The Future of Doctoral Education

“doctoral education in the humanities is particularly calcified. It is devoted to reproduction, not transformation, and it is a system predicated on exploitative labor practices that are just as egregious as anything found in the private sector”

“Since the 2008 economic downturn, there has been a vigorous, ongoing conversation about the purpose of doctoral education, funded largely by the Mellon Foundation”

“overreliance on private philanthropy—and on a single funder—to shape this conversation has left the field vulnerable”

“Based on what we’ve learned from five years of running the PublicsLab, we offer a set of provocations about graduate education as a public good”

“These provocations are about centering justice, student needs, and the public good over faculty interests, institutional demands, or disciplinary legacies”

“Provocation #1: Definitions of and ideas about “the public good” must be rooted firmly in racial equity and social justice”

“What this provocation looks like in practice:”

“Create intergenerational spaces for graduate students to have critical conversations about the flow of power and resources within and beyond institutions with peers, faculty, and administrative mentors”

“Have open and honest conversations about the ways racism, classism, and other systems of power influence graduate admissions and funding, and work to align university-wide and departmental admissions practices with aspirational goals of anti-racism, equity, and inclusion”

“Encourage students to do the work that matters most to them”

“Remove barriers to genuine scholarly collaboration, whether between scholars of various disciplines or between scholars and members of the community”

“eliminate the derogatory and offensive term “mesearch,” which has been weaponized against scholars of color and queer scholars doing work with and for their communities”

“Provocation #2: Public scholarship is necessarily interdisciplinary and collaborative. This requires graduate education to be generative and experimental”

“What this provocation looks like in graduate education:”

“Think differently about the apprenticeship model of graduate admissions, whereby faculty admit students as individual advisees or protégés interested in extending an aspect of their own research”

“Encourage students to take courses outside their disciplines in order to gain an introduction to a wide variety of analytical tools and methods”

“Remove barriers to team-teaching across departments”

“Craft alternative assignments that ask students to imagine what a grant proposal, exhibition proposal, or high school syllabus based on the material might look like”

“Train graduate students who want to do community-engaged research on how to do that work ethically, responsibly, and in an accountable relationship with those they are working to serve”

“Consider adding a community partner that participated in the research to the dissertation committee as an external reader”

“Provide teaching releases to graduate students to do internships outside the academy”

“Provide supportive, judgment-free spaces for students to express doubt and wrestle with works in progress”

“Recognize co-authored and collaborative work as on par with single-authored work, for faculty and graduate students”

“Open up dissertation requirements beyond the proto-monograph, and promote and tenure interdisciplinary scholars whose work does not fit neatly into a disciplinary box”

“Provocation #3: Students are experts in their own intellectual and professional development”

“Doctoral education has, traditionally, been a process of disciplining students into a discipline”

“Many students from marginalized backgrounds experience the disciplining process as one of self-negation or alienation, in which they are forced to deny the parts of themselves that the university or the discipline is not comfortable with”

“The current system assumes that graduate students cannot be trusted to make decisions about their own futures”

“Because it doesn’t trust students, the system pressures students to surrender their decisions, along with their psychological, intellectual, and material well-being, to the program and to the process”

“What this provocation looks like in graduate education:”

“Ask every single student about their goals, early and often”

“Provide compensation for a range of professional development experiences”

“Support alternative exam and dissertation structures that give students the latitude to make autonomous, informed choices”

“Do not assume that the academic job market is the only job market that matters or that every student will enter it”

“Commit to gathering feedback regularly from students about the program, making that feedback available for discussion, and creating change based on those conversations”

“Provocation #4: Abundance thinking and generosity can and should be cultivated even under conditions of material scarcity”

“What this provocation looks like in practice:”

“Don’t admit more students than the institution can provide with a living wage, adjusted for cost of living”

“Ensure that students have affordable, high-quality, year-round insurance coverage that can be extended to families and partners”

“Revisit business systems, where possible, to ensure that they support the work of the university and not the other way around”

“Make public engagement and scholarship “mission critical” to the university”

“Recognize that much of the abundance and generosity that sustain students within the university, especially during periods of great crisis like a pandemic or school shooting, are within the realms of teaching and mentoring”

“our students are calling for us to reimagine how the entire project of graduate education might be transformed”

“graduate education not only as a private benefit but as a public good as well”