Did Conservatives Kill the Liberal Arts?

In a recent Salon article, Katie Billotte, a classics scholar based in Berlin, answers the rhetorical question of my title with an emphatic “yes!” “The conservative movement killed the liberal arts,” she writes, “Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch, William F. Buckley and their latter-day heirs.” How? “They have done so through a combination of decreasing access to education and demonizing academic culture and academics. Make no mistake about it: The death of the humanities is an ideologically motivated murder, more like a massacre.”

There are elements of truth in Billotte’s argument. For example, higher education is more expensive, and the liberal arts are underfunded, in part because of an environment of austerity that conservatives have done much to foster. But the good parts of Billotte’s article are lost in a haze of reductionism.

1) Conservatives, or at least Republicans, have not acted alone in implementing economic policies that have made higher education more expensive. Since Clinton, Democrats (albeit, not the same thing as liberals) have been the party of austerity.Austerity limits public subsidies to higher education, one of the main reasons the cost of tuition has risen exponentially. As the cost of college increases, more and more students who do not hail from economically privileged backgrounds opt for vocational or trade majors that they think are more likely to provide them with a job after graduation. It’s not for nothing that “business” (the antithesis of the liberal arts) has been the fastest growing degree since the 1970s and is currently the most popular major in American universities.

2) The cost of education is also rising because of decisions being made by university administrators who might or might not be conservative (chances are the majority of them vote Democratic, for what that’s worth). As Marc Bousquet, among others, has shown, universities operate by the logic of capital. They’re every bit as interested in capital accumulation as are corporations, even though shareholders don’t reap the profits from university accumulation, as with corporations. Capital accumulation in the university works as such: presidents and assorted higher ups make obscene salaries; high-profile football and basketball coaches make even more, and are usually a state’s top paid employee, as the university operates as a sports spectacle; the president uses capital for power and prestige, by funding pet projects; and perhaps most nefariously, capital accumulation in the university has allowed for the growth of a large administrative class. University administration is a career path of its own now. All of this is to say that operating by the logic of capital is bad news for the liberal arts (and also bad news, more central to Bousquet’s point, for the army of adjuncts who are forced to work for little pay and benefits and no job security). I’m not exactly sure how the “conservative movement” is specifically to blame for these developments. Sure, conservatives have a hand in it, but, again, they did not act alone. If the liberal arts were massacred we can’t single out conservatives as the culprits.

3) My last point goes directly to the heart of my research on the culture wars. Has the conservative demonization of professors, which Billotte ritualistically dates to Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, created a context for the death of the liberal arts? It is tough to answer this question one way or the other in empirical fashion. There is little doubt that conservative critics of the academy in the late 1980s and early 1990s succeeded in reorienting many people’s opinions regarding the nation’s institutions of higher learning, reconceptualized as a leftist redoubt, where standards were destroyed and the best of Western Civilization had been replaced by a “politically correct” mish-mash of multicultural nonsense. But to what degree did this create a context for the death of the liberal arts?

In the academic culture wars of the 80s and 90s, the debate often focused on the humanities, specifically the teaching of literature and history. Both sides tended to argue that the humanities were important, though the reasons given for their importance were dramatically at odds. Left-leaning academics argued that learning how to interpret texts would make people better able to think critically about the world around them and to make better political choices. Conservatives argued that the humanities—in Matthew Arnold’s words, “the best which has been thought and said”—were the repository of the values that made America a free nation and thus crucial for young Americans to study. Both sides blamed the other for the diminishing prominence of the humanities. Conservatives like William Bennett, who kick-started the humanities wars with his 1984 report as chairman of the NEH, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, contended that students were turned off by the humanities by professors who “present their subjects in a tendentious, ideological manner.” Left-leaning academics, on the other hand, made the same move that Billotte makes in her Salon piece: they blamed conservatives for poisoning the wells, often, they argued, done in bad faith.

The question to you, dear reader, is this: to what extent do you think conservative culture warriors are to blame for the sad state of the liberal arts? I tend to think that my first two points are much more determinative, but I am genuinely curious about what you think.

The Academy in Peril

As readers of this blog may be aware, I was in Dallas on Saturday where I delivered the keynote address at the 4th annual RAW symposium at the University of Texas at Dallas. Thanks, again to USIH's own L.D. Burnett for inviting to speak on the Future of the Humanities.

Rather than reproduce my entire talk,* I wanted to briefly summarize my main arguments and then re-answer a question from the q&a period, having come to regret the answer I gave at the time (ain't blogging grand!).

I began the talk by suggesting all the hopeful things going on in the humanities these days...and I really think there are many. We're experiencing an explosion of interesting humanistic work beyond the academy. And academic humanities departments are operating in relative internal peace compared to the often nasty divisions found within them well into the 1990s.

But the second half of my talk, sub-titled "The Academy in Peril," focused on what I feel is the biggest challenge facing the humanities today: the threat posed to higher education by both its enemies and many of its supposed friends, who have all embraced a narrow, economist understanding of higher education that sees tenured and tenure-track (TT) faculty as an unconscionable fixed cost that interferes with rationalizing the operation of the university.**

We are already seeing the effects of decades of forced casualization of the academic labor force. Today, two-thirds of the 1.5 million college and university faculty are in non-tenure track (NTT) jobs.  Most of these faculty don't have PhDs, though many of them are pursuing the degree.  Marc Bousquet, one of the most trenchant observers of the current state of the academic labor system, summarizes the situation grimly, but not entirely inaccurately, as one in which PhD recipients are the system's waste products.  Far from preparing them for an academic career, graduate school is, for many PhD candidates, the academic career itself, as they become markedly less employable after they receive their PhDs. But while it makes perfect sense from an administrative perspective focused on the bottom line to replace newly expensive (though pedagogically experienced) recently minted PhDs with cheap (though totally inexperienced) entering graduate students, neither teaching nor scholarship is served by such a management technique.

Unfortunately, rather than thinking comprehensively about this whole labor system, faculty, especially TT faculty, tend to think in terms of a semi-mythical job market, which involves the competition among PhDs for the shrinking number of TT positions.

I concluded my talk not with a solution to these problems (I'm not sure what that would be), but rather with three things we should all do in order to work toward a solution:

1) Analyze.  We need to have a better understanding of the overall labor system of academia.  TT faculty, in particular, need to gain a better understanding of the experiences, needs, and hopes of NTT faculty.  Before we can devise solutions, we need to understand the problem.

