On February 27, 2023, The New Yorker published an article titled, “The End of the English Major.” Drawing on Robert Townsend’s research, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, the article noted that over the past decade, the study of English and History at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third and that humanities enrollment in the United States has declined overall by seventeen per cent. The snappy title of the article adds to several public statements that herald the demise of the humanities and its waning relevance in the contemporary world. The Hoover Institution published another article titled, “Death of the Humanities,” in 2014, which argued that declining university enrollments in the humanities since the 1970s was largely due to budget cuts but also due its manner of ‘indoctrinating’ students about current politics. And as Herb Childress argues in The Adjunct Underclass, there has been a deliberate and systematic effort to obliterate an entire class of professionals who are trained to educate and prepare students, so that they can become responsible members of society (ix). This destructive goal was achieved by diluting the significance of college education and simultaneously reducing career stability for college faculty.
With all this doom and gloom about the humanities degree in general and the humanities PhD in particular, one might be tempted to believe that the disciplines of knowledge dedicated to the critical study of human beings – their culture, history, and society – is indeed futile. Why are the humanities prone to attract accusations of irrelevance? It is, after all, often true that communities and nations uphold art, literature, music, and dance as their collective heritage. The critical evaluation of these creative works sheds light on the socio-economic, political and cultural conditions of their time. While it is crucial to support scientific innovations that bolster economies and the quality of life, it is equally necessary to encourage the humanities PhD since it trains students to interrogate the status quo, think critically, and transcend local loyalties. Martha Nussbaum affirms this notion in her book Not for Profit, where she explains and endorses the crucial role of the humanitites in building resilient democracies that can respond empathetically to contemporary issues of globalisation and climate change. She notes that in addition to helping to foster responsible and compassionate citizens, humanities are also pivotal to commerce as economic growth relies on political stability and creative innovation (10). The TRaCE Transborder Project aims to counter the narrative of irrelevance by foregrounding the continued relevance and crucial role played by the humanities PhD degree and the need to revitalise the practices of graduate education and the cultures of the academic humanities across a number of universities in Africa, Australia, Europe, India, North America, and the UK.
The TRaCE Transborder Project aims to counter the narrative of irrelevance by foregrounding the continued relevance and crucial role played by the humanities PhD degree and the need to revitalise the practices of graduate education and the cultures of the academic humanities across a number of universities in Africa, Australia, Europe, India, North America, and the UK.
Toward Change
In Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, Katina Rogers details how humanities graduate training can lead to fulfilling careers outside the academy. In order to leverage the benefits of graduate study, she urges us to normalise and encourage diverse career pathways. For this, reform should be initiated at all levels of the degree collectively – with students, faculty and administrators working together to restructure programs to benefit all stakeholders. Rogers also suggests new changes such as “encouraging creative dissertation formats, adopting new models for comprehensive exams, integrating digital skills and methods into humanities scholarship, and embracing scholarship with meaningful public impact” to open academic scholarship to broader audiences (3).
One of the key ways to implement this shift, is to reorient the ways in which we evaluate PhD success. Departments often seem to have forgotten the names of graduate students who have taken up alt-ac positions, Rogers notes. This is because only faculty job placements count toward program rankings. This short sightedness further discourages other students who might be interested in alt-ac careers but do not have easily accessible role models who could share their experiences on non-academic career pathways. This cycle of celebrating certain kinds of success and ignoring others, perpetuates conventional career pathways and limits the fostering of new opportunities.
Such a restricted setting is disadvantageous to PhD students, departments and the academy, and Rogers adds that this also can undermine public life itself. Modern democracy, mass culture and avant garde art are all intimately intertwined, and they were strengthened during the nineteenth century when debates about standardisation, dissent and public “will” were hotly contested (Levine 21). Caroline Levine suggests that academics, especially in humanities, are skeptical about mass culture and that they interrogate so much of what normally goes without saying in modern society. University classrooms mediate the space between the forward-looking challenges of the avant garde and non-specialist beginners (197). To illustrate this, Judith Butler’s rigorous analysis of how law and science permeate the social construction and regulation of identity are a key example of how humanities academic research can impact public discourses on sex and gender. As we continue to debate the issues of post-truth, AI-powered research and diagnostics, and how social media has affected our political, economic and cultural rhetoric, we need more people like humanities PhD professionals who can read, critique, interrogate and innovate complex arguments. For Rogers, the humanities PhD trains people to research national and global histories of systemic racism, and it equips them to examine institutional bias and inequalities, among other skills. These skills are relevant not only within academy, but are immensely pertinent in corporate settings, civic and non-governmental organisations, and other professional settings. Relegating such trained specialists to exclusively academic life denies the public access to the skillsets of humanities PhDs who are able to research questions important both inside and outside the academy such as the American history of race and the early modern literature of labour and social class, among others. Rogers notes how the exclusive emphasis on academic career pathways turns promising researchers away from the larger world: “the public is deprived of a deeply trained specialist who could help advocate for complex causes that require deft historical inquiry and cultural understanding” (6).
