Early Modern Notes

It’s argued that that computer literacy in schools should mean more than word processing. (And the kids are well ahead of the schools.) What would a digitally literate UK entail?

There are four million bloggers in the UK. (Recently, I confess, I’ve been feeling a bit ambivalent about the unstoppable march of The Blog. OK, I was never quite one of those blog evangelists whose mantra was: EVERYONE MUST BLOG!! It was more like Wow! Isn’t this exciting! Think of the possibilities! And then everyone did. It was fun in 2005 being the Brave Band of Beleaguered Bloggers vs the Doubting Tribbles and the Establishment. Now the Establishment has not only a blog but also a Facebook profile and an eye-torturing MySpace page. Harrumph.)

Yes, it’s that time of year again! (And I haven’t written on the topic lately so I’m not bored with it yet.) [Update: but I am bored with looking at it now so most of it’s going under the fold until I think of something new to say.]

The latest diatribe against Mickey Mouse HE courses (pdf) is out, ‘The Non-Courses Report’, produced by a group called the Taxpayers Alliance. And for once, there seems to have been some effort at proper research; not all of the courses listed are full Bachelors level degrees, but they do all seem to be at minimum Foundation degrees or other minimum two year courses. (So at least we’re not talking about another story that finds a single module or one-term course with a wacky title from a minute HE college that doesn’t even award degrees and then shrieks UNIVERSITY DEGREES GOING DOWN THE TUBES!!!)

The report is a fascinating mixture of the sensible, peculiar and shoddy. The authors say they have asked two questions, which sound fairly reasonable: (more…)

Bill Rammell, higher education minister, reckons the latest survey proves that the public supports its policy on tuition fees.

So take a slightly closer look.

Yep, 77% of respondents think that students should ‘pay something towards going to university’. Well, no shit. I don’t have a problem with that (as long as they don’t have to pay up front. Although, for the record, I’d like to point out that the way in which paying my student loan is organised is A PILE OF CRAP).

Unfortunately for the government, same public doesn’t like its top-up fees: 65% think ‘there should be a fixed price for all degrees’. This bit is not mentioned by the minister. (What’s that Mr Rammell? ‘La la la la I can’t hear you…’)

Largely unrelated: sometimes I think that academics should never try to be funny.

Report on doctoral research in the humanities (this is for the UK, compiled by the Arts & Humanities Research Council).

Some interesting statistics. (And they think there should be more money for postdoctoral funding, with which I’d heartily concur. The AHRC, as far as I can recall, currently has no postdoc fellowship schemes of any kind. OK, the British Academy is sort of the substitute for that, but it still doesn’t seem quite right.)

Plus a section on the purpose and use of a PhD in humanities subjects (which is less specific to the UK situation than some parts of the report). Nearly/recently completed PhDs looking for jobs take note of the right things to say in interviews, if you apply for jobs outside academia.

13. There is broad agreement in the sector that the key qualities of the completed arts/humanities doctoral researcher should be a capacity for original and autonomous thinking, an ability to command a field of knowledge, research skills (the ability to frame and explore research questions, the ability to frame and test a hypothesis and to manage a project), an understanding of the appropriate research methods, the ability to produce a cogent argument and conversely to engage in critical thinking, and an ability to communicate at a high level.

14. During the last three decades the doctorate has emerged as a crucial entrance qualification to the Academy to a degree which was not true a generation ago. A key purpose of doctoral research is and must be to develop the next generation of researchers and teachers in higher education. However, this has never been its sole purpose. There have always been researchers who elected to use their research skills in a wide range of public and private sector roles. And there has always been a significant demand for places from individuals primarily interested in the intellectual challenge of doctoral research. […]

15. The view of the disciplines nationally, reflected both in the consultative seminars and in the online survey, indicates a wide acceptance across the arts and humanities disciplines of the principle that doctoral study has not one but two aims: the production of high-quality research and the training of a highly qualified researcher. Colleagues nationally are equally firm in the view that a doctorate in the arts and humanities is a valuable preparation not only for a career in the Academy but also for a wide range of research-related and management jobs in the public and private sectors. Researchers from the subject domain enter a broad range of professions outside the academy, including public administration, corporate management, library and museum work, publishing and marketing. …

The report also comments that “transferable skills developed by doctoral research must be made explicit both to researchers and to potential employers. At present it seems that both researchers and disciplines undersell themselves.” Well, it seems to me that that’s often because departments and supervisors themselves are pretty clueless about it.