2) Organize. Any solution will involve organizing.  Though I'm less convinced than Bousquet that doing so is the solution, unionization is a critical first step...where possible. Unfortunately, many states, including my own, ban faculty unions at public institutions. And the most powerful form of unionization--one that would link TT and NTT faculty in a single bargaining unit--is being bitterly contested even in places in which faculty unionization is well established.***  But even if you can't join a union, you can--and should--join AAUP. And NTT faculty should also join the New Faculty Majority.****  Finally, it is appalling that many faculty still oppose graduate student unionization efforts.

3) Advocate.  For the humanities, on and off campus. And for a new vision of higher education that puts the focus back on education and scholarship broadly understood.

So that's more or less what I had to say.

Let me add here that these things are especially important right now because a lot of people on and off our nation's campuses want to make the lives of faculty--and with them the quality of education and scholarship that goes on in our colleges and universities--immeasurably worse.

If you're a tenured or TT faculty member (or just hope to be one some day), now's a good time to take a look at how the NTT faculty are treated on your campus. Include graduate instructors in your field of vision.  What you'll see won't be pretty. And yet, what you'll see is what your administrators and educational reformers--Democratic and Republican--want your job to look like in the future.*****

The latest example of this sort of thing appeared in the Washington Post on March 23. Opining that faculty don't work hard enough, educational consultant and former New School Chancellor David C. Levy argues that all college and university faculty ought to be teaching 6:6 or 7:7 loads.******

All of which brings me to the audience question from Saturday that I wish to re-answer.

The q&a opened with a faculty member (I think), asking me what my work on Leo Strauss (which L.D. had referenced in her introduction of me) had to do with my "activism" (this word is usually meant as a pejorative in such a context).

My answer was simple: "Nothing," I said.

What I meant by that was that my work on Strauss and the Straussians really isn't informed at all by the sort of things I was discussing in this talk.  I understand--and appreciate--that many humanists understand their activism and scholarship as a kind of seamless web, that their scholarly work is, in a fundamental sense, engagé.  But that ain't me.  I'm kinda old-fashioned that way.

But I think I misunderstood the spirit of the question. Or at least, my very pithy answer didn't cover all it's potential meanings.

Almost immediately after the q&a ended, however, I began to wonder whether this question may have actually been intended as way of asking "Shouldn't you be doing your work instead of this sort of thing?"*******

At any rate, there is, in fact, a very direct relationship between my scholarly work and my "activism": if my conditions of employment significantly deteriorate, I will not be able to do my work on Leo Strauss and the Straussians or much of anything beyond teaching (badly due to the increased load).  Which is, I suppose, also why I object a little to the word "activism" here.  I'm not, after all, choosing to be involved in a political struggle. I'm just thinking about and trying to improve, or at least preserve, my own labor conditions.  And suggesting that if others in a similar position don't do so as well, we will all likely pay a very heavy price for our failure.

_____________________
* I gave the talk off of an extended outline, so reproducing it would either involve reprinting a series of notes to myself or attempting to reproduce the thing ex post facto.

** I've blogged at greater length about these issues on USIH before here, here, and here.

*** Last week, an Illinois State Court prevented such a combined union from gaining recognition at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which is happy to bargain with split unions.

**** Seriously. If you're a faculty member--and that includes grad students who teach--and aren't a part of those organizations, follow those links now!

*****Although my talk at UTD was generally well-received by its majority grad student audience, I heard through the grapevine that some senior faculty felt that I had come across as young and naive.  Though I'll admit that I've reached the age at which being called "young and naive," like being carded, has become more compliment than insult, I really do think that, with the possible exception of those of us lucky enough to be tenured at the best-funded and least sectarian private institutions in this country, all of our jobs are--or will shortly be--under direct, sustained attack.  The naive position at this point is to conclude that, because you have tenure, the bell does not toll for you.

****** Levy's argument is pretty self-refuting. But if you crave refutations, you can visit Paul Krugman at the Grey Lady (for a short one) or Robert Farley at LGM (for a longer version).

******* Though in all fairness to my interlocutor, my own capacity for guilt and self-punishment enables me to translate, say, a desire to grab a second cup of coffee into the question "shouldn't you be doing your work instead of this sort of thing?"

Occupy Academia (and More Mundane Concerns)

The growing Occupy Wall Street movement heartens me. I’m not quite as optimistic as some about its likely impact, and am thus probably aligned with Zizek’s pessimism: “The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year drinking beer and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here.” Nonetheless, I’m heartened to see people taking to the streets in large numbers, finally, over the obvious injustices endemic to our plutocracy.

Ideally, the Occupy Wall Street movement would simultaneously expand into an Occupy Academia movement. This makes sense on a number of levels. Rule by Wall Street has ravaged the public sector, including higher education. Universities operate more like corporations, as made crystal clear by Marc Bousquet in his must-read, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. And, finally, a good chunk of the OWS protestors are graduate students and tenuously employed academics whose very existence is evidence of the tight causal connections between Wall Street misrule and an insecure academic labor market.

Thinking in bold political fashion about how to transform academia is much more interesting to me than discussing the depressing details of the so-called academic labor market and other mundane professional concerns. I hope I am not alone in thinking that this blog, our conference, and S-USIH did not come into being in order to make U.S. intellectual history more professional. I despise the hyper-professional turn academia seems to have taken as a symptom of a larger crisis. Rather, we sought to create space for discussion of U.S. intellectual history, from an academic perspective, to be sure, but not solely on the hyper-professional terms of academia.

And yet, the sad state of the job market is something that smart and well-meaning people seeking gainful academic employment must pay attention to, on its own awful terms no less. Thus, it is also something that an academic society like ours must turn its attention to. In short, my ideas on how we need to “occupy academia” is my roundabout way of qualifying, rationalizing, and apologizing for the need to discuss what might seem like more mundane concerns, although they are anything but mundane to those seeking jobs.