Individual career trajectories apart, Rogers also adds that there is need for a systemic shift in the way we understand sustainable academic employment. Tenure-track positions are becoming increasingly difficult to secure, while the pool of graduates continues to grow. Job advertisements in the academy are increasingly for short-term contracts as adjunct or visiting fellows. In California community colleges, notes John Martin, chairman of the California Part-time Faculty Association, adjuncts outnumber tenure-track professors by almost 4 to 1. Additionally Joe Berry, co-author of Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education, states that adjunct contracts make up 75% of college instructors in the U.S. and teach more than half of the college courses (Times Editorial Board).
In such a situation, it becomes absurd for departments, supervisors, and administrators to ignore the reality of the whole job market and to view tenure-track employment as the sole successful outcome for PhDs. Rogers also adds that the high ratio of adjunct faculty and growing doctoral recipients is not an indicator of ‘overabundance’ of humanities PhDs. On the contrary, it demonstrates the outcome of budgetary cuts in universities and institutional priorities that prefer short-term gains over the kinds of long-term institutional support that would ensure job security, good wages, and appropriate benefits. There is no correlation between the intake of PhD students and the number of tenure-track positions in the discipline. The issue of employment opportunities and the humanities PhD, therefore, is not an issue of employability – it is rather a disregard for the training, welfare and advancement of PhD students and the institution as a whole. The case against labor casualization and contract-hiring therefore is a collective call for preserving the integrity of academic research and scholarship, regardless of discipline.
This brings us back to the question of the humanities PhD and why it is pivotal to encourage, re-evaluate and re-invigorate doctoral programs. For Katina Rogers, the answer is simple – “Humanities study taps into some of the deepest motivations and fears of individuals and societies—how we understand identity and belonging; what we consider to be beautiful; how dynamics of power, authority, and rebellion change over time. These questions resonate with people far beyond the confines of the classroom” (9). Furthermore, it trains researchers to analyse why certain cultures, histories, and writers have been marginalised and how society perceives its past and its future. Beyond academia, these questions are crucial for designing and curating learning experiences in museums, archives, public libraries, cultural heritage organisations, popular media, and non-profits. The people who pivot to alt-ac roles transfer their training and knowledge; they are able, for example, to make public health policies more inclusive or ensure that art collections and museums acknowledge their own histories of exclusion. A great example of this successful transmission and transferring the skills and research acquired during PhD training is David Breslin, the Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), New York. He received his bachelor’s degree in English from Amherst College, a master’s in art history from Williams College, and a PhD in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University (MET 2022). As a curator at one of the most influential museums in the world, he applies his PhD training to lead, organise and design the museum’s collection on modern and contemporary art. His work influences public perception of contemporary art and will help to reimagine modern art collections from across the world.
To facilitate the transfer of skills and insights from PhD training to professional settings, we must hear more about, and from the people who made these transitions. Several initiatives like Papa PhD, Versatile PhD and PhD to Life, among others, provide helpful tools like professional networks and informational webinars to translate and transfer the domain specialisation of doctoral training to sectors of work beyond academia. Personal narratives and accounts of why PhD graduates made the decision to change careers, how they repositioned their insights and experiences to forge new trajectories can help rupture the assumption that after a PhD, the university is the only viable option for meaningful employment.
Humanities PhDs study how political electoral strategies tap into social signs, how tourism industries market landscapes, how nations leverage their power for good and ill, and how technology can be designed to be more inclusive in order to override human biases. As Rogers notes, these are not jobs that require a PhDs per se, and yet for individuals with a PhD, these remain viable options as alt-ac pathways where they can apply and implement their research in real-life situations.
