Thursday, March 04, 2004
(9:15 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Down with disciplines
Invisible Adjunct's open thread on interdisciplinarity brought up several interesting points, which I will gladly summarize for you now. Kieran Healy mentioned that interdisciplinarity requires disciplines. Timothy Burke brought up a proposal for reforming graduate education: at a certain point, you decide whether to become a specialist and teach at a research-based institution, or become a generalist and teach at a liberal arts institution. Zizka mentioned the fact that disciplines didn't even exist "back in the day." Sam, a professor of political science, made several interesting arguments about the discipline system, even advocating hiring someone whose formal training is outside a discipline, contingent only on their ability to teach and write about politics. He then launched into a nice conspiracy theory (the names mentioned all refer back to previous commenters):
Ralph, let me push back a bit. I would hesitate to accept an academic division of labor as such: undergraduate liberal arts colleges do interdisciplines while graduate research universities do disciplines. The strong objection would be something like this: it is precisely the overemphasis given to disciplines at research universities that causes knowledge to be artificially limited by out-dated bureaucratic structures. Moreover, since disciplinarity is the ruling ideology of those who own the academic means of production (don't know how many will buy the analogy...), it also plays a part in the overproduction (underconsumption?) of Ph.Ds. The prime function of graduate programs is to reproduce themselves, and "contributing to the discipline" is the key rationalization, masking the reality of admitting and turning out more Ph.Ds. than the market can bear. As long as we can say we are "advancing the discipline," we can believe that admissions policies are virtuous.
ABD, hiring is certainly at the heart of the matter. I now argue in my department that we should look beyond political science Ph.Ds for people who can teach and write about politics. Shouldn't we prefer the best mind, whether or not its education is called by a disciplinary name?
So here's a shocking thought: let's abolish the PhD (I'm speaking only in the humanities -- the hard sciences seem to be doing pretty well with the current system, from my limited knowledge). Obviously most schools are tacitly admitting that an MA is adequate preparation to teach undergraduates, so just make it official. If we wanted to retain some kind of doctorate in the humanities, perhaps we could make it introduce a "second phase" of one's career, rather than the beginning -- I'm not sure exactly how to structure it, but I think it's more fair to everyone if they don't start out their career with the highest degree in their field, both because the actual work of educating undergraduates does not require a terminal degree (in point of fact) and because of the huge amount of lost time involved in achieving a terminal degree before having any assurance of long-term success in a field. Maybe we could make the MA into a two- to three-year degree instead of a one- to two-year degree. I don't know.
Part of my motivation behind this is not simply rationalizing the labor market for college-level education -- I don't understand enough about the economics involved to know whether this would help that at all. (From reading Invisible Adjunct, it would appear that nothing short of a catastrophic class-action lawsuit that destroys the academy would offer a permanent solution. [Not that I think she advocates that at all.]) I also think that entering into a teaching career after a masters degree would help to keep people from excessive specialization, which is one of my primary fears (call it fear of commitment). My objections to specialization are two-fold:
- The blindness and narrowness involved
- The inevitable disappointment of never being able to teach a course in one's specialization
Maybe this will be one of the many problems the blogosphere will solve.
