Why Do PhD Programs Even Exist?

* What faculty say when they're drunk and honest

Photo by Khürt Williams on Unsplash

*The following dialogue is a fictionalized reconstruction of off-record conversations the author has had in the past five years with a variety of philosophers. The author, for the record, does not drink, and has spent the entirety of his adult life as the sober one in drunken academic discussions.

Jordan is a distinguished senior philosopher at a “top” analytic research department “Sterlington,” that has been competing for the best graduate students and faculty internationally for over fifty years.

Kerr is a junior philosopher at a PhD granting department, Prarieview State, which competes for students who are not competitive at internationally top-ranked programs.

Lin is a senior philosopher at a university that is trying to transform a small master’s program into a PhD program.

Blam is a faculty member who spent the entirety of his career at a liberal arts college, but who is just starting a job at a research institution with a PhD program.

The four are sitting at a casual dinner after having had a bit too much wine, and their inhibitions are gone, so that semi-joking but somewhat honest opinions are now being expressed.

Jordan: The graduate students aren’t any good these days. Thirty years ago we still had people on the brink of being Parfit, Lewis, Williamson, or Nussbaum, and they were solving very serious and ambitious problems. Now everyone is making a little move in a literature of 100 articles and they go to their little niche conferences thanking each other for their talks. What happened to systemic philosophy? What happened to the next great thinker? I think we need to end our graduate program, maybe permanently or at least until I see evidence that good people are coming back to philosophy. Its a waste of our time advising these kids. Its a waste of their time writing these papers about these trivial moves in their little games.

Blam: You think that Sterlington of all places shouldn’t have a PhD program? I can see the argument that there are too many PhD programs out there handing out too many PhDs, and that it is hurting the students because they can’t get jobs. But Sterlington has been and will continue to be churning out PhDs who are getting jobs. It’s still a big success comparatively, why the hell would you end that?

Jordan: We’re not a trade school for university employment, we’re here to find and cultivate true philosophers, people who are going to change the field and be read for 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. We’re looking for groundbreaking, agenda-setting thinking. If that’s not happening, what’s the point? Right now we’re about as good as every other PhD program churning out a bunch of technocrats who are trying to find a niche amongst a group of friends so they can collect a paycheck. These aren’t philosophers, these are people who teach and study philosophy. Go ahead and have programs for teachers of philosophy, that’s not Sterlington. We are a program for true philosophers, and if they’re not showing up, we don’t need to have a program. The faculty are doing enough real philosophy here.

Blam: I guess I have never thought of graduate programs in philosophy as having that goal. I mean, there are so few philosophers that are comparable to the likes of Nussbaum or Williamson even at Sterlington. If that’s your standard for having a graduate program, there really should only be three of them in the world, right? Who is going to be teaching all those philosophy majors and nonmajors at all of these other universities? Isn’t the goal of a graduate program to staff those universities, and as a side benefit, these teachers can also write for each other because they get enjoyment and fulfillment out of it? Isn’t the point of graduate programs to sustain the tradition of thinking, writing, and critique extending from Plato, Mencius, Nargarjuna and other world figures right up to Nussbaum or Williamson or those from the Continental tradition? Isn’t the purpose of a graduate program just to keep that alive, in the culture, for the next generation of people? You and I, in fact most professional philosophers, are just temporary custodians of that tradition. Some uniquely gifted people are going to be players in it, but that’s not most of us. PhD programs are for all of us, even the unremarkable ones.

Jordan: Wow, you’ve been spending way too much time at a liberal arts college. We never think about those issues, not when we schedule courses, not when we do PhD admissions, not when we hire, and not when we tenure and promote. We are looking to find the best philosophers, the smartest interlocutors, and people whose work is excellent on all dimensions. We’re looking for people who, when other people read them, think, this is it, this is philosophy worth thinking about, worth putting on a syllabus. That’s what we want in our graduate students, that’s who we want to advise our graduate students, and that’s what we think the purpose of our graduate program is.

