Month: May 2017

Changing the Dissertation Will Not Save the Humanities or Some Other Nonsense

Let’s say we get rid of the monograph-style dissertation or that we at least open up the range of possibilities. For a while now, at least since David Damrosch suggested it in We Scholars, the obvious alternative has been a series of linked articles, which together would add up to something like the same amount of work previously required by the dissertation.

The first thing to say is this: no they won’t. The monograph dissertation is a kind of writing for which most PhD students are critically unprepared (see Hayot 36–46). It is several times longer than anything they’ve ever written in their lives. It requires a level of psychological concentration and attention, as well as intellectual management, of a radically different order from the one required for articles. Articles are deeper and more complex, richer than seminar papers; monographs are all these things, and eight times longer. (As always, we are speaking of ideals here.) So we’re not talking about an even trade.

But even if that’s all true, it answers the wrong question. The question is not, “What should we do to make sure people who get a PhD in the future are doing the same amount of work as the people who get one today?” The question is, “What is the right kind of work, done competently, for which we should award someone the PhD?” To answer that question, we need to ask what the PhD is for.

Leave aside for the moment the idea of careers outside the academy, or indeed of careers at all. What the PhD says is that someone can (A) do original, publishable scholarship in their field and (B) teach university-level courses appropriate to their training. (I know that for some folks the second claim is arguable, but I don’t want to argue about it here.)

Now, everything depends on how you frame (A). For instance, if I say, “Do original, book-length scholarship in their field,” then you can’t do without the dissertation. So already, by leaving out “book-length,” I have framed the situation so as to make a collection of articles a possible substitute. But if I put “book-length” in, we have nothing to talk about.¹

So we want people to show that they can (A) do original, publishable scholarship in their field. The monograph dissertation has traditionally been taken to fulfill this part of this formula. We know that it has not done a perfect job; all the work most students have to do to turn their dissertations into books suggests as much (as does all the advice about how to do it). So it’s not as if the system we have right now has a perfect relation to the outcome the PhD is supposed to guarantee; plenty of dissertations never get published. At the same time, we must recognize that the system has produced a great deal of success, including many wonderful first books.

Our goal would then be to find another system that would at least do equally well, that would testify to our desired outcome at the same or better rate than the current one. The point would be not to have to replace the system we have but to have two options, recognizing that even if the outcomes in terms of the profession were identical, the systems might have very different outcomes for students. The monograph is hard for reasons that have as much to do with psychological qualities and personal luck as with intellectual ones; a system that does not put that kind of pressure on its writers would allow people for whom it is difficult to write books, but who are perfectly capable of producing publishable, article-length scholarship, to earn PhDs. The argument then would be that, if our agreed-upon goal is to give PhDs to people who can do original, publishable scholarship, a system that has an article option and a monograph option would make a difference not to our capacity to meet our pedagogical and professional goals but to our capacity to make those goals accessible to a wider variety of people.

All this falls apart if you don’t think that a collection of articles meets whatever threshold for original, publishable scholarship you have. If you have such a threshold, it’s likely to involve something like a sense of length or weight, an idea that someone should make a sustained contribution to a single field, as some tenure language has it. Here I want to urge you to give that up. Why should you care whether someone contributes to one field or to four? There are limits, after all; no one will write twenty articles in a career on totally different subjects. So … what’s the objection? That someone who publishes an article on Shakespeare and another on Matteo Ricci can’t be totally serious about either Ricci or Shakespeare? If the work is publishable and peer-reviewed, presumably it’s serious; or you could read it yourself and decide. But knowing in advance anything about its seriousness seems unlikely.

All this explains how I, who write books and believe in books, have come to think that we need to get away from the requirement of the monograph dissertation while leaving it as an option. Notice what I have not said: I have not said that books are old media, or tired, or only read by a few people; I have not claimed that any new system will have to open itself to the public humanities or be published digitally; I have not argued that we need to do this to save the humanities or to make them relevant again. My only claim is pedagogical and professional: given how hard it is to write a monograph, the current system favors lucky people. It would be better if, minimally, and as long as the new alternative met the fundamental demands measured by a PhD, we allowed for two kinds of luck (for it is lucky, too, to be able to write articles). Better for our students, and better for the profession and for scholarship.

Why Probably No One Will Do Anything

I say that a collection of articles can prove that someone can do original, publishable scholarship as well as a dissertation. But of course I don’t know, and neither do you. No one will know until someone tries it. And right now the main thing keeping people from trying it is that no one wants to be first.

No one wants to be first because they are afraid that it will seem as if they have relaxed standards. In this way the monograph dissertation threatens to become a Veblenian good, the kind of thing that certain institutions retain because they can afford it and because affording it allows them to display their wealth.

That is not what leadership is, or what courage is. Having convictions means having them even if it hurts. My guess, honestly, is that making this kind of change would not hurt that much anyway, that it could enhance an institution’s reputation as much as damage it. But even if not: what does it hurt? Your reputation, because your reputation is a proxy of your university’s? Your department’s inflow of graduate students? I suppose it might, though I could see things going the other way. What about their professional outcomes? Well … yes. That might happen. Because the major disadvantage of writing a collection of articles for the PhD will be that it makes it difficult for the student to get a job at a place that requires a book for tenure.

