Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new report from the Modem Language Association. The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track job.The core of the problem is, of course, the job market. The M.L.
A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that’s wildly optimistic: the M.L.
A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting―not to mention the older professors who didn’t receive tenure, and who now find themselves competing with their former students. In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That’s why the mood is so dire—why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee’s words, “Why maintain doctoral study in the modem languages and literatures—or the rest of the humanities——at all?”Those trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less elite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the G.I. Bill and, later, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly. When the boom ended, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid¬seventies, schools were creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students—for instance, women and minorities. Those reforms worked: as Nate Silver reported in the Times last summer, about twice as many people attend college per capita now as did forty years ago. But all that expansion changed colleges. In the past, they had catered to elite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts. Now, to attract middle-class students, colleges had to offer more career-focused majors, in fields like business, communications, and health care. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university. Today, they are often regarded as a kind of institutional luxury, paid for by dynamic, cheap, and growing programs in, say, adult-education. These large demographic facts are contributing to today’s job-market crisis: they’re why, while education as a whole is growing, the humanities aren’t.Given all this, what can an English department do? The M.L.
A. report contains a number of suggestions. Pride of place is given to the idea that grad school should be shorter:“Departments should design programs that can be completed in five years.”That will probably require changing the dissertation from a draft of an academic book into something shorter and simpler. At the same time, graduate students are encouraged to “broaden” themselves: to “engage more deeply with technology”;to pursue unusual and imaginative dissertation projects; to work in more than one discipline; to acquire teaching skills aimed at online and community-college students; and to take workshops on subjects, such as project management and grant writing, which might be of value outside of academia. Graduate programs, the committee suggests, should accept the fact that many of their students will have non-tenured, or even non-academic, careers. They should keep track of what happens to their graduates, so that students who decide to leave academia have a non-academic alumni network to draw upon.What does the author mean by saying “that’s wildly
吴老师在指导青年教师时说道:“我们是生物老师,自己就知道生物的多样性和保护这种多样性的重要,所以对各有所长的学生,我们可不能做一个把学生修剪得整整齐齐的园丁。”这种说法表明教师劳动具有()。
下列选项中,不属于15世纪到17世纪地理大发现时期的航海家是()。
教学《雪地里的小画家》一课时,张老师展示了大量动物脚印的图片,帮助学生更好地理解课文内容。他所采用的教学方法是()
16岁的蒋某因抢劫被公安机关抓获,当地电视台将蒋某接受审讯的清晰画面在当地新闻节目中播出,该电视台的行为()。
小学生梁某欺凌同学,扰乱课堂纪律,学校经过研究决定将其开除,该校做法()。