As concerns about authoritarian regimes increase, and hyper nationalist ideologies and revisionist histories intensify, the tools of close reading, historical inquiry and in-depth factual research becomes all the more necessary. A survey of the job ads in the Modern Language Association’s Jobs Information List by Beth Seltzer, Roopika Risam, and Matt Applegate found that faculty listings often expressed preferences for skills that were commonly associated with administration or management. While a humanities PhD prepares students with diverse skills such as project management, time management, and collaboration, there is need for institutional support to prepare students for varied positions that can align with responsibilities for teaching and communication with wider audiences. This goes beyond publication in traditional peer-reviewed journals or university-press book publication as the sole rubrics for measuring success.
In Manifesto for the Humanities, Sidonie Smith counters the public perception of the doom facing the humanities. She asserts that the times are good enough and indeed that this time of trouble can open new opportunities to revitalise the humanities. Smith’s book engages with the issue of high attrition levels and the lack of diversity in the humanities professoriate to respond to the diverse aspirations, research and professional interests of doctoral students. To address the needs of the time, Smith explores the evolving concept of the university and the trend toward new media and “open” scholarly production and communication. Humanities doctoral programs therefore need to teach new skills that are transferable to other careers that graduates may move into. Questions about funding and institutional support become crucial to address these evolving needs. Smith notes how the withering of state support that has led to institutions increasing tuition fees and preferring students, especially international students, who can afford to pay the exorbitant cost of an away-from-home university education. This means that while there can be a certain transnational diversity, economic diversity becomes impossible since students from different socio-economic backgrounds are systemically denied the opportunity to access the benefits of an international education. Conservative state legislators, Smith reminds us, are often wary of advanced degrees as well as anxious about students coming from outside the state or province since these students are often perceived as threats to cultural and political unity. This perception is further complicated by assumptions about the irrelevance of formal college or graduate education. Anecdotal evidence is cited by way of figures such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who dropped out of their prestigious undergraduate degrees, and for whom graduate education is touted as extraneous to the path of becoming “white male billionares” (Smith 10). This narrative equates correlation with causation, and ignores the intersections of gender, race and class in the unequal access to educational and professional opportunities, further demonstrating the need for nuanced and critical insights on public debates.
It is a mistake to apply the corporate logic of quantifiability to the humanities since the outcomes of humanities research and teaching are often gradual and nuanced. Additionally, the rising costs of higher education, the cuts in public funding and the corporatisation of academic discourse and practices have heightened the “doom-and-gloom-prognosis” of the humanities PhD (Smith 12). We cannot ignore the realities of decreased enrollments, lack of funding and the subsequent downsizing of departments. In response to the media emphasis on the death of the humanities, published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times among others, Smith notes that these analyses betray the neoliberal presumptions of the journalists and commentators who “reproduce the market-driven narrative of the crises of inutility” (26). Instead, she urges reporters to take a deeper dive into the historical and material factors of the 1970s that led to opening of the academy and academic professions to white women, men of colour and how that has impacted society today. Statistics cannot be the sole way of evaluating the role of humanities within and beyond the academy. It might be useful to attend to the testimonies and experiential impact of those who have taken to humanities scholarship in order to advocate for its continuing relevance. In the midst of articles that proclaim the doom of the humanities, Smith urges readers not to be complacent. We must face and seek to overcome current obstacles in order to empower current and future graduate students.
Smith goes on to enumerate the current drawbacks in the design of the humanities PhD. Time to completion for a humanities PhD for instance is much higher than in other fields. A survey of job ads confirms that there has been a drop in the number of ads and, equally worryingly, there is a consistent decline in tenure-track positions. The Survey of Earned Doctorates from 2011 and 2012 indicates that of the major sectors in the survey, the humanities had the lowest percentage of graduates with “definite employment or study commitments at doctorate award,” somewhere around 58%–59% (Smith 117). Additionally, funding the degree remains a large concern as a high percentage of humanities doctoral students rely on teaching to support themselves. The demography of the PhD recipients also reveals the lack of representation from historically underrepresented groups such as indigenous communities, Asian, Hispanic, Black and first-generation students. In view of the increasing student debt and unpredictable academic job prospects, Smith emphasises the need to transform humanities doctoral education for the new, vastly different world that we are facing.
