Why The Number of Doctorates Awarded In The Humanities Is Falling

A Key Part of the Story That's Rarely Acknowledged

(This is adapted from an address I gave at the National Press Club in January. The speech was given under the auspices of the National Association of Scholars [NAS] and with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thanks to NAS, and, especially, to NAS President Peter W. Wood for the invitation.)

Between 2003 and 2023, the number of doctorates issued by U.S. colleges and universities nearly doubled within the field of engineering. Yet the number of doctorates issued in the Humanities declined by 15%. In addition, more of those doctorates were awarded to foreign students. Thus, adjusted for the increase in our population, the number of Americans receiving doctorates in the Humanities fell by about 40 percent.

Of course, such a quantitative account doesn’t offer us an explanation for why this change has been happening. The most common explanation that’s been offered is that there’s increasingly little economic benefit in working towards a doctorate in subjects like Philosophy, English, History and Classics. Too few tenure track positions are available in the academy. Simply put, it doesn’t make sense for most of the young people who aspire to be college professors to pursue a PhD.

There’s much to this claim.

It’s also true that many of the professors in these fields have betrayed their subjects. This is a qualitative dimension of the quantitative problem. One study of graduate English programs, for example, found that of 54 U.S. doctoral programs in English just four required students to take a class in Shakespeare.

This shift from meaningful study pushes sincere lovers of the disciplines away. All too often those who wind up pursuing doctorates are not advocates and devotees but radical ideologues interested in the study not of the subjects themselves but esoteric theories about the subjects.

Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library: Where the graduate students hang out and commiserate over their mistreatment.

A related problem that’s often cited is the ideological conformity within these programs. That’s evidenced by research showing that only 2% of U.S. college English professors are registered Republicans, and close to 0% of those in Sociology are. A study at Yale found that whole departments in such seemingly apolitical fields as Chemical Engineering, Italian and Music were without a single identifiable Conservative. In fact, 27 departments were without one. In the same way, a nationwide study of college Journalism and History departments found that 60% had not one registered Republican. The aim of ethnic and racial diversity, it seems, is not consonant with diversity of opinion.

But I would like to point to a much more immediate difficulty that is less often discussed. This is the routine abuse that graduate students in the humanities suffer at the hands of senior faculty members. It’s supposed to take four years to complete a typical doctoral problem — five years at most…