So it may all come down to a collective willingness to change tenure requirements, which would require, in turn, our recognizing the fact that tenure requirements are not, as some seem to imagine, either historically immutable or out of faculty control. In an era in which so little feels like it is in our control, and in which it feels so hard to imagine how to open up the corridors of social power to a wider variety of people than before, the really fantastic news is that these are changes that departments and faculty members can make, this very year, if we are interested in improving things, and brave enough to do it.

The History of Tracking PhDs and Why We Need to Do More of It

Tracking projects seem to be everywhere and nowhere. In the University of California system, the Office of the President surveys PhDs one year out from their degree through the UC Doctoral Placement Survey.² Add to this the efforts of the federally sponsored Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) and the many campus-based graduate divisions that administer an exit survey to PhDs upon graduation, the purpose of which is to identify employment plans as volunteered by recent graduates.³ Across the UC system, several graduate divisions and humanities centers have begun to track PhDs who pursue varied careers after receiving their degree. Among them is the UC Davis Humanities Institute. Molly McCarthy, associate director of the institute, has led a cross-college team to collect data about humanities graduates. She notes that “much of [the team’s] success collecting this data is due to graduate students taking the lead” and negotiating with their departments to pursue the information, although “no one has yet figured out what to do with the data.” To date, no comprehensive analysis of the UC Davis data has been performed, and this outcome is not unusual; collected employment data often languish in databases, not readily available even to those centers and departments who collected the data. This scenario is surprising, considering the extraordinary labor required by tracking projects and the value of these data for current graduate students and their university-based support systems. In some cases, tracking projects have either stopped entirely or exist in a bureaucratic limbo, collected but invisible to current graduate students, faculty members, and administrators. Of course, when legal departments get involved, the individual data collected by departments cannot be shared on Web sites and in other public forums without the consent of each student mentioned by name, for reasons of privacy.

Notable among recent large-scale tracking initiatives are projects of the Humanities Indicators, the Scholarly Communication Institute, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association; the Ph.D. Placement Project; and the TRaCE Project.⁴ The AHA and the Humanities Indicators, for example, compile national data and offer a broad perspective on the state of the profession. This data collection is an important first step toward a culture change in the academy, since it begins to make visible the range of work environments of PhDs in non-tenure-track teaching positions. But is this identification enough? Those of us who have already engaged in this data-collection process think not. A standardized approach to data collection must begin with the intent to analyze the data and continue with the goal of discovering the nuanced stories behind the numbers. We need to begin by asking ourselves what we want to know about these graduates and their careers. Questions would include the following: What kind of longitudinal information might be helpful to track as programs advise graduate students on future career paths? What challenges do graduates face as they transition to life after graduation, and how can programs better support them? What level of career satisfaction do our graduates report one year, five years, and ten years after having received the doctorate? How do graduates pursue a variety of scholarly activities after leaving the university? What kind of resistance do they face, if any, upon entering the work world outside the academy? The analytic foci will vary from university to university and from discipline to discipline, but they should always involve input from current graduate students.

At Humanists@Work, we have begun a process to track humanities PhDs across the UC system through our Humwork initiative, a project organized by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).⁵ Humwork includes current and recent graduate students in developing programming that makes a variety of career paths and training opportunities accessible to humanities MAs and PhDs. Humanists@Work hosts an online publishing and resources platform (humwork.uchri.org), runs biannual statewide workshops, and offers paid summer internships and advisory committee positions to support the professionalization of humanities PhDs and include them as primary collaborators in the process of developing professionalization activities and conversations. We also are beginning a collaboration with language and literature departments across the UC system to track the employment placement of graduated PhDs. Yet, throughout our Humwork programming, we have had little luck discovering where our graduates are working and how they are using their advanced degrees outside the academy. How can we program professionalization seminars and all-day workshops, much less create entirely new graduate programs, without information about how and where our PhD alumni are at work in the world?

To gain the understanding required for good professionalization training of our humanities PhDs, we developed the project Humanists@Work: Where Are the Humanities PhDs? Over the past two summers, three humanities PhDs have worked as interns to develop and update a database of humanities PhDs at work. These initial forays into tracking served as the basis for the MLA’s Connected Academics tracking project we are pursuing for the next two years. By partnering with two language and literature departments at eight of the ten UC campuses to track PhDs, we will collect data that reach back to at least 2011 and continue to track students after they graduate.⁶ We hope that in partnership with these departments we can begin to change the culture as it pertains to the acceptance of, and support for, careers outside and alongside the academy. To support our students as they transition to careers after graduate school, we must at the very least acknowledge the history of PhDs at work.

Why Track? Why Now?

