An Interview With the Authors of THE NEW PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education
(Johns Hopkins University Press; December 29, 2020), Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch outline a more timely and versatile PhD that will end this waste of talent and treasure. The authors describe how to renovate academia’s highest degree to ready PhD graduates to use their expertise more broadly, to tackle the big challenges not only in education but also in every social sector from government to technology to industry.
If you could reinvent the American PhD from scratch what would it look like?
The first precept is simply this: Graduate schools should build their programs backward from what students need. In today’s world—and especially after covid–that means a curriculum that attends to both disciplinary expertise and the diverse career outcomes that students will choose.
Statistically speaking, graduate school is a tiny sector of academia. Why pay so much attention to a boutique operation?
They say that “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” What happens to the PhD is the opposite. One possible title for our book was “Why a Better Graduate Education Matters to Everyone,” because what happens to the PhD affects all of academia, and with it every member of our society. PhD curriculum shapes liberal arts curriculum—which remains the center of American academia. And the way that universities design and teach the liberal arts affects how colleges do the same, and high schools—all the way down.
Then there are the PhD graduates themselves. PhDs teach the future teachers of grades 1-20. Further, those PhDs who leave academia to work in labs, non-profits, government agencies, corporations, and just about anywhere you can think of – well, they affect every aspect of our lives. They’re discovery-makers, in fields from technology to moral norms.
The numbers surrounding the PhD system are so absurdly bad that it’s hard to believe people will let the system go on for another second. Who benefits by maintaining the status quo, and who is fighting change?
Academia is conservative with a small “c.” There’s nothing wrong with that. We wouldn’t want a venerable institution to lurch in the direction of every fad. But graduate school is conservative even by academic standards–it has changed little in over a century.
That conservatism can manifest itself in a fear of change. You asked “who,” but the answer is “what.” All professors and graduate school administrators were socialized into a system that’s suspicious of change–and that system is what needs to change first of all.
Especially in these pandemic-straitened times, we have to recognize the opportunity we have to make graduate school answer to its students. That response should come from both the top-down (driven by enlightened administrative leadership) and from the ground up, in the culture of every program. In The New PhD, we offer a guide that programs can follow to stage purposeful discussion and implement reforms of their choosing.
The numbers are still coming in, but it’s clear COVID is going to drastically change the makeup of colleges and universities. In this report, first-year enrollment fell by 16%. With less revenue, fewer undergrads to teach, and presumably, fewer tenure track positions, is this as ominous for PhD students as it sounds?
It’s ominous for all of higher education. Simply put, we will have less: less student revenue, less government support. (Though we hope for a government that recognizes higher education as the public good that it is—more on that below.)
Let’s skip over the “less is more” cliches. Less is less. But we were already facing shortages and squeezes: academia–including graduate school–hadn’t yet recovered from the 2008 financial crash at the time the pandemic hit. The current situation is worse, but it’s unfortunately terribly different from the fix we were already in.
Here’s the important question before us: How should we change to accommodate the reality that graduate study was facing for decades before now? The “temporary” academic job shortage has been going on for about 50 years (!). It’s past time that graduate programs met the actual professional needs of our students. For too long we have been preparing them for jobs that don’t exist and teaching them to disdain the work that’s actually out there for them in the world.
This unsound pedagogy squanders the human resources of PhDs: advanced knowledge, all-purpose creativity, extraordinary dedication, even genius. As a nation, we can’t afford this brain-drain. We need PhD graduates to meet our social challenges. Graduate school (and the rest of academia) too often oppose the public it serves, and which is served by it. Professors and students need to reach outward and embrace public scholarship.
How should any changes to the PhD incorporate more inclusive views on race, gender, and sexuality?
Graduate school is way too white and male. The numbers clearly say so, and so do the norms and standards of the academic workplace. This not a controversial assertion: there’s a broad consensus around it in academia.
The problem is not demand but supply. If there aren’t enough people from diverse backgrounds applying to graduate school, we need to look to the undergraduate pipeline, and earlier. It has often been said–by us, anyway–that no industry treats its main supplier with greater indifference than higher education treats the K-12 school system. We pay a high price for that, and we see it in our demographics.
To boost diversity, graduate school must do two things together: First, recruit. (Don’t wait for them to come to you—reach out instead.) Second, retain. (It’s not enough to get folks through the door. They need to feel welcome, and valued as something more than a statistic.)
Graduate faculty need to get off their (ahem) rear ends and work with teachers at all levels to excite young people about their fields. And we need to pay attention to what these young people want. Graduate programs need to model public scholarship to benefit local communities, for survey after survey tell us that social engagement helps to persuade students from underrepresented groups that graduate study is worthwhile.