As Helen Small writes in The Value of the Humanities, simply focussing on the economic usefulness of the humanities PhD provides a flawed description of the degree. We have witnessed successful humanities students transform their knowledge and the intellectual training into “practical activities” like media, business, journalism, the civil service, politics, publishing, among other fields. Doctoral supervisors can feel out-of-touch with their students if they hold fast to the notion that a doctorate in English, History, or Philosophy trains students to become university teachers of English, or History, or Modern Languages only.
Small recommends moving away from the binary of usefulness and uselessness that has structured the debates about the value of the university and of culture – and by extension, the humanities. The language of economic instrumentalism that undergirds these conversations is predicated on a false premise that the humanities are economically useless as well as culturally useless. On the contrary, I suggest, the humanites are indeed vital to the maintenance and the health of a democracy as centres for the higher study and practice of the skills of critical reasoning, debate, and evaluation of ideas that are ‘the core practices of a democracy.’ The objects and cultural practices of the humanities have intrinsic value ‘for their own sake’ and can add to building a fulfilling life for an individual as well as society at large.
The benefits of studying and training in the humanities for individual and public good needs to be shared with the wider world beyond the university. Revitalizing the humanities PhD requires an increase in the diversity of students and research areas, reforms to facilitate faster rates of completion, more institutional support, including better funding, equipping students with skills for alternative careers, and shifting the emphasis from peer-reviewed journal publication only so as to include public scholarship--a shift that will encourage academics to create knowledge in the public domain and as a public good. Smith argues that ongoing debates about the overproduction of PhDs or the diminishing scope of the humanities dangerously undermine the ways in which humanities disciplines have facilitated path-breaking research, fostered risk-taking and innovation and shaped the ways we perceive our histories, cultures, languages, literatures, arts, in ways that fuel future visions of these human interests. It ignores the marginalisation of vulnerable groups and the consolidation of core-periphery dynamics between domininant and minority groups. Limiting PhDs becomes an “ethically and socially irresponsible position” when there is much left to achieve in terms of increasing the diversity of research opportunities for students, faculty and cross-disciplinary collaborations. For Smith, a renovated doctoral program adequate for the current time should “support and energize students to stay on track, hold fast to peer networks, find multiple kinds of mentors, minimize debt and anxiety, and maintain a sense of possibility, if not certainty, about the future, whatever career path unfolds” (127). This translates to an urgent need for change at the level of individual supervisary support as well as institutional reform to make the program more flexible and rigorous and thereby able to meet the needs of the 21st century.
At the heart of the question about how to reform the humanities PhD for the 21st century, there remains a tension between program and outcome. The PhD was designed to train graduate students to become competent professors who could undertake innovative research and push the boundaries of their fields as well as teach diverse student groups. The program reformations being considered suggest that we need to rethink doctoral programs from top to bottom in light of real and desired outcomes. In a study titled “Humanities PhD Graduates: Desperately Seeking Careers?”, Lynn McAlpine and Nichole Austin examine the PhD experiences and post-graduation employment trajectories of 212 Canadian humanists from 24 universities who graduated between 2004 and 2014. They conclude that there is increasing job insecurity among humanities students –they experience higher rates of both unemployment and part-time employment, compared to graduates in other fields. Additionally, the lack of academic positions has spiralled upwards over time. As Léo Charbonneau notes, “Canada lags behind many countries in the number of PhDs produced, and yet graduates and postdocs are increasingly voicing concerns about finding jobs.” There remains a tension therefore in striking a balance between the ratio of PhDs produced and the academic positions that need to be filled. One way to address this, is to shift our method of evaluation – both at the institutional level and the supervision level. To do this, we must look beyond the academic job market as the sole criteria for defining success and employment. Vital ways to rethink the outcome of PhD programs begins with the acknowledgement of potential alternative pathways, the relevance and importance of public scholarship, and the transferable skills that can be fostered in a humanities doctoral program and that can lead toward careers beyond the academy.
At the heart of the question about how to reform the humanities PhD for the 21st century, there remains a tension between program and outcome.
For Brad Nelson too, the solution lies in restructuring PhD programs to reflect the actual – as opposed to imagined – career outcomes of students. This involves the reassessment of the relation between research-based outcomes and professional development in doctoral programs. In “We need an outcomes-based approach to doctoral education”, Nelson argues that research training should remain the principal focus of the degree, but that training should also incorporate professional skillsets to support students who may wish to work outside the academy and in interdisciplinary settings. Instead of focusing on proving the social and economic relevance of the humanities PhD amidst the rhetoric of decay and stagnation circulating in the media, he notes that we must leverage the PhD training in other aspects of Canadian and international societies. The task ahead lies in equipping PhDs with adequate training and experience to thrive in current and future economies and this can be achieved by a thorough revision of the doctoral program to meet the changing nature of funding, evaluations and outcomes today.
