The Emerging Scholars Blog

Any responses to the NY Times piece End the University as We Know It?  Another piece highlighting the concerns of specialization and the slave labor by graduate students in the research universities with diminishing chance of reward after pushing through the system.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

What do people on the inside think about Mark Taylor’s, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, assessment of higher education and his proposal of rigorous regulation and complete restructuring?  Does he shake you from your complacency and open academia to a future you cannot conceive, just speak out without proposing viable next steps, or miss the boat for followers of Christ engaged in higher education? 

Note:  I was particularly interested in the transforming the traditional dissertation, providing opportunity for other formats.

Inside Higher Ed reports on two interesting studies about which students complete a PhD and why. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are completing your PhD, part of the process is completing forms to copyright your dissertation. danah boyd, a researcher who studies online social networks and recent PhD recipient herself, has written an interesting post about licensing her dissertation under Creative Commons, instead of the standard “all rights reserved” copyright. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that provides free licenses for creative works, generally to make it easier to share those works. (I use CC’s search tool frequently to find CC-licensed artwork for the ESN and Faculty Ministry websites.) The post provides a couple of reasons why you might want a CC license (e.g. it will make it easier for someone to use your dissertation as a classroom text), but also potential hurdles you might face from your school administration. It’s an intriguing idea, and I’m now considering following danah’s example with my master’s thesis.

How the University Works

This week, I began reading Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. Bousquet is an academic labor activist, and blogs at both the Chronicle’s Brainstorm and at his own site. (A side note: Bousquet is now a prof at Santa Clara, but he first received tenure at the University of Louisville, my alma mater, at the same time I was a student there. He and I did not cross paths, as far as I can remember, but I witnessed firsthand many of the same things he saw, including UofL’s deal with UPS (PDF) to employ students at UPS’s graveyard shift in exchange for financial aid.)

Bousquet views the current academic economy as systemically corrupt. Here’s his description of graduate education:

Under casualization [of academic labor], it makes very little sense to view the graduate student as potentially a “product” for a “market” in tenure-track jobs. For many graduate employees, the receipt of a Ph.D. signifies the end, and not the beginning, of a long teaching career. Most graduate students are already laboring at the only academic job they’ll ever have – hence, the importance for organized graduate student labor of inscribing the designation “graduate employee” in law and discourse.

From the standpoint of the organized graduate employee, the situation is clear. Increasingly, the holders of a doctoral degree are not so the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its by-products, insofar as that labor system exists primarily to recruit, train, supervise, and legitimate the employment of nondegreed students and contingent faculty. (21)

Do you agree with Bousquet’s assessment? Is the difficulty in finding employment for Ph.D. recipients due to a flooded job market (the standard explanation) or due to an academic system that prefers cheaper, usually non-degreed contingent faculty to degreed tenure-track faculty?

On Friday, I led an International Discussion Forum on Randy’s Last Lecture at U. of Pennsylvania, sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the Penn Graduate Christian Fellowship, and Intercultural Friends.  Note:  Discussion questions posted here in PDF.

Afterward, there was an opportunity for participants to offer suggestions for future topics.  The international students in my discussion group desired an introduction to the practical elements of navigating American culture, one significant area being the management of money while studying in the U.S.

If you have suggestions of web resources/links on this topic or some helpful tips, please post them here.  To get us started below are some pieces from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s International Student Ministry Website:

Read the rest of this entry »

Inside Higher Ed reports on new data from the Council of Graduate Schools’s Ph.D. Completion Project. It finds “significant gaps” in Ph.D. completion rates among different demographic groups. IHE’s summary:

Generally, foreign, male, and white students are more likely to earn their doctorates after 10 years than are their counterparts who are American, female or minority.

The gaps vary greatly across disciplines. For example, in engineering, life sciences, and physical sciences, men are more likely to finish their Ph.D.s within 10 years than women, but in the humanities and social sciences, women are more likely to finish.

International students are also more likely to finish than domestic students. One theory is that international students feel real pressure to finish because of their visas’ expiration dates, though one commenter notes that domestic students typically have greater access to financial resources.

The article is worth reading. Any thoughts about why these gaps exist?