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National Humanities Alliance |
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Testimony Regarding the FY-1994 Appropriation for the National Endowment for the Humanities Presented to the U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies (Committee on Appropriations), by Laura Shanner, Ph.D. Candidate, Georgetown University, on behalf of the Association of American Universities and the National Humanities Alliance May 12, 1993 INTRODUCTION
WHY BOTHER WITH THE HUMANITIES? Your previous commitment to the NEH Fellowship Program and to other forms of aid for humanities education reflect your understanding of the importance of the humanities for our society. Many people underestimate the value of the humanities, however, because we usually do not offer marketable widgets or money-making strategies. What we do is often perceived to be a luxury, or worse, irrelevant to the real world. I strongly believe that this perception is mistaken, and that the failure to grasp and cultivate the humanities can lead to extremely dangerous situations. We need only read recent headlines to see how: The tragic hold which David Koresh had on his followers involved a twisted interpretation of Biblical texts; learning to read texts critically enables people to see through such misrepresentations. Overhauling our health care system is not just an economic necessity, but a responsibility grounded in justice, beneficence, and a notion of the minimal requirements for a good life. Rapid advances in medical technology challenge us to decide whether we should do everything which we are able to do. The new Holocaust Museum showcases the writings, art, and photographs of the survivors and witnesses, which not only give voice to the human tragedy but also assist historians to reconstruct the past in the face of revisionists who claim that the Holocaust never happened. In a more general vein, a common response to the spiraling violence which engulfs our society is that we seem to have lost our values. What might those values be, if not human values, or the roots of the humanities? Artists and writers express our needs, hopes, suffering, and experiences; philosophers critically reflect upon our experiences and attempt to understand the meanings of life and death; historians offer insight into what has worked and what has led to disaster in the past. The pursuit of science, economics, politics, or other "more practical" fields without reflection upon what it means to be human - the work of the humanities - can lead to irrelevant and unworkable solutions, to feelings of emptiness and meaninglessness in life, and in some cases, to catastrophes. My work in bioethics is obviously applicable to problems in the real world, but I cannot do my work without drawing upon other disciplines in the humanities for understanding and context. It is for the long-term, fundamental well-being of our society that we encourage all people to think, read and write critically; to express their experiences and to reflect upon the experiences of others; and to consider their goals and activities in relation to the meaning such pursuits entail for themselves and others. THE LIFE OF AN ABD (ALL BUT DISSERTATION) Attached are several pages from a book which I have read often in the past few years: David Sternberg's How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1981). Chapters 1 and 7 are the most relevant to our current discussion, as much of the rest offers practical advice to dissertation writers and to those who have to live with them. One might assume that his descriptions are overly melodramatic, but I can assure you that they are not. Writing a dissertation has been the most frustrating, isolating, anxiety-provoking experience I have faced, and have come through it relatively unscathed (so far) because of a deep interest and commitment to the work that I do, and with the help of friends, colleagues, and a counselor to help me reevaluate priorities. I consider myself to be an extremely lucky graduate student, as I have observed friends and colleagues who have faced serious setbacks in both their personal and professional lives because of the dissertation. One of the key problems for Humanities Ph.D.candidates is that the dissertation is begun after 3 to 5 years of course work and exams, when most other professional and advanced degree candidates are already repaying their loans and enjoying their long delayed gratification. My peers have all finished their professional degrees: a friend who started law school when I came to Georgetown is starting his fourth year of practice with a six-figure salary; medical students have completed all but the most rigorous surgical residencies by now, and MBA students have been working for five years. Such comparisons are enough to make very bright and talented people in the humanities wonder what on earth they are doing by investing in decades of uncompensated work. According to the most recent statistics from the National Research Council, the median time-to-degree in the humanities is the longest of any field at 8.4 years, and the humanities show the largest increase in time-to-completion of any field. [Summary Report 1991 Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities. Washington DC: Office of Scientific and Engineering Personnel, National Research Council, 1993.] It is my experience and firm belief that this extended time to completion is directly related to the difficulty of completing a dissertation in the humanities while working to pay for expenses. As I have mentioned, I am one of the very lucky ones; my graduate career ran extremely smoothly for the first five years. A Javits Fellowship from the Department of Education allowed me to finish my courses ahead of schedule without the distractions of a teaching assistantship, and