Monday, January 9, 2012

MLA considers radical changes in the dissertation | Inside Higher Ed

MLA considers radical changes in the dissertation | Inside Higher Ed:


Dissing the Dissertation
January 9, 2012 - 3:00am

By

Scott Jaschik

SEATTLE -- The average humanities doctoral student takes nine years to earn a Ph.D. That fact was cited frequently here (and not with pride) at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Richard E. Miller, an English professor at Rutgers University's main campus in New Brunswick, said that the nine-year period means that those finishing dissertations today started them before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Kindles, iPads or streaming video had been invented.

So much has changed, he said, but dissertation norms haven't, to the detriment of English and other language programs. "Are we writing books for the 19th century or preparing people to work in the 21st?" he asked.

Leaders of the MLA -- in several sessions and discussions here -- indicated that they are afraid that too many dissertations are indeed governed by out-of-date conventions, leading to the production of "proto-books" that may do little to promote scholarship and may not even be advancing the careers of graduate students. During the process, the graduate students accumulate debt and frustrations. Russell A. Berman, a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, used his presidential address at the MLA to call for departments to find ways to cut "time to degree" for doctorates in half.

And at a standing-room-only session, leaders of a task force studying possible changes in dissertation requirements discussed some of the ideas under consideration. There was a strong sense that the traditional model of producing a several-hundred-page literary analysis dominates English and other language doctoral programs -- even though many people feel that the genre is overused and frequently ineffective. People also talked about the value of digital projects, of a series of essays, or public scholarship. Others talked about ways to change the student-committee dynamic in ways that might expedite dissertation completion.

"We are at a defining moment in higher education," said Kathleen Woodward, director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. "We absolutely have to think outside the box that the dissertation is a book or a book-in-progress."

The MLA's discussion of the dissertation is in some ways an outgrowth of a much-discussed report issued by the association in 2006 about tenure and promotion practices. That report questioned the idea that producing monographs should be the determining factor in tenure decisions. When the report was released, many MLA leaders said that the ideas the association was endorsing also called for reconsideration of graduate education, and especially of the dissertation.

As part of the process of encouraging change, the MLA recently conducted a survey of its doctoral-granting departments. Among the findings:

  • 62 percent of departments reported that their graduate schools have guidelines for dissertations, but most of those guidelines are general, dealing with issues such as timelines, composition of committees and so forth, and not dictating the form of a dissertation.
  • 33 percent of departments have written descriptions of what kind of dissertation is expected of graduate students.
  • Minorities of departments have specific rules authorizing nontraditional formats for dissertations, and even smaller minorities of departments have approved a dissertation using one of those formats.
  • Of those with traditional dissertation length requirements, the range of minimums was 150 to 400 pages. Most maximums were 400 to 500 pages.

Nontraditional Formats Permitted and Used in Dissertations in English and Other Language Departments

FormatPolicy Permitting Its UseFormat Approved in Last 5 Years
Digital project10.4%3.4%
Creative nonfiction8.8%6.8%
Suite of essays8.8%5.7%
Fiction or poetry7.7%6.8%
Translation7.7%3.4%
Public scholarship4.4%3.4%
Portfolio2.2%2.3%
Collaborative work1.1%0.6%

Sidonie Smith, professor of English at the University of Michigan and a past president of the MLA, said that the survey results demonstrated the potential for change. She said, for example, that many department leaders have in the past said that they would consider changes in dissertation requirements but for the rules of their graduate schools. In fact, there are very few graduate schools that would block change, she said.

Further, she noted that while the percentage of departments that have explicitly authorized nontraditional dissertations is small, they provide evidence that such alternatives are possible. Finally, she said that the survey showed that relatively few departments provide explicit information to graduate students on what is and is not possible. That lack of information, she said, "is disturbing."

While much of the talk here was about digital formats of scholarship, some of the possible changes in the dissertation process could also be helpful to graduate students pursuing a traditional, 250-page work of literary analysis.

David Damrosch, chair of comparative literature at Harvard University, described a reform recently instituted there that grad students in the audience seemed to find ideal. The department has started requiring that every single chapter of a dissertation be discussed, as they are produced, in a meeting attended by the author and all three committee members. Further, the department staff -- not the student -- sets up the meeting. (This is in contrast to grad students sending off copies, and receiving suggestions or silence from committee members individually.)

Damrosch said that many graduate students are delayed when some committee members don't read chapters in a timely way, and then go on to offer "totally contradictory advice, months after a draft has come in." Forcing everyone on the committee to meet in person, Damrosch said, shames them into reading the chapter on time, and to working out a common set of recommendations for the grad student.

