Many of us read the piece in The New York Times in August, rehearsing the woes which non-academic writers are encountering. As publishing conglomerates become more gigantic and smaller retail book sellers close their doors, "mid-list" writers who once could count on major publishing houses are finding fewer outlets for their work. The Times writer informed us that "to cope with a shrinking market for their work, mid-list authors are seeking refuge with . . . University Presses to publish manuscripts in return for advances that in some cases wouldn't buy a used car." Leaving aside the dubious notion of a link between the size of university press advances and used car prices, I was struck -- and not for the first time -- by how gloriously oblivious the Times can be to complex conditions at work in the academic sector: not even the faintest awareness here of the kinds of pressures being encountered by university presses, university libraries, and the scholarly community these exist primarily to serve.
I've been asked to identify the pressure points in a system which leads to the publication of the first scholarly monographs written by assistant professors in the Humanities and related social sciences, but the other challenges that members of this universe are experiencing are also worth at least a passing glance. As is well known, owing to the removal of the cap on mandatory retirement ages, and given other mounting pressures to contain and reduce costs in colleges and universities, emerging Ph.D.'s in the Humanities continue to face a depressed academic labor market. To be sure, no federal or other agency has systematically collected good data about the number of jobs secured in various fields by new Ph.D.'s year by year; the availability of such data, in my view, is a critical first step in enabling universities and policy makers to confront the issue of over-production of Ph.D.'s in an analytical, and not just anecdotal, way. Available statistics from the Modern Language Association and American Historical Association this past year indicate a somewhat more favorable ratio between job applicants and jobs available -- but 770 historians competing for 220 possible slots (many of these only temporary) is scarcely cause for rejoicing. Equally sobering are statistics just released by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation:[1] only just over two-thirds -- 69% -- of the Mellon Fellows who have earned Ph.D.'s in the Humanities -- an exclusive group of extremely able, rigorously selected, highly motivated, and well supported young scholars -- are currently employed in tenure-track academic positions. In the overall population of recent Ph.D.'s in the Humanities, many of those fortunate enough to secure teaching positions are finding only part-time employment, as "lecturers," often without benefits or the possibility of promotion. Others move through a succession of full-time, but one-year posts, forced to expend their psychic energies in annual job searches even as they invest their professional energies in preparing a new series of new courses at new institutions. That many young scholars nonetheless manage to mount and sustain research momentum under such conditions is remarkable.
Furthermore, the ways in which our universities structure and organize humanistic knowledge may have serious implications for the nature of the graduate training which recent Humanities Ph.D.'s have been receiving. Since that training is closely linked to the kinds of research in which young scholars engage and hope eventually to publish, it may be worth taking a moment to spell this out. The starting point is the often exciting new interdisciplinarity which has been propelling the Humanities in recent years -- Humanities institutes, interdisciplinary journals, programs in women's studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, film and video studies, international and area studies, regional studies. The faculty architects of this new interdisciplinarity, as Catherine Gallagher notes in a recent survey of developments in literary criticism,[2] have been doing their building outside or across departmental boundaries, not inside them. But the Ph.D. tends still to be awarded by Departments; they remain the basic university organizational unit. Thus, the most interesting intellectual adventures have been taking place outside departments, and perhaps not enough of them always got transported back inside them, especially inside English departments, and their graduate programs. To be sure, some of these new intellectual directions have become departmentalized, through the graduate courses and seminars which faculty choose to teach. Still, there is some justice in Gallagher's observation that, while we were busy building these interdepartmental programs, "we avoided translating our ideas into coherent graduate programs;" we avoided, I take her to mean, coming to agreement as Departments as to what graduate degree requirements ought to be, and took refuge instead in different curricular "options" and "tracks," which sometimes leave graduate students quite bewildered about what the faculty believe to be central to graduate study, and what more peripheral or at least less essential. As a result, Gallagher concludes, "Ph.D.'s trained in today's English departments have widely dissimilar skills and knowledge; sometimes they possess knowledge that members of their own faculty fail to recognize as such. Students find it increasingly difficult to describe with one set of terms both the value of what they do and the reason they need a Ph.D. in English to do it. The expansion of literary into cultural studies, for example, has had serious implications for the character and content of graduate training in English."[3] We might usefully ponder what all this might mean for the kinds of first scholarly monograph which Ph.D.'s in some fields are attempting to create, and for the kinds of difficulty that they, scholarly readers for presses, and editors confront in bringing such work to final, polished, and marketable form.
