Bleak View from the Ivory Tower

By Ellie McGrath

Ph.D. candidates in the humanities face a degree of uncertainty

Mark Horowitz, 33, is a candidate for a Ph.D. in Tudor history at the University of Chicago, where graduate-school tuition is more than $7,000 annually, and the doctorate requires an average of six years of work. In 1980 Horowitz took a full-time public relations job for the university's business school to support himself and his family. With about a year's work left on his degree, Horowitz labors on his dissertation in his spare time and still hopes to become a professor. The prospects are not good. As the student population shrinks, and tenured faculty members cling to their jobs, Horowitz can look forward to a string of one-or two-year academic appointments, paying between $15,000 and $23,000 a year. Admits Horowitz: "You've got to be a hopeless romantic to get a Ph.D. in the humanities today."

While job-minded college graduates have been flocking to business and law schools for the past decade, fewer and fewer have been devoting themselves to scholarship, particularly in the humanities. Nationwide the number of doctorates awarded in the humanities has dropped from 5,049 in 1972 to 3,745 in 1981. At Harvard, for example, a total of 1,765 students applied to graduate programs in the humanities in 1969, and 251 enrolled. Last year the number of applications was down to 776, and only 82 matriculated.

Part of the problem is the high cost (up to $40,000) of a Ph.D. One out of every two graduate students is borrowing money from the Guaranteed Student Loan program and going into considerable debt. The number of federal fellowships for Ph.D. candidates decreased from about 50,000 in 1968 to fewer than 10,000 today. Says University of Chicago President Hanna Gray: "Someone attempting to get a Ph.D. is facing a very large commitment, a large financial investment and an uncertain job market."

Doctoral programs expanded at a fierce pace in the wake of the baby boom of the '50s and '60s. While only 107 institutions granted doctorates in 1940, 326 award them today. Some 30,000 new Ph.D.s graduate each year, but only a projected 100,000 academic positions will be available from 1980 to 1995.

Confronted with these figures, many universities have been cutting back large programs and ending marginal ones. Columbia eliminated Egyptology, the University of Michigan closed its geography department, and the State University of New York at Albany is phasing out its Ph.D. program in French literature. Duke decided that its education department was not distinguished enough and shut it down. As they sort and cull, most universities are committed to maintaining what they do best. "You don't destroy one of the greatest classics departments in the world because there is not a great demand for Latin teachers," maintains Richard Sutch, chairman of the graduate council at the University of California at Berkeley.

The University of Chicago has been a leader in searching for ways to preserve graduate programs, and for good reason: its grad students outnumber its undergraduates 2 to 1 (6,000 to 2,962), even though enrollment in advanced-degree programs has decreased 41% since 1969. A commission issued a report last May calling for a "broader conception of graduate education" that would make the Ph.D. "less exclusively a vocational degree for academic teachers." The report also recommended that the formal course work take two years instead of three. Although the university has increased aid to graduate students from $4.7 million in 1980 to $8.8 million for this year, the commission advocated more support for postdoctoral fellows while they hunt for teaching positions. Chicago has begun to place students in part-time jobs with business and cultural programs to give them broader experience.

Universities increasingly count on the corporate world to absorb the glut of Ph.D.s. Such universities as Harvard, Pennsylvania, Stanford, Virginia, Texas and U.C.L.A. have set up programs to retool humanities Ph.D.s for jobs in the business sector. Says Ed Escobedo, director of career planning at Stanford: "Humanists can do just about anything. They possess writing abilities, administrative abilities and the ability to work with values." Since 1978, New York University has been conducting summer crash courses in accounting, finance, economics and marketing for scholars from all over the country. Of the 271 graduates, nearly all have got jobs in the business sector. Few express regrets about leaving academia.

As graduate-school programs shrink, many deans and professors worry about the need to foster scholarship. Theodore Ziolkowski, dean of graduate studies at Princeton, argues, "It's extremely important that some of the graduate schools in the U.S. maintain the continuity of all of the academic disciplines, from Sanskrit and esoteric forms of mathematics to 'hot' subjects like computer science and biochemistry." Although enrollment in graduate programs has remained steady at Stanford, Graduate Dean Gerald Lieberman admits, "We are afraid that the best minds will go into fields where they see attractive job opportunities, such as medicine, business and engineering. There has to be a genuine concern about who is going to be the faculty of the future."

The news is not all bad, however. Some graduate-school administrators believe the decline in students has begun to stabilize. Says Gwynne Blakemore Evans, Harvard English professor emeritus: "People now enter this profession with their eyes very much open. They know the job situation, so they are perhaps a more dedicated group." In addition to drawing on their own resources, universities are turning to foundations to help students financially. Starting this spring, the New York-based Mellon Foundation will provide fellowships of up to $7,000 for 100 graduate students in the humanities.

Columbia's President Michael Sovern thinks the worst may be over for aspiring humanities professors. He points out that in 1991, when many of today's undergrads will be completing their Ph.D.s, there should be jobs opening up as the current bloc of tenured faculty members retires. Predicts Severn: "The people who begin their Ph.D.s about now will be coming up for tenure at a golden moment."

--By Ellie McGrath.

Reported by Jay G. Merwin Jr./New Haven and J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago

With reporting by Jay G. Merwin Jr, J. MADELEINE NASH This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.