Dear Commons Community,

Maddalena Alvi, who  has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The European Art Market and the First World War (Cambridge University Press), had an opinion piece in yesterday’s The Chronicle of Higher Education. She reviews the current state of PhD degrees in the humanities and comments on universities that are pausing admissions in these programs. Hers is a sober treatment.  Below is the entire article.

Tony

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The Chronicle of Higher Education

Pauses in Ph.D. Programs

The overproduction of doctorates in the humanities has ruined the job market.

By Maddalena Alvi

In August, the University of Chicago announced it was pausing admissions to most of its arts and humanities Ph.D. programs. Chicago’s decision prompted The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper to ask: “If even Chicago is not willing to support and protect American arts and letters, who will?” The question has only gained urgency. Brown University recently announced Ph.D. admissions pauses across six departments, including classics, anthropology, and French. And last week Harvard University slashed Ph.D. admissions spots in the arts and humanities by around 60 percent.

As a young historian, I believe that these institutions are taking a pragmatic approach to the current crisis of the humanities.

Only 57 percent of humanities doctorate recipients in the United States reported definite commitments in 2024, and less than a third secured an academic-related position, according to the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates. As the Princeton University historian David A. Bell wrote in 2023: “Of my 10 Ph.D. students who defended their dissertations before 2016, all but one got a tenure-track job. … Of the eight who have defended since then, only one has so far gotten a tenure-track job.”

Data from the Ohio State University English department sums up the issue:

It is not just the numbers that paint a grim picture: In recent weeks, my social-media feed has been inundated with complaints from American academics and researchers about funding cuts and the elimination of university positions. “Workforce reductions” are striking near and far at both academic and staff positions, and nontenured positions in particular are falling victim to the funding cuts of the Trump administration.

This isn’t all new — or confined to the United States. The academic jobs crisis is a long-festering problem, culminating in recent strikes around Europe. Apart from cuts to funding, systemic issues like precarity, exploitation, and abuse are being vocally addressed by a generation of young academics asking for change.

At this time of mounting crisis, compounded by current political volatility, pausing admissions is a painful but necessary decision.

At this time of mounting crisis, compounded by current political volatility, pausing admissions is a painful but necessary decision.

Why? A humanities Ph.D. is a job in which graduates invest money. Forty percent of humanities graduates in 2020 relied mainly on teaching for support, 20 percent on their resources, while 37 percent depended primarily on a grant or fellowship, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Yet, even the best scholarships cannot free doctoral researchers from the need to secure further financial support for activities that range from traveling abroad to conducting archival research or attending and organizing academic conferences. It is additional funding that enables young researchers to be competitive in a job market flooded with excellent competitors. Given the current and proposed cuts to arts and humanities funding in the United States, the question evolves from which members of an incoming Ph.D. cohort will find a job to which of them will be able to complete their doctorate.

Some years ago, anthropologist Emma Quilty posted on Twitter: “Doing a PhD is like putting 100,000 piece puzzle together without a box. And the pieces keep changing shape and colour. And the room is on fire.” Studies have described the impact of the doctoral environment as “hazardous” for mental health. The prospect of retrenchments, economic and political crises, and a steady rise in living costs, is not going to improve work conditions.

Of course, obtaining a Ph.D. is supposed to be challenging, but there is a major difference between tackling an adventure with adequate tools and embarking on a journey in which your map (funding) and destination (jobs) are in the process of vanishing just as you start walking.

I do not regret my doctorate. As an EU citizen, I started my Ph.D. in post-Brexit Britain, wrote and defended my dissertation during quarantine, and witnessed firsthand the funding and job crisis in the humanities. That said, I would not start a doctorate in the United States under what look like even harsher conditions — and I would certainly not advise anyone hoping to find work to do so either.

In “There Has Never Been a Better Time to Start a Ph.D.,” a Chronicle Review essay published earlier this week, the historian Ada Palmer argues that deep skills will always be needed. At the cost of sounding cynical, I don’t see why anyone would voluntarily embark on a highly specialized and restrictive training — one designed as a vocational prerequisite — just to develop deep skills. Palmer is right when she says that there will always be some demand to employ the holders of doctorates, but she neglects the real question: How high will that demand actually be? There is already have an oversupply of Ph.D.s in many fields, and the positions that are available often come with low pay and lack of job security. In the United States, 73 percent of all faculty positions in 2016 were off the tenure track. The situation has not improved. While hard work once led to a permanent position, it now fast-tracks doctoral students into un- or underemployment. With career safety gone and sacrifice left unrewarded, recent doctorate recipients are left at the whims of a system whose hiring practices are beset by preference, patronage, and bandwagon thinking.

Some proponents of retaining large Ph.D. cohorts despite the lack of jobs will argue that it can still lead to jobs outside of academe. The Ph.D. can, of course, lead to such positive outcomes, but this doesn’t make sense as a general strategy. Joining a highly specialized work force after a yearslong delay in a market where — sadly — the knowledge of something like philosophy provides no competitive advantage, can be fiendishly difficult.

The rise of artificial intelligence is poised to make this even harder. Recent research from Microsoft suggests the 40 occupations most at risk from AI include historians, political scientists, mathematicians, economists, geographers, and postsecondary teachers of library science. Also on the list are interpreters, translators, writers, journalists, editors, and archivists — exactly the kinds of positions that used to be prime non-academic destinations for fresh Ph.D. holders. This isn’t to say that creative and original thinkers won’t be needed in the future, and humanities students tend to be just that. Yet right now we seem to be in an adjustment phase where AI is likely to produce redundancies rather than create new opportunities.

Research in the humanities should be supported and protected, but not at the cost of graduates spending years in pursuit of a path that cannot offer them professional and financial dignity. In an ideal world, barring someone from entering their dream program might seem unfair; in the real world, it’s a blessing in disguise for a generation that deserves serious and tangible perspectives.

The decisions made at Chicago, Brown, and Harvard are a much-needed confession about the state of the academic humanities. Things have not worked in academe for a long time — and they aren’t getting better. Assessing where the humanities stand with honesty and pragmatism is the first step toward change and reform, both of which are sorely needed for the future of the humanities.