Our efforts are just the beginning of a process that tracks PhDs, even those who leave the program with ABD status (“all but dissertation”), to enable universities to tell an accurate story about the diverse impact and importance of graduate programs. Placement information of former students allows organizers of professionalization initiatives and departmental programs to analyze for what careers graduate education has prepared students.⁷ Program directors can use the information gained from tracking graduates to actively engage with the career journeys of current students, even before students take their first graduate seminar and throughout the rest of their studies, and also collaborate with students to articulate the relevance of graduate education for a variety of work spheres. Program organizers might also use placement information to reflect on how graduate pedagogies can better support students as they transition to different professional positions—and in so doing adopt a proactive response to the current reality of life after graduate school. Ultimately, an institutional drive to track PhDs will empower students to make choices that align with their financial, social, and geographic needs and desires by providing them with access to a network of PhDs at work in the world and communicating to them that diverse outcomes are an acceptable, and sometimes celebrated, result.

By tracking students, directors will be in a better position to answer questions about the impact of their graduate programs: What are the trends or notable details regarding where students go to work postdegree? What role, if any, do we (as a department? as faculty members? as graduate students with diverse interests and work histories?) have to play in tracking placement information? How has the program, either purposely or inadvertently, trained PhDs to work in a variety of careers? How might we rethink our graduate curriculum to address the emerging needs for specific skills, expertise, and experiences for potential careers as identified by graduate students and as reported by graduates? To be useful to students and program organizers, answers to these questions must take into account the long and diverse history of humanities PhD career pathways and acknowledge an academic job market that has not and cannot supply all PhDs with tenure-track teaching positions.⁸ As departments are asked to create learning outcomes and objectives for undergraduate and graduate students, tracking PhDs speaks to an institutional accountability for the graduate student population in particular. This accountability, however, must extend beyond our supporting students to land tenure-track teaching positions at the highest-level research (R1) universities to encompass the vast spectrum of professional trajectories. Doing so requires us to confront the issue of how departmental and university prestige has been measured historically and to propose new models for evaluating institutional and individual success.

Tracking all graduate students is an institutional responsibility for which programs and universities must hold themselves accountable. Departments tend to reliably collect data from graduates who have gone on to obtain tenure-track teaching positions, and this information is celebrated on the placement page on departmental Web sites. But what of those graduates who never intended to pursue teaching positions or who decided to forego the precarious journey toward an increasingly improbable tenure-track position?⁹ Where are these PhDs now, and in what kind of work are they engaged? What kind of salary, and retirement, are they earning? Information about these graduates is rarely included on departmental Web sites, and departments and universities provide professionalization activities without significant knowledge of their former students’ professional trajectories. In part, this situation has something to do with an antiquated notion of placing students in jobs.¹⁰ All too often, the PhDs who find employment beyond the academy did so by way of their personal networks, with little help from faculty advisers and mentors.¹¹ But the missing stories of many PhDs also speaks to very real, if outdated, notions of professional success and failure in the academy and of what we are training graduate students to do. Even if fifty percent of PhDs find tenure-track employment upon graduation (and many argue that this number does not reflect current conditions), the other half will go on to secure other kinds of positions. In truth, we don’t know what we are training the other fifty percent of students to do. And although there are both real and perceived repercussions for certain kinds of placements, there are also a variety of intellectual, social, and institutional benefits for engaging in the difficult work of tracking and reflecting on the information we receive about our PhDs at work.

Tracking will yield data that can counterproductively influence rating a department’s record of success, should that notion of success follow a paradigm that privileges R1 tenure-track teaching over other forms of teaching and teaching in any form over other kinds of work. But for those programs and departments that value the influence of advanced humanistic education in arenas beyond the academy, these data will reveal the range of career outcomes that have resulted from the programs’ or departments’ graduate education and perhaps will reflect on their role in preparing students for nonacademic careers.¹² David Laurence suggests that a program’s view of placement information

comes down to a question of the attitude or affect that accompanies the recognition of the fact that doctoral program graduates make careers beyond the postsecondary classroom and teaching. Does the fact inspire a celebratory sense of success, both for the individual graduate and on the part of the doctoral program and its faculty? Or is it met with mournful resignation and a reflexive sense that, rightly judged, placements and careers other than the career in scholarship and teaching as a tenured faculty member can only be evaluated as failure—a failure on the part of the individual graduate, of the program and the members of its faculty, and also of the wider profession? And what are the underlying suppositions and convictions that produce one or another affective connection to the placement facts?¹³

Laurence identifies the range of potential responses to the “fact[s]” made real through tracking data. One wonders, however, how often such a reflexive conversation about reactions to placement data is taking place anywhere in the university. Would data collection prompt such reflection, and, if so, how might quantitative and qualitative data affect the range of affective responses? Ultimately, we must move the conversation about career diversity beyond the theoretical and put faces, names, and careers to those missing PhDs who do not grace departmental Web sites, and collecting comprehensive data is an important first step.

