Another short piece out today, this time on the Antipode Foundation website:
“In the Chronicle of Higher Education, William Pannapacker – under his pen name Thomas H. Benton – wrote an article titled ‘Graduate school in the humanities: Just don’t go’. In it he warned against undertaking a PhD in light of what he “had learned about the academic labour system from personal observation and experience”. His perspective is obviously coloured by his context in that he works in a North American university and in a humanities discipline, but since I recently moved to Canada his arguments have struck a nerve in terms of what I have read and experienced in my short time here. This is not to imply that these issues are, by any means, limited to the North American continent. Last month, the Times High Education Supplement published an article about the challenges facing junior academics in the UK as growing numbers of people apply for each new academic post…”
See the rest of the article here ….
[UPDATE (8 May 2012) – a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps” really highlights the issues I discuss in this piece]