Professionalization in the academy | Harvard Magazine Nov-Dec 2009 - The Diigo Meta page

• 01 Dec 09
  

  David Lee

  academia menand professionalization phd

  • social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create
  • ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it
  • 25 more annotations...
  • • the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers
    • the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years
    • their justification: in order to serve the needs of others properly, professions must be accountable only to themselves
    • interdisciplinarity, practical training, and time to degree
    • The profession has just gotten used to a serious imbalance between supply and demand.
    • Students are told from the very start, almost from the minute they apply to graduate school, that they are effectively entering a lottery.
    • the conversion of the professoriate into a group of people who were more likely to identify with their disciplines than with their campuses
    • Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent.
    • ABDs—graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations. There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs
    • upward movement in only two major liberal-arts areas: psychology and the life sciences
    • BGN—business, government, and NGOs
    • the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life
    • graduate-school dropouts: Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, Richard Bernstein, David Lehman
    • The median total time it takes to achieve a degree in the humanities including stop-time is 11.3 years.
    • only about half of the people who enter doctoral programs in English finish them, and only about half of those who finish end up as tenured faculty, the majority of them at institutions that are not research universities. An estimate of the total elapsed time from college graduation to tenure would be somewhere between 15 and 20 years
    • Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious.
    • They like being in a university, and, since there is usually plenty of demand for their quite inexpensive teaching, universities like having them.
    • It takes three years to become a lawyer. It takes four years to become a doctor. But it takes from six to nine years, and sometimes longer, to be eligible to teach college students for a living.
    • students who spend eight or nine years in graduate school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available
    • If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship.
    • there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get
    • The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals.
    • Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep on its toes.
    • Professors tend increasingly to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected.
    • It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate.
• 22 Nov 09
  

  alisa perren

  academia education phd professionalization scholarship

• 14 Nov 09
  

  Nathan Rein

  !toread academe education humanities higher_education

• 13 Nov 09
  

  Earl W. Koteen

  phd professionalization credentialing examining education excellence in ministry

• 07 Nov 09
  

  Cochin Blogger

  academia ToAnand

• 06 Nov 09
  

  ChrisDickman

  Ph.D. Process is bad, out of touch with real-world needs.

  Harvard Magazine Menand State of the Academy

  • Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years.
  • Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years.
• 

  Dan Mroz

  education

• 03 Nov 09
  

  Bill Anderson

  Louis Menand outlines the changes afoot with regard to graduate education (and education in general?) and notes the danger of losing academia's contributions to social criticism and reflection.

  academia education professionalization trends

• 02 Nov 09
  

  Isk Aldur

  academia

• 

  Rafael Alvarado

  academia

• 31 Oct 09
  

  Katie Day

  Article by Louis Menand

  academia professions sociology education phd disciplines

  • It is easy to see how the modern academic discipline reproduces all the salient features of the professionalized occupation. It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields. The discipline relies on the principle of disinterestedness, according to which the production of new knowledge is regulated by measuring it against existing scholarship through a process of peer review, rather than by the extent to which it meets the needs of interests external to the field. The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor. The academic credential is non-transferable (as every Ph.D. looking for work outside the academy quickly learns). And disciplines encourage—in fact, they more or less require—a high degree of specialization. The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.

    
    

    Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers.

• 

  Mare BV

  sciencepolicy academic phd scienceorganization sts books menand

  • In this work, Menand examines general education, the state of the humanities, the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, and, in chapter four, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?” The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society. ~The Editors
• 

  Martin Nguyen
  • the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system.
• 30 Oct 09
  

  Michelle A. Hoyle

  In this work, Menand examines general education, the state of the humanities, the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, and, in chapter four, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?” The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society.

  academia article history education highereducation doctorates

• 

  Elizabeth Koh

  academia phd

• 29 Oct 09
  

  Gerhard Stoltz

  2009 education opportunity investment time credentials academia organization training research degree

• 27 Oct 09
  

  lfriedl

  academia

  • The argument that they need the training to be qualified to teach undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates. Undergraduate teaching is part of doctoral education; at many institutions, graduate students begin teaching classes the year they arrive.
  • But the main reason for academics to be concerned about the time it takes to get a degree has to do with the barrier this represents to admission to the profession. The obstacles to entering the academic profession are now so well known that the students who brave them are already self-sorted before they apply to graduate school. A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out. The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals.
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.

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