What Tracking Contributes to the University

Knowing how PhDs are at work in the world allows us to begin to understand the relevance of our existing graduate education programs. We can start by acknowledging the places of employment and job titles of our former students; although this information isn’t enough to help us understand how graduate training prepared them for these careers, it does open the door to new voices. This acknowledgment is a symbolic opening of the doors of the university, for sure, but it could expand to take into account the graduate school and post-graduate-school experiences of these former students, as a way to identify how graduate programs may develop to better support their current students. What will we find when we collect, compile, and analyze employment trends for a particular department? And at this point it is critical to acknowledge that tracking our students and inviting their narratives back into the university asks us to examine our institutions and our roles in them as much as it asks us to acknowledge our former students. Our histories are intertwined.

We are beginning this process of analysis at Humwork. Figure 1 shows the distribution of career fields and highlights a few professional titles from a representative sample of the more than two hundred UC humanities and humanistic social science PhDs at work in nonteaching positions. The size of each circle corresponds to the number of individuals working in a career field; not surprisingly, most humanities PhDs who do not obtain tenure-track teaching positions pursue other education-related career fields or work in the nonprofit sector. Though interesting, especially in terms of the smaller circles, the graphic and the data behind it suffer from incompleteness and incomparability. The graphic is incomplete in that it only includes data for those who we’ve been able to identify as former UC humanities graduate students and are findable through online searches (primarily through Google and LinkedIn). It also suffers from combining outcomes in a way that doesn’t attend to difference, placing students from more than thirty departments across ten large universities side by side, without attention to differences between, say, an art history PhD from UC Santa Barbara and a literature PhD from UC Santa Cruz, or between those who graduated over a decade ago and those who graduated last June. The graphic also does not include the very large group of PhDs serving in adjunct positions in the academy.¹⁴ This graphic is one example of how a national or statewide tracking project may be instructive but in partnership with campus-based tracking could articulate a more nuanced, and less abstract, reality.

Figure 1

Through tracking our PhDs we might also discover different models for how the humanities matter—beyond the university. Of course the humanities do matter, though we increasingly find ourselves in the position of defending their relevance to a variety of publics. Ironically, this defense occurs alongside a very public celebration by tech firms of the value of advanced study in the humanities (see, e.g., Wadhwa; Reisz; Horowitz). And yet I’m not sure that many departments can identify how their most highly educated humanistic thinkers—besides the ones engaged in university teaching positions—do contribute to working worlds beyond the university. Again, discovering where our former students employ their advanced humanistic training, and the publics they serve, is a good start. If we take our tracking initiatives even further and spend time evaluating how these individuals have or are currently shaping their organizations, the stories of current PhDs at work will provide compelling cases for why and how the humanities matter. Furthermore, this kind of engagement with PhDs outside the academy will make space for these stories to return to the university, simultaneously paving a variety of career paths for current graduate students and allowing for the existence of more capacious institutional messages regarding the importance of the humanities. It’s critical that as we engage in tracking we balance numbers with narratives.

This kind of work is under way across the UC system. We are pursuing both broad-based initiatives that track humanities PhDs globally and localized, campus-specific projects that focus on individual graduate students and programs. Our LinkedIn group, PhDs in the Humanities, for example, is an opportunity for humanities PhDs anywhere in the world to connect with one another, learn about different professional trajectories, share experiences, and network. From a data-collection standpoint, we see great potential in LinkedIn as a venue to evaluate how PhDs are at work and to learn more about how they pursue particular professional development as they move throughout their careers. We also see the benefit of LinkedIn for current graduate students, who have asked for help imagining potential career fields. We are currently offering programming that demonstrates how LinkedIn can be used to search for jobs and how students can build profiles that effectively represent doctoral-level education in the humanities.

At Humwork, we’ve also engaged in a series of narrative-based projects to highlight individual PhDs. Though we recognize the importance of thinking about the many, including broad surveys of PhDs, we emphasize individual stories when discussing and representing career diversity. Our Stories from the Field interview series was created, in part, to break the silence around pursuing nonacademic or alternative (“alt-ac”) careers. In many ways, this series is the inverse of the big national data projects. Through this series we ask recent UC humanities PhDs employed in careers outside or alongside the academy to talk about their current positions and reflect on their paths from the doctorate to employment. Although we believe that tracking these individuals is critical, we want to know more than just where they went and what they’re doing postgraduation. We want to hear about how they made the transition from the academy to government or a nonprofit organization, including the culture change that comes with entering a new profession. What served them well in graduate school? What would they do differently? How, for example, have they meaningfully contributed to struggles for social justice or educational reform?¹⁵ Stories from the Field also seeks to introduce current and future students of humanities doctoral programs to the range of careers pursued by peers who have similar education and training. Through this series we’re beginning to plot, drawing lines around experiences and through various career paths in the hopes of discovering what the field of humanists at work looks like.

