Rick Reis
SEATTLE -- The average humanities doctoral student takes
nine years to earn a Ph.D. That fact was cited frequently here (and not with
pride) at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Richard E.
Miller, an English professor at Rutgers University's main campus in New
Brunswick, said that the nine-year period means that those finishing
dissertations today started them before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Kindles,
iPads or streaming video had been invented.
And at a standing-room-only session, leaders of a task
force studying possible changes in dissertation requirements discussed some of the
ideas under consideration. There was a strong sense that the traditional model
of producing a several-hundred-page literary analysis dominates English and
other language doctoral programs -- even though many people feel that the genre
is overused and frequently ineffective. People also talked about the value of
digital projects, of a series of essays, or public scholarship. Others talked
about ways to change the student-committee dynamic in ways that might expedite
dissertation completion.
"We are at a defining moment in higher
education," said Kathleen Woodward, director of the Simpson Center for the
Humanities at the University of Washington. "We absolutely have to think
outside the box that the dissertation is a book or a book-in-progress."
The MLA's discussion of the dissertation is in some ways
an outgrowth of a much-discussed report [3] issued by the association in 2006
about tenure and promotion practices. That report questioned the idea that
producing monographs should be the determining factor in tenure decisions. When
the report was released, many MLA leaders said that the ideas the association
was endorsing also called for reconsideration of graduate education, and
especially of the dissertation.
As part of the process of encouraging change, the MLA
recently conducted a survey of its doctoral-granting departments. Among the
findings:
62 percent of departments reported that their graduate
schools have guidelines for dissertations, but most of those guidelines are
general, dealing with issues such as timelines, composition of committees and
so forth, and not dictating the form of a dissertation.
33 percent of departments have written descriptions of
what kind of dissertation is expected of graduate students.
Minorities of departments have specific rules authorizing
nontraditional formats for dissertations, and even smaller minorities of
departments have approved a dissertation using one of those formats.
Of those with traditional dissertation length
requirements, the range of minimums was 150 to 400 pages. Most maximums were
400 to 500 pages.
Nontraditional Formats Permitted and Used in
Dissertations in English and Other Language Departments
Format Policy Permitting Its Use Format Approved in Last
5 Years
Digital project . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4% . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4%
Creative nonfiction . . . . . . . . . 8.8% . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . 6.8%
Suite of essays . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.8% . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . 5.7%
Fiction or poetry . . . . . . . . . . . .7.7% . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . 6.8%
Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.7% . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4%
Public scholarship . . . . . . . . . .4.4% . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . 3.4%
Portfolio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2.2% . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3%
Collaborative work . . . . . . . . . 1.1% . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .. .0.6%
Sidonie Smith, professor of English at the University of
Michigan and a past president of the MLA, said that the survey results
demonstrated the potential for change. She said, for example, that many
department leaders have in the past said that they would consider changes in
dissertation requirements but for the rules of their graduate schools. In fact,
there are very few graduate schools that would block change, she said.
Further, she noted that while the percentage of
departments that have explicitly authorized nontraditional dissertations is
small, they provide evidence that such alternatives are possible. Finally, she
said that the survey showed that relatively few departments provide explicit
information to graduate students on what is and is not possible. That lack of
information, she said, "is disturbing."
While much of the talk here was about digital formats of
scholarship, some of the possible changes in the dissertation process could
also be helpful to graduate students pursuing a traditional, 250-page work of
literary analysis.
David Damrosch, chair of comparative literature at
Harvard University, described a reform recently instituted there that grad
students in the audience seemed to find ideal. The department has started
requiring that every single chapter of a dissertation be discussed, as they are
produced, in a meeting attended by the author and all three committee members.
Further, the department staff -- not the student -- sets up the meeting. (This
is in contrast to grad students sending off copies, and receiving suggestions
or silence from committee members individually.)
Damrosch said that many graduate students are delayed
when some committee members don't read chapters in a timely way, and then go on
to offer "totally contradictory advice, months after a draft has come
in." Forcing everyone on the committee to meet in person, Damrosch said,
shames them into reading the chapter on time, and to working out a common set
of recommendations for the grad student.
"People are forced to focus," he said, and
doctoral students "get coherent advice." The resulting revisions are
much more likely to solve any problems, so that the student can keep moving
forward.