"People are forced to focus," he said, and doctoral students "get coherent advice." The resulting revisions are much more likely to solve any problems, so that the student can keep moving forward.

More Than PDFs

Miller, of Rutgers, stressed that opening up students to digital work was a responsibility for humanities departments, given the way people increasingly communicate information. Graduate students need to learn "what it means to write for the web, with the web," which is not the same thing, he said, "as making PDFs of your [print] articles."

Whether departments want it to happen or not, the form of scholarship is going to change, he said. Rather than avoiding that, scholars should consider the ramifications, he said, by redesigning dissertations. "Once you lose the monograph, what’s the future of the long argument?" he asked. "What is the life of the mind is going to look like when it’s no longer stored on the page?" The answers will become clear when those about to become professors or public intellectuals are set free from the traditional dissertation, he said, and are encouraged to produce digital works.

Several also noted that the digital projects that might replace traditional dissertations may well be more oriented to teaching than are most monographs -- and that such an emphasis would reflect the reality that most graduate students will be finding jobs focused on teaching, not research.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, professor of media studies at Pomona College and director of scholarly communication at the MLA, said that much more needs to change than simply telling graduate students they can prepare dissertations online. Graduate students who are doing digital work are "being given very mixed messages” from faculty members on such questions as whether they should let dissertation drafts circulate digitally in advance. Some faculty members approve of what is common practice among those who work online, while others frown upon it. Some warn graduate students that if they do so they will have a tougher time finding a publisher, while others say that online discussions about one's work can "help demonstrate that there is an audience."

Digital publishing is more collaborative than the traditional model, she said. "It's a shift from thinking about individual discrete products of scholarship" to "a more constant process of communication."

Further, these shifts require changing the way professors think about their graduate students' careers. When she has talked to many professors about the shift away from monograph dissertations, Fitzpatrick said, many seem to feel "anticipatory remorse," and think they are somehow hurting their graduate students' future careers by not encouraging them to produce what could become a book. "The problem with this is that the career this graduate student will have looks different from the careers we have expected," she said.

"It should be our jobs to support new kinds of work," she said. And for faculty members trained before the digital era, she said that means a responsibility to "learn how to read in new formats," not just to look for linear arguments over hundreds of pages.

Fitzpatrick made a comment in closing that inspired several of the questions from the audience. She said that she recently gave a talk at a digital humanities center and a graduate student told her about a project, and the dilemma of whether to approach it as a book-length writing project or a digital work. "I blurted out to do the risky thing," the digital project, Fitzpatrick said. But she quickly found herself wondering if that was wise, given that she didn't know about the support this graduate student would have. So she amended her advice a little. "The thing you have passion for is the thing you should be doing," she said. "But make sure somebody's got your back."

Grad Students as 'Canaries in the Coal Mine'

The questions from the audience were notable in that they didn't challenge the central premise of the speakers that scholarly communication is changing, and that the traditional dissertation shouldn't be the only option. But people were clearly worried about whether anybody would support graduate students during this transition period. Even with all the enthusiasm about digital humanities, many grad students or junior professors fear that it only takes one Luddite member of a dissertation or hiring committee to squelch all kinds of creativity or careers.

One graduate student asked whether the digital projects would simply be added on to already full workloads. He said that it felt like graduate students were being asked "to do double the skills in half the time."

Damrosch said that faculty members needed to replace some traditional assignments with different kinds of work. He said, for instance, that in one of his courses, he has replaced one of the major papers students were required to do with a wiki instead.

The director of graduate studies at a university -- referencing the idea of having a graduate student's back -- asked if that was really possible for anyone on a graduate committee to do. How, she asked, can an adviser today be sure that a student who does a digital dissertation will do well on the job market? "Are we asking our graduate students to be canaries in a coal mine?" she asked. Another person asked for data on how people with nontraditional dissertations do in the job market, and was told that there aren't enough people to know.

Still another professor in the audience said that the changes being discussed will happen only if elite universities make them first. "Elite universities have to have everyone's back," he said. "Harvard has to change first" because, if it does, "then my provost ... will say it's O.K."

Smith, of Michigan, said that she understood the concerns about encouraging people to break out of traditional models of scholarship. But she said she worried about the idea of saying people need to be cautious until they earn tenure. "We mentor people to be careful," she said, as graduate students and as junior faculty members. "If everyone is careful all that time, they are going to be careful after they get tenure. We have to change the academy."