Plotting this field is partly a numbers game and as such is prone to easy display in charts and graphs, which capture the number of PhDs, the number employed in various sectors, and the year in which they graduated. But a comprehensive tracking project can be so much more than a list of such entries. As part of our history, the PhDs who have pursued careers beyond the academy represent an enlargement of our plot, and in a way that enlargement invites diversity into the humanities more generally. To understand the trajectory of higher education as it influences organizations outside and alongside the academy, we must begin by tracking the data and attending to the numbers by asking questions that further our interests. As individuals who are already generating complex questions that open up the data in promising ways and prompting action on behalf of their programs to collect and work with the data, graduate students may be ideal partners for this project. We can’t, however, ask our graduate students to do this work on their own. Tracking must be a partnership that transcends hierarchical divisions of labor in the academy, reaches across campus departments and units, and ultimately connects with professional organizations. There are so many reasons we should track humanities graduates: to diversify the stories we tell about the impact of our graduate education, to add to our public case for why and how the humanities matter, to honor our PhDs as individuals with interests and capacities that extend beyond the university, and to make space for faculty and staff members to reflect on our responsibilities to doctoral students. Tracking can bridge the gulf that awaits PhDs when they leave the academy and pursue other kinds of careers, but it must be done with these purposes in mind and with the commitment to work with and share the data and stories as widely as possible.

Of course, the haphazard approach to course work of our graduate school experience arose from the technology of the era. We were pre-Internet in the late eighties and early nineties, and computers had barely made their way into graduate education in the humanities. And while the Internet did indeed enable better communication, it was mostly through e-mail. For all its convenience, e-mail constitutes a clumsy flow of communication, subject to all manner of error and lag when it comes to working with mentors and students, especially in the time-sensitive world of graduate academic progress. Yet here we are, twenty-five years later, and e-mail is still the dominant mode for the sharing of time lines, the exchange of drafts and comments, and the communication between mentor and student that results in career opportunities. Even as personal digital repositories, managed work flows, and aggregating tools were being developed for use in industry or other areas of the university, they were too slow, only marginally relevant, or beyond the capabilities of the student for them to be serviceable. In essence, students were—and still are—subject to the inefficiencies of the back office: filing cabinets, the attention of an office staff, and the stability of administrative leadership.

The landscape has changed in profound ways since the early age of the Internet, both in higher education generally and in humanities doctoral programs specifically. Because many PhDs in English are competing for ever fewer jobs, there is new and increasing pressure on programs to make sense of the time and effort they require of doctoral students. Why spend nine years on a degree that doesn’t lead to the kind of job we went to graduate school to try to attain? Many of the curricular reforms in the humanities proceed from the perspective that we should streamline programs: reducing the number of required courses, making exams measure what happens inside rather than outside the classroom, reformulating the dissertation so that it directly demonstrates the skills we want the holders of PhDs to have even if it is not an original contribution to scholarship.

We want to suggest an additional approach. If we empower students and their faculty advisers to pull together and demonstrate to the world a strong independent program of study, then we have in effect created a personalized curriculum that’s akin to the personalized medicine that will shape health care over the next twenty years. We propose using technology to empower students and their faculty—in particular, digital portfolios.

In our positions as dean of humanities and associate dean for graduate initiatives at Arizona State University, we’ve used that rare alignment of administrative wherewithal, friendship, and shared history to attempt to rethink graduate progress. We are developing these ideas with the help of Connected Academics, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation–funded MLA initiative to help doctoral students in languages and literatures better understand career options, inside and outside the academy. We designed ASU’s part of Connected Academics without the digital portfolio system—that came later. But we knew we wanted to think through how curriculum might be reshaped to serve students’ real needs. We didn’t want to impinge on the authority of the faculty to set the requirements for the PhD, and we certainly did not want to be in the business of approving courses to ensure that they built on one another or of telling faculty members what to teach. Instead, we thought about a tool that would allow the curriculum to develop more or less organically, from the students’ point of view. The goal is to see if we can help students be metacognitive in their approach to their growth, to see their own decisions (both deliberate and improvisational) as part of a whole.

A series of questions drove our project: Can we help students understand connections between graduate courses? Can we invent a tool that could help reshape pathways through the degree, and beyond, to make better sense and provide more opportunities? How does the curriculum work with the student to produce a network of possible successes? A networked curriculum would, conceivably, involve both better design on the part of the faculty and more conscious empowerment of the students in our doctoral programs.

We have avoided altering the core curricula of our programs in the English department and the School of International Letters and Cultures. Instead, we are developing curricular add-ons (which will likely become part of the core) and other processes that help students network their knowledge in newly useful ways. Emphasizing core skills and competencies might be anathema to a humanities community that rightly resists the instrumentalization of higher education. Over the years, however, we’ve yet to observe a doctoral curriculum in danger of succumbing to a sense of the PhD as a commodity. Our goal is to use skills and competencies to transform standard parts of most curricula, including course requirements and comprehensive exams. We want the curriculum to help humanities scholars serve students and our communities outside the academy.

And we envision digital portfolios, flexible in what they can provide in both internal organization and external communications to the world, as helping students accomplish the key goals of design and empowerment. The implications of our efforts will, we believe, be far-reaching and transformative.

At their most basic level, digital portfolios are structured spaces that can bring together student work as it develops over time, serving as both repository and representation of the academic products of graduate training. Digital portfolios offer the ability to achieve three objectives for students in our Connected Academics PhD programs: the construction and continuous adjusting of a coherent curriculum, the provision of a space for student-faculty communication and collaboration, and the fostering of flexible options for presenting a student’s abilities and accomplishments to the university’s publics and their communities.