an ITT International Fellowship from the Fulbright Scholarship competition pool enabled me to conduct research on infertility with patients and clinicians in Australia in 1990. My problems began when I returned from Australia with boxes of research materials and no apparent means of support. I naively fell into the trap which snares many graduate students: I began teaching introductory courses at Georgetown, where I was responsible for as many as 120 students per term with no teaching assistant, no benefits, and a salary of approximately $2500 per course (or about $41 per student per term). The next year, I had to add a course at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which added another 30 students, another course preparation, and travel time to my responsibilities, but added only another $2500 per course to my wallet. Georgetown offered faculty benefits for one year, since I was teaching the equivalent of a full load for Philosophy Department professors, but those benefits were revoked in 1992 due to budget constraints. In spite of the financial setback caused by the loss of benefits, I elected to stop teaching at Johns Hopkins this fall because I literally had not touched my dissertation for almost the whole year. Had I been offered support for a year of full-time dissertation work, I am confident that it would have been completed within 9 months of my return from Australia, rather than 2 1/2 years later. I should note that, once again, I was one of the very lucky graduate students: Georgetown and Johns Hopkins pay well compared to many other schools. A colleague at Georgetown has taught as many as five courses per term, scattered throughout the area, in order to pay his expenses. Not surprisingly, it took him six years to write his dissertation after his courses were completed. Dissertation writing has been described my many people as a full-time job in itself, and spending 30-60 hours per week preparing, grading, traveling and lecturing makes it very difficult to focus sustained attention to a research project. Loss of time is not the only concern; much of one's precious time left over for writing is wasted trying to remember where one left off days or weeks previously. Working outside of academia often pays more, but the dissertation writer sacrifices important contact with colleagues. Taking a "normal" job has probably been the death knell to more dissertations than any other factor. The dissertation writer is thus caught in an insidious trap: she might work full-time on the dissertation and accumulate enormous debt for all living expenses for the year(s) required to complete the draft, with little confidence that her eventual salary will repay the loans; she might accept low-paying and time-consuming jobs in her field; or she may work in an unrelated field which pays well, but which distracts her both practically and mentally from the research and ultimately leads her to abandon the project. At the age by which people begin writing dissertations, most are also beginning to raise families, establish a home, and worry about retirement plans and health insurance. Part-time and low-paying jobs are inadequate to meet these reasonable needs, and full-time jobs disrupt the research irreparably. One's long-term financial and professional prospects may be damaged not only when the dissertation is abandoned, but even when successful writing simply drags on for too long. The inability to complete and publish one's work after several years leads prospective employers to worry that the scholar is unable to produce good research. While low-paying adjunct positions allow the young academic to hone and demonstrate teaching skills, a pattern of such positions for more than a few years may compromise the scholar's chances for winning a tenure-track position. As a series in the Washington Post documented last fall, many people struggle for their entire careers in dead-end adjunct positions, which are increasingly attractive to financially strapped institutions which can avoid paying employee benefits. Perhaps even worse for the Ph.D. candidate is the personal and emotional toll taken by the dissertation experience. I am not sure that I can describe the frustration, anger and fear that well up when years of hard work look as though they are about to swirl down the drain for lack of time to finish the final, hardest part of the degree. A masters' degree in most humanities disciplines is worth very little, and after tens of thousands of dollars and many years of sacrifice and hard work, the degree often seems even further from reach at the end than it was at the start. It is not surprising, then, that dissertation writers exhibit the emotional pathologies Sternberg describes:
WHY SOCIETY PROFITS FROM EARLIER COMPLETION OF A DOCTORATE A dissertation writer is not just a graduate student any more. As Sternberg notes in the opening chapter, and as can be verified by a glance at any academic job listings, the ABD has achieved validity as an interim degree status. A dissertation writer is producing his or her first substantial piece of publishable research, not a mere summary of other work or a glorified term paper. Since this is professional-level work, it should be made available to the public and to other researchers as quickly and as efficiently as possible. If the research waits for several years while the writer seeks employment, however, anyone who may have profited from it in the meantime will have been denied access potentially important or useful materials. For example, my work on reproductive technologies, infertility and related medical issues is directly relevant to health policy debates in the United States, Australia and other nations. Three sections of my dissertation have already been edited for presentation and publication, and more will follow within the next year. These