A reader, Henry Lara (Edinburgh), has drawn my attention to a new interview up at Inside Higher Ed entitled, "Manifesto for the Humanities." The subject of the interview, Sidonie A. Smith (Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities at the University of Michigan), has some interesting things to say against a proposal that has recently been pushed on a number of philosophy blogs–namely, reducing the number of PhD programs and PhD candidates, in response to consistently horrible academic job-markets:
I refuse arguments calling for fewer doctoral programs for several reasons. The strength of doctoral education in the humanities in the United States is the diversity of schools offering doctoral training: public, private, religious, secular, urban, regional, gigantic, small. The strength is in the diversity of emphases, constellations of faculty and cross-disciplinary filiations. The more the diversity, from my point of view, the more energy and impetus for innovation, for risk taking, for experimentation, for recognizing and achieving excellence. And here’s a second reason, about another kind of diversity. It comes via Dolan Hubbard, who argues that “the quiet consensus to limit access to graduate programs is an ethnically and socially irresponsible position when viewed from the perspective of the underproduction of African-American Ph.D.s.” Humanities departments also underproduce doctorates coming from Hispanic communities, from indigenous communities, [from those] who are the first in their families to go to university.
My reasons are personal as well. I am the product of a second-tier, less-elite doctoral program at Case Western Reserve University. I was the beneficiary of the program’s modest size, its small doctoral cohort and its openness to women graduate students back in the late 1960s. I was the beneficiary of faculty who maintained high expectations of their female students at a time when larger flagship state universities and the elite privates tolerated a woman or two but failed to mentor them adequately or with grace and generosity. I knew I would never have the bona fides of my many colleagues with Ph.D.s from the Ivies. But I have always taken pride in my pedigree from Case. This is exactly the kind of doctoral program that could be seen as expendable when those trained at the elite privates and publics make the case for downsizing doctoral education in the United States.
Thoughts?
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