The Harvard English department hasn’t been in the news too much lately. Their last big splash was a few years back when they invited Tom Paulin, an Oxford professor and poet to receive some big honors and give an important public lecture. Paulin’s sideline in Jew-hatred got a lot of press and attracted some comments from Larry Summers, then president of Harvard (and the only Jewish president in Harvard’s history). Most of Paulin’s opinions turned out to be fairly standard for a European, e.g., equating Israelis with Nazis. Paulin did supply a few unique amusing incidents. For example, he had a run-in with an Oxford teacher named “Fritz Zimmerman”, who had dispensed some harsh criticism to a Muslim student. While defending the Muslim student, Paulin talked about Zimmerman’s Israeli connections, failing to notice that his antagonist was German, not Jewish.
My neighbor ran into a Ph.D. student in the English department the other day. He told her that there were 12 Ph.D. graduates this year; two had found the tenure-track jobs for which they had trained.
The problems with excess numbers of PhD graduates in the Arts is similar in Australia. Many of them end up teaching university courses on a part time contract basis until they realise there must be something better to do, and join our public service or teaching. Anyone doing a PhD needs to do the research on what happens to graduates in that area, but it must be obvious when a department has a similar number of postgrad students to faculty, that only a few will get academic positions. OK in engineering or most sciences, but it must be hard selling an ability to critically evaluate an obscure 19th century author.