ASU is working with the industry leader Digication so that students will have control over the look and feel of their portfolios. Students will create a portfolio for internal use by mentors and advisers, bringing together their electronic program of study, a time line of their progress, and their set of work completed for courses and examinations. Using the Digication platform layered above ASU’s PeopleSoft-based tracking and documentation system, students and their advisers construct a curriculum that is personalized to their needs and interests and then share it with the other faculty members. The Digication system tracks a student’s progress in ways that are too granular and program-specific for PeopleSoft tracking. And because the portfolio allows a set of the student’s documents to be curated over time, the external-facing element presents the student’s progress as scholar. Mentors will not only be able to see and understand the scholarly progress of their students but also, through a process created by our project and the university’s technology office, be able to enter into a scene of social reading, by commenting on work in progress shared through Google Docs for Education.

Students will be able to construct outward-facing portfolios for various purposes, customizing the content and appearance of the portfolios they provide to potential employers and other audiences. By sending a link along with a letter of inquiry or job application, students will be able to control (while at ASU and for endless years after) what they share about themselves with particular audiences. There is no limit on the number of portfolios that can be created.

The use of digital portfolios will marry the capacity of new forms of scholarly communication as a mode of social reading and composition with the prudent need for administrative tracking at various stages of the process. Indeed, the simultaneous visualization of tasks, progress on ongoing projects (e.g., dissertation chapters), and public-facing documents (e.g., vitae) enabled by digital portfolio is what is so simple and so powerful about it. Digital portfolios provide easy access to a time line of milestones and put the space of composition and revision within easy reach.

We are most excited, though, about the impact digital portfolios will have on the student’s course of study. It will certainly be possible for students and their mentors to continue with the atomized noncurriculum we describe above. But we believe that digital portfolios will transform how most students understand their progress through a program. Instead of being shoved in a drawer or revised and sent out for publication as a discreet product, a seminar paper will become part of a continually revised narrative of intellectual development registered in the portfolio. As our PhD programs come to understand the power of these digital portfolios, we believe that faculty members will choose to assess student progress through analysis of accumulated student work rather than through the typical milestone examinations. Whether that work consists of seminar papers or other forms of scholarly communication, it will be contained in this one place as an accessible record of a student’s life of scholarship.

Faculty members control the PhD curriculum, and that control is essential not only to their teaching careers but to their intellectual legacy within their fields. The way we educate our doctoral students will be our greatest legacy in scholarship. The fields we research and teach as humanities scholars will change a great deal over the next few decades as demographics and technology provide new ways of seeing and new media for sharing our knowledge. No one faculty member—no one department—will be able to create the change we need. Through the Connected Academics project generally, we hope to be pushed to make the right major changes in all aspects of our doctoral programs. Through assessing where our students are and where they are going, we will be able to shape the courses we offer, the research assignments we require, and the ways in which we communicate what we know.

I interned during the same summer that I was going through the application process at McKinsey. I was more covert about my professional goals and intentions within my department. But I was able to be open and honest with my colleagues at UCHRI, who supported me in those goals and wanted me to succeed. The supportive environment made a huge difference, as did the work I was doing each day in tracking the many career outcomes of PhDs. That work reaffirmed for me that I was on a plausible and valuable path [beyond the academy].

Robinson received strong mentoring and institutional support, both tangible and otherwise. And her work was of clear value to the needs and long-term goals of UCHRI.

Whereas the UCHRI program takes place during the summer, when doctoral students are often seeking employment, a new initiative at the University of Miami extends over the full academic year. The program, called Graduate Opportunities at Work (UGrow), offers opportunities for doctoral students to take nonteaching positions in campus units outside their departments. UGrow has thus found creative ways to cover costs for doctoral student tuition and stipends for professional development outside the traditional teaching assistantship or research assistantship model. Tim Watson, who established UGrow in August 2015 and in one year has nearly doubled (from six to eleven) the number of opportunities it offers, explains, “The financial side of things was a hurdle to overcome at first. Departments have to release students from their teaching responsibilities. The hosting unit has to agree to reimburse the student’s department, and the department can then use those funds either to replace that teaching assignment or for other purposes.” The value to the hiring departments has become quite clear, he reported, as the doctoral students have already made high-level contributions in their new roles and have all worked semi-autonomously after an initial period of training.

Watson has placed doctoral students in campus units from the University Libraries—which, he notes, have been a key partner in establishing the program—to Advancement.² Brad Rittenhouse, a PhD candidate in English with an undergraduate background in computer science, is a UGrow Fellow in the Center for Computational Science at Miami, where he works on digital humanities projects related to his dissertation research. “Over the course of the year, I have gotten a lot of great experience in the coding language R—in the quantitative branch of DH, in other words,” he says. “I focus on how you read texts with computers, and what kind of reading this allows you to do.” Rittenhouse notes that professional development opportunities for doctoral students can be equally engaging whether they resonate with their dissertation research or open an entirely new line of professional inquiry.

