Are Humanities Grad Students Exploited?

Not on purpose, says the "Marketplace of Ideas" author. But the system is starting to hurt them nonetheless.

Question: Are humanities
degrees high-risk?

Louis Menand:  Yeah.  Well, I think the time to degree is right now the big
obstacle to entry into the professions. 
Now, the median time to degree, to PhD in the humanities is nine
years,
and that's time as a registered student. 
The time between Bachelor's degree and a PhD, the median time is
over 11
years.  So then you're still only
on a tenure ladder, you're not tenured. 
So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure.  So that's a very long period of what's
essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity. 
I don't think that's very healthy for any business, certainly not
for a
business where you want people to be original and creative and take
risks.  So I think that's a big problem, and
the humanities seems to be doing worse than the other disciplines,
though the
other disciplines also have increased time to degrees.

Now, part of the reason for that is that it's
difficult to
get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as
teaching
assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where
they're
graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because
they're
very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the
institution's
interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I
don't
think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system
is
starting to work.  That's a bad
morale problem and it's something that gets into the mentality of the
ABD's, who
do a lot of this teaching, and it's not good for, again, not good for
collegiality, and not good for intellectual culture.

So I think everybody recognizes at this point that
we've
gotten ourselves into a really weird situation where the supply curve
and the
demand curve are just not, you know, where they should be and it would
be very
good for the profession generally, and the humanities in particular,
because we
have a lot of other things that we're struggling with, if we could
get the
professional training part of it a little more rational and efficient.

Question: Are humanities
degrees high-risk?

Louis Menand:  Yeah.  Well, I think the time to degree is right now the big
obstacle to entry into the professions. 
Now, the median time to degree, to PhD in the humanities is nine
years,
and that's time as a registered student. 
The time between Bachelor's degree and a PhD, the median time is
over 11
years.  So then you're still only
on a tenure ladder, you're not tenured. 
So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure.  So that's a very long period of what's
essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity. 
I don't think that's very healthy for any business, certainly not
for a
business where you want people to be original and creative and take
risks.  So I think that's a big problem, and
the humanities seems to be doing worse than the other disciplines,
though the
other disciplines also have increased time to degrees.

Now, part of the reason for that is that it's
difficult to
get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as
teaching
assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where
they're
graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because
they're
very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the
institution's
interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I
don't
think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system
is
starting to work.  That's a bad
morale problem and it's something that gets into the mentality of the
ABD's, who
do a lot of this teaching, and it's not good for, again, not good for
collegiality, and not good for intellectual culture.

So I think everybody recognizes at this point that
we've
gotten ourselves into a really weird situation where the supply curve
and the
demand curve are just not, you know, where they should be and it would
be very
good for the profession generally, and the humanities in particular,
because we
have a lot of other things that we're struggling with, if we could
get the
professional training part of it a little more rational and efficient.