David Lee's Profile

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.