We hope and expect that this trend of internships for doctoral students will continue. At the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State University, the Graduate Internship Program (GRIP) is designed to connect graduate students in the liberal arts with university units that can gain most from their skills and expertise. Students are hired for one or two semesters of twenty hours of work per week; costs for tuition and stipends are shared between sending and hiring departments. One of the key strategic requirements of the program—one that costs nothing in financial terms—is that the internship must be endorsed by the student’s dissertation adviser. This is all-important because, as the MLA report underscores, many faculty members continue to believe that success is only achieved if those with doctorates aspire to and are offered tenure-track positions at well-known institutions of higher education.

Finally, at Arizona State University there is the Humanities Doctoral Internship Program, a part of the Connected Academics initiative. Shannon Lujan, a PhD candidate in English and a Connected Academics Research Fellow at ASU, explains that the program is establishing a variety of opportunities for doctoral students, including an “Administrative Program Operations internship, where students will assist and learn from deans, department chairs, and program directors.” This internship will be designed specifically to “prepare students for a variety of careers,” she says. All these new programs offering internships are broadening what counts as success for doctoral students in the humanities.

At the same time, programs are being created that expand the traditional meaning of the term fellowship to include forms of professional development beyond research support. The term confers prestige on its recipients; to be given a fellowship is often to have been competitively selected to undertake what is viewed by a committee as important and difficult work. Within the academy, and within the higher education sector more broadly, a fellowship is considered a mark of distinction. But beyond the borders of a research university, the term internship seems to resonate more strongly. We thus understand the use of the term internship in the programs mentioned above to be a strategic choice, connecting doctoral students with wider audiences across sectors. Similarly the use of fellowship—in its expanded form as practice-based work—is itself a strategic choice.

“Give Us a Voice in Our Own Future,” the title of an August 2015 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education by James Van Wyck and Joseph Vukov, captures the ethos of emerging practice-based fellowships. Van Wyck and Vukov are the first doctoral students in the Fellowship in Higher Education Leadership program at Fordham University. The fellowship offers graduate students a two-year experience working alongside senior administrators at the university. The key term is alongside. Fellows in the program are tasked with high-level program and curriculum development; “the hallmark of this fellowship,” they write, “is the voice and responsibility it gives to graduate students.” One project they are working on is Public Scholarship for the Common Good, which they describe as a service-learning program.

A new program at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics, is similar in the level of autonomy it offers its fellows. Each year six doctoral students from departments across the humanities and humanistic social sciences at the university are paired with faculty mentors in their disciplines at community colleges in the Seattle district.³ Both fellows and mentors are compensated; time spent on the fellowship—thirty hours per quarter—is additional to the teaching-assistant appointments the doctoral students hold in their home departments at the university.⁴ The faculty advisers of the University of Washington doctoral students also receive a modest research budget as one way of pulling them into the orbit of the program.

In working on this program together over the past year, we have been elated to see these pairings of two-year college faculty members with doctoral students grow into inspiring collaborations, the outcomes of which we could not have possibly foreseen. The fellows and their faculty mentors have worked on exciting new projects, such as the course Philosophy for Children, to be added to the two-year college schedule in coming years, and a coauthored academic paper on economic precarity and transfer students. Fellows have told us that the freedom of project design is a core strength of the partnership. They have stated, in no uncertain terms, that their experiences in the program have literally changed the meaning of their work in graduate school. They also insist that they would not want to be called interns.

Three of our six 2015–16 fellows were from disciplines represented by the MLA (the others were from philosophy, history, and communication). AJ Burgin, in English, helped develop and launch the two-credit course College Applications and Personal Statements, designed by Kennan Knudson, a faculty member in English and Burgin’s mentor at North Seattle College. Central to the course is the mastery of what are to many of the students the altogether mysterious genres of the college application and personal statement. The students begin by researching transfer and admission requirements and then revise rough drafts of their application materials in an instructor-led, peer-review workshop. At Seattle Central College, Lise Lalonde focused with her mentor, Laurie Kempen, on integrated courses and assignments in French. Kempen, who holds a doctorate in French from the University of Washington, is an experienced advocate for foreign language learning as a critical area of funding by our state legislature, and Lalonde took up this cause as a secondary area of interest, looking into the ways in which such programs, at both the two-year college and the university, are perceived by lawmakers. And Angela Durán Real, in conversation with national reporting on the intense disparity in access and participation in study abroad among working-class and minority college students (see, e.g., Lu), started a project with her mentor, Asha Tran, at South Seattle College to encourage students to pursue their study of Spanish language and culture internationally.

