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November 27, 2009
The Academy - why we don't really love it
Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years. And the more self-limiting the profession, the harder it is to acquire the credential and enter into practice, and the tighter the identification between the individual practitioner and the discipline.
And that's from the first page. Read the whole thing - an essay by Louis Menand about the academy.
via Fr. Philip
Posted by CrankyProfessor at November 27, 2009 10:12 AM
Comments
Very interesting article. I have a Boggle of PhD's within my social circle and they run the spectrum from content to disgruntled. The PhD in social work admires another friend who crafted a career without giving a whit about tenure. My PhD candidate nephew (linguistics) walked away from his dissertation and found employment in a totally unrelated field.
I know two PhD's in anthropology and one in archaeology, the latter is a digger-for-hire working at small historical sites having fallen off the tenure track.
If you get a chance rent the documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" by Werner Herzog. He interviews the people and scientists working in Antarctica. There are PhD's washing dishes and one memorable PhD candidate in linguistics who not only walked away from his work but destroyed it as a political statement. Very interesting stuff and no fluffy penguins!
Posted by: Suzanne at November 28, 2009 8:33 AM