People do PhDs for a number of reasons, not least in order (they hope) to become academics, and for personal fulfilment and intellectual satisfaction. (Few students, I suspect, embark on a PhD in humanities with the intention of using it as a way into an entirely non-academic career.) It’s important to know that if you don’t make it in the hideous competition for academic jobs, you have other options. But the crucial question, in the end, is not whether you get valuable transferable skills from doing a PhD. You do. But do you get enough of them to justify the extra investment of time and resources in the years of research over and above doing a Masters? In terms of useful professional research skills, what does a PhD add to a MA thesis for the non-academic workplace where most people with humanities PhDs will end up?

A deal has been struck: students resident in Wales won’t have to pay top-up fees at Welsh universities, while English and Scottish students will (as will Welsh students who go to English universities). The National Assembly will compensate the universities for the difference (more than £50 million a year by 2009/10). It has also, apparently, pledged to address under-funding of Welsh universities compared to their English and Scottish counterparts, amounting to £100 million (per year?).

(I wonder if I’ll be in Wales for long enough to see whether the money makes any noticeable difference?)

Thanks to the mighty Luker, I just came across Prof Blogger’s Pontifications. (Let’s not go into the subject of weasels’ testicles here, however.)

Well worth a visit (and duly blogrolled). A word of caution to this particular post on an alleged course at Syracuse University about the rapper Lil’ Kim, however. I’ve learned to distrust anything any journalist reports on this kind of topic. A ‘degree’ on some ridiculed topic turns out to be at most a vocational diploma; a ‘course’ is frequently no more than a single class, and one that turns out to be perfectly reasonable in its course context.

And that was clearly the case here, too. What actually took place was a single session in an upper-level undergraduate course on Reading Empire and Nation: Race Traitors in the African World; and within that session, just one of the texts studied was a Lil’ Kim lyric. The professor himself sets it out:

Somewhere along the line, someone decided to simply re-title this course that developed out of my on-going research on race and sex in the context of empire, as if it were now a course on celebrity biography—not lyricism…

Around mid-term, thirty-plus students and I were set to analyze three texts in one session: (1) a song-skit from Lil’ Kim’s sophomore solo album; (2) an article called “Law and Disorder” by Dasun Allah and J.F. Ratcliffe on government surveillance of rappers; and (3) an “open letter” by Sylvia Wynter, a powerhouse intellectual critic…

As historians, we know the basic rules of source-criticism: who’s producing it? for what purpose? And we know the golden rule: go back to the primary sources wherever you can. It took me a few minutes of googling to track down the Syracuse English department website, with its course catalogue that contained not a mention of Lil’ Kim (and even less to find the professor’s own comments). Academics may rightly worry about dumbing down and commercialisation of university education. But we also need to be careful that we don’t feed media distortions of what goes on in universities, by failing to observe basic fact-checking and to practise just a little scepticism of media sources - even when they say what you want to hear.

……..

Update: Prof Blogger responds, and has a very interesting point about the differences between teaching literature and teaching history. My concern was that bloggers often swallow what they read in media stories like this without checking their accuracy (the only ones we really tend to check on are the ones that we disagree with - something of which I’ve been guilty too, I’m sure). In this case, that’s not really relevant to Prof Blogger’s objections. I basically disagree with him that Lil’ Kim has no place whatsoever in an English department. But the post wasn’t intended as an attack on him.

It’s Adult Learners’ Week.

Unfortunately, it seems that the government’s current emphasis on getting 16-19 year olds into higher education is likely to mean cuts in support for adult learners. Fewer courses, fewer places, higher fees.

So an exam board has decided how many extra marks to allow students for a range of personal trauma on or close to the day of an exam, and this is scandalous. It encourages an “excuse for anything” culture, etc.