Given the highly specialized nature of the training that has dominated in our graduate schools for a generation or more, none of us ought to be the least surprised that first monographs, the first manifestations of that training, are highly specialized as well. Do such specialized scholarly monographs continue to have a purpose; do they fill important intellectual and pedagogical needs of students and scholars in the many fields and sub-fields of the humanities? The stunning growth in numbers of new books published by university presses -- more than 8,000 in 1995, nearly twice as many as in 1983 -- is one indication of the sector's vitality.[4] But here again, more evidence is required. We have no reliable data on the number of annual submissions to university presses, or of submissions to multiple publishers, or the acceptance rates of presses, in the aggregate, or by field. By what percentage have press lists devoted to serious scholarship declined over the past decade? In the absence of such data, we are reduced to asking: what improvements might we make -- and by "we" I mean not just faculty members but university administrators and outside funders -- in the system so as to assist junior faculty members in the process of bringing out a first substantial and sustained piece of scholarly writing? Where along the chronological continuum of scholarly apprenticeship, which begins at entry to graduate school and ends with the earning of tenure, does it make most sense to intervene? James Shapiro would focus on the latest stage; he advocates not requiring a published manuscript when the candidate's tenure case is being considered, urging instead that faculty tenure committees judge unpublished manuscripts "solely on their intellectual promise" and steer "errant but promising unpublished manuscript in the right direction."[5] I wish I shared his confidence that such an approach would indeed encourage young scholars to undertake more ambitious projects that would lead, ultimately, to wider readership. But given the highly specialized state of humanistic inquiry at the doctoral level, the kinds of evaluative energies which many faculty currently bring to the criticism of incomplete manuscripts, and the likelihood that many such promising but unfinished manuscripts will remain just that -- unfinished -- is his solution realistic?
Equally unacceptable, in my view, is what we might call the "front end" solution, prolonging graduate students' years of dissertation research and article-writing in the hopes of making the authors more competitive in job searches. Growing numbers of students, departments, administrators, and policy makers now question this alternative, for it lengthens the time-to-degree beyond all reasonable limits. Ten years ago a study of time-to-degree in the Humanities conducted jointly by the Graduate Schools at Michigan and Berkeley found that the mean time-to-degree across fields in those universities exceeded ten years (figures for comparative literature, philosophy, and the history of art were even higher). The authoritative study here appeared in 1992: Bowen and Rudenstine's In Pursuit of the Ph.D. presented and analyzed unprecedented quantities of good data in compelling ways. At the same time, the Mellon Foundation began its series of grants to ten research universities -- grants which cumulatively will total nearly $76 million over ten years, and that constitute the largest single investment which the Foundation has ever made. The overall objective is to change departmental cultures and to structure graduate student financial support so as to improve Ph.D. completion rates and bring down time-to-degree in Humanities fields to no more than 6-7 years.
Since this Mellon experiment is still in process, it remains to be seen whether the grants will achieve the desired results at the ten selected universities and, even if they succeed there, how far those results will spread nationally, across all universities which award Ph.D.'s in the Humanities. The Mellon initiative has run up against formidable structural impediments: the depressed academic labor market and institutional "downsizing" to which I've already referred. Still, the results to this point are highly encouraging, and the spirit of the objective has been rightly embraced by most institutions in the AAU, especially the conviction that too many years in graduate school, characterized by too much teaching, too little compensation, and too long a dependence on the sometimes haphazard guidance of dissertation supervisors and doctoral committees, runs counter to the best interests of students, faculty, universities, and ultimately society at large.
I believe that a better way forward -- at least over the near term -- is to target the middle of the chronological continuum. Nurturers of young humanists could do more to institutionalize a modified form of what has become the coin-of-the-realm among our colleagues in the natural sciences -- the post-doctoral appointment.
