MLA mulls five-year completion target in PhD reform

By Colleen Flaherty. Colleen Flaherty reports for InsideHigherEd from the Modern Language Association conference 2014. Criticising humanities doctoral programmes is easy. They take too long, they continue to emphasise training for tenure-track faculty positions in an era when such positions are scarce, they encourage the book-model of dissertation at a time when books are hard to publish, even full funding isn’t always “full” – the list goes on.
Solving the PhD predicament is much harder, but that’s what the Modern Language Association is attempting to do, or at least start to do, in a new report. The Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Literature culminates two formal years of work but reflects discussions dating to 2008 and earlier. More...