Well, permit me some scepticism. It’s clear enough on reading the article that the only novelty here is the precise quantification of various events: for example, an extra 5% for the death of a close family relative (I can’t help thinking, is that all?) to 2% for hayfever and 1% for a headache (migraine sufferers might have something to say to anyone who thinks that headaches are merely minor inconveniences, by the way). Students have always been able to apply to schools for such consideration in exceptional circumstances, and even the critics of the move seem to accept that this should be so. Now they know exactly how much they can benefit if they do so. Or how little.

In other words, they and the schools alike now know that if they apply for extra marks because of hayfever or death of the family pet (and they’ll probably have to provide proof), the most they’ll get is an extra 2%. It might make a difference to a very small number of students on borderline grades, if getting the higher grade matters (say for university admission scores - although I can’t help thinking they’d do better to put their case directly to the university in that event). For most, is it really going to be worth the effort?

Fairly recently, I recall there being some discussion at Cliopatria (thanks to Jonathan Dresner for the link) on average completion times for US PhDs.

Well, now we might be able to do some comparisons: Study reveals low completion rates.

Low? What that means, apparently, is that “Nearly three out of 10 full-time PhD students have still not completed their doctorates seven years after starting their studies”. Which means that more than seven out of ten have, of course. But how much more than that, I wonder, is it reasonable or even possible to expect? A PhD is a big undertaking; a lot of things can go wrong, beyond the control of students or supervisors. (And it’s a vast improvement on the situation just a couple of decades ago.)

Oh, and not the big surprise of the year: “students were more likely to gain a doctorate if they had financial backing”.

More on average completion times might have been illuminating (rather than simply completion rates). The research apparently comes from Hefce (Higher Education Funding Council for England), but at the moment I can’t find it online and the newspaper report gives no further information. If it turns up at the Hefce website, I’ll post a link and possibly further comment. Or if anyone knows anything, let us know…

Update: The full report is now available online. Very quickly, in response to Jonathan Dresner’s comment: they’ve only partly broken the results down by discipline, I’m afraid; historians will have to make do with looking at ’social studies’ (61% ‘completion’ within 7 years for full-time students) and ‘other humanities’ (56%, the second lowest. Ouch). And those are the only figures by subject that you’re going to get, I think. (They also use a bureaucratic definition of ‘completion’ that, apparently, adds on up to a year from the date of submission.) Oh, well. It’s probably the best we’re going to get any time soon.

I don’t think too much should be read into the low part-time completion rates in 7 years, given that it takes at least 5-6 years for even the fastest part-timers to complete… (The other column for PhD awarded/still active does indicate that more part time students are dropping out than full timers, but that may not be so surprising.)

As a follow-up (though later than intended) to earlier posts about doing a PhD and MA courses, this is about how to go about acquiring the financial wherewithal to do your post-grad and post-doc study and research - or at least to cut down on the burden on your own pocket as far as you can. It isn’t easy. It requires hard work and focus; and I’m afraid that there’s an element of luck, however good you are.* But at least you can avoid making unnecessary mistakes and increase your chances of success by going about it in the right way…

I’ve decided to split this post in two since I started it: this one will be about the basics of where to look for funding and the application processes, the second will look more at strategies for writing research proposals.

NB: I have in mind particularly students and starting-out post-docs in history (and related fields), by the way, rather than faculty looking for, say, grants for research leave and replacement staff, although some of the principles are the same. And as ever, when I focus on details I’m looking at the British system with which I’m familiar.

The sources of funding

You need to start by finding out what funding might be available in your field, for your course/study programme/research project. The ideal is, of course to get a substantial award that will cover as much as possible of your various costs: tuition fees, living expenses, research expenses. If you can only get partial funding - say, tuition-only grants or small bursaries - you may have to think hard about where the rest is to come from. But some is always better than none. Similarly, the fewer strings attached, the better. Some universities offer Teaching Assistantships for PhD students (though they seem much rarer than in north America), for example; you’ll need to look carefully at the workload that goes with this. Or (but this is much less common than in sciences) there are sometimes PhD studentships attached to larger research projects, but then of course you’re tied in to somebody else’s research agenda rather than being able to independently pursue your own. Make sure that research is something you really want to do.

