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More caveats- I also had two MA degrees before coming in, and thus my total years in grad school WILL look more like 8, with 4 years of coursework. (This included language training, so I was able to accelerate through the PhD.)

My point is that I can actually see others who come in with language competency completing their PhD in 5-6, in departments that aren’t four-field.

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I’d recommend “Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the Fish-Scale Model of Omniscience” by Donald Campbell if you’d like not to reinvent the wheel. But then again you may want to.

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There are also differences in terms of what we expect Ph.D.s to be able to do. People like Margaret Mead and Marshall Sahlins did their Ph.D.s in four years (or less!) and did no fieldwork — the standard back then was a library thesis. It was after you got your Ph.D. you did fieldwork!

People have been giving doctorates for almost a thousand years now, and the standards on what counts as ‘qualified for a Ph.D. varies widely. At times it is scandalously low — at others times you had to wait until the middle age to finally pick one up.

My guess is that with the decline in the numbers of the professoriate we will start turning back into a gentlemen’s club with low standards — we don’t have the numbers and institutional incentives to keep up the level of professionalism that the cold war university eventually produced. But maybe I’m pessimistic.

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Banks is dirty filthy commie, like Mieville — the Culture novels are about imagining what a post-scarcity world would look like, no?

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http://savageminds.org/2012/05/16/silos-of-casino-capitalism/.

To me the quote I challenged presents a clear differentiation of the discourse of the theorist and that of the informant. My ethnographic problem is that both theorist and informant use the same weird and emergent term: silo. In this instance, what is my duty as an anthropologist?

I bracketed out this provocation from the evidence in today’s post for brevity and to hopefully receive two sets of commentary. Blogging for me is a way to test theories and receive critical commentary before manuscript preparation. I admit that the use of this quote, in this way, was controversial and for that I apologize for making the mistake of a lumbering graduate student looking for advice. This is the processual or permanent beta approach to scholarship: release early and update often. Your commentary has helped me methodologically but theoretically I remain confused.

What to do when there is little difference between an indigenous discourse and an anthropological discourse?

Mine may be a problem exclusive to ethnographers of Western knowledge workers. But if such ethnographic work is to be included within the canon of anthropology, then over-arching definitions of the future of anthropology need to be written to be inclusive of this expansion of the discipline.

In this way, anthropology may avoid its suicide.

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“Matrix organizational structures emerged in the 1970’s as an effort to restructure inefficient organizational structures to support the more efficient project-based management. Until then, big organizations had tendency to operate in “silos”, rational divisions where basically separated groups of workers would report to a line manager or functional manager.”

These remarks are not a put-down. An issue I have often pondered is the spread of academic ideas, which, in the pre-Internet age, might require generations, as, for example, when a business school prof would start talking about bands and tribes, drawing on what he took to be authoritative definitions learned decades earlier when taking an anthropology course as an undergraduate. A marvelous thing about the Internet and search engines is that we can now do what I just did, and, when we run across a new term or concept, track down its history in seconds.

Anyway, I am curious about how many of us react as you have to “silo,” i.e., as something new and cool, while others of us know that Gillian Tett is intervening in a long standing debate, using already established language, to talk about a particular problem in the banking industry, writing for an audience for whom the term “silo” is “right, I know just what you are talking about” instead of “Gee, whiz.”

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The 9 yrs is an average but actually 25% of university anth departments manage to have an average of under 7 yrs. Some though have an average of 12yrs. (with averages some people have to be finishing in under 5 years)

The difference between the US and UK/Auss system is the number of postdocs. The US has very few while the UK/Auss/NZ systems have lots (relatively still not a cake walk). Most PhD’s there go on to a postdoc or two which ends up adding 2-5 years more of work. Also, many take 4-5 years not the three they are suppose to. So you add 4-5 + 2-5 and you get a similar career.

While in the US you kind of jump out of the plane and hope you land in a job after the PhD. I know quite a few people who drag out their PhD’s for an extra of couple of years to up their publications so they can compete for academic jobs.

In the UK though there are very few TA jobs to pay for a PhD so while you might get 2-5years of paid post doc the majority of PhD students pay for their PhD (not too bad if you are UK/EU). It is a bit of a trade off but for the most part the systems are more similar then people think.

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In my program, the students that do their MA here have about a year less coursework than those that come in with an MA from elsewhere (mostly because they make us repeat the four-field theory courses as well as some others). Students that are doing either short periods of fieldwork or lab work are able to finish pretty quickly. However, one of the big things that delay people that are doing extended fieldwork (ie primatologists and cultural anthropologists) besides the fieldwork itself is the time it takes to amass sufficient funding to afford the fieldwork. Some of this is unavoidable, but I think it would help cut down this time if students were encourage to take grant-writing classes and independent study early on in the program to develop their projects.

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1) While some of my colleagues went through the PhD fast (they’d worked before and didn’t need the TA to pay for school, or they had fellowships) – they had a tough time getting jobs because they didn’t have the experience in the classroom or the publications yet. So it didn’t really speed up the employment process. That extra time as a museum tech or a TA/Instructor can help to boost a CV in this market.

2) I’m glad for my 3 years of coursework as well, thought it took time. I use that information all the time as I teach now. But if you are going to use your PhD to work on development projects for the gov’t, and not teach, you probably don’t need the breadth of coursework. However, you can’t know what someone will actually do with a PhD until they’ve done it, so I think 2-3 years of coursework is impt. That being said, it could be done as an MA, and then you could have a pure-research PhD.

3) I think we need to reconsider the way we do PhD projects. When you look in the hard sciences, people are working as part of a lab on a larger project the whole way through. In Anth we require each student to develop an independent research project. What if, instead, your advisor said ‘I study gender and identity in this village in India. I could use some more data on teenage women there.” and that was what you did for your research? There are pros and cons to this – you don’t get the experience of creating your own project from scratch – but is that really ness. for the PhD? Or could you just join in on the project, collect the new data, analyze it and move on to create your own project for your new job? This gets back to funding – how do we get NSF to pay for grad assistants in Anthropology the way they do in Biology, so you can spend your out-of-class time reading the literature and working on data your advisor already collected during year 1, rather than grading quizzes. Sure you should get some teaching in, but shouldn’t the bulk of your semesters be spent as an RA rather than a TA?

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1) the 9 year figure seems off to me. is this a mean or a median? the latter would be a better measure.

2) i imagine for readers who aren’t at private insitutions and/or “top school” programs, the notion that it’s somehow a stretch to go from BA to PhD in cultural anthropology in 7 years will be a bit hard to take. it’s not uncommon for students in many programs to either finish or be cut off from internal funding opportunities after 5-6 years (including fieldwork).

3) a more general point relates to the skewed incentive structure that permeates “time to degree” discussions. departments are often under much pressure to cut down on the time it takes its students to finish. administrators tend to worry less about things like departments’ job placement. at the same time, hiring committees rarely care about time degree and will instead reward the candidate who took the extra year or three to write a more polished dissertation and develop a publication record. an outcome of all of this is that we now have professors who took 9+ years to finish–and whose lengthy graduate careers may have helped them secure good jobs–exhorting students to “finish on time.”

4) i endorse the the “two year review” option as a means of quickening the process and i know many anthro departments, public and private, have gone this route. a downside is that it eliminates an important opportunity for students to do real research (and potentially publishable research) before their dissertation work.

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