articles should have been published at least a year ago, however, because the debate concerns a current problem. I have also recently been asked to contribute to the National Advisory Board on Ethics in Reproduction; I would be able to help them more if my research were polished and published rather than in draft form, and if I were free to move on to the next project. Further, people writing dissertations are among the most actively engaged in current research, but ABDs are rarely allowed to teach upper-level courses in their specialties. Introductory courses can be distracting for the writer, but the larger problem is that the writer's best talents are unavailable to the students who would profit from the insights of a cuffing-edge researcher. Finally, those of us writing dissertations have borrowed many thousands of dollars and (often) won several scholarships or fellowships for our education. By delaying the completion of the dissertation, we are unable to begin paying back the substantial investment that the community has already made in us. Taxpayers are continuing to absorb the interest on my $15,000 Guaranteed Student Loans while I remain in school, and my low income prevents me from paying higher taxes which would subsidize the next generation of Javits fellows. Not only is the community not profiting from my research or my ability to teach in my specialty, they are continuing to support me. I would certainly profit from a rapid completion of my degree; so would everyone who is assisting me. WHY USE FEDERAL MONEY? It is quite reasonable to ask why the government should be asked to pick up the tab for dissertation research in the humanities when we could just encourage universities to support their students. The problem is that the universities themselves are also facing financial limitations, and thus often leave their graduate students without support long before the dissertation begins. Georgetown offers a 3-year teaching assistantship in a philosophy program that requires an average of 8.7 years to complete. The national average for philosophy degrees is approximately a year shorter than Georgetown's, and most schools coincidentally offer a fourth or even fifth year of support. When the lengthy time-to-completion problem was discussed in the Philosophy Department, several recommendations were made. The first was to attempt to secure fourth-year funding for students, which would have to come out of the Department budget rather than from the University. Another recommendation was to reduce the requirements for the degree, thus facilitating earlier completion of courses and allowing the student to complete a substantial portion of the dissertation with the fourth year of support. The requirements for the Ph.D. in Philosophy at Georgetown have changed substantially from when I began the program in 1986:
1993: 15 courses, 1 language, 2 mini-comprehensives (half the length and scope of the original exams), and dissertation. While the reduction in requirements is appreciated from the perspective of someone having to clear the hurdles, I think the policy is ultimately counter-productive. The volume of information in every discipline, not just philosophy, has not decreased over the years, but has increased often exponentially. Most of us audit several courses after completing our requirements, because the range of what we do not know so vastly outstrips our ability to learn it without guidance. After completing 20 courses for credit, I have audited another five and wish I could have taken dozens more. The result of cutting program requirements to meet financial limitations will result in scholars who are less well-trained than their teachers, and who will be more narrowly focused with less sense of their role in a larger discipline. Rather than scholars who are able to nurture and impart a genuine love of learning, we risk churning out technicians who teach a cookbook approach to problem solving. Given the importance of the skills of critical reasoning, artistic and verbal expression, and of reflection on the meaning of our lives and decisions, we cannot risk allowing the best of the best in the humanities to settle for mediocrity. CONCLUSIONS Dissertation writing is a frustrating and emotionally taxing enterprise, and money alone will not make all of our problems go away; as one who has struggled with both a dissertation and money problems, however, I will attest that financial support would help enormously by providing inspiration, relief from financial anxiety, and the time to focus on our work and get it done. While the government is clearly unable to support every talented, hard-working scholar who genuinely deserves funding, it is in the best interests of our national community to assist the best and brightest people to choose careers in the humanities and to expedite the completion of their degrees so that we may profit from their expertise. Too many top quality people have been driven out of the humanities to pursue work which can support themselves or their families, have given up in the face of seemingly endless emotional trauma and the disruption of personal relationships, and have been stuck in go-nowhere adjunct positions where theiralents are wasted. A salary for a year to allow full attention to the dissertation makes a world of difference for the recipients as individuals, allows those individuals to repay their debt to society through both financial and educational mechanisms, and emphasizes for others the importance of supporting work in the humanities. On behalf of my peers and colleagues, I would like to thank you for your time and for your continued support of graduate education in the humanities. I wish you well in your deliberations. |
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2008
National Humanities Alliance (Washington, DC). All rights reserved. |