Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities

Chapter 1. Introduction

C H A P T E R 1 Introduction Gratitude is mostly due to the ways in which the Mellon grant impelled change. Signing on to the Mellon grant required faculty to reconsider their collective responsibilities and forced them to devise new requirements and monitoring procedures . Although impressionistic evidence will be cited, faculty and students will easily attest that the cultures of their graduate groups have changed with new expectations and sense of mission. —Graduate dean of a participating university in 19961 When I began my grad career, there were formal steps early in the program, but there was no further program designed to encourage students to make progress in dissertation writing or to prepare them for professional work. The department began to have a more consistent program for encouraging progress in the early ’90s. Perhaps a response to a Mellon Foundation grant. —Student in English who began graduate school in 1985 and left in 2001 IN 1991, THE Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched what would become the largest effort ever made to improve graduate education in the humanities in the United States. The Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) was “to achieve systematic improvements in the structure and organization of PhD programs in the humanities and related social sciences that will in turn reduce unacceptabl[y] high rates of student attrition and 1 The quotations introducing this chapter and those that follow are drawn from annual reports sent to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on the Graduate Education Initiative and from the Graduate Education Survey (GES) of students. See Chapter 2 for detailed descriptions of the reports and the GES. 2 C H A P T E R 1 lower the number of years that the typical student spends working towards the doctorate.”2 At the time, the humanities were, it is fair to say, uneasy not only because their central intellectual presuppositions remained in contention but also because their standing in American universities was uncertain.3 During the preceding decades, from the mid-1960s onward, “theory” in its many varieties had flourished in many fields of the humanistic disciplines and had also found advocates in some of the social sciences as well. Only departments of history, philosophy, and the “hard” social sciences remained relatively immune to these developments. Debates continued about the contributions various theoretical perspectives made to the interpretation of texts and evidence and the epistemological and political issues they raised. Inevitably, they also centered on the place of theory in graduate education, on what the humanities were for, what students should know, what skills they should command, and whether “the canon” should survive and if so, how it should be constituted. In the process, the graduate curriculum grew and became more diverse, not only in response to the succession of new theoretical perspectives being introduced but also because a multiplicity of new subject matters had emerged.4 By 1991, however, contention had mostly abated, although the objectives of humanistic inquiry and what students should be taught remained undecided. In the preceding decades, other significant trends were also discernible. Interest in the humanities among undergraduates, as gauged by the percentage of students majoring in these fields, had dropped to a low of about 10 percent in the mid-1980s and rebounded very mildly to 12 percent in 1990s.5 The number of PhDs awarded in the humanities had fallen steadily from a high of 4,873 in 1973 to a low of 2,749 in 1988, a re2 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “Foundation Announces a Major New Program in Graduate Education,” press release, March 25, 1991. 3 “Humanities and related social sciences” is so unwieldy a term that hereafter when we refer to the humanities, we intend to include the composite of fields being represented. These are art history, English, classics, comparative literature, all foreign languages, history, musicology, philosophy, and religion, along with anthropology and political science, two fields residing in the social sciences but parts of which (cultural anthropology and political theory) draw on methodological and theoretical perspectives from the humanities. The array of hybrid fields—such as medieval studies, Asian studies, Africana studies, women’s studies , and ethnic studies, with their strong multidisciplinary commitments—was already developing , but at the time these were not yet standard components of the humanities. 4 The state of play in the humanities at the time is well summarized in the essays in Alvin B. Kernan, ed., What’s Happened to the Humanities? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 5 Kernan (1997...