There are various options: government funding through the national research councils; university studentships and fellowships; grants from other academic organisations; charitable organisations (usually for small grants only). For history, the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) website used to have an excellent freely-accessible database of grants in history. Now you have to buy the book (£15 + postage) to get most of that information, although a sample chapter is still available online. Yeah, thanks guys.

Jobs.ac.uk regularly advertises studentships and post-doc fellowships. Right now, for example, there are Masters and PhD studentships on offer at Cardiff University’s School of History and Archaeology (deadline 1 June 2005) and Research studentships at the Open University (deadline 1 March 2005). If you already have an idea of what university you want to go to, find out if it has its own studentship schemes on offer. The IHR itself has a range of competitions for post-grad and post-doc grants (which you can find in that online chapter). The British Academy runs an annual post-doc fellowship competition, amongst other post-doc level grant schemes. The main sources of university postdocs are Oxford and Cambridge colleges (where they are called Junior Research Fellowships); these are also advertised at jobs.ac.uk.

Postgrad history students in Britain will be looking at one of two research funding bodies, depending on what kind of historical research they want to do:

The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB)

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

Application essentials

Read the requirements and all documentation provided for guidance, eg for AHRB Research Grants. Check, to start with:

1. Whether you personally are eligible to apply (eg, nationality or residency restrictions)

2. Whether what you want to do falls within the competition rules. Don’t apply to the AHRB if you want to do heavily statistical history, or to the ESRC if literary analysis is your thing… Don’t ask for £2000 for a small research grant if the top limit is £1000… And so on.

3. When the deadline is, and prepare well in advance accordingly. For most studentships for entry next autumn, you need to be preparing NOW, even though the deadlines are not until next spring (and the forms may not even be available yet). You need to have an offer of a place from a university before you can apply for grants; and moreover the universities will want to have your AHRB/ESRC form before Easter, so that they can complete their sections in time for the deadline (which is in early May).

The rules for the AHRB and ESRC postgraduate studentship competitions - and consequently the application forms - seem to become more complicated every year. Also, the AHRB rules have changed in recent years; they no longer fund stand-alone Masters (the ESRC made this change some time ago), only Masters’ courses explicitly intended to prepare students for PhD research. The research training and support provision by universities has become much more important than it used to be, and is likely to be a key part of your application.

Writing a strong research proposal

It’s not enough to have a good idea for research (whether postgrad or postdoc). You also have to be able to write a good proposal, one that will stand out from the crowd and convince committees that it’s a project that deserves their money. Only about one in four or five applications for AHRB/ESRC studentships is successful; the competition for postdoc and junior research fellowships will be even more intense. As I say, I hope to come back to this in more depth soon. In the meantime, you might want to read these:

ESRC: How to write a good application

The Art of Grantsmanship (this is written for scientists and with large-scale research projects in mind, but contains much of value at any level or scale (or field) of research)

——

* If you follow the advice here and have no success, don’t sue me. I’m not making any guarantees.

Chris sent this link.

I laughed. I cried.

Which is worth more, a journal article or a chapter in an edited book?

To those of you who know which particular academic bean-counting exercise I’m talking about, my heartfelt sympathy (I sat in on one of those conversations yesterday lunchtime).

In the meantime, here’s something to raise academic morale. Not.

It’s that time of year again: newly-fledged graduates are considering whether to take the plunge into taking post-grad courses - whether because they’ve been enthused by inspirational teachers, are putting off finding a ‘real’ job, or even think the ‘real’ job for them might just lie in academia - and there’s an ever growing range of early modern options. Here’s a list (in no particular order) for you, or anyone you know who’s that way inclined. I’m sure it’s not complete, of course.

MA in Early Modern History, Sussex University. Core courses include ‘Society and Culture’ and ‘Literature, Politics and Religion’; options include ‘Heretics, witches and jews’; ‘France under Louis XIV’; ‘The Atlantic World’. There is also a Early Modern Literature and Culture MA based in the English department.

MA in Early Modern History, Kings College London. The core course is ‘Approaches to early modern history’; options include ‘Composite monarchies and consensual states’; ‘Ritual in early modern society’; ‘The body and society’.

