In Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom, Katina Rogers takes graduate training reform as her mission. She argues that current graduate training is not fit for purpose; i.e., it primarily trains PhDs to become tenured track faculty members when A) there are very limited TT faculty jobs, and B) most PhDs end up working in other roles or industries altogether. In doing so, Rogers suggests, academia replicates inequalities as a very small (generally moneyed) sliver of the population is willing to take the risk of such an investment without certain employment and / or “fits the profile” — that is, they are already successful in a traditional academic way.

Rogers’ work intersects with open scholarship when she argues that diversifying the modes and fruits of academic production would encourage a more diverse graduate student population. She aligns even further in her embrace of public engagement activities. Rogers puts significant importance on such work, going as far as to suggest that

Decreased funding and negative public opinion become a vicious cycle, with each feeding the other until the elitism that was feared becomes reality in a self-fulfilling prophecy, with only the wealthy able to afford an advanced degree. Universities can break the cycle by recommitting to serving the public, both by developing a more fully inclusive professoriate […] and by fostering creative and publicly engaged research. (58)

Moreover, Rogers succinctly argues:

The lack of public support for higher education is exacerbated when scholarship does not have a public impact. (58)

Although much of Putting the Humanities PhD to Work is aimed at graduate students seeking career direction and engaged faculty and admin who are committed to graduate training reform, it also offers astute commentary on the relationship between the university and broader publics in the 21st century.

 

Work cited

Rogers, Katina. 2020. Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom. Durham: Duke University Press.