Today's Chronicle features an interview with education researcher Michael T. Nettles who, along with Catherine M. Millett of ETS recently conducted a massive study of what it takes to get a PhD, interviewing over 9,000 PhDs from 21 PhD granting institutions. The least surprising finding of the study is something I've been thinking about and talking about with John and Elizabeth for awhile now, and it's best rendered as a quote from the article's interview:
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Q. Are humanities students more or less satisfied than those in the sciences?
A. The humanities students were distinctive in the fact that they were the highest socioeconomic class of doctoral students. Doctoral students in general are of higher socioeconomic class than the general population. But humanities students had the parents who were more likely to be postbaccalaureate-trained professionals. They also came from higher-income families.
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I imagine there exist subtle differences across fields within the humanities; for example, scholars in rhetoric and composition don't tend to bear the same class markers as literary scholars; this is likely because ivy schools don't have rhet/comp programs. Nevertheless, these class distinctions bear out even in the course of one's daily institutional life. When I first arrived at this R-1 university, a new acquaintance excitedly told me that his colleague, a cultural anthropologist, was dying to meet me since I was such a rare specimen (my word) with my three degrees, all from--gasp!--state schools.
You see, Illinois tends to hire from the ivies, where those from upper-income families tend to go. I know there are exceptions. A colleague of mine who is in fact one of those exceptions complains that we tend to hire people who are a lot alike, and that colleague is kind of right: lots of our colleagues have ivy on their degrees, some even have professor parents. The English department is doing a pretty good job hiring from underrepresented groups and noticing that the number of women full professors needs to be raised, but here's my question, inspired by convos with the ever class-conscious John: why does diversity as an institutional (and laudable) goal frequently overlook class? If class diversity is assumed to be 'covered' by minority or international scholars, that assumption, in the academy particularly, is frequently dead wrong.
At this point, as the study suggests, faculty hiring is the place where class manifests itself most by not manifesting itself at all. And while I'm all for making sure we have individuals from a variety of institutions in our final applicant pools, the problems of course seem to hatch much earlier, at the level of grad admissions or recruitment, or even earlier, at the undergrad admissions level. Hell, it probably all starts with expensive, competitive, straight-to-PhD preschools. But let's think about admission to grad school. Perhaps the Nettles-Millett study has data that would support the anecdotal evidence from a friend at another Big 10 school who noticed during his tenure as Director of Graduate Studies that applications from ivy league undergrads were noticeably on the rise. I'm sure this is a mark of extreme competition for graduate school in bad economic times--these students can no longer just switch to another ivy for their PhD but must go to the next tier down, their 'backup' schools, and the schools where their labor comes in handy--and the implications are huge. Perhaps a PhD in the humanities is a Bourdieuian question of taste--those who grow up with lots of books in their house migrate to libraries out of cultural habit. But it might also be that middle- and working-class graduates who develop scholarly inclinations, however accidentally, may slowly get squeezed out.
[update: This Chronicle first person piece does a nice job cutting to some of the issues I was trying to raise with this particular entry.]