In this light, I pose this question to those of you on the market: How is it this year? Any better or worse than the past few, which have been described as the worst since the early 1970s, if not worse than that? My cursory examination of the listings at H-Net and AHA lead me to think it’s fairly sparse in most areas. I only count two jobs specifically directed at U.S. intellectual historians, one for an intellectual/cultural historian, and one for an intellectual/religious historian. So how else do you all sell yourselves? For now, cultural and social history, focused on gender, race, and ethnicity, and sometimes religion, seem paramount in the discipline, as they have for decades. I assume those of you who consider yourselves intellectual historians also, then, consider yourselves cultural historians of a sort, for reasons necessarily professional? (Not to discount good epistemological reasons!)

How do we create what Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital” for our sub-discipline of U.S. intellectual history? Perhaps S-USIH might act as a beachhead in this endeavor. At our second conference, Thomas Bender speculated that intellectual history might be the wave of the future, based on the enthusiasm for it shown by an increasing number of grad students and junior scholars, on display at our conference, among other places. If so, we might expect intellectual history positions to be explicitly listed with more frequency at some point in the not-too-distant future. If so, how much lag time should we expect? I offer up this post as a discussion board for these issues.

Now, back to fighting the plutocracy!

Paging Marc Bousquet

Columbia University English professor Nicholas Dames has an interesting essay in the latest issue of the journal n+1 reviewing three books responding in one way or another to the latest "crisis in the humanities."  The essay shares some common ground with Peter Brooks's recent New York Review of Books essay on a similar set of books about the current "crisis in the university"; though the only  common text between the two is Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit (which both like very much).  Having discussed the Brooks piece at some length on this blog a couple weeks ago,  I figured I'd devote this post to a quick comment on the Dames essay, before descending back into the Cave of Late Semester Grading and Service.

You may recall that I found Brooks's essay generally convincing, but that I felt that my positive response to it may have reflected a kind of complacency about (or at least acceptance of) the institutional status quo that both Brooks and I would probably do well to more emphatically resist.  Dames's essay is much more interesting than Brooks's, but I find myself less satisfied by it in many ways.  Before diving into my central complaint about it, let me encourage everyone to go over and read it for yourselves. It's really interesting and thoughtful, despite its limitations. And since I'm going to be focusing on what I see as its limitations, I hope that everyone reading this post will bother to discover for themselves what's interesting and worthwhile about Dames's piece.

The core of Brooks's NYRB essay concerned two books--Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It and Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities--that, each in its own way, blames the universities and especially the faculty for its perceived crises and proposes fairly draconian reforms to correct things. These books are both rather obviously wrong in their portrayals of the university today.  As I suggested in my earlier post, criticizing them is shooting fish in a barrel, and Brooks is a pretty good shot.

Dames has a more complicated task, as he is reviewing three much more nuanced books with which he is in generally greater sympathy. In addition to the Nussbaum volume, he covers Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University and Terry Castle's autobiographical essay collection The Professor and Other Writings. 

Dames discusses all three books under review in complicated and interesting ways.  He likes them all; all three seem genuinely worth reading. The Nussbaum and Menand volumes, in particular, are likely of interest to intellectual historians.  But the problem with the essay concerns the way in which it frames its subject.


Dames begins by recounting the story of Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama-Huntsville biology professor who opened fire with a 9mm pistol at a faculty meeting last year after being denied tenure.  Dames very sensible declares that these events "were hard to read as an allegory for the Problems of Higher Education."  But, notes, Dames, that was exactly what the Bishop affair became in the online comment sections of New York Times articles on it:

Among the helpless expressions of sadness was a large and growing strain of anger amounting to celebration. What was bizarre about the reaction was that, though Bishop worked in the Department of Biological Sciences, most of the commenters’ rage was directed toward the humanities. The dozens of hateful posts — however incoherent their stated reasons — were troubling moreover because they borrowed the rhetoric of neoliberal reform. Away with unjust privileges (like tenure), away with the guardians of unmonetizable knowledge (the humanities, the speculative sciences), away with any kind of refuge from the competitive market! Academics may not need to worry much about hostile gunfire, but they do need to worry, more than ever, about the more legal means by which hostility toward the academy gets expressed.

Taking extreme things written in any online comment section as symptomatic of broad cultural trends is always a questionable move. But in this case, I think Dames makes a larger mistake.

Dames argues that our current crisis in the humanities results from a failure of nerve on the part of humanists:

If the question of the ’80s and ’90s was, “What should we be reading, and how?,” the question that dogged the opening years of our new millennium was of a vastly more dismal kind: “Why bother?”

People are attacking the humanities, Dames suggests, and humanists have no defense of what we do.  And while he sees Nussbaum and Menand providing thoughtful answers to the question of "Why bother?, " he suggests that their arguments will be sufficient neither to help humanists regain "some collective nerve" nor to win the policy battles that threaten the humanities.

But is the biggest threat facing the humanities--and the academy in general--in the U.S. today public hostility to the humanities or even to universities in general? And do humanists fail to meet this challenge because most of us have trouble answering the question, "Why bother?"

I don't accept either of these propositions.

Yes, there is plenty of popular mistrust and even anger at the humanities and the academy. But this is nothing new.  As long as the modern university has existed people have denounced the trahisons des clercs.  I'm not convinced that this anger is any worse today than it was two decades ago...or four decades ago, when Hofstadter wrote Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. As Michael Bérubé likes to point out, after a couple decades of decline, humanities enrollments at universities and colleges have stabilized for the last two decades. 

Nor do I think that humanists are incapable of answering the question, "why bother?"  Perhaps fewer of us are as passionate about our (often competing) understandings of the mission of the humanities than we were at the height of the '80s and '90s culture wars. But this is not an entirely bad thing.   All of this is not to say that we have nothing to gain from refining our understanding of what we are up to. And books like Menand's and Nussbaum's seem valuable to me.  But I certainly don't detect a collective failure of nerve.  However, that we have a more robust sense of what we are up to than Dames admits is not at all to say that we have answers that will satisfy our most vociferous public critics.

But those critics are not, in fact, the biggest crisis facing the humanities or the academy. Instead, the  continuing changes to the structure of academic employment, which are caused less by public hostility to the humanities and more by larger changes in the economy, threaten us most.  And no case for why it's worth bothering with the humanities is going to be a sufficient response to these challenges.

