To Do Research--Or Not

Gregory Zobel at Adjunct Advice is an adjunct teaching first-year writing at the College of the Redwoods, a community college in beautiful northern California, and asking himself whether he should grab himself by the scruff of the neck and get into a Ph.D. program: "Every couple months I think about going for my doctorate. 'It would be wise,' I tell myself, 'and I’d be so much more employable.' However, it would take a chunk of five or seven years out of my life." Not to mention the fact that he loves living in northern California, and to get a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition he would have to move; and:

Second, I do not want to spend 30 hours a week writing a dissertation. Based on what I have read on the WPA-list and heard from many Ph.D.s, getting the diss done requires that amount of work. If I am going to write 30 hours a week, then I want to write fiction, narratives, book reviews, essays, blogs, and so on. I do not want to spend that much time on composition theory or rhetoric at this point in my life. I wrote two MA theses two years ago and I am not interested in repeating that process any time soon. Perhaps in the future, but not now.

By "the WPA-list" he means WPA-L, the writing program administrators' list, which did indeed recently spend several days on a thread entited "How to Cut Ph.D. Time to Degree," beginning with a December 17 article in Inside Higher Ed (no longer on the web) about Harvard's plan to speed up progress to the doctorate, noting: "Recent data from the Council of Graduate Schools, for example, show that only 36.7 percent of humanities students have finished their dissertations by year 8, and only 49.1 percent have done so by year 10." The WPA-L posters mostly focused on questions regarding the factors that slow Ph.D. candidates' progress toward a degree, such as faculty unhelpfulness, heavy teaching loads, and various conscious or unconscious motivational problems, such as not really being sure whether you even want a Ph.D.--Gregory Zobel's specific concern in his post.

So what--if anything--should be done? Should universities take decisive action to shorten time-to-degree for Ph.D. candidates? What should that action be? What would the emotional and intellectual effects of this pressure be on Ph.D. candidates? The WPAers agreed that some would probably respond well to it, while for others it would just increase already redlining stress levels.

And what about the Ph.D. candidates who aren't really sure they should be working toward a doctorate? Should they be left to flounder with their indecision for years, or would ruthless pressure in their cases ultimately be a form of mercy? I'm personally inclined to let those who need to flounder flounder indefinitely, but within an institutional context of limited resources, that seems increasingly unrealistic.

Perhaps the answer is more consciousness-raising posts like Zobel's?