A new era for humanities and social science PhD programs?

This should be very old news by now to anyone remotely acquainted with academia, but since the 2008 recession, there have been very few jobs for PhD’s in the humanities and social science fields. In my academic field (Classics) it seems that some years, the announcements of department and program closures have outstripped the number of new jobs. And yet, many PhD programs have continued to accept as many students as before or have only slightly reduced the number of students they admit. There’s a practical reason involved here, which connects to how universities operate. For decades, some universities have been relying on graduate students as cheap labor to teach introductory survey courses or at least serve as teaching assistants or graders. Ironically, the realization that such labor is not so cheap after all is what is leading one major research university, Boston University, to suspend admission to its humanities and social science PhD programs for next year. Specifically, “two deans blamed a new grad workers’ union contract for the cutbacks to a dozen programs including English, history and sociology.”

Here is more from Inside Higher Education‘s coverage of this story:

The university didn’t announce this in a news release and has not fully explained the move. In an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed on condition of anonymity, the heads of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), in which all the affected programs are located, pointed to increased costs associated with the union contract that graduate student workers won after their historic, nearly seven-month strike ended in October.

According to an undated post on the university’s website, the programs not accepting Ph.D. students for next academic year are American and New England studies, anthropology, classical studies, English, history, history of art and architecture, linguistics, philosophy, political science, religion, Romance studies, and sociology.

The decision to suspend admissions in fields like English or philosophy or classics–fields where new tenure track jobs per year can be numbered on fingers of one hand, or maybe two hands in a good year–makes ethical sense. Many of us in these very fields have been talking for over a decade about the unethical nature of admitting students into programs that do not, in fact, train anyone for the jobs that the students who enter these programs hope to get. So, it would make sense for all but a few programs to suspend or drastically scale back admission into the PhD in fields that average fewer than ten new jobs per year, for which hundreds of new PhD’s compete.

Funnily enough, that’s not the conversation that BU had before making its decision.

What I find fascinating is that BU’s decision (at least according to the information IHE reports) has been made not with an eye towards the lack of employment prospects for PhD recipients, but rather entirely based on the financial considerations of what profit the graduate students bring to the university while they are enrolled. When higher enrollments meant financial sense for the university (since these students were teaching a lot of students, and saving the university money), it supported admitting more students into its PhD programs. Now that the graduate students have issued demands for much higher pay in order to be able to afford to live in the Boston area, admitting so many of them is no longer sustainable for BU.

The question the university will have to figure out now, I suppose, is how to staff next year the many lower-level courses that PhD students used to teach. Presumably the solution will be adjuncts–that other source of low-paid labor. Unethical as this model is, at least in the Boston area, expert adjunct labor is readily available.

But this story raises bigger questions about the future of PhD programs in these fields. On the one hand, America needs trained experts in some of these decidedly niche fields–say, military history (as historian Bret Devereaux has noted, “The History Crisis is a National Security Problem“). But without academic jobs to incentivize the training of future experts, and without a sustainable model for these PhD programs (as BU’s experience demonstrates), where does this leave us?

The future of American higher education in many fields appears bleak, and I could just stop there. But I would rather note something else. Perhaps it is indeed time to say goodbye to some of the very traditional and very secular humanities PhD programs that have generally become carbon copies of each other and do not offer anything distinctive. At the same time, we also need to consider a related and larger question: what makes something not just generally good (e.g., experts are useful to have around!), but a public good? And if we consider certain types of expertise a public good, how do we ensure that this public good still exists in twenty, fifty, or a hundred years hence?