Which is why I'm ending this post as I ended the last post I made on this topic by invoking Marc Bousquet, who sees the central challenge we face not as public hostility to the humanities nor our unwillingness to mount a vigorous enough defense of our intellectual specialties, but rather as the deteriorating conditions of our employment and our inability--or unwillingness--to successfully oppose these changes.  Rather than simply reiterating our claims to specialness--which we are much better at and more willing to do than Dames thinks we are--humanities professionals in the academy need to understand that we are becoming victims of the same economic forces that are affecting other professionals and working people throughout our society and around the world.  Mounting the sorts of intellectual defenses of the humanities that Dames calls for is well within most of our comfort zones as humanists.  Not so the kind of serious thinking about the conditions of employment within our profession and the political and labor actions that might be necessary to defend or even improve them.

Paging Marc Bousquet

Columbia University English professor Nicholas Dames has an interesting essay in the latest issue of the journal n+1 reviewing three books responding in one way or another to the latest "crisis in the humanities."  The essay shares some common ground with Peter Brooks's recent New York Review of Books essay on a similar set of books about the current "crisis in the university"; though the only  common text between the two is Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit (which both like very much).  Having discussed the Brooks piece at some length on this blog a couple weeks ago,  I figured I'd devote this post to a quick comment on the Dames essay, before descending back into the Cave of Late Semester Grading and Service.

You may recall that I found Brooks's essay generally convincing, but that I felt that my positive response to it may have reflected a kind of complacency about (or at least acceptance of) the institutional status quo that both Brooks and I would probably do well to more emphatically resist.  Dames's essay is much more interesting than Brooks's, but I find myself less satisfied by it in many ways.  Before diving into my central complaint about it, let me encourage everyone to go over and read it for yourselves. It's really interesting and thoughtful, despite its limitations. And since I'm going to be focusing on what I see as its limitations, I hope that everyone reading this post will bother to discover for themselves what's interesting and worthwhile about Dames's piece.

The core of Brooks's NYRB essay concerned two books--Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It and Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities--that, each in its own way, blames the universities and especially the faculty for its perceived crises and proposes fairly draconian reforms to correct things. These books are both rather obviously wrong in their portrayals of the university today.  As I suggested in my earlier post, criticizing them is shooting fish in a barrel, and Brooks is a pretty good shot.

Dames has a more complicated task, as he is reviewing three much more nuanced books with which he is in generally greater sympathy. In addition to the Nussbaum volume, he covers Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University and Terry Castle's autobiographical essay collection The Professor and Other Writings. 

Dames discusses all three books under review in complicated and interesting ways.  He likes them all; all three seem genuinely worth reading. The Nussbaum and Menand volumes, in particular, are likely of interest to intellectual historians.  But the problem with the essay concerns the way in which it frames its subject.


Dames begins by recounting the story of Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama-Huntsville biology professor who opened fire with a 9mm pistol at a faculty meeting last year after being denied tenure.  Dames very sensible declares that these events "were hard to read as an allegory for the Problems of Higher Education."  But, notes, Dames, that was exactly what the Bishop affair became in the online comment sections of New York Times articles on it:

Among the helpless expressions of sadness was a large and growing strain of anger amounting to celebration. What was bizarre about the reaction was that, though Bishop worked in the Department of Biological Sciences, most of the commenters’ rage was directed toward the humanities. The dozens of hateful posts — however incoherent their stated reasons — were troubling moreover because they borrowed the rhetoric of neoliberal reform. Away with unjust privileges (like tenure), away with the guardians of unmonetizable knowledge (the humanities, the speculative sciences), away with any kind of refuge from the competitive market! Academics may not need to worry much about hostile gunfire, but they do need to worry, more than ever, about the more legal means by which hostility toward the academy gets expressed.

Taking extreme things written in any online comment section as symptomatic of broad cultural trends is always a questionable move. But in this case, I think Dames makes a larger mistake.

Dames argues that our current crisis in the humanities results from a failure of nerve on the part of humanists:

If the question of the ’80s and ’90s was, “What should we be reading, and how?,” the question that dogged the opening years of our new millennium was of a vastly more dismal kind: “Why bother?”

People are attacking the humanities, Dames suggests, and humanists have no defense of what we do.  And while he sees Nussbaum and Menand providing thoughtful answers to the question of "Why bother?, " he suggests that their arguments will be sufficient neither to help humanists regain "some collective nerve" nor to win the policy battles that threaten the humanities.

But is the biggest threat facing the humanities--and the academy in general--in the U.S. today public hostility to the humanities or even to universities in general? And do humanists fail to meet this challenge because most of us have trouble answering the question, "Why bother?"

I don't accept either of these propositions.

Yes, there is plenty of popular mistrust and even anger at the humanities and the academy. But this is nothing new.  As long as the modern university has existed people have denounced the trahisons des clercs.  I'm not convinced that this anger is any worse today than it was two decades ago...or four decades ago, when Hofstadter wrote Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. As Michael Bérubé likes to point out, after a couple decades of decline, humanities enrollments at universities and colleges have stabilized for the last two decades. 

Nor do I think that humanists are incapable of answering the question, "why bother?"  Perhaps fewer of us are as passionate about our (often competing) understandings of the mission of the humanities than we were at the height of the '80s and '90s culture wars. But this is not an entirely bad thing.   All of this is not to say that we have nothing to gain from refining our understanding of what we are up to. And books like Menand's and Nussbaum's seem valuable to me.  But I certainly don't detect a collective failure of nerve.  However, that we have a more robust sense of what we are up to than Dames admits is not at all to say that we have answers that will satisfy our most vociferous public critics.

But those critics are not, in fact, the biggest crisis facing the humanities or the academy. Instead, the  continuing changes to the structure of academic employment, which are caused less by public hostility to the humanities and more by larger changes in the economy, threaten us most.  And no case for why it's worth bothering with the humanities is going to be a sufficient response to these challenges.

Which is why I'm ending this post as I ended the last post I made on this topic by invoking Marc Bousquet, who sees the central challenge we face not as public hostility to the humanities nor our unwillingness to mount a vigorous enough defense of our intellectual specialties, but rather as the deteriorating conditions of our employment and our inability--or unwillingness--to successfully oppose these changes.  Rather than simply reiterating our claims to specialness--which we are much better at and more willing to do than Dames thinks we are--humanities professionals in the academy need to understand that we are becoming victims of the same economic forces that are affecting other professionals and working people throughout our society and around the world.  Mounting the sorts of intellectual defenses of the humanities that Dames calls for is well within most of our comfort zones as humanists.  Not so the kind of serious thinking about the conditions of employment within our profession and the political and labor actions that might be necessary to defend or even improve them.

