Introduction: Rethinking Graduate Studies

Of all the hyperbole surrounding the fate of the humanities today, the problems facing graduate studies seem the least exaggerated. The number of PhDs has far outpaced the number of available full-time jobs. Financial support is both inadequate and unevenly distributed, requiring students to defer earnings over long periods of time, assume unneeded debt, and compete against differently funded peers. Overspecialization has made knowledge transfer between the disciplines, not to mention between the academy and the rest of the workforce, increasingly difficult. The model of mentorship that largely guides student progress, now centuries old, seems increasingly out of touch with a culture of non-academic work, so that students are ill prepared to leave the academic track. Time to degree not only has not sped up but increasingly correlates with lower success rates - the longer students stay in the PhD track, the lower their chances for full employment. The hegemony of the seminar as the only model of learning is also at odds with much recent thinking about learning and intellectual development. Undoubtedly, numerous teachers and students alike would describe at least some, if not many, of their seminar experiences as profoundly uninspiring. Add to that the way we largely operate within a developmental model premised on major phase changes that dot otherwise stable, and largely flat, plateaus - the long gaps between exams and their sink-or-swim nature do little to promote long-term incremental development of students as thinkers, writers, or teachers. We think more in terms of a nineteenth-century-inspired model of botanical metamorphosis, with its inscrutable internal transformations, than in terms of incremental, cumulative performances. There are also bio-political aspects to the crisis that have recently been raised: the most intense periods of work and the most intense periods of economic insecurity overlap precisely with the normal time frame of human fertility. The PhD is seemingly Saturnalian, consuming its own offspring. Finally, there is the oft-decried yet seldom addressed divorce of most graduate education in the humanities from one of the major facets of the job, namely teaching.

What is there to like about this scenario?

In response to the many problems facing graduate education – and there are still others not mentioned here – we have invited three talented Germanists to give us their thoughts on rethinking graduate studies. In each case we asked them not to promote or justify business as usual but to think about deep levels of change and where possible to report on actual programmatic transformations. Ideas are many right now; examples of successful change few.

Michael Boehringer is currently chair of graduate studies in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo. In his view, our primary mission should be “to begin thinking of our programs without a view to academe; to see the ‘alt-ac’ options – that is, alternatives to the academic career – as the primary focus of our programs, not as an afterthought for those who ‘do not make it.’” For Boehringer, it is time to retool the PhD from the ground up towards a more holistic view of education and its alignment with social needs. To this end, he recounts Waterloo’s redesign of a joint-degree program with their German partner in Mannheim and the emphasis on translingual and transcultural competence. At the heart of this joint program is the experiential emphasis on moving between cultures in Germany and Canada. Students in the master’s program spend one year at each campus, and students in the PhD program spend two years at each university, providing cohorts with valuable knowledge of the inner workings of foreign systems. These programs are not seen exclusively as feeders for academic jobs but instead as facilitators of the international exchange of knowledge.

Helmut Müller-Sievers is professor of German and director of the Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder. He oversaw the creation of a new German PhD, which has become known for its abbreviated time-to-degree model (brief by normal standards). The first point Müller-Sievers makes is the need to discard the outdated...