Roadrunner academics
My undergraduate alma mater is pioneering what they call a "5+2 program" in the humanities, which combines a five-year doctorate with a two-year postdoc--er, excuse me, "assistant adjunct professorship." I have no objection to completing a Ph.D. program (including the MA) in five years, having done so myself, but I continue to be puzzled by the emphasis on moving people through quickly to...non-existent jobs. If there is nothing at the end of the pipeline, squeezing people through the pipeline more rapidly does not achieve much of anything, other than increase the supply of adjuncts. (Yes, it might save people money. Yes, that's important. No, it still doesn't help at the other end.) Moreover, even if every adjunct position this moment were to be converted to tenure-track lines, we would still not need hundreds of people specializing in Hegelian thought or, for that matter, Victorian religious fiction: we would need hundreds of rhet-comp specialists and generalists to teach things like, oh, UCI's Humanities Core.
I also wonder about the idea that students would be all coursework/pedagogy/dissertating, all the time, for five years, and then put off doing their "professionalization" until the last two. First, although Hum Core is centralized--there are seminar sections attached to a team-taught lecture component--there's actually a fair amount of prep work for the seminar leaders, almost all of which will be out of their fields. And lots of papers. Second, this effectively tethers the student to the campus--someone who finishes and wishes to decamp pronto will be stuck, because they won't have anything on their CVs aside from teaching. Now, historically, UCI has placed a lot of its students at community colleges and teaching schools like the CSUs, but even the CSUs are asking for more scholarship these days. Given how expensive this area is (will the assistant adjunct professors be eligible for faculty housing?), I expect a lot of people might wish to leave for pastures that, if not necessarily greener, would certainly require the expenditure of less green.
Short(er) version: unless there are major structural changes to the entire enterprise of faculty hiring, accelerating doctoral speeds doesn't do much (or anything) for the problem of adjunctification.