Some Thoughts on the Crisis in Higher Education (2011 Edition)

Like masculinity, higher education is apparently always in crisis in the United States.  The March 28, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books featured what to me was an entirely sensible assessment by the Princeton literary scholar Peter Brooks of four books on higher education today, two of which were minor sensations last year: Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It and Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (h/t for the link to the Brooks piece to bookforum.com).


Now to be fair, responding to Taylor and Hacker & Dreifus is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Their portraits of the university today seem transparently unfair; their solutions arbitrary and ill-conceived.  I'm not going to repeat the bill of particulars here. Those interested can read Brooks's take on them, with which I feel wholly sympathetic.



Brooks essentially argues that there's much more right than wrong in US higher education today, and that the principal challenges that our colleges and universities face come more from off-campus than from on:  a collapse in public funds for public institutions, leading to huge increases in student fees, and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in American society, which is mirrored on campus by an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots within higher education itself.

Along the way, he mounts a vigorous defense of tenure as not only required by academic freedom, but also as a key aspect of faculty self -governance:

if the body of permanently appointed professors is not to determine who merits appointment as professors, according to peer review of their competence and the prospect of their remaining active and engaged, who will? Who will do the hiring and the firing?

But while I'm entirely comfortable with my agreement with Brooks's rejection of Taylor's and Hacker & Dreifus's prescriptions, there's a side to me that's a bit suspicious of my easy acceptance of Brooks's essay.  To begin with, it strikes me as too defensive. While earlier crises in American higher education featured robust critiques from both left and right, for most of the last three decades, the voices of criticism from the right have been much louder.  And the responses to them from the left have often been oddly, well, conservative.

Brooks, to his credit, acknowledges that there are aspects of the academy today that merit real concern:

The affluence gap between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, plus a few others, and the rest of the universities has indeed increased, and permits a degree of luxury to both students and faculty in those institutions that are the envy of the rest.  . . .

Meanwhile, many students who would previously have gone to a four-year college have to be content with a two-year community college, where faculty are typically underpaid and overworked. Even at many relatively more prosperous institutions, full-time tenured faculty—expensive and immovable—are being replaced by various temps and adjuncts. As in the rest of corporate America—and universities are increasingly corporate in their management style—a hungry and mobile labor force is considered desirable. There is in fact some evidence that increased access to higher education has simply perpetuated or even exacerbated social stratification since the educational “system” is itself so highly tiered, and expansion tends to come in lower tiers rather than the elites.

But these observation occur in Brooks's piece in an odd context, as an explanation for what Brooks sees as the largely arbitrary concerns of the authors of three of the four books under review*:

The result, I think, is a fair measure of bafflement and ressentiment, resulting in a kind of indiscriminate flailing about in criticism of the university, some of it justified, much of it misdirected, and some pernicious.

Brooks is not wrong, I think, to link the concerns of Taylor, Hacker, and Dreifus--and the avid audience for them outside the academy--to larger social changes.  But his notion that these critics are merely confused by an unsettling time strikes me as punting an interesting and important intellectual historical story, one that Andrew Hartman is probably better suited to tell than I am.

Brooks notes the odd way in which critics simultaneously call for a return to the "Great Books" and demand that higher education more directly serve the post-college job market:

On the one hand, all the critics of the American university claim to be partisans of the liberal arts, to want students to study philosophy and literature, even the arts, and to learn “critical thinking” (the currently accepted mantra—not a bad one). On the other hand, the tests proposed always seem to have to do with job preparation—even as the critics in the same breath deplore “vocationalism” and point to the impoverished education that many majors in business or accounting receive. And one would like to know whether the level of higher education attainment measured by the OECD is in fact liberal education or simply technocratic training at a high level.

Though this position is seemingly incoherent, both aspects of it seem to me to flow out of the waters of the culture wars of the last thirty years.

And the tendency to blame supposedly lazy, self-interested faculty (and the supposedly cushy conditions of their employment) for all the failings of higher education is closely paralleled by the tendency of the currently dominant sect of would-be reformers of public primary and secondary education, who blame teachers and their unions for all of public education's ills.

Education is in a very strange place in this nation's political culture today. On the one hand, with the very peculiar exception of the military, it is the only public institution whose efforts at improving individuals' social status are seen as entirely legitimate.  On the other hand, as a result, our educational system is being asked to substitute for our denuded social safety net and for policies that might be designed to alter the structure of income and wealth in our society. The fantasy is that, even in a winner-take-all society, if we are all educated well, we can all be winners.  But when that fantasy inevitably fails, someone needs to blamed, or at least "held accountable." And the most convenient targets are teachers and professors.

Of course professors are also among the exemplars of the "New Class," that has been a bête noire among some quarters of the right for a couple generations.

Rather than representing ressentiment-tinged "flailing about," the seemingly contradictory critiques of higher education today reflect a complicated but traceable heritage.

The other problem with Brooks's treatment of the real, economic crisis that is hitting higher education--and especially public higher education--today is his sense that nothing can be done about it. So sure is Brooks of this sentiment that he expresses it almost parenthetically. And the sense that public education cannot be improved in the most meaningful way in which Brooks feels it might be improved not surprisingly underscores the basic defensiveness of his message:

I am not so much impressed by the faults and failings of the university—they are real enough, but largely the product of frightening trends toward inequality in American society that the universities can combat only to a limited degree. It’s more the survival of the university that amazes and concerns me. It’s one of the best things we’ve got, and at times—as when reading these books—it almost seems to me better than what we deserve.

As I say above, I admit there's a side to me that feels very comfortable with this tone.  There's a fairly delicious irony, I think, for those of us on the left to go to battle in a culture war as defenders of our nation's established culture and institutions.  It's also, however, a lot easier to do this than to try to really address the ways in which America's growing social inequality affects academia. And it's an (unfortunate) luxury of tenure that some of us can avoid such a confrontation.

So while Brooks's argument feels in many ways more comfortable to me, the more difficult path of active, progressive reform proposed by folks like Marc Bousquet probably has more merit.    
________________________

*  Brooks praises Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, but discusses it only in passing.

