Active History

By Sam Hossack

The report of the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada is now available (in English and in French). This is the ninth (and final) in a series of posts by Task Force members, offering their perspectives on selected themes from the report. Activehistory.ca encourages readers to join in the conversation, either in the comments or on social media, or by submitting a response piece to be considered for publication upon the series’ completion.

Over the past month, members of the Canadian Historical Association’s Task Force on the Future of the PhD have contributed articles to Active History summarizing the major findings of our report. Many of the report’s findings suggest that the current state of the History PhD is dismal, including long completion times and poor career outcomes for graduates.

While many might rush to conclude that we should simply stop training History PhDs in order to better match the number of graduates and the number of academic jobs, doing so does not address the diverse reasons students pursue a PhD or the many structural problems that exist within programs. To improve student experiences and enhance the value of the PhD, departments need to acknowledge the flaws in current programs and recognize the effects of these flaws. We can re-think the design and purpose of our programs. The Task Force heard throughout our consultation process that there is value in completing a History degree, and History PhD training is important for those who work outside of tenure-track faculty positions. As historians, we know that there are numerous benefits of studying history and of doing so at an advanced critical level. The problem is not that there is no value in a History PhD. The problem is that we have not yet done a good job communicating the value and translating the benefits to other-than-academic realms.

We need to think about what History PhD programs teach and what graduate students learn. The first step in any program evaluation process is to reflect on and answer perhaps the most difficult question of all: What is the goal of a History PhD program? Most programs are implicitly designed to prepare students for academic careers, but that narrow goal is no longer appropriate. The current misalignment between program goals, program design, and post-graduation results shapes adverse conditions for students, contributing to mental health issues, dire financial situations, and long times-to-completion, in addition to precarious employment upon graduation. In spite of all of this, while only a small minority of graduates find tenure-track academic positions, many more graduates do use the skills they developed in their History PhD programs.

Good program design requires alignment of goals, activities, and assessments. An over-emphasis on assessments creates misalignment.

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Co-operative Education and Work-Integrated Learning Canada, https://cewilcanada.ca/CEWIL/About-Us/Work-Integrated-Learning.aspx

By Tina Loo

The report of the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada is now available (in English and in French). This is the eighth in a series of posts by Task Force members, offering their perspectives on selected themes from the report. Activehistory.ca encourages readers to join in the conversation, either in the comments or on social media, or by submitting a response piece to be considered for publication upon the series’ completion.

It’s clear from the CHA Task Force Report that there are far more History PhDs than there are fulltime, tenure-track jobs, and that many such degree holders have found work in other sectors.

Given that, if History departments wish to continue to have doctoral programs they should offer students more and different kinds of learning opportunities, ones that would both serve them well academically and position them for other kinds of jobs. Certainly, the participants in the CHA webinars on “Historians at Work” agreed. Employed outside the academy in the public and private sectors, these History PhD holders pointed to the utility of collaborative work experiences, quantitative and language skills (including programming languages), and learning to write for diverse audiences.

While many of these skills can be acquired in a university classroom context by allowing doctoral students to fulfill some of their program requirements with, say, existing undergraduate courses in statistics, languages, or GIS, I think there’s a strong case to be made for offering them the opportunity to pursue what’s known as “work-integrated learning” (WIL).

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Football players take the field. Tim Mossholder via Unsplash.

By Christine O’Bonsawin

The report of the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada is now available (in English and in French). This is the seventh in a series of posts by Task Force members, offering their perspectives on selected themes from the report. Activehistory.ca encourages readers to join in the conversation, either in the comments or on social media, or by submitting a response piece to be considered for publication upon the series’ completion.

What is the purpose of comprehensive exams? Subject mastery? Subject knowledge? Command of the field? Broad expertise? Situating the dissertation? Preparation to teach?

At the conclusion of the work of the Task Force on the Future of the History PhD, it was clear to members of the team that perceptions about the purpose of comprehensive exams vary between and within History departments across the country and that there are diverse opinions about the aims of such exam processes. In fact, there exists significant uncertainty around the comprehensive exam requirement in our departments, more so than other requisites of the History PhD, including coursework and the dissertation.

As detailed in the Task Force Report, faculty and graduate student respondents were divided on the question of comprehensive exams but also largely open to reform. A quantitative breakdown reveals that only 21% of respondents to our survey felt that no modifications to comprehensive exams were required. Further, 27% of English respondents and 28% of French respondents supported replacing one or more comprehensive examination fields with the opportunity to teach a course, and 28% of English respondents and 30% of French respondents supported replacing one or more of the comprehensive examination fields with a co-op internship.

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Convocation Hall, University of Toronto. Credit: Kara M, via Unsplash.

By Catherine Carstairs

The report of the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada is now available (in English and in French). This is the fifth in a series of posts by Task Force members, offering their perspectives on selected themes from the report. Activehistory.ca encourages readers to join in the conversation, either in the comments or on social media, or by submitting a response piece to be considered for publication upon the series’ completion.

For the past year, I’ve been lucky to work with an amazing group of colleagues on the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD, including Will Langford and Sam Hossack, whose posts in this series preceded mine. As Will and Sam have articulated, one of our key concerns was the lack of academic jobs and the paucity of funding, especially in the later stages of the degree program.

One of the issues that I helped to investigate was whether or not better supervisory practices could improve the student experience, speed the time to completion, ensure greater diversity among PhD students, and encourage groundbreaking scholarship. Supervisors cannot change the bleak academic job market for recent PhD graduates, and we have little direct control over the funding provided to PhD students. We can and should lobby for better funding and against the growing precarity of the academic workforce, but we can also work to ensure that our students complete in a reasonable period of time and are producing valuable scholarship that has meaning inside and outside of the academy. We can help our students articulate the skills that they have learned through the PhD, and we can make our departments more welcoming to people who have long been excluded from our profession.

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