Too Many Humanities PhDs

Back in April, Peter Conn, a professor of English at University of Pennsylvania, wrote an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education stating that Humanities graduate programs were churning out more PhD grads than the market could bear - a situation I feel has marked my career path, despite my not completing my PhD, and having done all kinds of non-academic work since. It's an interesting article, and one I hope the universities take to heart.

While the whole article is bearish on the place for people with impressive degrees in future markets, it concludes with a nice defense of the humanities having some essential purpose in the world.

Collectively, those of us who profess the humanities must make a sustained effort to explain to our various constituencies... that these disciplines, and the traditions they represent, are not merely ornamental and dispensable. They lie near the heart of mankind's restless efforts to make sense of the world. Debates over war and peace, justice and equity: From the uses of scientific knowledge to the formulation of social policy, the humanities provide a necessary dimension of insight and meaning.

Now if "providing necessary dimension of insight and meaning" would just show up in more job descriptions...