Some Thoughts on the Crisis in Higher Education (2011 Edition)

Like masculinity, higher education is apparently always in crisis in the United States.  The March 28, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books featured what to me was an entirely sensible assessment by the Princeton literary scholar Peter Brooks of four books on higher education today, two of which were minor sensations last year: Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It and Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (h/t for the link to the Brooks piece to bookforum.com).


Now to be fair, responding to Taylor and Hacker & Dreifus is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Their portraits of the university today seem transparently unfair; their solutions arbitrary and ill-conceived.  I'm not going to repeat the bill of particulars here. Those interested can read Brooks's take on them, with which I feel wholly sympathetic.



Brooks essentially argues that there's much more right than wrong in US higher education today, and that the principal challenges that our colleges and universities face come more from off-campus than from on:  a collapse in public funds for public institutions, leading to huge increases in student fees, and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in American society, which is mirrored on campus by an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots within higher education itself.

Along the way, he mounts a vigorous defense of tenure as not only required by academic freedom, but also as a key aspect of faculty self -governance:

if the body of permanently appointed professors is not to determine who merits appointment as professors, according to peer review of their competence and the prospect of their remaining active and engaged, who will? Who will do the hiring and the firing?

But while I'm entirely comfortable with my agreement with Brooks's rejection of Taylor's and Hacker & Dreifus's prescriptions, there's a side to me that's a bit suspicious of my easy acceptance of Brooks's essay.  To begin with, it strikes me as too defensive. While earlier crises in American higher education featured robust critiques from both left and right, for most of the last three decades, the voices of criticism from the right have been much louder.  And the responses to them from the left have often been oddly, well, conservative.

Brooks, to his credit, acknowledges that there are aspects of the academy today that merit real concern:

The affluence gap between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, plus a few others, and the rest of the universities has indeed increased, and permits a degree of luxury to both students and faculty in those institutions that are the envy of the rest.  . . .

Meanwhile, many students who would previously have gone to a four-year college have to be content with a two-year community college, where faculty are typically underpaid and overworked. Even at many relatively more prosperous institutions, full-time tenured faculty—expensive and immovable—are being replaced by various temps and adjuncts. As in the rest of corporate America—and universities are increasingly corporate in their management style—a hungry and mobile labor force is considered desirable. There is in fact some evidence that increased access to higher education has simply perpetuated or even exacerbated social stratification since the educational “system” is itself so highly tiered, and expansion tends to come in lower tiers rather than the elites.

But these observation occur in Brooks's piece in an odd context, as an explanation for what Brooks sees as the largely arbitrary concerns of the authors of three of the four books under review*:

The result, I think, is a fair measure of bafflement and ressentiment, resulting in a kind of indiscriminate flailing about in criticism of the university, some of it justified, much of it misdirected, and some pernicious.

Brooks is not wrong, I think, to link the concerns of Taylor, Hacker, and Dreifus--and the avid audience for them outside the academy--to larger social changes.  But his notion that these critics are merely confused by an unsettling time strikes me as punting an interesting and important intellectual historical story, one that Andrew Hartman is probably better suited to tell than I am.

Brooks notes the odd way in which critics simultaneously call for a return to the "Great Books" and demand that higher education more directly serve the post-college job market:

On the one hand, all the critics of the American university claim to be partisans of the liberal arts, to want students to study philosophy and literature, even the arts, and to learn “critical thinking” (the currently accepted mantra—not a bad one). On the other hand, the tests proposed always seem to have to do with job preparation—even as the critics in the same breath deplore “vocationalism” and point to the impoverished education that many majors in business or accounting receive. And one would like to know whether the level of higher education attainment measured by the OECD is in fact liberal education or simply technocratic training at a high level.

Though this position is seemingly incoherent, both aspects of it seem to me to flow out of the waters of the culture wars of the last thirty years.

And the tendency to blame supposedly lazy, self-interested faculty (and the supposedly cushy conditions of their employment) for all the failings of higher education is closely paralleled by the tendency of the currently dominant sect of would-be reformers of public primary and secondary education, who blame teachers and their unions for all of public education's ills.

Education is in a very strange place in this nation's political culture today. On the one hand, with the very peculiar exception of the military, it is the only public institution whose efforts at improving individuals' social status are seen as entirely legitimate.  On the other hand, as a result, our educational system is being asked to substitute for our denuded social safety net and for policies that might be designed to alter the structure of income and wealth in our society. The fantasy is that, even in a winner-take-all society, if we are all educated well, we can all be winners.  But when that fantasy inevitably fails, someone needs to blamed, or at least "held accountable." And the most convenient targets are teachers and professors.

Of course professors are also among the exemplars of the "New Class," that has been a bête noire among some quarters of the right for a couple generations.

Rather than representing ressentiment-tinged "flailing about," the seemingly contradictory critiques of higher education today reflect a complicated but traceable heritage.

The other problem with Brooks's treatment of the real, economic crisis that is hitting higher education--and especially public higher education--today is his sense that nothing can be done about it. So sure is Brooks of this sentiment that he expresses it almost parenthetically. And the sense that public education cannot be improved in the most meaningful way in which Brooks feels it might be improved not surprisingly underscores the basic defensiveness of his message:

I am not so much impressed by the faults and failings of the university—they are real enough, but largely the product of frightening trends toward inequality in American society that the universities can combat only to a limited degree. It’s more the survival of the university that amazes and concerns me. It’s one of the best things we’ve got, and at times—as when reading these books—it almost seems to me better than what we deserve.

As I say above, I admit there's a side to me that feels very comfortable with this tone.  There's a fairly delicious irony, I think, for those of us on the left to go to battle in a culture war as defenders of our nation's established culture and institutions.  It's also, however, a lot easier to do this than to try to really address the ways in which America's growing social inequality affects academia. And it's an (unfortunate) luxury of tenure that some of us can avoid such a confrontation.

So while Brooks's argument feels in many ways more comfortable to me, the more difficult path of active, progressive reform proposed by folks like Marc Bousquet probably has more merit.    
________________________

*  Brooks praises Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, but discusses it only in passing.

Career Opportunities

I've been following with interest the discussion on this blog and elsewhere about the state of the academic job market in history. I put a few thoughts in a comment on Tim's post below, but I thought I'd expand on them in a post.

