The great PhD scam

Part 3

by Jordan Ellenberg

Everyone at the MLA conference agrees there's a job crisis in the humanities, but they don't agree on much more. Even the most basic terms of arguing about the subject remain, in a popular formulation here, "sites of contestation." Incompatible stories compete, Rashomon-like, to explain the same dead body.

One story, apparently the most popular: because of a demographic contraction and declining state funding of higher education, the academic labor market has shrunk, and shrunk for good. Faculty members have nonetheless sanctioned the increasing production of graduate students, even opening new PhD programs. Why? Robert Holub, a professor of German at UC Berkeley, writes in the MLA journal Profession: " . . . professors profit directly from graduate students, who teach classes professors do not want to teach, populate seminars so that professors can indulge in their specialties, and do research professors do not want to do (or pay for)." From this point of view, the solution to the job problem is primarily a difficult exercise of will; faculties should allow marginal graduate programs to be closed, and cut admissions to the ones that remain, so that people will no longer be trained for jobs that don't exist.

Another story of the work shortage: there is no work shortage. This leftist critique holds that to apply the supply-and-demand logic of capitalism to the academy is to give up on what makes the academy important. "The job market is a contestable idea," says a graduate student from CUNY. "It's not natural; it can be opposed; and it can be reversed." Grover Furr, a professor at Montclair State and member of the MLA Radical Caucus, puts it this way: "These are politically created circumstances -- and so the political dimensions of the response are more important than the economic dimension." That is, the first story contains the implicit, and wrong, assumption that the job problem is the result of God-given economic forces, when, in fact, there's lots of work for everyone to do -- it's just not available in the form of jobs. Here the administrators are the guilty parties; it's their decision not to replace retiring faculty, or to replace them with cheaper adjunct labor. In this analysis, cutting graduate enrollment is the worst possible policy. Instead, the faculty, adjuncts, and graduate students ought to make common cause, endorsing unionization of student employees and faculty, and resisting the efforts of state legislatures and university administrators to reshape the university along corporate lines and fiscal rationales.

Then there's the right-wing story, in which the humanities are in trouble because the current mainstream of scholarship -- that is, scholarship informed by theory -- is a fraud, perpetrated by leftist professors embittered by their marginalization in the public sphere. The reason there are so few jobs for English professors is that English professors are selling a product students don't want, and which legislatures are (rightly) reluctant to subsidize. People like Dinesh D'Souza, Roger Kimball, and William Bennett sold a lot of books on this theme during the so-called culture wars of the early 1990s, and it still makes a reliable column for conservative op-edders like the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley, who, on the third day of the conference, wrote sternly that Shakespeare and Toni Morrison were not "equivalent." To the conservatives, the special language of theory is just obscurantism -- an attempt to assert an authority that hasn't been earned. And any knowledge that's to be gained from reading Steve Martin (or radically re-reading Shakespeare) is knowledge not worth having. No one at the MLA was espousing this point of view, at least not audibly, but the popularity of the conservative story has had its effect on morale. "What we do is such a caricaturable quantity," one graduate student told me. "We all live in fear that people think we're doing intellectual masturbation and that our difficult work isn't appreciated. . . . You're suddenly beset with the feeling that no one understands or cares about what you're working on."

The MLA has its own story to tell about the job problem. By their count, the number of jobs listed in English was up 13 percent this year, and the worst of the shortage may be over. "We know that there are going to be larger numbers in college -- a boomlet -- by the turn of the century," says Phyllis Franklin, the MLA's executive director. "We also know our society values advanced education. This is a fact."

No one who wasn't speaking for the MLA seemed to share this view.

Part 4

Jordan Ellenberg is a writer living in Somerville.