Kerr: What Jordan says is to a large extent true Blam. We might not be Sterlington, but even here at Prarieview, we very seldom think about our graduate program, including the structure of it like how much coursework, when people have to write a prospectus, the kind of exams we require, and how long the dissertation ought to be, in terms of the best way to staff other universities with teachers that inspire and sustain a certain tradition. We definitely don’t think of training some custodian of a tradition. We’re looking to teach people to make an original, publishable contribution to a literature, so that their career as a researcher can be established. You can see this by how little pedagogical training we have, and why we don’t look for anything teaching-related in PhD admissions, and we put so little weight on that in whom we hire for advising our graduate students. Its not that that kind of thing isn’t important, its just not a priority and we kind of assume that kind of stuff will work itself out. Plus, no one ever gets hired or promoted on the basis of that stuff, so we structure our entire program on what will get our students hired and promoted.

Blam: So the purpose of a graduate program is to churn out the best possible researcher you can from a cohort, and “best possible researcher” means, what exactly? I doubt you think it means what Jordan says it means.

Kerr: It means the person gets published in the highest ranked journal they can possibly get published in. It means they publish regularly in a variety of other journals. It means other researchers will pay some attention to them so they can write them letters for promotion. It means the student will gain a reputation in the small niche in which they, are they become someone for whom to request peer-review, make contribution to edited volumes, and invite to conferences. The goal of our program is to admit the best students who will matriculate here, and to try and get as many of them as possible to become professional philosophers in the research sense. Even if its not going to be the agenda-setting students, it is going to be students who in some sense want it, and why shouldn’t there be programs like ours for the students who want to do what we do for a living?

Jordan: You’re wasting a lot of these kids’ time Kerr. They can get all the success they want along those dimensions, but that makes them only as good as any half-rate blogger who is talking to other bloggers back and forth on the internet. And good for them if they get to collect a paycheck doing it, but these are very smart kids and they would do better for themselves and the world if they turned their intellectual energy onto more impactful things. They can make a bigger contribution to biology, or ecology, or tech. They’re wasting their time playing this little game that this profession has turned into, as much as they’re wasting their time streaming video of themselves playing video games on the internet, even if they can monetize it.

Blam: This exchange is getting me pretty depressed, especially because I now have to advise in a PhD program. On the one hand, I think I really do value the kind of thing Jordan is talking about, in that I highly value and esteem the work of people like Parfit, Lewis, Nussbaum, and their students who are now my peers. How could I not? And I’m not so pluralistic and egalitarian that I think anyone who gets a PhD and publishes in one of our journals is as good or has contributed as much knowledge as Nussbaum. But I am a pluralist enough to think that far more people than just a handful a generation make significant contributions to philosophical knowledge than just those greats. On the other hand, I do find the careerist aspirations of a view like Kerr’s, while realistic and prudent, rather depressing, and probably for pluralist reasons also. I’ve been around long enough to have evaluated tenure-files from people at teaching institutions, who are happy there and have great jobs, but were forced to have three publications or so, and whose publications clearly show they are not interested in being an original contributor to a literature so as to be invited to conferences and what not. Those papers just go through the motions of looking and sounding like a piece of philosophy. These people are happy teaching and learning about and passing on all of this great work to another generation. They’re probably more excited about teaching philosophy than any of the research-errific friend’s I’ve had. Why is the only path for them to do that by way of the path of a typical researcher, publish or perish graduate school, when even successful people on that model sometimes make about as significant a contribution as some random blogger talking to friends on the internet? What value does the typical PhD program have for them? Shouldn’t there be graduate programs for these other people also?

Lin: Listen to all of this super elitist bullshit! Jordan, you think only the Roger Federers and Serena Williams of the world should get a shot at playing pro tennis? Even the most elitist assholes in philosophy doesn’t believe this! There are thousands of people who aspire for professional tennis, the same in professional philosophy. We have a small masters program, we barely get any students applying, most of them are people who liked philosophy in college but have no idea what to do with their lives. At the same time, we can’t get anything from the Dean’s office, no TAs for our courses of 300, no raises in two years, no money for traveling to conferences, no endowment for department talks. The fact is, at our university, you want to get any resources, you have to be a PhD granting department. And our faculty of seven, no one pays any attention to our work or our institution. If we can get our PhD program started, we might get two extra tenure-track lines, and then we might be able to hire someone that gets us ranked onto the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Do you know how much a game-changer that would be for us? The Dean would immediately give us a speaker series and we’d have three TAs for our courses, and we’d probably get $5000 in research funding each per year. That’s not a lot but its more than we have now. And maybe your little friends Nussbaum and Williamson would actually read and respond to our work instead of seeing us as rejects and losers.