In the fall and spring each year, we bring fellows and mentors together for discussion-based workshops. These events give momentum to collaborations at the beginning of the academic year and space for reflection at its close. Also joining the conversation are deans from our partner institutions and guest speakers whose work distinguishes them as national leaders in the humanities and in two-year colleges. Last year we welcomed Anne McGrail, professor of English and recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for her program Doing DH at the CC, at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, and Lauren Onkey, chair and dean for humanities at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Humanities Center at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio. Both speakers energized the room with their remarks on the transformative work of two-year colleges. And in their end-of-year presentations, fellows and mentors shared their thoughts on how doctoral programs in the humanities could learn from that work. “This program, to me, is about dispelling myths and blurring boundaries,” Tran noted. She was met with wide agreement. The fellows told us that, over the course of the year, they came to view the two-year college with a deepened, more nuanced perspective. Burgin described the distance between the University of Washington and the North Seattle College campus as becoming ever smaller in her mind; now, “there is institutional proximity and possibility,” she said. This program, and others like it, seek to expand on such possibilities for the benefit of students across our educational system.

Internship and fellowship models range in the depth of their connection to the higher education sector; some programs aim to prepare students to go into business, nonprofit institutions, and government, while others explicitly focus on the future of universities and colleges. Many programs seek to bridge the two, partnering with on-campus units to provide students with experiences that would be useful within and transfer beyond higher education. For programs such as Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics and the CUNY Humanities Teaching and Learning Alliance, a partnership between the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and LaGuardia Community College, there is a strong emphasis on preparing doctoral students to participate in and contribute to a changing landscape of higher education, one in which inclusion and diversity are of major and increasing concern. The Mellon Fellowships at the University of Washington are designed to give our doctoral students a full sense of how higher education is serving people in the United States—or not (Mettler). Inside Higher Ed reports that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has increased its focus on gathering data on postsecondary education, specifically related to students for whom the two-year college is a crucial point of entry:

The impetus for the data push is gaps in knowledge about “posttraditional” students, . . . including low-income, first-generation and adult students.

“Higher education is reproducing privilege in this country,” said Dan Greenstein, the director of education and postsecondary success in the foundation’s U.S. program. “It’s unsustainable.” (Fain)

To counter this alarming trend, yes, we certainly agree that we do need to gather further information; the efforts of the foundation are commendable. But in addition we need to create structures of professional development that will enable doctoral students to position themselves effectively on the side of social mobility, especially if they choose to pursue careers in higher education.

The terms internship and fellowship are not strictly different in meaning, but we think that a small distinction may be useful for people who are considering creating such programs for doctoral students. Informing our thinking is our fellows’ insistence that the two terms imply radically different levels of expertise. When we asked the fellows if we should rename their fellowship an internship in subsequent years of the program, they immediately said, “No!” We suggest the following as a working definition of the term internship: internships meet the preexisting needs of an organization while expanding the experience base of the intern in a meaningful way. Internships should be highly directive, with specific and measurable outcomes determined in advance by the hiring organization. It is the responsibility of the mentor to find and create projects that will leverage and expand the doctoral student’s skills and to balance this work against the needs and goals of the organization. The humanities centers, university departments and offices, and external partners who hire doctoral interns will have a sense of the most valuable contributions these doctoral students can make in these settings. This may include the picking up and developing of backlogged projects, the improvement of processes, and the updating of documentation. This is the sort of work that sustains institutions. It is also fundamental to a professional skill set in a knowledge economy, as are the answers to such questions as, How do you draft a budget? respond to the concerns of multiple constituencies? plan and promote an event? conduct a meeting or an interview?

Fellowship, by contrast, could be defined thus: practice-based fellowships create space for breaking new ground and, as a result, yield outcomes that cannot be directed or anticipated. We might conceptualize the difference between an internship and a fellowship as one between the work of sustaining and strengthening organizations, on the one hand, and the work of reimagining and reconstructing organizations, on the other. These kinds of work do require, to our minds, different levels of expertise. But to be clear: both internships and fellowships are needed. Ideally, students would be able to do both. Because they serve different purposes—one focusing on the development of core competencies and responsiveness to the needs of an organization, the other applying those competencies and sensibilities to the creating of new projects and perhaps even to the building of new structures—they complement each other. They are two different forms of professional development. Doctoral students who pursue internships, fellowships, or a combination of the two will be better prepared to take on positions of leadership in higher education—and elsewhere.

On the basis of our work at the University of Washington and our discussions with UCHRI and the University of Miami, we make the following recommendations:

Strong mentoring. Internships and fellowships allow doctoral students to build relationships with mentors who are not their faculty adviser or members of their dissertation committee. Mentors, because they play a key role in guiding doctoral students and connecting them to larger networks, are indispensable to emerging forms of professional development for PhDs.

Project-based work. Well-designed projects develop core competencies that translate across a variety of professional opportunities. Doctoral student interns and fellows, and their mentors, should track the specific capacities that their various projects foster.

Deliverables. Doctoral students should emerge from graduate internships and fellowships with the ability to narrate their skill development in terms of measurable accomplishments. Whether these concrete outcomes are directed by the hiring organization or developed through collaboration, they will provide an archive from which talking points for interviews with potential employers and partners can be drawn.

The reconceptualization of doctoral education in the humanities is well under way, in national discussions and, more important, in practice. We are convinced that these initiatives will help prepare the next generation of PhDs to be leaders in and on behalf of their fields of study. We also believe that the programs noted here, and others like them, will serve as leading models for change.