Luis Villa
@kfitz wooooof.
I recall talking with a PhD student friend who had stopped writing in the area they were passionate about. I asked why, and it was because (in essence) their advisor had said “I’m advising you so that *my* intellectual project is passed on; work on your intellectual project doesn’t further that goal”. I’ve since heard variations from a few other PhD candidates.
Your discussion does indeed sound like the limit case of my example. Fascinating, and sad.
Limit Case
I argued back in Planned Obsolescence that the limit case of scholars' belief in collaboration was the co-authored dissertation; if we could not imagine such a thing -- how it would work, how it would be assessed, how it would be valued and rewarded -- we would at least unconsciously maintain the pre-eminence of the individualistic single-author/Great Man mode of production within the academy.
I raise this because yesterday in a department meeting, in which we were discussing professional development opportunities for graduate students, it occurred to me that the limit case of our belief in alternative career paths -- trajectories that lead outside the classroom, into a range of roles on and off campus that make use of the skill set developed in PhD programs but not in ways that replicate the careers of PhD faculty -- might be whether we could imagine admitting a candidate whose statement of purpose described such a path. An application like this might describe how the candidate's passion for the study of literature or art history or philosophy and their desire to see that knowledge do work in the world lead them to want to build the knowledge base and skill set necessary to work in a nonprofit organization, or a foundation, or a secondary school system, or anywhere else we might imagine.
How would we respond to such an application? Would we think you don't need a PhD to do that, or that's not what a PhD is for? Or would we see the benefit of helping prepare a student to take the ways of reading, writing, and thinking that we believe are important out beyond the walls of the academy to do that work in the world?
If we have a hard time imagining how we would support such a student, how we would assess their work, how we would see the opportunity to support them as an opportunity rather than an uncomfortable fit, we are at least unconsciously maintaining the assumption that the academic job market is the natural outcome of the PhD program, and thus ensuring that other career paths can only ever be Plan B.
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@kfitz I see your great man and raise you "one on one teaching" as the motivating principle: typically graduate study represents the most intimate teaching experience a student can get, with ready access to hands on personalised supervision. But even so, already one of the greatest difficulties a graduate student faces is lack of supervision, and introducing means allowing the supervisor to dodge this duty to their students by having them formally take over co-authorship doesn't seem very beneficial for the students. Just in general, how does having a co-author help the student? Have to say "no, I didn't write all of that" doesn't seem like it will help a non-academic career, except if co-authorship was the only thing that allowed completion at all. Maybe it can be beneficial in some specific circumstances, but it seems too open to abuse by faculty looking to escape responsibility for it to be a general feature.
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