An Op-Ed by Ross Douthat. It was surprising to see this in the Times.
Why are you surprised? Ross Douthat is a regular contributor. I like some things he says and disagree vehemently with others. It helps keep my mind sharp.
I read his piece in today’s print edition and agreed with it. Many universities today have lost any moral or philosophical base for their mission. Administrations talk a liberal talk because that keeps them in their offices, but the dollar trumps everything. Beyond Douthat’s examples, consider how most research universities staff increasing numbers of adjunct instructors who are paid starvation wages with no benefits, as some heartless captains of industry would have done to their workers 100 years ago.
Thanks for sharing.
“And within this system, the contemporary college student is actually a strange blend of the pampered and the exploited.”
IMO a brilliant observation which explains what we are seeing on some campuses today as well as indicts often ineffective administrations.
I think I agree with @Pizzagirl about 90% of the time, maybe more. But I am having trouble understanding how this particular screed from Ross Douthat is going to help keep anyone’s mind sharp.
There’s elegance and promise in his assertion that students are both pampered and exploited, and of course it’s easy to understand what he is talking about when he starts with the football recruit. But then his argument – if one can even call it that – not so much goes off the rails as separates itself from any concept that could be represented by metaphorical “rails”.
Huh? The writing here is grammatical – barely – but the content is straight out of Jabberwocky. We’ll give him a pass on the common, if uneducated and highly misleading, mistake of substituting “liberal arts” for “humanities”. I’ll also pass on wondering just what percentage of liberal arts students have “absurd” debts. But what, exactly, or even inexactly, does Douthat think is wrong with liberal arts education? That is doesn’t try to pass along “the best”? Or that it doesn’t try to pass along what Matthew Arnold thought was the best? Those are two very different complaints, one a heck of a lot more credible than the other.
Instead of resolving the ambiguity, or explaining why it might be worthwhile to take on absurd debts to study the Matthew Arnold curriculum, he doubles down on more ambiguity. Is “pursuing worldly success” what’s bad? Or is “pursuing worldly success” OK as long as you do it right, without “mental breakdows”? And do we really believe that liberal arts education is manufacturing mental breakdowns? Excuse me, not manufacturing them, “inducing” them? Really? How? How often? This is a common problem in the real world of today, humanities-induced mental breakdowns of junior investment bankers? That sounds like more of a 19th-century fictional-world problem to me, something that Matthew Arnold would have recognized.
The rest of Douthat’s examples repeat the pattern so precisely – ambiguous rhetoric without any comprehensible connection to something that may actually happen in the world – that I have to conclude that he meant to do that, although why is beyond me. What the heck is a “carefree Rumspringa justified on high feminist principles”? Is he making a point, or just stringing phrases together than look nice next to one another, like beads on a necklace?
Here is another article that follows along with Douthar’s Op Ed. Entitled “So You’re Getting a Ph.D. Welcome to the worst job market in America” :
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/so-you-re-getting-phd_1059359.html?page=1#
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All of this means that every fall there is a desperate scramble among the young and the highly credentialed to garner one of the ever-diminishing entry-level tenure-track slots that still exist. A May 2014 report from the Modern Language Association (MLA), representing scholars in English and foreign languages, asserted that every year about 1,000 brand-new Ph.D.s in those fields emerge to chase about 600 new job openings. The report didn’t consider that those newbies are also competing with the 400 leftovers who had failed to obtain jobs during the previous year—plus all the leftovers still in the job market from the years before that. The humanities, where undergraduate majors are in steep decline, are famously overloaded with unusable doctorates, but as John Cooley learned to his chagrin, new STEM Ph.D.s fare only slightly better. Atlantic senior associate editor Jordan Weissman observed in 2013 “a pattern reaching back to 2001” of “fewer jobs, more unemployment, and more post-doc work.” Postdocs in the sciences essentially consist of low-paid lab scut work. “Once it was just a one or two-year rite of passage where budding scientists honed their research skills,” Weissman wrote. “Now, it can stretch on for half a decade.”
As Kelsky—but almost nobody who is actually still inside academia—points out, there’s an elephant in this clamorous room of underemployed scholars. It’s the fact that from a supply-and-demand standpoint, graduate schools are simply turning out way too many Ph.D.s for the academic market to bear, depressing their wages accordingly. It’s a similar crisis to the glut of new attorneys that law schools were churning out in recent years even as law jobs paying enough to cover sky-high law school debt were disappearing. The law market seems to have corrected itself, with law school enrollments steadily plunging since 2011. That collapse hasn’t happened with graduate schools. Indeed, throughout the 2000s and beyond, new enrollments in master’s and doctoral programs of every kind continued to climb, even in the arts and humanities, where the job pickings are slimmest. In the fall of 2012, for example, new arts-and-humanities enrollments shot up by nearly 8 percent, according to a report from the Council of Graduate Schools. “It’s an ethical problem,” Kelsky said. “The Ph.D. degree in the majority of cases leads directly to unemployment. Five- or six-figure debt and unemployment.”