MA in Comparative History of Early Modern European Societies, Birkbeck University of London. Core: ‘Themes in Early Modern History’; options including ‘Early Modern London’; ‘Death, Disease and the Early Modern City’; ‘Power and Communication from the Reformation to the Enlightenment’.

MA in Medieval and Early Modern History, University of Bristol. Core: ‘Themes and Problems in Medieval and Early Modern History’. Most of its early modern content focuses on the period to about 1600, eg: ‘The English Reformation’; ‘The first globalisation, 1400-1600′; ‘The decline and fall of the GAelic World: Ireland and Scotland, 1300-1600′.

MA in British and European Cultural and Political History c.1400-1800, Manchester University. The core is ‘Issues and debates in early modern history’; options include ‘First Century of Spanish America’; ‘Church, society and religion in seventeenth-century France’; ‘People, work and wealth in English towns’.

MA in Early Modern History, University of East Anglia. Core courses include ‘Authority and ideology in early modern England’, ‘Society and culture in early modern England’; options, ‘Political cultures of eighteenth-century Britain’, ‘Colonial America’, ‘Landscape history’.

Interdisciplinary MA, Texts in History, 1500-1750, Reading University. Core courses focus on ‘history and literature’; options include ‘Riot, rebellion and popular protest’; ‘Mid-tudor political narratives’; ‘The early modern midwife’.

MA in Early Modern History, University of York. Focus on ’social and cultural’ history; options include ‘The radical reformation in Germany’; ‘From the body beautiful to the body politic’; ‘The politics of the parish’.

MA in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, Royal Holloway, University of London. There is a core course on methodology, theory and skills; again ranges over medieval and early modern, options include ‘The material culture of domestic life’; ‘The body in culture/society’; ‘Eighteenth-century women’.

MA in Seventeenth-century Studies, University of Durham seventeenth-century studies centre.

The Centre for 18th-century Studies at York runs several interdisciplinary MA courses, mainly on the period 1750-1850.

Update: Cambridge University has a MPhil in Early Modern History, a taught course that looks similar to other universities’ MAs. (A Cambridge or Oxford MA is not the same as a normal MA, by the way). (Thanks to Danny for the tip.)

Think and look around carefully. Even if you’re certain that you want to do early modern, you don’t necessarily have to do a dedicated early modern history course. I didn’t (my MA was in Women’s and Gender History at York, which gave plenty of opportunities to do early modern subjects). It can be healthy to do something else from time to time! Apart from courses designated as ‘early modern’, there are many more ‘general’ Masters courses that include early modern ‘pathways’ or substantial early modern components. For example:
University of Durham
University of Sheffield
University of Wales Aberystwyth

Or, as with the different options at Sussex, there are plenty of early modern Literature courses in English departments - worth thinking about if you have strong interests in that direction. The Guardian online provides a very good postgraduate course search facility.

It’s worth making sure that the course includes strong research training and preferably auxiliary skills training too (languages especially Latin, palaeography, computing skills). A dissertation, which may be up to 20,000 words long, is a key part of all Masters courses. And if you’re planning to go on to a PhD, it will be essential preparation [you can do a PhD without a MA beforehand if resources are limited, but I tend to not recommend it…]. Visit the department and the location if you possibly can. Find out from other students what the prospectus doesn’t tell you, not least about IT and library facilities. And research resources for that all-important dissertation.

Bear in mind, if you’re thinking about it for this year [2004-5], that you’ve missed the competitions of the two governmental funding bodies in this area, the AHRB and ESRC [but they’ll soon be opening for 2005-6; I will try to get round to writing that post on how to get funding, promise]. There may still be university and departmental opportunities, however. And I’m sure these courses will still be around next year.*

(Originally posted 24 June 2004).

* NB that course details and offerings could have changed since the summer - check carefully before signing up to anything!

I regularly feel like having a good rant here about the Research Assessment Exercise, and no doubt will get round to it at some point (although I’m unlikely to say anything that hasn’t been said repeatedly before, it might make me feel better). In the meantime, read this one.

For you lucky, lucky people outside the UK who don’t know what it is, you can find out more here.

… that an education minister would be familiar with education policies, no?

Er, not if he’s David Miliband, schools standards minister.