Let me start with some caveats: I have not studied this problem systematically. Like most of the other folks commenting on this issue, I rely on the professional organizations for my data and my own experience of the profession for further evidence (while recognizing that the plural of anecdote is not data). I haven't read Marc Bousquet's How the University Works though it's been on my seemingly endless to-read list for some time. My understanding of his views is based on reading shorter pieces by him, such as his recent blog entries in this conversation, as well as reviews of the book. I apologize if I have, therefore, misconstrued any of his positions and welcome clarifications from those more familiar with his book.

I share Bousquet's concerns about the casualization of academic labor. And I agree that there is no substitute for addressing the demand side of the academic job market, organizing, and fighting back against the dominant trends in the structure of academic employment. Though I fear that this is easier said than done (about which I'll have more to say in another post), I am extremely grateful that people like Bousquet's are leading the good fight. Incidentally, if you're an academic and you're not a member of the AAUP (on whose council Bousquet serves), stop reading this post and join now. I'll wait for you here...

Welcome back!

While I'm happy to join Bousquet on the ramparts of the demand side, I remain puzzled by his position on concerns about the supply side of the academic job market. It seems to me that one can think one of three things about the number of PhDs currently being produced in a field (let's talk about history, since this is a history blog): 1) we're producing too many history PhDs; 2) we're producing too few history PhDs; 3) we're producing roughly the right number of history PhDs. Which of these three positions one takes will naturally depend upon how one defines the right number of history PhDs. And I agree with Marc Bousquet that we should absolutely resist the temptation to assume that the number of tenure-track jobs (or even the number of jobs period) that are currently available is the same as the ideal number of PhDs seeking employment. Indeed, I take his central concern about supply-side talk to be that it tends to take the demand side as a given. With this, too, I agree. Worrying about the supply side can be no substitute for attending to the demand side structures. And, indeed, supply-side worries can help naturalize demand-side changes that we ought to be actively resisting.

The problem is that I don't see any alternative conception on Bousquet's part of what the right number of PhDs is. Instead one gets the sense that he objects to any concern at all about how many PhDs are being produced. This is, I take it, the point of associating such concern with Reaganomics (e.g. "This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers -- as what I call part of a 'second wave' of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration.") But Reagan-era supply-side economics was a theory of macroeconomics that argued not for limiting the supply-side, but doing the opposite, i.e. lowering perceived barriers to the production of good and services. The microeconomics of the academic job market don't have much to do with this, but to the extent that we want to draw a metaphorical connection, the idea of limiting the production of PhDs, whatever its merits, seems to me to have very little to do with the "discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan era." This sounds to me like argument by pejorative.

In fact, I think that there are very good reasons to limit the production of history PhDs, especially in the short run. First, the size of PhD programs tends to be determined by a series of factors that has next to nothing to do with either the actual or the potential demand for people with PhDs. Having a PhD program tends to add to a department's prestige. At most institutions, the larger the program, the better it is for the department within the institution. Graduate students also provide a supply of cheap labor that helps limit the size of of faculty teaching loads (or that substitutes for less qualified people, e.g., undergraduates, teaching instead).* Mentoring graduate students can, of course, be very personally fulfilling to historians. Factors that limit the number of PhDs produced by a department tend to include student demand and the availability of funding and/or assistantships.

None of this has much of anything to do with employment demand for the PhDs being produced by the department. At this point I should pause and note that while I have taught for three history departments with PhD programs, I have never had a tenure-track appointment in one (my current, tenured appointment is in an undergraduate-only unit). So there are perhaps conversations taking place in meetings in which I have not been involved that took the question of job opportunities for my various departments' future PhDs into consideration when thinking about how large the PhD program ought to be. But I certainly never heard any such conversations. And I know for a fact that, at least back in the 1990s, when I taught at one of these three departments--a flagship midwestern state university with a fine history department--it did not even track the record of its PhDs on the job market.

And while I take Bousquet's point that a restructured demand side might need a substantially larger number of PhDs than the current casualizing market does, in the context of the current market, we are producing a vast reserve army of the unemployed that helps to ease the process of casualization, as there are always unemployed and underemployed PhDs willing and available to take the ever worsening deals offered to them by universities and colleges in the hope that they will eventually get something better. Far from denying the need to organize, I think that reducing the pool of history PhDs would substantially improve our bargaining position.

All that being said, the devil is in the details....and here I must say that I don't have a strong sense of how one should go about equitably limiting the number of new history PhDs. Jonathan Rees endorses Ralph Luker's view that some marginal PhD programs should be simply shut down and replaced with MA programs. This seems like a sensible idea in principle, though the incentives for particular PhD programs to go out of business are pretty weak. And I'm not sure who could be empowered (or who we'd be comfortable with empowering) to tell them they have to go. Moreover, there's no particular reason to assume that an overproduction problem is best solved by eliminating entire programs rather than shrinking but retaining programs. There's a good case to be made that a greater number of programs (with a greater number of faculty supervising PhDs) increases the diversity of the discipline in any number of ways. All of which is to say that, while I tend to think that we ought to be reducing the number of newly minted history PhDs, I don't know the best way to do so.

Sometime later this week I'll return with a few thoughts about the challenges of addressing the demand side.
________________________________
* Bousquet uses this fact as an argument against limiting the number of PhDs:

[J]ust imagine the shrinkage of grad programs.

Who would do the work that grad students were doing? On what terms? Would they be more qualified or less? At some institutions administrations will want to replace grad student discussion leaders with undergrads. What would be a proper replacement for the grad student discussion leader? A teaching-intensive faculty member? In that context are teaching-intensive faculty “historians” to the AHA? Ditto small colleges and community colleges?

In the end, any actual shrinkage of doctoral programs leads you right back to the tough questions that “job market theory” initially bypasses–because those doctoral programs are that size for a reason: the students are working!

Here, as elsewhere, Bousquet seems to assume that the only reason to discuss the supply side is to avoid discussing the demand side. I agree with him 100% that shrinking graduate programs would necessarily entail a restructuring of academic employment, i.e. addressing the demand side. I just don't see this as much of an argument against shrinking the size of PhD programs.