Blam: Hold on, Lin, are you saying that the purpose of a graduate program is for the reputational and career benefits of the people who are teaching in it? What a bad reason for having a graduate program!

Lin: Spare me the posturing self-righteousness of the question Blam. Its sanctimonious coming from you, who TA’d at Princeton and taught Vassar students for 15 years. Go your entire career having thousands of students give less than half a shit about what you’ve spent your life studying and writing about, for crappy pay, having to read daily fifty essays by students who can’t reason their way out of a paper bag, and then admonish me for wanting just 10% of my job to be the kind of thing that you and Jordan and Kerr have taken for granted. Yes I want more prestige in my life. Yes, I want important people to think about me once in a while. Yes I want more money and resources for my department, and I want some minor budget so I can go to a conference a year, and I think I deserve it as much as any of you, and fuck you for judging me for wanting it.

Blam: Lin, are you sure starting an entirely new PhD program and chasing the rankings is the best way to get this money and prestige and labor you’re after? You’re talking about getting in the game of being reputationally ranked by your peers amongst a hundred programs around the world that sets metrics by which you will then need to evaluate yourselves and your junior colleagues on, all for the benefit of competing for three or four graduate students who show up for 6-8 years of struggle for a degree half of them will not get, and the other half will get but do nothing with because they won’t get secure academic employment afterward. Wouldn’t that subtract not add to your reputation, and also impose a lot of very dreadful features into your job and departmental life?

Jordan: And what possible prestige can come to you, Lin, having to advise these half-rate students writing some useless dissertation about the semantics of terms of epistemic violence on Twitter, or whatever it is young people like to write about these days? Even at Sterlington, you want to advise the best students, the ones going on to the other Sterlingtons of the world. Then at least you can say you were their advisor. You really want a reputation as advisor to the adjuncts and unemployable?

Blam: It sounds like Jordan thinks a PhD program and PhD advising is an ongoing “best philosopher in the world” contest. Its just like the pro tennis tour; there’s space for 128 players at any given grand slam, at most space for about 2000 total pro players, and prestige is only granted to the players and coaches of players in the top 100. First of all, you realize Lin that you’re not going to win that contest, and Jordan has a point about whether you really do want to create a space for the students who come in 600th in that contest at twenty-two years old, but hope to contend with the top 200 in the next contest eight years later. Is it really good for them to have all this false hope? But more importantly, do you see how prestige-chasing changes the values by which you work by Lin? Are you really going to get up in the morning every day and interact with young people, your colleagues, your peers, with the thought of whether a particular interaction increases your prestige? What happened to educating and inspiring young people?

Lin: You’ve been a big talker about the importance of perpetuating and sustaining a tradition of ideas, writing, and thinking of high value as the primary aim of what we do Blam. In what sense is adding a program that allows four more young people a year to educate themselves beyond their bachelors degree working against that? How can it not be a good for there to be even more PhD programs that provide this good, because it will provide this good to more people? Even by your lights, the more people in philosophy PhD programs, the better it is for philosophy!

Blam: So PhD programs are for the sake of students, and not for your own reputation after all? If that’s the ultimate goal, then you really need to think hard about how you structure the program.

You’re talking about a PhD program not all that different from any others, you have students take classes, demonstrate competence and specialized knowledge, then choose a topic to write 300-pages on, and insist they say something no one who has written on that topic has said yet.

One thing I’ve been noticing in this whole discussion is people are recreating the conditions of their own success, which is a PhD program just like the ones they went through. Jordan is a top philosopher in a top department and believes graduate programs need to be producing the top people. Kerr is a PhD from a top department, trying to recreate the same kind of students at a non-top department.

You folks ever hear of the Bollitieri academy? It was a top tennis academy in the 80s-2000s, producing lots of top 100 players and Grand Slam champions. If you asked them “What is the point of a top tennis academy”, they will clearly answer that it is charged with producing the Agassis or Sharapovas of the future. Their training curriculum was the same for all; there really is a kind of forehand, and backhand you teach future grand-slam champions. That’s why everyone at the top looked the same, and why one-handed backhands and continental forehands have disappeared in pro tennis.