More Than PDFs
Miller, of Rutgers, stressed that opening up students to
digital work was a responsibility for humanities departments, given the way
people increasingly communicate information. Graduate students need to learn
"what it means to write for the web, with the web," which is not the
same thing, he said, "as making PDFs of your [print] articles."
Whether departments want it to happen or not, the form of
scholarship is going to change, he said. Rather than avoiding that, scholars
should consider the ramifications, he said, by redesigning dissertations.
"Once you lose the monograph, what?s the future of the long
argument?" he asked. "What is the life of the mind is going to look
like when it?s no longer stored on the page?" The answers will become
clear when those about to become professors or public intellectuals are set
free from the traditional dissertation, he said, and are encouraged to produce
digital works.
Several also noted that the digital projects that might
replace traditional dissertations may well be more oriented to teaching than
are most monographs -- and that such an emphasis would reflect the reality that
most graduate students will be finding jobs focused on teaching, not research.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, professor of media studies at
Pomona College and director of scholarly communication at the MLA, said that
much more needs to change than simply telling graduate students they can
prepare dissertations online. Graduate students who are doing digital work are
"being given very mixed messages? from faculty members on such questions
as whether they should let dissertation drafts circulate digitally in advance.
Some faculty members approve of what is common practice among those who work
online, while others frown upon it. Some warn graduate students that if they do
so they will have a tougher time finding a publisher, while others say that
online discussions about one's work can "help demonstrate that there is an
audience."
Digital publishing is more collaborative than the
traditional model, she said. "It's a shift from thinking about individual
discrete products of scholarship" to "a more constant process of
communication."
Further, these shifts require changing the way professors
think about their graduate students' careers. When she has talked to many
professors about the shift away from monograph dissertations, Fitzpatrick said,
many seem to feel "anticipatory remorse," and think they are somehow
hurting their graduate students' future careers by not encouraging them to
produce what could become a book. "The problem with this is that the
career this graduate student will have looks different from the careers we have
expected," she said.
"It should be our jobs to support new kinds of
work," she said. And for faculty members trained before the digital era,
she said that means a responsibility to "learn how to read in new
formats," not just to look for linear arguments over hundreds of pages.
Fitzpatrick made a comment in closing that inspired
several of the questions from the audience. She said that she recently gave a
talk at a digital humanities center and a graduate student told her about a
project, and the dilemma of whether to approach it as a book-length writing
project or a digital work. "I blurted out to do the risky thing," the
digital project, Fitzpatrick said. But she quickly found herself wondering if
that was wise, given that she didn't know about the support this graduate
student would have. So she amended her advice a little. "The thing you
have passion for is the thing you should be doing," she said. "But
make sure somebody's got your back."
Grad Students as 'Canaries in the Coal Mine'
The questions from the audience were notable in that they
didn't challenge the central premise of the speakers that scholarly
communication is changing, and that the traditional dissertation shouldn't be
the only option. But people were clearly worried about whether anybody would
support graduate students during this transition period. Even with all the
enthusiasm about digital humanities, many grad students or junior professors
fear that it only takes one Luddite member of a dissertation or hiring
committee to squelch all kinds of creativity or careers.
One graduate student asked whether the digital projects
would simply be added on to already full workloads. He said that it felt like
graduate students were being asked "to do double the skills in half the
time."
Damrosch said that faculty members needed to replace some
traditional assignments with different kinds of work. He said, for instance,
that in one of his courses, he has replaced one of the major papers students
were required to do with a wiki instead.
The director of graduate studies at a university --
referencing the idea of having a graduate student's back -- asked if that was
really possible for anyone on a graduate committee to do. How, she asked, can
an adviser today be sure that a student who does a digital dissertation will do
well on the job market? "Are we asking our graduate students to be
canaries in a coal mine?" she asked. Another person asked for data on how
people with nontraditional dissertations do in the job market, and was told
that there aren't enough people to know.
Still another professor in the audience said that the
changes being discussed will happen only if elite universities make them first.
"Elite universities have to have everyone's back," he said.
"Harvard has to change first" because, if it does, "then my
provost ... will say it's O.K."
Smith, of Michigan, said that she understood the concerns
about encouraging people to break out of traditional models of scholarship. But
she said she worried about the idea of saying people need to be cautious until
they earn tenure. "We mentor people to be careful," she said, as
graduate students and as junior faculty members. "If everyone is careful
all that time, they are going to be careful after they get tenure. We have to
change the academy."
Source URL: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/09/mla-considers-radical-changes-dissertation
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