A professor I contacted sent me this email: “It’s a hypocritical system in which we talk about how much we ‘love’ students while they are undergraduates, only to exploit them as graduate students and then adjuncts.” The professor refused to let me use the email for attribution: “One can’t even talk about these questions from inside the system without risking serious pushback.”
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Why share this article on this thread? It has nothing to do with OP. The difficulties in the PhD market in America have been discussed often on CC in many threads.
Douthat (such a complainer) and the Weekly Standard. Hmm It’s time we got sharper, quit always blaming something, took more personal responsibility and expected more others to, also. Every generation points fingers.
"“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
Socrates
Not every PhD is very good at what they do. If every PhD got a tenure track faculty position, they would be more poorly performing professors. A top university needs to screen through a lot of PhDs to identify a few that are worth further consideration.
Some of that screening could be happening at PhD program admission, rather than after the degree is earned.
One problem with that is if PhD programs start doing that across the board, most academic departments, especially those not ranked within the top 50 would need to severely curtail or even shut down their PhD programs altogether.
Something most are loath to do as having a PhD program is not only perceived to lend more prestige to a given department and university, but also provide a steady source of “cheap labor” in the form of grad students serving as TAs, RAs, and quasi-adjuncts*.
- Advanced PhD students who are full-instructors of college courses in their own right....sometimes with their own TAs as was the case in some friends' courses at a few large private research I universities in the Boston area.
Sorghum, while I wouldn’t claim that everyone who manages to earn a PhD is a top-flight scholar, nearly everyone familiar with the academic job market would tell you that even highly qualified people are getting left out in the cold. There simply aren’t enough jobs.
I could say more, but since that isn’t really what this thread is about, I’ll shut up unless someone starts a new thread on the issue.
Sounds like Ross Douthat is uttering much of the same critical spiel tossed around by the then prevailing establishment and sympathizers among those in older and boomer generations against the boomers involved in protests for Civil Rights, against the Vietnam War, and for greater freedoms to express themselves freely in various forms on campus*.
One thing I do agree with him is his approximate timeline where he cited the radicalism of the '60s changing over into a greater careerism/political apathy of many undergrads at mainstream colleges during the '90s era. This seemed to have extended even to some colleges with a long tradition of radical left political activism such as Berkeley judging by how one transfer student arrived at my LAC(Oberlin) in the mid-'90s because he complained “Berkeley has become too damned conservative and students too pre-professional” to be a good fit for him.
However, I’m not sure it’s necessarily the fact many such undergrads were vaguely liberal so much as apolitical or inclined towards being right-leaning as most of our childhood years did take place during the Republican era of Reagan and the first Bush administrations.
One common complaint among many classmates’ parents and older HS/college alums…especially those who were hippies or otherwise active/sympathetic to the '60s protests/counter cultural movements was that our generation(Gen X) tended to be much more conservative and/or politically apathetic than they were in their day.
And there were plenty of real-life Alex P. Keatons** during my HS years rebelling against their progressive/radical lefty boomer parents who enjoyed riling up their parents and progressive/radically lefty HS classmates. And they along with the rest of us who were children of the Reagan and Bush I administrations ended up being undergrads throughout the '90s and extreme early '00s which accounted for the politically apathetic or inclination to lean more right politically than those before or after us.
- I.e. Eradication of rigid classroom dress codes in most US colleges as opposed to the mid-'60s and before when undergrads can and were ejected from class for not wearing a formal suit & tie or female equivalent or for even merely forgetting to wear a tie as a HS classmate's father experienced as an NYU freshman in 1964.
** Alex P Keaton(played by Michael J. Fox) was the out and proud young Conservative son of two boomer parents who were active hippies during the '60s era on the '80s era Sitcom, Family Ties.
However, isn’t it more of a numbers game than the quality of PhD students/graduates?
A professor at a research university supervises a few dozen students to PhD completion over his/her career, far more than needed to replace him/her when s/he retires. Obviously, some people with PhDs do go to research/academic jobs other than research universities (e.g. a few go to LACs, more go to non-research universities or community colleges, and some in some fields go into industry or other non-university research). But that still leaves many more PhD graduates than there are research/academic jobs for them, except in a few fields where industry hires the “excess”.