To enhance the lives and career outcomes of PhD graduates, Paul Yachnin in “The PhD Conversion Experience,” encourages a large-scale transformation of the university itself. Initiatives like Individual Development Plans (IDPs) and professional skills training are well-meaning interventions on the outskirts of PhD programs, but they do not significantly address the needs of students. He reminds readers that the PhD is the sole degree program that requires candidates to make a “significant original contribution to knowledge.” Doctoral graduates must demonstrate mastery over their field and develop research questions and ideas that push against the existing boundaries of their disciplines. The predominant desire to remain within academia is rooted in the graduate experience where one is converted to a “life of ideas,” where one is motivated to produce original research, and where the university is assumed to be the sole environment for applying those skills. Yachnin defines this dilemma as a conjunction of conversion and induction into the “Church of Knowledge.” This desire to be inducted into the academy is contrasted with the grim statistics that the TRaCE McGill study tracking 4,624 graduates from 2008 to 2018 found – only approximately 25 percent of PhD grads are able to secure permanent jobs as professors. He outlines that the conversion of students to a life of ideas—the thrill of finding, proving and sharing new research – is not a problem in itself. The problem arises when there is an assumption that the life of ideas can be lived only within the university. The way forward toward improving the prospects for graduates, therefore, lies in mobilizing their training and research skills across multiple sectors beyond the academy. Coupled with their creative, visionary skills and in-depth knowledge, these researchers and teachers can increase awareness, act as interlocuters outside the academy and leverage their training to work in meaningful and sustainable careers.
These recommendations are reiterated by the Report of the CAGS Task Force on the Dissertation (2018), which notes that doctoral students and candidates require new competencies to engage in diverse research beyond the academy and communicate with specialized as well as general audiences. The doctoral dissertation should remain at the core of the PhD, keeping in mind that it is the pivotal focus of the degree. But the report urges readers to rethink the sole emphasis on the dissertation and urges us to consider broadened dissertation policies. It states that the dissertation is often, “the only work formally evaluated, and, along with a successful defense, is often the sole criterion for the granting of the degree. If the forms of research and communication in the world are changing, why should the academy not only refrain from encouraging, but actually prohibit, dissertations that more closely align with those forms (4)?” To rise to the challenges of the 21st century, the task force recommends “expanding mentorship of doctoral students, enhancing learning opportunities, broadening dissertation policies, and expanding notions of valid scholarship in universities’ faculty reward systems (2).” There is a critical need to affirm alt-ac career paths and access to career counsellors, while increasing opportunities for interdisciplinary and collaborative research. Another recommendation that stands out is the departure from a sole master-apprentice paradigm to a broader network and encouraging broader dissertation possibilities with more experiential engagement opportunities outside academia.
The humanities examine the meaning-making texts and practices of human culture, interrogating historical interpretation and critically evaluating conventional interpretations for the present and future. The humanities is engaged in both individual and collective responses, and investigates the nuances of critical questions and answers of our time. Literary and artistic texts, objects and practices are often the site of contesting national ideologies, myths and cultures and projecting histories and futures. The critical study of these disciplines remains pivotal to engage with questions that are varied and interdisciplinary- such as ideas of utility, the role of artificial intelligence, the aesthetics of appreciating beauty, languages, literatures, cultures and histories, understanding the unimaginable scale and impact of climate change--all these questions resonate with humane impulses. Unsurprisingly then, we need more trained PhDs to engage with these issues in universities, in business and industry, in the media, and across the work of policy and politics.
Diversity in Academia
In the previous section we discussed the lack of diversity in the humanities, and the urgent need to increase the racial, gender and economic diversity of faculty, students, and research fields. Vernita Burrell in “Reimagining Graduate Pedagogy to Account for Career Diversity” notes that, “Rather than train PhD students in the humanities to teach at the kinds of institutions that produced them, we need to refocus much of our attention on training them to engage a range of audiences—within and beyond academia (133)”. She suggests that pedagogical training for PhD students needs to be in tune with the diverse interests of graduate students. Often it is assumed that graduate students will teach at the kind of institution that produced them. Consequently departments presume that academic positions are the primary and most desireable outcomes. But this is frequently not the case and the diverse range of first-generation, low-income, students from historically underrepresented groups—students who might have alternative career aspirations—will require different skills. In particular, she reminds readers that BIPOC PhD students need additional support to navigate and confront barriers in academia, while avoiding burnout. Furthermore, BIPOC PhD students are called on for service by departments and schools, but they are often not compensated or rewarded for this labour.