Jordan has an interesting point: on the tennis analogy, a lot of kids who will never be competing on the professional tour, or even coaching on that tour, shouldn’t be spending their youth at a tennis academy. Its a lot of money and time, and the opportunity costs are immense. I take Jordan’s view to be that the same holds for PhD study in philosophy. I don’t think this is true, but its a coherent view of the purpose of graduate education, to train contenders and only contenders.

Kerr seems to think that everyone who wants a shot at going pro should have an academy fit for their level to give them a shot, to compete on the pro tour even if they get beat down and drummed out. That’s because the occasional dark horse really does make it on tour, and does very well, once in a while they even win a Grand Slam. That’s more true in philosophy than in tennis. So Kerr has a point too. Maybe the place to do this isn’t your Bollitieri academy or in this case the Sterlingtons of the world, but it speaks to the idea that there should be as many PhD spots as there are undergraduates who want to get into them, because they all could have a shot at being contenders. I think this is far too hopeful in philosophy, and in tennis.

Lin has ended on the view that more PhD programs is just better because being a coach at a tennis academy confers honors and resources on the coaches, and confers benefits on the students because, even on my own view, if we think tennis is valuable, then people who want to play tennis in their youth should have a spot at least somewhere, even if they will never even try to compete on tour. The perpetuation of people who value the sport is the central value, and that has been my view of PhD programs in philosophy.

But I think my biggest critique in all of this is that its funny just how little variation there is in how you are all conceiving of a PhD program. A program designed for the next great tennis players to me looks very different than one designed for careerists who will never compete at the highest levels, and very different than one designed for the people who are good enough tennis players that they are tasked with helping sustain and support the sport in all of the local clubs and community centers across the country. In philosophy this is just as true; why think that everyone has to be trained the way you would Williamson or Nussbaum, if the purpose of a PhD program is as different as the purpose of a tennis academy?

The research model PhD program is seeking to turn an undergraduate philosophy major into a specialist who talks to other specialists. To this I think Jordan is onto something. The tennis player who is never going to be playing on the tour and who is at best going to be director of the tennis community center, teach kids, adult clinics, needs to learn very different things than what the next Federer needs to learn. Its actually a disservice to tennis that we teach everyone, including those completely incapable of turning pro, how to hit and move like a pro.

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that either every PhD program should have different tracks, or there should be very different kinds of PhD programs, that are tailored around very different kinds of education. Maybe Sterlington should pack up if they don’t think they are producing any more Grand Slam champions, and Lin should consider designing a program that is nothing like Sterlington. Maybe there is a place for the kind of continuing philosophical education that develops erudite generalists who are good at teaching and inspiring kids to pass on what they love, even if they’re never a contender.

Jordan: Wow Blam, you really have been brainwashed by your liberal arts college. You talk like we’re all educators, like our primary purpose in our jobs and our careers is to educate, to be of pedagogical service to students. That’s just false. We are philosophers first, not educators. If we educate, that is a side benefit. We are not teaching or educating aspiring philosophers, we are being philosophers, people who aspire to the deepest knowledge in the universe. We surround ourselves with graduate students to model good philosophy, showing them what we do and how we do it, and engaging with them as philosophers, not students. And forgive me for wanting only the best possible philosophers around to engage with. That makes me and them better philosophers. And to the extent that that ends, then philosophy itself deserves to end.

Kerr: I usually disagree with almost everything Jordan says, but I agree that we don’t conceive of ourselves as educators. We’ve worked incredibly hard as philosophers to get noticed and read by all the important people, and part of maintaining that is to stay ranked as highly as possible in our PhD programs. Its why other philosophers from higher and lower ranked place keep tabs on our work. They won’t pay any attention otherwise. PhD students are just miniature versions of us who aspire to the same careers.

Lin: All I want in my life is just a little bit of that, when I haven’t had any. Call it prestige-seeking if you’d like its why I got into this in the first place.

Blam: Funny how different people who have the same job have such completely different conceptions of what that job is.