Dissertating
Sidonie Smith's "Beyond the Dissertation Monograph," featured in the most recent MLA Newsletter, argues that it is time to "expand the forms the dissertation might take," especially given the perfect storm of such phenomena as "debt level[s]," "time to degree," "the failure to attract diverse cohorts of students," and the rise of electronic media.1 By instituting "[m]ore flexible dissertation models," Smith argues, we can shorten the over-long path to the doctorate, take advantage of the new possibilities opened up by digitalization, and, of course, prepare for the "increasingly collaborative scholarly world of the future and for new ventures in collaborative public scholarship, which seeks to link those in the academy to intellectuals and communities outside it" (2). And, on top of all that, toppling the dissertation idol will help prepare students for the pedagogical demands of the twenty-first century. Graduate will learn "digital composing" and produce "digital scholarship that doubles as teaching tools" (3).
1. The assumption seems to be that the actual form of the dissertation monograph extends the time to degree. But this does not seem to be altogether true. The Ph.D. Completion Project found (PDF) that "[f]our-fifths (80%) of respondents indicated that financial support was a main factor in their ability to complete their doctoral program" (2). And how do students in the humanities tend to receive financial support? By working as teaching assistants. In the same survey, 52% of humanities respondents said that TAships had increased TTD (3). The extent of the effect, however, remains under debate. Thomas B. Hoffer and Vincent Welch found that, in general, "the time-to-degree measures were generally highest for those whose primary source of support was a teaching assistantship," although in the humanities, their stats suggested that there was only a slight difference between assistantships & and fellowships (but quite a substantial one for students with no institutional support, about three years). The University of California's Accountability Report (2009), noting that students in the humanities took longer to complete their doctorates, speculated that the reasons included "the additional time humanities students spend as teaching assistants, the more individual nature of humanities dissertation research or the fact that these students more often interrupt their studies for financial or other reasons." (Only the suggestion in the middle suggests that reforming the dissertation process is the best way to go.) And again, the Council of Graduate Schools points out that "[t]hose with teaching assistantships and other forms of funding, such as loans, take longer to complete their degrees."
The point, quite simply, is that focusing on the dissertation as a means of reducing TTD skips over the much more pressing question of cold, hard cash. Students who need to juggle writing a dissertation with employment now will still need to perform the same juggling act with a shorter, or just different, project. So, then: where do doctoral programs get this cash? (Presumably, you have to reduce program intake in order to increase financial output. This means faculty will have fewer graduate seminars.) Moreover, given that TAships certainly seem to have some measurable impact on TTD, do doctoral programs intend to do something concrete about it--namely, reducing2 the TA workload? Of course, somebody else will have to teach those courses vacated by the TAs...
Excuse me a moment--I'm feeling a little cynical, for some reason.
In any event, proposing that reworking the dissertation will significantly impact TTD seems, to me, to be something like using a band-aid to repair a car engine.
2. Actually, I'm all gung-ho for digital projects and other forms of electronic scholarship, because they certainly make the lives of faculty such as myself--located at colleges with relatively few financial resources to support research, book purchases, and the like--considerably easier. But before we get all hot and bothered about training students to seek out new media and new scholarly genres, to boldly code where no academic has coded before, could we perhaps think about what's at stake for those academics when they land at, well, a college like mine? I'm concerned that we're not examining how these new projects implicitly shift the financial burden from publishers to academic institutions, to the detriment of scholars at poorer institutions, let alone independent scholars. A college that cannot afford subventions (mine can't, for example) may not be able to afford to maintain the ongoing costs of a major digital archive, textual repository, or multimedia project, let alone to supply faculty with the necessary computer equipment and software for doing high-quality graphics and video. Nor, for that matter, can it necessarily fund the RAs needed to help put such sites together. Of course, you can charge for access, which kind of undoes the whole "make stuff more accessible to the public" thing. (Actually, it undoes the whole "make stuff more accessible to other academics" thing, too.) Or apply for grants, although grant money has a bad habit of being finite. I suppose there's always a PayPal tip jar. The point being that despite proposing new scholarly forms as a way of diversifying the academy, there's a bit of a "pay no attention to that empty bank behind the curtain" attitude at work here.
3. For any of this to work, R1 universities need to stop requiring books for tenure in the humanities. (Schools like mine don't require books, but academic pundits tend to ignore us.) Which R1 will actually step up to the plate and do that? Harvard? Yale? Princeton? I've yet to hear any department announce that they're carrying out such a step...
1 Sidonie Smith, "Beyond the Dissertation Monograph," MLA Newsletter 42.1 (Spring 2010): 2.
2 I was in one of the final five-year Mellon Fellowship cohorts, and because of fellowship requirements, did no teaching during my degree--my experience amounted to leading two once-a-week discussion sections. I can unequivocally say that in the end, that was not a great arrangement, and it helped torpedo me my first time on the market. It wasn't exactly good for the students I did have at my first (temporary) job, either.