Passage 2

Everyoneknows that English departments are in trouble, but you can't appreciate just howmuch trouble until you read the new report from the Modern LanguageAssociation. The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in declinesince 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 yourprogram, you' re unlikely to find a tenure-track job.

The core ofthe problem is, of couse, the job market. The M.L.A. report estimates that onlysixty percent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure track jobs aftergraduation. If anything, that's wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got tothat 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). Butthat leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who arestill 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 suggestsThat's why the mood is so dire---why even professors are sarting to ask,in the committee's words, "Why maintain doctoral study in the modernlanguages and literatures- or the rest of the humanities---at all?"

Thosetrends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with theexpansionand transformation of American education afer the Second Word War.Esentially, colleges grew less elite and more vocational. Before the war,relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the G.LBill and, later, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly. When the boomended, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. Bythe mid-seventies. schools were creating new programs designed to atract a broaderrange of students---for instance, women and minorities.

Thosereforms worked: as Nate Silver reported in TheTimes last summer, about twice as many people attend college per capita nowas 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 traditionalliberal arts. Now, to attract middle-class students, colleges had to offer morecareer-focused majors, in fields like business, communications, and healthcare. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting awayfrom the center of the university. Today, they are often regarded as a kind ofinstiutional luxury, paid for by dynamic, cheap, and growing programs in, say,adult-education.These large demographic facts are contributing to today'sjob-market crisis: they're why, while education as a whole is growing. the humanitiesaren't.

Given allthis,what can an English department do? The M.L.A. report contains a number ofsuggestions. Pride of place is given to the idea that grad school should be shorter:

"Departmentsshould design programs that can be completed in five years." That will probablyrequire changing the dissertation from a draft of an academic book intosomething shorter and simpler. At the same time, graduate students areencouraged to "broaden“ themselves: to“engage more deeply with technology“; to pursue unusual and imaginative dissertation projects; to workin more than one discipline; to acquire teaching skills aimed at online andcommunity-college students; and to take workshops on subjects, such as project managementand grant writing, which might be of value outside of academia. Graduate programs,the committee suggests, should accept the fact that many of their students willhave non-tenured, or even non-academic, careers. They should keep track of whathappens to their graduates, so that students who decide to leave academia havea non-academic alumni network to draw upon.