Student-centered practices and a student-centered program culture benefit everyone, but they’re crucial for marginalized students. We offer current examples in The New PhD of how programs have successfully done these things.
Best-case scenario, what does this issue look like 20 years from now?
To begin with, a reconsidered, rejuvenated graduate school enterprise will produce happier graduates. We’ve underestimated the value of happiness for too long. When we teach students to want one kind of job that we can’t supply, we’re teaching them to be unhappy. A majority of PhDs have been working outside of academia for generations already. If we actually prepare them for that reality and honor their choices, we reinvent graduate school in a way that benefits students and harmonizes with greater social needs.
We foresee an academic experience that remains rich in scholarship but far less hermetic: it will be student-centered, career-diverse, and outward-facing. It will draw from and benefit our society with a greater representation of graduates of color and women. Time to degree will be reasonable, four or five years rather than twice that long. Dissertations and scholarship in general will break the single mold and take a number of creative forms. Graduates will seek a range of meaningful employment without a sense of failure if they don’t become professors. Employers will compete for their services, and the public will witness and appreciate their productive role across society.
What types of jobs should a PhD in the humanities prepare students for besides becoming a professor?
Let’s turn that question around—what type of job would a humanities PhD not be prepared for? Students in fields like history, literature and the arts, philosophy and religion have in common a creative and sophisticated ability to work with information: to create, gather, analyze, manipulate, and synthesize it—and perhaps most important, to teach it. The PhD offers the ultimate portable toolkit.
The usual tired answer to this question might list such job sites for humanities PhDs as publishing, museums, and libraries, or public relations, high school teaching, media and journalism. But the actual possibilities are more various, surprising, and just plain numerous. As the head of a major corporation told us, “I can’t train the narrow MBA how to think, write, research, and, most of all teach fellow employees even if she can already handle a specific task. But a PhD comes with all of these abilities. I can initiate her into that specific task in days—and then, watch out!”
But such an outcome depends on two factors: for students to understand their own abilities and the myriad ways those abilities can be employed, and for employers to recognize in a PhD the very same.
What part of this issue can be solved by the government, federal and state? Besides increasing government education funding, is there anything else that can be done?
The government can do plenty, but everything comes down to one crucial move: We need to reinvigorate the belief in higher education as a public good.
That’s to say the PhD can do plenty for our republic in turn—thus James Madison’s great vision of “Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other.” To the nation’s founders, education was the engine for democracy. “Liberty can never be safe,” said Jefferson, except in the hands of “people with a certain degree of instruction.”
Higher education in a democracy is far more than the individual purchase of valuable credentials. It’s a collective investment in our society—and on both levels, it pays off. It’s a public good that benefits everyone.
The general public doesn’t see it that way these days—but it wasn’t always so. The establishment of publicly-funded state universities in the 19th century carried forth the vision of the founders. And not so long ago, the Cold War, and the accompanying technological rivalry with the Soviet Union, led to an unprecedented collective commitment to higher education in the United States. Colleges and universities were vessels for national hope, pride, and belief in progress.
Federal and state funding—approved by an oft-divided government across party lines— allowed universities to grow into the research centers that we recognize today. At the same time, new government programs opened the doors of colleges and universities to less-wealthy populations who couldn’t afford them before. American higher education rose and democratized at the same time.
The consensus fractured during the 1960s. Support for higher education has since turned into a partisan political issue. Most people now see college and graduate school as a personal investment in their own individual future, not a shared social benefit.
Higher education can restore public belief in the value of its public mission, but we must enact that value and not just talk about it. The sciences, still well-funded by government agencies, offer a prime example via “tech transfer,” by which government-supported research at universities leads to innovations well beyond the academy. If universities are to regain public trust and support, we must extend the principle to the humanities and social sciences fields as well. Especially in light of the covid pandemic, this imperative has never mattered more than it does right now.
That means employing academic skills to meet social challenges, the more locally the better. When a professor gives a talk about her specialty at the local public library or explains complicated matters in a popular publication, it doesn’t make headlines—but it replaces caricature with character. It’s a step toward restoring trust. Academics call such social engagement “public scholarship,” and we need more of it.
The government can support public scholarship, and not just with money. Federal, state, and local agencies offer a rich assortment of internship possibilities and career options for students in PhD programs. John Adams writes, “There are two kinds of education. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.” The New PhD, with its emphasis on the many applications of expertise, unifies Adams’s two purposes.
