31.Jan.2010 Stating the Obvious

Michael Bérubé reviews The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand:

Things get more interesting in the final chapter, where Menand explains how academe’s training and hiring system works and suggests, unconvincingly, that the preponderance of liberals in academe is partly a function of “increased time to degree.” It now takes a decade on average to get a Ph.D. in English, and surely that fact discourages risk-taking. But it does not explain, say, why Democrats outnumber Republicans 10 to 1 in departments of physics. Along the way, Menand notes that most graduate students don’t earn Ph.D.’s, and that most Ph.D.’s don’t get tenure-­track jobs: “There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs” — graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations — who can teach introductory courses for a pittance.

It’s good to see the two-track system get some ink.