It seems to me that the question of graduate study has something to do with
scholars' need for validation. As much as we would like to think otherwise,
academia is still a *very* elitist institution. I hear faculty at my school
griping about teaching loads that prevent them from doing what they think is
really important - ie their own research. And these are faculty who have a
light teaching load, relatively speaking. As one who is "in the pipeline," and
well familiar with the bleak projections, I totally agree with those who think
advisors need to be realistic with their students; I also agree that history
departments around the country need to stop mass-producing PhD's.
Unfortunately, I don't see that happening until the faculty at research
institutions, from whence most of the PhD's come, have a more realistic
understanding of their role in the educational process. I'm an almost ABD grad
student in a not so prestigious department, and even here faculty get miffed
when they have to teach more than 2 classes a semester (1 undergrad, 1 grad),
because it takes away from the time they spend on "real" work. Even as the
number of full-time faculty have declined, the number of adjunct faculty has
sky-rocketed. And here's a sorry statistic - at our university the average
adjunct faculty member makes *less* per month than the average TA...And we
wonder why the time-to-degree in the humanities - almost 9 years - is so high.
The point is, part-time and adjunct faculty are treated as the "hired help" so
that full-time, tenured faculty can focus on the work that they think is so
important (ie research and publishing) but that, in the whole scheme of things,
has almost no social value. This is not to deny that scholarship is
important, but merely to suggest that perhaps graduate education, especially in
the humanities, has in recent years lost a sense of perspective and focus.
For what it's worth,
Moira Maguire
American University