December 18, 2008

The Case for Fewer PhD Students

This thread at Leiter's has turned into a discussion of whether we should be admitting fewer students to PhD programs, given how bad the job market is. I take Matthew Smith's side here; I think we're seriously hurting ourselves by glutting the job market; it makes things bad for the candidates who can't get tenure-track jobs, and it also makes things bad for philosophy departments as a whole. When we create a pool of adjuncts and temp lecturers, administrations are going to rely on them if they can. But the whole thread is worth discussing.

[Another thing I think is that it would be good if we had a lot more MA students; it would let students do graduate work without devoting the rest of their youth to the field, PhD programs would have better information if they were admitting MAs instead of undergrads, and it would mean that departments still had graduate students for their teaching needs.]

I also thought that Brian Leiter might wish to have the comments return to the topic of the original post; in case he does, I'd be happy to host more discussion on the topic.

Posted by Matt Weiner at 02:15 PM | Comments (3)

December 03, 2008

Where's My Bailout?

Robert Reich is right. I say this with no vested interest whatsoever.

Posted by Matt Weiner at 05:34 PM