While designing new pedagogical training courses, she also cautions us against the practice of imagining an “ideal” student, a presumption which results in considering students as “ideal”, “traditional” and “nontraditional”. Such labels are linked with assumptions and biases that neglect local, national and institutional demographics, and can be harmful for the psyche of the student. Notably, the idea of an imagined ideal student limits programs from equipping current PhD students with necessary skills to work beyond the academy. Even for students who want to pursue a career in academia, some might not subscribe to the goal of the “ideal” student. Some may want to teach at community colleges or work as museum curators and educators. Pedagogy seminars therefore, should comprise of broadly applicable skills, “like teaching and sharing information with technology, public speaking, and so on—that can be applied in a range of contexts, including a variety of academic contexts (136)”. This recalibration and reconfiguration is crucial to ensure that the PhD training is relevant and flexible for graduate students.
This need to reimagine the humanities PhD is emphasised by Alexandra M. Lord in “Skill-Building and Thinking about Career Diversity for Graduate Students”. She posits that it can be easy to assume that the academy is the sole venue for the cultivation of the “life of the mind”. Yet it is necessary to note that it is only one of many career options that value research, independence, analysis and strong communication skills. She encourages students to take up temporary or part-time postitions as well as internships and fellowships to familiarise themselves with diverse options and expand their professional networks. Another way to plan ahead for future careers is to analyse job advertisements while in graduate school, so that students can acquire more skills associated with different careers before starting the job search. This includes the industry-specific language, compensation expectations, and usual professional practices of the career that the student might have in mind. Lord also shares a helpful suggestion about work experience. She recommends that, “Whenever possible, students should avoid performing the same job over and over, semester after semester “(173). Diverse work experiences should be prioritised such as teaching assistantships, research assistantship projects, and professional experiences able to develop well-rounded skillsets for a diverse job market.
In light of the growing need for diverse careers as the academic market shrinks, Michael J McGandy in “Diverse Careers, the Waning of the Prestige Regime, and the Rise of the Influence Economy in Academic Publishing,” notes that publishing opportunities are growing for scholars who are engaged outside the academy. He writes that increasingly humanities and social science PhDs are looking for employment beyond tenure-track positions, and editors are responding to changing trends in the field by estimating diverse parameters in addition to the prestige of the academic qualifications. People who can promote and disseminate their research in public effectively, who are visible and connected to the media and active on social media platforms, and who are likely to attract sizeable readerships are increasingly being sought after by editors in academic publishing. McGandy highlights the changing trends in academic publishing, where one can recognise a decline of the prestige regime and the rise of influence economy, where authors with diverse career paths have more opportunities to publish their research. But this also means that that all authors are now expected to demonstrate their reach in the literary marketplace before securing a contract. The increasing significance of “publicly engaged scholarship”, that is “outward facing” means that public scholars are expected to be active on Twitter discussions and participate vocally in contemporary debates. These expectations signal the rise of diverse research profiles that combine research, academic intergrity as well as the ability to translate their research for non-academic audiences. A reimagination and reinvigoration of the humanities PhD would have to take these trends of the academic market into account and equip graduate students for myriad academic and alternative outcomes.
To reinvigorate and reimagine the humanities PhD, Yachnin, Director of the TRaCE Transborder project suggests in “The Crisis in the Humanities—What Would Shakespeare do?” that we have to pivot our scholarship towards the “collective, multi-faceted work of ecological and political healing” (164). This includes sharing our scholarship with ongoing efforts to combat xenophobic, racist neo-fascist populism and mobilising our training to reclaim the role of humanities in public life.
For the great Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye, the teaching of literature does not end with the admiration of literature; it is also “the transfer of imaginative energy from literature to the student” as it influences the moral and social development of individuals and societies (492). The humanities PhD – like a trained critic, mediates between art and the public, interrogating and consolidating ideas and representations. And it is to this end, that now, more than ever, we must uphold and strengthen the humanities PhD degree across the world.
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