The one, two, and (occasionally) even three year post-doctoral appointment in the Humanities and related social sciences, held before the tenure clock begins to run, and accompanied by limited teaching responsibilities -- one or no more than two courses per year -- is scarcely a novel idea. Columbia's Society of Fellows has a total of seven such scholars in residence in any given year. At the Institute for Advanced Study a small number of advanced post-doctoral Fellows are preparing second books for publication. The University of Michigan's Society of Fellows annually selects four "post-docs" for three year terms; Fellows participate in interdisciplinary colloquia at the Society, but also contribute the equivalent of one full year of teaching in a particular Department over the course of their three year terms. The Mellon Foundation -- how often this Foundation's name recurs in any discussion of steady, substantial and imaginative commitment to funding in the Humanities -- has by now placed 50 post-doctoral fellows at liberal arts colleges and universities, 90 more at major national research libraries.
What factors are most likely to bring the kind of "value added" to the post-doctoral experience that will result in superior, synthetic, scholarly writing? The question is important: after years in graduate school, emerging Ph.D.s have every right to believe themselves not just marinated in their disciplines but close to fully cooked, ready for full-time professional careers and working on their first major scholarly publications. It may be time to survey the existing post-doctoral universe with that question in mind. My own limited probes suggest that it is not just the free time (little teaching and increased research time) which matters most, but significant academic acculturation (that raises the question as to whether research libraries are really the optimal locations for newly minted Ph.D.'s). I suggest that three conditions need to be met: first, post-docs need to participate in a stimulating, collaborative, intellectual enterprise of some kind, in or near their own disciplinary territory; second, they need close association with faculty conveners and catalysts who are themselves personally invested in a collaborative intellectual project, and who take a broad and synthetic view of their subjects; third, the most successful of these faculty conveners must possess a special gift: the ability to lift the quality of work of all participants in the enterprise, helping participants to conceptualize ideas more sharply, contextualize them more effectively, and to articulate them more clearly.
I am thinking of such scholars as Peter Brown at Princeton, and the highly successful Sunday afternoon explorations of the Seminar in Late Antiquity which have brought an entirely new sub-field of classical studies to life; or Rebecca Scott at the University of Michigan and Tom Holt (now of the University of Chicago) who are orchestrating the work of a group of faculty, graduate students and post-docs investigating the comparative study of slave emancipation in Brazil, Latin America and the United States; or Tony Judt at NYU, who had 104 applications for one post-doctoral position last year at the Remarque Institute, where he directs an interdisciplinary consortium studying developments and transformations in contemporary Europe; or, finally, Linda Schele, art historian of Maya culture at the University of Texas at Austin, who has recently characterized her investigative approach as follows: "I cannot describe to you the sheer joy of working with colleagues who follow different approaches, while still sharing mind -- disagreeing about many things, combining ideas and data, debating, playing together until a new kind of understanding emerges from the collaboration that would never come from any of us alone."[6]
In short, I suspect that it is when faculty catalysts possess such exceptional qualities that the experiences of the post-docs engaged in these collaborative projects are most likely to be truly productive. If I am right, it behooves all of us to think carefully about the kinds of incentives that need to be built into university support systems to improve the chances that more of our first-rate senior faculty will be eager to help post-docs to realize their potential as scholarly writers. Note, too, that though the post-doc model may be borrowed from the sciences, the character of humanistic collaboration has distinctive features of its own. In high-energy physics -- to take a clear example -- it becomes increasingly difficult to identify, let alone to evaluate, the role played by individual post-docs in complex experiments. In contrast, robust individuality and a distinctly personal voice are a part of the essence of humanistic scholarship -- of even the most collaborative scholarship. This and other differences between investigative cultures need to be borne in mind. Nonetheless, if our objectives are to strengthen humanistic learning and writing in the pre-tenure years, and at the same time to facilitate entry into academic careers of more of our most able emerging Ph.D.'s, more post-doctoral opportunities of the kind sketched out above might prove attractive, and bring multiple benefits.
10/15/97
[1]Annual Report, Mellon Fellowships in the Humanistic Studies, 1996-1997, p.4.
[2]Catherine Gallagher, "The History of Literary Criticism," in American Academic Culture in Transformation, Daedalus, Winter, 1977, p. 152.
[3]Gallagher, op. cit., p. 152.
[4]For these and other figures, see Ken Wissoker, "Scholarly Monographs are Flourishing, not Dying," The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 1997, B4.
[5]James Shapiro, "Saving Tenure Books from a Painful Demise," The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 1, 1996, B6.
[6]Linda Schele, "Reflections from the Forest: 1995 Convocation Address," CAA News, March/April 1995, p. 10.