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  • Tom Abeles 1 hour ago
    It has always been hard for me to understand how a Ph.D. student can pick a dissertation committee and then have that committee defer to a publisher to validate the worth of the dissertation because the committee claims that the research is outside of the expertise of its members. How was the topic chosen, approved and monitored during the research being conducted and how can the work be so far outside of the committee or the entire department and external advisors' knowledge base? What is the benefit of the dissertation to the department and the university as a whole and particularly to the primary advisor of the student? Which of these advisors has been admitted to the faculty of the graduate school with the right and privilege of advising students as opposed to being ranked as a researcher instead of teaching member of the school? Why, as in the sciences, would a senior faculty member pass up the opportunity to work with a graduate student to further both party's research?

    Why would a dissertation student pay tuition to the graduate school to support a team of advisors who, in the end, have contributed little to that student's quest and even less to the literature wherein the work is being done.

    Clear up this gap and several problems will be solved at once. Students would not be admitted if there was no faculty who would be willing to responsibly take on a graduate student through admission to a phd program through the final awarding of a degree. And, the research being performed would be significant and done in a reasonable time because there is a vested interest on the part of the advisors to the student (they too would get publications)

    Finally, given open access journals, the work has eyes not only of an editorial board but the academic community at large which passes judgement in public over the lifetime and not just for the brief moment that a few hundred copies are archived in research libraries and on the shelves of a selective academic community.

    The academic community is looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope and avoiding looking into a mirror.
  • Of necessity, the article distills the 70 minutes of presentations and 20 minutes of discussion. Readers can rest assured that both the panelists and the audience members are aware that there aren't universal answers to either the question of what a dissertation is or how long it should take to complete one. Indeed, Sid Smith's presentation presented the results of the working groups' questionnaire for grad programs, which revealed that more than 40% of graduate programs do not provide their students with a written definition of what a dissertation is or with a minimal description of expectations with regards to page length.

    The function of the dissertation is determined by multiple factors, not all of which work in concert. So, too, the quality of the dissertation. Time to degree was brought up not as a factor to be considered in isolation, but as a reality that brings with it something most faculty don't consider in detail: student debt, which is tangible and measurable, and the opportunity cost, which is fuzzier, of committing to a profession with such a long probationary period and with low-entry level salaries. And demand for new faculty is, as is mentioned below, itself a function of the teaching load of faculty at R1 institutions, as well as the lack of mandatory retirement for faculty, the slumping economy, and the de facto shift to a reliance on transitory labor for a larger and larger segment of the teaching obligations at the university.

    To pull on just one string of this interconnected web: given the fact, as one commenter notes, that publishing a revised dissertation is now more difficult than ever, owing to the shrinkage of academic publishing venues, what will the fate of tenure be in those disciplines that remain focused solely on the book as a measure of having meet disciplinary standards that extend beyond one's local community? This problem is not a theoretical one nor does it rest comfortably far off in the distance: it is one that is on the minds of every junior faculty member approaching tenure at this time. It's a discussion departments will soon be wishing they'd had earlier: what to do when a promising junior faculty member comes up for tenure, with an excellent manuscript in hand, but no publisher?

  • Well, one could read the manuscript and determine from the manuscipt, rather than the assumed prestige of the publisher, whether or not it embodies the habits and qualities of mind that we desire in our colleagues, or that meet the needs of our institutions and students. We should do that whether or not traditonal opportunities for publication are shrinking or expanding.
  • Dave,

    I agree in principle, but in practice faculty tend to let the prestige of the press do a lot of the work of establishing an impartial assessment of the quality of the work--especially when the work is outside one's assumed (or imagined) area of expertise.

