New Era for Ph.D. Education

By   ·  Monday, January 9, 2012

Now posted at the Inside Higher Ed website, an excerpt from Russell A. Berman’s presidential address at the 2012 meeting of the Modern Language Association.

Not all doctorate recipients will become faculty members, but all future faculty will come out of graduate programs. Do these programs serve the needs of graduate students well?

In light of the rate of educational debt carried by humanities doctoral recipients, twice that of their peers in sciences or engineering; in light of the lengthy time to degree in the humanities, reaching more than nine years; and in light of the dearth of opportunities on the job market, the system needs to be changed significantly. I want to begin to sketch out an agenda for reform.

The major problem on all of our minds is the job market, the lack of sufficient tenure-track openings for recent doctorate recipients. One response I have heard is the call to reduce the flow of new applicants for jobs by limiting access to advanced study in the humanities. If we prevent some students from pursuing graduate study—so the argument goes—we will protect the job market for others. I disagree.

Read the full essay here.

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A Discipline in Crisis: The View from Within

By   ·  Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Philosophy is a discipline in crisis, a discipline literally split, in an exceptionally asymmetrical fashion, between two competing strands that go under the names “analytic” and “Continental.” The crisis of philosophy is, in the first instance, one of legitimacy and legitimation, whereby each of the unevenly divided halves claims for itself the exclusive right to represent the discipline as a whole. While it is notoriously difficult to define the main criteria of what constitutes analytic, as opposed to Continental, thinking, the most blatant distinction is that the former relies on formal logic in measuring the quality of argumentation, while the latter generally explores a set of questions and concerns—dealing with human existence and death, for instance—where formal logical thinking falters. More broadly, analytic philosophy models itself after modern science and adopts a problem-solving approach to its subject matter, whereas its Continental counterpart explores the fundamental questions that have troubled philosophers for millennia, without putting forth exhaustive and universally applicable solutions.

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Community and the Future of Higher Education

By   ·  Tuesday, January 4, 2011

On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Maxwell Woods looks at David Pan’s “The Crisis of the Humanities and the End of the University,” from Telos 111 (Spring 1998).

Acknowledged by the London Times as the center of one of the five greatest orchestras in the world (the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra), generating some of today’s most important musicians, and declared by the renowned conductor Simon Rattle as the “future of music,” a new educational force has penetrated the international music consciousness. Yet, the educational institution producing one of the world’s most significant orchestras is not the result of the traditional bastions of Western orchestral music; instead, it is the direct consequence of community education in the barrios of Venezuela. The youth music program, “El Sistema,” functions by organizing “nucleos,” educational centers started and maintained by local leaders for high-level orchestral music that are located in and run as part of the community. Instead of being sent off to the conservatory or university, children learn how to play orchestral music in their own neighborhood from instructors who are members of the locality.

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