The radical new humanities PhD

The warning last year from Russell Berman, who at the time was president of the Modern Language Association, was apocalyptic: If doctoral programs in the humanities do not reduce the time taken to graduate, they will become unaffordable and face extinction.

Now, Berman has taken his ideas home. At Stanford University, where he is a professor of comparative literature and directs the German studies program, he and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford -- a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy. The professors at Stanford aren't just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years -- roughly half the current time for many humanities students....

Jennifer Summit, a professor of English at Stanford who also worked on the document with Berman, said graduate programs have been reluctant to try out new ideas because no one wants to take risks. And that’s mainly because the impact on graduate students is unknown. “It has to be part of an effort not isolated to Stanford; we have to have serious conversations across the spectrum,” she said.

These discussions tend to spike whenever the job market is bad, said Robert Townsend, deputy director of the American Historical Association. He agreed with the general ideas outlined in the Stanford document, with the exception of the proposal to reduce time to degree. “That seems to me to run contrary to the notion of creating a more open and diverse set of paths for doctoral students. I also have the sense that expectations for an acceptable dissertation generally require about four years to properly ferment and develop – at least in history,” he said.