    And, when this moment of assessing an unpublished manuscript on its merits arrives (as it will), there will be those who read the non-acceptance as a judgment of the manuscript and not a reflection of the dramatic changes in the opportunities for getting into print. So, it's a cultural challenge: how does one maintain parity in standards during a shift in opportunities.
  • I currently acquire books for my research library in the field of education. When I'm reviewing new titles, I have absolutely no idea which ones are based on an author's dissertation. And I certainly don't have the time to go back to Proquest Dissertations to check to see if every single new book in the field is based on a prior dissertation. Even if I did know it was based on a dissertation, I'd prefer the book because I'm sure it's gone through quite a few revisions (I sure hope so) to improve the readability and presentation of the content. So where exactly are you seeing this trend of librarians not buying books that were dissertations. Do you know how librarians even know when a book is based on a dissertation? I'd like to know how they do that.When I ask colleagues about this, I've yet to find anyone who admits to this practice of not buying a book if there is an available dissertation. Yes, acquisition dollars are somewhat more scarce, but there are better ways to economize.
    Perhaps it is happening more than I know. I just haven't seen evidence of it.
  • Sonia is very right. The dissertation is supposed to be evidence that the author has the knowledge and qualities/habits of mind that we desire in a university schholar. Arguing about the form the "product" takes seems a bit trivial. We might better spend our energy discussing what those qualities/habits of mind are so we can start looking for evidence of them in every aspect of our colleagues' scholarly work. This might also be a good idea when we start thinking about who is qualified for reappointment, tenure, promotion, or what have you. We keep confusing form and substance.
  • Sandy Thatcher 6 hours ago
    The discussion at the MLA meeting seems to have proceeded in ignorance of the fact that publishing a book based on a dissertation is not so easy as it once was. Ever since dissertations went electronic and were stored by ProQuest in a database that it licenses to academic libraries, many of those libraries have decided that it makes little sense to spend scarce resources on buying books based on dissertations. Acquiring editors at universities are aware of this trend and so are reluctant to invite submission of these manuscripts. However, P&T committees continue to insist on publication of one or two books, a goal difficult to achieve in six years if one of those is not based on a dissertation. So, it does make sense to look for alternatives to writing dissertations if they will shorten the time to degree. This problem will persist unless and until scholarly publishers can transition to "open access" monograph publishing, where sales do not matter. That is also true for any kind of digital works, such as those in the Humanities E-Book Project, that still depend on library subscriptions to support their publication.---Sandy Thatcher
  • Sonia Morin 7 hours ago
    Why do we ask students to write a dissertation in a PhD program? A dissertation is THE academic mean by which a student demonstrates to a panel of experts in his field that he has met the requirements to be granted the title of a researcher. The main, if not the only, question in exploring other formats for a dissertation should be: do they allow this demonstration? If concern over time completion is indeed a real problem, it should not override that training a PhD is based on a set of academic requirements that have to be assessed. But over all, could the main issue about time completion be the quality of supervision of graduate students and the lack of explicit expectations about how they
    should progress through their program and research?

    (Edited by a moderator)

  • I don’t mean this to sound too harsh, as it sounds like some folks are honestly interested in the fate of humanities graduate students. But here goes: changing dissertation requirements will do virtually nothing whatsoever to improve the lot of graduate students. In fact, it may make things worse, insofar as making the Ph.D. an easier degree to obtain could lead to further flooding of the job market.

    We need to recognize that we have a labor problem in the humanities, not some other kind of problem – and certainly not a technology problem (spare me the burble about 19th and 21st centuries, please). We enroll too many graduate students, and we use these students to prop up the careers of those allowed to teach 2-2 loads. We need to raise teaching loads in the humanities, moving away from the R-1 model that clearly does not work for us or the undergraduate students who actually fund what we do. We need to cut the number of graduate students by large margins, too. By doing these things, we will show that we are willing to put skin in the game. Once we’ve done that, we can bargain collectively for more tenure-track lines and less contingent labor. That’s the way forward. In other words, the hard way.
  • Mgpiety 9 hours ago
    I absolutely agree with Smith's comment that if you mentor people to "be careful" until they get tenure, by that time they won't know how to be anything other than careful. Risk aversion is, I believe, a huge problem among academics. I'm skeptical, though, about the value of replacing a longer project with a shorter one. The expected length of the standard dissertation would not seem to be the problem however. Check out the table above. Creative nonfiction, an essay collection, a fiction or poetry project, or a translation could all easily fall within the traditionally expected length (i.e., 150-400 pages) of a dissertation, but these non-traditional formats for a Ph.D. project are rarely used. This issue isn't learning to think outside the book, but being more open-minded about what sort of book would be acceptable.
  • I agree: "Risk aversion is a huge problem among academics." And theproblem extends far beyond the dissertation, requiring us to empower ourdoctoral students to think like intellectual entrepreneurs.

    Johanna Hartelius and Richard Cherwitz, "Promoting Discovery andOwnership: Graduate Students as Intellectual Entrepreneurs," Getting theMost from Your Graduate Education in Communication: A Student's Handbook,2008, pp. 83-95.https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/w...

    See also:
    Richard Cherwitz and Charlotte Sullivan, "Intellectual Entrepreneurship:
    Vision for Graduate Education," Change, November/December, 2002.
    https://webspace.utexas.edu/ch...
    We have been experimenting with this approach to education at UT-Austin:
    https://webspace.utexas.edu/ch...
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