So instead of the ‘what stupid regulations’ story (if you haven’t read it already, that a distinguished physics professor would have to sit GCSE Maths to keep his school teaching job), we have a ministerial/departmental incompetence story. Well, good to have cleared that up. Sigh…

The Little Professor drew my attention to this article by Mark Edmundson, All Entertainment All The Time, and I think I was even more irritated by it than she was. A few main gripes (which partly overlap with hers):

1. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Edmundson was distressed by student evaluations of a class on the works of Sigmund Freud along these lines: “Edmundson has done a fantastic job,” said one reviewer, “of presenting this difficult, important and controversial material in an enjoyable and approachable way.”

So he’d rather his students found it dull and inaccessible, presumably. He goes on to excoriate them for appreciating the ‘enjoyable and approachable’ aspect without once giving any credit for the other part of the comment: this student has understood that Freud is not only ‘difficult’ but also ‘important and controversial’. It doesn’t seem to occur to Edmundson that making difficult subjects ‘enjoyable’ and ‘approachable’ might be a path to better understanding. He also complains that his students failed to “see intellectual work as confrontation between two people, reader and author”: doesn’t that one word, ‘controversial’, suggest that they have in fact understood that in some way? (I wonder how the students themselves would feel if they read his entirely negative reaction to their enthusiasm? Just a little hurt?)

2. “Why hadn’t anyone been changed by my course?” I’m basically repeating the LP here, but this really got my goat: how does he know they hadn’t been changed? (Also, if they hadn’t previously understood Freud’s significance and now did, it strikes me that that’s a worthwhile change in itself.)

3. The ‘critique’ of TV.

TV is a tranquilizing medium, a soporific, inducing in its devotees a light narcosis. It reduces anxiety, steadies and quiets the nerves. But also deadens. Like every narcotic, it will be consumed in certain doses, produce something like a hangover, the habitual watchers’ irritable languor that persists after the TV is off. It’s been said that the illusion of knowing and control that heroin engenders isn’t entirely unlike the TV consumer’s habitual smug-torpor, and that seems about right.

Oh, come on. I mix a fair bit with people who research in audience studies (ie, take the trouble to ask the audiences about their responses rather than making patronising and usually snobbish assumptions about them), so I’ve picked up a lot of their irritation at this kind of crass characterisation of the effects of TV (and film) watching. But personal experience should tell us that this kind of generalisation is utter rubbish. Sometimes I watch TV to be soothed and amused. Sometimes I watch it to learn and be stimulated, or provoked and challenged. Sometimes I slump; sometimes I shout at the screen. Haven’t I written here before about why I love good quality TV history?

4. More generally, how about some evidence for all the generalisations? As ever, there are good points to be found somewhere in the mix. But, as the LP says: “Is there some reason why academics bewailing the decline and fall of academia refuse to undertake anything that looks vaguely like the systematic gathering of evidence?” (And I have to continue her line here, because it’s just so irresistible.)

My own skeptical interpretation of such essays, to be honest, is that they are a wonderful way of inflating one’s vita without having to do anything but contemplate the elegantly decorated interior of one’s own hospitable brain. I suspect that this opinion may not make me well-loved in some quarters, but so be it.

Well, dear Little Professor, it makes me love you even more than I did before.

I sometimes get emails from prospective history PhD students seeking advice. This seemed a good time of year to gather together and set out some of my usual responses in a post.

NB: What follows is geared specifically to the university system that I’m familiar with in Britain. Only some of it will also be relevant to the very different PhD programs of the USA (and other countries); feel free to add further thoughts based on your own experiences there and elsewhere, or useful links.

You should take your time and do plenty of homework. If you’re contemplating doing a PhD (or, indeed, a Masters) next autumn, you do need to be thinking about it now, especially if you’ll be applying for funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) or the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (and you probably should, even if you don’t think you’ll be successful!), which have strict application deadlines in the spring and complicated application procedures.

What is a British PhD?

