Louis Menand on the perversities of academia

For a tidy summary of the rough straits that higher education finds itself in -- or, at least, that Ph.D. candidates in the humanities find themselves in; college presidents seem to be doing okay--you could do worse than read Louis Menand's piece in the latest issue of Harvard Magazine. It's adapted from his forthcoming book, "The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University" (Norton).

Menand notes that the post-war boom in higher education created, by 1975, an oversupply of humanities professors and Ph.D. programs. Yet the problems are worse, or at least weirder, than a mere mismatch of supply and demand might suggest. For example, today

Fewer students major in English. This means that the demand for English literature specialists has declined. Even if a department requires, say, a course in eighteenth-century literature of its majors, the fact that there are fewer majors means that there is less demand for eighteenth-century specialists. But although the average number of credit hours devoted to courses in English literature has gone down over the last 20 years, the number-one subject, measured by the credit hours that students devote to it, has remained the same. That subject is English composition. Who teaches that? Not, mainly, English Ph.D.s. Mainly, ABDs--graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations.

Menand's conclusion? "There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs."

There is not much that's new in the article, but that very observation happens to be one of Menand's themes. Perversity has become routine, the new normal as it were:

What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about 30 years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since

So accustomed is the academy to its new reality that you can find professors and deans who will defend years spent clinging to a branch as years well spent. The people who write such pieces tend to have tenure, however.