph.D. program might alleviate some of the intense pressure placed on graduate students to secure tenure-track jobs. If graduate school is more an opportunity for personal and intellectual growth than an expensive and lengthy means of jumpstarting a lifelong career, success for a Ph.D student would mean more than just a professorship.

There appears to be an unbridgeable gap between Taylor’s and Ellicson’s visions. Is it possible to offer a deeply intellectual and practical education without corrupting both ends? How can universities launch their students on a career path while still allowing for in-depth study of the “impractical” subjects?

Maybe they can’t. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Rigidly adhering to tradition for its own sake is foolish, but whatever its flaws, the current system has brought us some tremendous scholarship. Creating zones of inquiry in lieu of departments might improve grad students’ job prospects, but it would do so at the expense of the rigor that has produced real intellectual breakthroughs. In the academy, vast banality is often accompanied by a few sparks of genius. But that genius requires cultivation and refinement. Even men like Einstein and Foucault went through the grind of graduate school.

Source: Columbia Spectator