A four-year doctorate?

That's one of the recommendations from the MLA's president for "reforming doctoral programs."  It's not clear to me if he understands time-to-degree as including the MA, or not.  In any event, I finished my Ph.D. at Chicago in five years, including the MA, but my situation as a graduate student was thoroughly atypical: not only was I fully funded for the entire haul, but I also did zero independent teaching.  At the time (mid-90s), you had to be in your sixth year of a degree program to teach your own course; I led two once-per-week discussion seminars--and only got the second (students at the time were generally kept to one) because I pointed out that I was about to be let loose upon the world with no practical experience worth discussing.  Of course, once I actually finished, much to everyone's astonishment ("Wait, you're done."  "Yes, I said I was going to be done."), I turned out to be pretty much unemployable for some time, there not being any jobs for people who really haven't the slightest clue how to teach.  (Through certain backchannels, I got feedback from one committee, who thought I had given an excellent interview. They also thought I would probably explode in a pile of smoking ash if placed in front of their students.) 

This is all another way of saying that the current demand for faculty who have a basic grasp of pedagogy is probably incompatible with completing a four-year degree, which presumes a student doing not much else except coursework and dissertating.  My department's own MA, which predominantly serves teachers working on their credentials, takes two years, and teachers who are employed full-time often need to take longer to finish.  By the same token, if, as the president suggests, universities should "provide the broad professional development and skills that, while central to an academic career, can also be transferred to other paths," you will very likely also need a degree that takes more than four years to complete, unless you somehow expect to cram in two forms of job training at once--and, I suspect, do both rather badly.

Meanwhile, none of this addresses the two pink elephants in the middle of the room, wearing tutus: the lack of jobs for people who have doctorates, and the likely irrelevance of a doctorate in English for many other potential careers, aside from the usual writing-intensive suspects.  (By which I mean that Ph.Ds in English wind up in other careers on a frequent basis, but there were probably much less time-consuming and, quite frankly, much less emotionally/psychologically painful paths to get there; I don't think a four-year Ph.D. changes that.)  

 

Comments

[Kerry NZ]

##Doctoral education in the humanities now takes nearly twice as long as it did in the 1960s—and it takes considerably longer than degrees in law or business;##

But nowhere in his article does he explain clearly why this is. He alludes to a lack of consistency in course offerings - but is this really why? The timings seem quite long in comparison to what the expectations are in New Zealand - here it is BA (3 yr) + MA (1 yr coursework + 1 yr thesis) + PhD (3-4 yr thesis only) = 8-9 yrs from starting as an undergrad.

[Laura Vivanco]

The timings seem quite long in comparison to what the expectations are in New Zealand - here it is BA (3 yr) + MA (1 yr coursework + 1 yr thesis) + PhD (3-4 yr thesis only)

In England it's even less: BA/BSc (3 yrs) and PhD (3 yrs). Some people do a one year post-graduate degree before a PhD, and Scotland has four-year undergraduate degrees but a student who starts at an English university at 18 could finish their PhD aged 24. There isn't an expectation that PhD students will have done much teaching.

[Miriam]

In the US system, we do four years for a BA, then 1-2 years for an MA (depending on the program--in a straight-to-Ph.D. program, you may get the MA at the end of your first year), and then things get really slow. 1 1/2 - 2 yrs more coursework + thesis for the Ph.D., with the thesis taking goodness knows how long, + most graduate students are teaching. He doesn't address people deliberately delaying time to degree, however (because there's no job, so why graduate and lose what little health insurance you have?).

US theses may also be longer than many of their European counterparts, albeit certainly not longer than a Habilitationsschrift.

[jseliger.com]

(By which I mean that Ph.Ds in English wind up in other careers on a frequent basis, but there were probably much less time-consuming and, quite frankly, much less emotionally/psychologically painful paths to get there; I don't think a four-year Ph.D. changes that.)

I think it does change the core issue: the students in question will, at the very least, expend less in opportunity costs (they'll be stuck in grad school for four years, not ten) and will be able to start their "real" career sooner.

Plus, there's one other real issue: does one really need five to ten years of training to teach undergrads literature? The answer appears to be "no," based on the fact that a lot of grad students with zero to four years of training are doing exactly that, which Louis Menand points out in The Marketplace of Ideas. The book is definitely worth reading if you're interested in these issues (apologies if you already have and I'm bringing old news).

[D]

Some science departments in the U.S. (e.g., chemistry at UCBerkeley but not physics at UCBerkeley) already have a 4-year Ph.D., but I get the impression that chemists from Berkeley tend to go work in industry after graduation.