Career Opportunities

I've been following with interest the discussion on this blog and elsewhere about the state of the academic job market in history. I put a few thoughts in a comment on Tim's post below, but I thought I'd expand on them in a post.

Let me start with some caveats: I have not studied this problem systematically. Like most of the other folks commenting on this issue, I rely on the professional organizations for my data and my own experience of the profession for further evidence (while recognizing that the plural of anecdote is not data). I haven't read Marc Bousquet's How the University Works though it's been on my seemingly endless to-read list for some time. My understanding of his views is based on reading shorter pieces by him, such as his recent blog entries in this conversation, as well as reviews of the book. I apologize if I have, therefore, misconstrued any of his positions and welcome clarifications from those more familiar with his book.

I share Bousquet's concerns about the casualization of academic labor. And I agree that there is no substitute for addressing the demand side of the academic job market, organizing, and fighting back against the dominant trends in the structure of academic employment. Though I fear that this is easier said than done (about which I'll have more to say in another post), I am extremely grateful that people like Bousquet's are leading the good fight. Incidentally, if you're an academic and you're not a member of the AAUP (on whose council Bousquet serves), stop reading this post and join now. I'll wait for you here...

Welcome back!

While I'm happy to join Bousquet on the ramparts of the demand side, I remain puzzled by his position on concerns about the supply side of the academic job market. It seems to me that one can think one of three things about the number of PhDs currently being produced in a field (let's talk about history, since this is a history blog): 1) we're producing too many history PhDs; 2) we're producing too few history PhDs; 3) we're producing roughly the right number of history PhDs. Which of these three positions one takes will naturally depend upon how one defines the right number of history PhDs. And I agree with Marc Bousquet that we should absolutely resist the temptation to assume that the number of tenure-track jobs (or even the number of jobs period) that are currently available is the same as the ideal number of PhDs seeking employment. Indeed, I take his central concern about supply-side talk to be that it tends to take the demand side as a given. With this, too, I agree. Worrying about the supply side can be no substitute for attending to the demand side structures. And, indeed, supply-side worries can help naturalize demand-side changes that we ought to be actively resisting.

The problem is that I don't see any alternative conception on Bousquet's part of what the right number of PhDs is. Instead one gets the sense that he objects to any concern at all about how many PhDs are being produced. This is, I take it, the point of associating such concern with Reaganomics (e.g. "This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers -- as what I call part of a 'second wave' of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration.") But Reagan-era supply-side economics was a theory of macroeconomics that argued not for limiting the supply-side, but doing the opposite, i.e. lowering perceived barriers to the production of good and services. The microeconomics of the academic job market don't have much to do with this, but to the extent that we want to draw a metaphorical connection, the idea of limiting the production of PhDs, whatever its merits, seems to me to have very little to do with the "discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan era." This sounds to me like argument by pejorative.

In fact, I think that there are very good reasons to limit the production of history PhDs, especially in the short run. First, the size of PhD programs tends to be determined by a series of factors that has next to nothing to do with either the actual or the potential demand for people with PhDs. Having a PhD program tends to add to a department's prestige. At most institutions, the larger the program, the better it is for the department within the institution. Graduate students also provide a supply of cheap labor that helps limit the size of of faculty teaching loads (or that substitutes for less qualified people, e.g., undergraduates, teaching instead).* Mentoring graduate students can, of course, be very personally fulfilling to historians. Factors that limit the number of PhDs produced by a department tend to include student demand and the availability of funding and/or assistantships.

None of this has much of anything to do with employment demand for the PhDs being produced by the department. At this point I should pause and note that while I have taught for three history departments with PhD programs, I have never had a tenure-track appointment in one (my current, tenured appointment is in an undergraduate-only unit). So there are perhaps conversations taking place in meetings in which I have not been involved that took the question of job opportunities for my various departments' future PhDs into consideration when thinking about how large the PhD program ought to be. But I certainly never heard any such conversations. And I know for a fact that, at least back in the 1990s, when I taught at one of these three departments--a flagship midwestern state university with a fine history department--it did not even track the record of its PhDs on the job market.

And while I take Bousquet's point that a restructured demand side might need a substantially larger number of PhDs than the current casualizing market does, in the context of the current market, we are producing a vast reserve army of the unemployed that helps to ease the process of casualization, as there are always unemployed and underemployed PhDs willing and available to take the ever worsening deals offered to them by universities and colleges in the hope that they will eventually get something better. Far from denying the need to organize, I think that reducing the pool of history PhDs would substantially improve our bargaining position.

All that being said, the devil is in the details....and here I must say that I don't have a strong sense of how one should go about equitably limiting the number of new history PhDs. Jonathan Rees endorses Ralph Luker's view that some marginal PhD programs should be simply shut down and replaced with MA programs. This seems like a sensible idea in principle, though the incentives for particular PhD programs to go out of business are pretty weak. And I'm not sure who could be empowered (or who we'd be comfortable with empowering) to tell them they have to go. Moreover, there's no particular reason to assume that an overproduction problem is best solved by eliminating entire programs rather than shrinking but retaining programs. There's a good case to be made that a greater number of programs (with a greater number of faculty supervising PhDs) increases the diversity of the discipline in any number of ways. All of which is to say that, while I tend to think that we ought to be reducing the number of newly minted history PhDs, I don't know the best way to do so.

Sometime later this week I'll return with a few thoughts about the challenges of addressing the demand side.
________________________________
* Bousquet uses this fact as an argument against limiting the number of PhDs:

[J]ust imagine the shrinkage of grad programs.

Who would do the work that grad students were doing? On what terms? Would they be more qualified or less? At some institutions administrations will want to replace grad student discussion leaders with undergrads. What would be a proper replacement for the grad student discussion leader? A teaching-intensive faculty member? In that context are teaching-intensive faculty “historians” to the AHA? Ditto small colleges and community colleges?

In the end, any actual shrinkage of doctoral programs leads you right back to the tough questions that “job market theory” initially bypasses–because those doctoral programs are that size for a reason: the students are working!

Here, as elsewhere, Bousquet seems to assume that the only reason to discuss the supply side is to avoid discussing the demand side. I agree with him 100% that shrinking graduate programs would necessarily entail a restructuring of academic employment, i.e. addressing the demand side. I just don't see this as much of an argument against shrinking the size of PhD programs.