The British PhD, essentially, is the PhD thesis (in American terms, you are ABD - ‘all but dissertation’ - from the word go). It is usually defined as a substantial piece of independent research, which should make an original contribution to an academic area or discipline. The PhD thesis is 80-100,000 words in length; the notional period of registration (standard period for funding) is 3 years full-time, and it usually must be completed in 4 years (the funding bodies set this deadline, and they get stroppy with departments that don’t achieve it with the majority of students…); for part-time students, it’s usually 5-7 years. (An MPhil is shorter, with less emphasis on ‘originality’, and many departments initially enrol students for this, ‘upgrading’ them after the first year if progress is satisfactory.) You will probably need at least an upper second class undergraduate degree in history or a related subject and/or a relevant Masters degree to be considered for a place.

Why do a PhD?

Perhaps the very first question you should be asking is if you really should do a PhD. It’s hard work, expensive if you don’t get funding, will eat several years of your life and probably drive you half-crazy in the process. Don’t go into a PhD simply because you can’t make up your mind what job you want or are having difficulty finding one, or because you aren’t keen on working 9 to 5 in an office or wearing suits (all that will seem even less appealing after three years as a research student). If you’re burning with desire to work on a particular topic then you might do it purely for its own sake, but you still need to think about the costs. If what you want is to be an academic historian, then it’s an essential qualification (though not a guarantee of employment; far from it). But otherwise? There are probably better ways to get a well-paid job than doing a history (or humanities generally) PhD. Yes, completing a history PhD will equip you with many skills beyond knowledge of the subject itself, which have value in the workplace beyond academia; the question is how much it really adds that you wouldn’t get simply from doing a Masters degree. Think it through very carefully.

A British PhD is an intensely personal, individualised experience. The only taught element will be research training in the early stages; that may involve a few exams or assessments, but the essential core of the PhD is independent research for the thesis itself. You will (nearly always) choose your own topic (unlike the sciences) and be responsible - with guidance from your supervisor - for designing and structuring the research. Some key issues follow from this.

Where to do your PhD?

The first is: it is not the overall prestige of a university or even a department that counts when deciding where to study. The first and foremost question you have to ask is: is this the right place for the research I want to do? If you can’t simply pack up and go where you please, because of, say, family commitments, don’t assume that you’re stuck with the nearest university whether you like it or not. Look into distance learning options (including the Open University). Think about whether you could commute once a month or so for meetings while using locally based library resources and inter-library loans. Unlike taught courses, it’s not necessary to be close at hand all the time, although you will miss out on some social aspects (and, perhaps, teaching opportunities). Some universities have quite strict rules about postgrads residing within a certain distance of the university; others seem to be more flexible.

You have to start, essentially, by looking for a department with at least one lecturer who will be a suitable supervisor (sometimes you will have more than one, especially if your research is interdisciplinary): someone who has the expertise to guide your research and, equally, someone you can feel comfortable with for three years plus. You’ll be spending a fair bit of time in intensive one-to-one discussions with them; you want someone who will both guide and challenge you, take your ideas seriously, treat you like an adult. There needs to be respect both ways. The precise nature of the ‘ideal’ relationship will depend on your own needs: how independent and mature you are; how much external stimuli you need to meet deadlines; how confident you are when it comes to developing your ideas (but remember, it’s not your supervisor’s job to massage frail egos or nag you into getting work done).

On the academic side, finding someone suitable is relatively easy. In Britain, you can check out the Institute of Historical Research’s list of academic historians, and visit departmental websites; where more specialised MA courses related to your interests are offered (this database is very good), that implies there are staff with the expertise to supervise PhDs. But you should already have an idea from your previous study and reading of historians whose work you respect and enjoy reading. Look them up. They aren’t gods just because they’ve been published. And they do not necessarily have to be specialists in precisely the narrow area in which you want to research (particularly if you’re doing something new); a supervisor who knows too much can actually, I think, inhibit the development of your own ideas. You don’t really want to end up doing their research for them, or feeling that you can’t approach their work critically where it relates to your own.

The personal side is harder. I was fortunate; I knew my supervisor well as an undergrad, I knew he was conscientious, highly knowledgeable and moreover that we were on the same wavelength. (I also knew several of his recent PhD students.) Not everyone can be in that situation. But this is something to emphasise: don’t walk into your PhD without having made personal contact. Don’t just fill in the forms, accept a place and turn up hoping that you’ll like it and they’ll assign you a good supervisor. Doing a PhD will require a lot personal initiative: get in some practice right at the beginning (OK, you can’t just demand a particular supervisor, but you can do a lot to make sure that the person you want chooses you…). If you can, go and meet potential supervisor(s) in person and also take the opportunity to look round the university’s facilities and environment too; if not, pick up the phone and write emails.

Get the insiders’ view

And not just to the staff. Perhaps the best way to find out about a supervisor – and a department and university generally – is from existing students. You could ask them questions like: How often do you get to meet your supervisor, and is it easy to get an appointment? Do you feel comfortable turning to the supervisor about problems like writers’ block or (say) family or work pressures that hold up your work? How long does it take to get work returned? Do you get constructive feedback? Are you encouraged to keep writing (conversely, do you feel under too much pressure to perform, too many deadlines)? Does this supervisor seem to care about their supervisees? And broader questions: What’s the library like? The computing facilities? The research training? Do you feel happy and at home in the department, or do you get treated like cash cows, ignored or condescended to? I don’t think that many prospective research students do things like this – but they really should if they’re planning to go to an unfamiliar institution.

How do you get in contact with students? If you can visit in person, then find out where the postgrad facilities are and go and talk to them. Otherwise, you may need to do a bit of work. Institutions don’t always provide the kind of information that helps to locate research students – unless they’re also on the teaching staff. But there is another way with history students in Britain. You can track them down through the IHR’s list of theses in progress (although it tends to be a bit out of date at this time of year); once you have names, you should be able to get email addresses – or write a letter c/o the department if the university doesn’t have an open-access email directory. The list of theses in progress (and the lists of theses recently completed at the same URL) is an important resource for prospective PhD students in another way: you can find out about the latest doctoral research in your topic area, potentially avoid replicating too closely someone else’s research (remember that ‘originality’ element of the thesis!) and, moreover, find people doing related work who you might want to strike up contacts and share ideas with.

That might be particularly helpful if you’re looking at studying in a department with few research students. Small departments and/or small PhD cohorts have advantages. Firstly, you’re more likely to get more personalised attention and not get lost in a crowd; individually, you (and the fees you pay, to be practical here) are more important to that department; your relationships with staff are likely to be closer and less formal. The thing is that they may well need to be, since there won’t be a large postgraduate community to fall back on for support, sharing of academic ideas and socialising. It’s something else to think about.

NB: check out the research training and facilities

Look at what’s offered in terms of research training - especially if you plan to go straight into a PhD from undergraduate study. Largely because of the demands of the funding bodies, some kind of RT programme is now pretty much ubiquitous. Some, I suspect, are better than others. Ask whether there is training geared to your particular needs as a historian (individually tailored training seems now to be the emphasis of the AHRB, while the ESRC has tended to more uniform approaches), or whether it’s a more general programme taking in students from across the university. Again, get actual students’ opinions (you really don’t want to know what we think of parts of the training in place at Aberystwyth over recent years…). It’s not the most crucial issue - though, frankly, don’t even look at a place that doesn’t offer some kind of RT - but, like library and computing facilities etc, it’s something that might tip the balance in a final choice.

Oh, and it’s worth checking out accommodation costs in the area (both university-owned and the local rental market), since these vary hugely around the country.

I hope to follow up this post with something on how to play the funding game (which is another reason to start communicating with potential supervisors and others who can give you advice that will help you in writing grant proposals). A final reiteration for now, however: don’t rush into anything. For autumn 2005, think in terms of spending from now until Christmas preparing to make your applications. Look around at different places, consider the possibilities open to you. Think hard too about what you do want to do a thesis on, what sources you would use and what facilities it would require. These are things that will need to go into a grant proposal.

Claire has of course decided (quite sensibly) to take a break from blogging at Fenland until her thesis is done (hope it’s going well, Claire). Still, she gives us an occasional update on what she’s been up to, and last weekend she took a trip to north Wales. Which was blowing a gale.

This weekend I went to see Harlech castle. I climbed the tower but it was so damn windy I went straight down again…

I climbed an almost mountain to see a ruined fort. It was so damn windy I couldn’t look at it properly…

I smiled, and found myself on a nostalgia trip. I remember the winds of Harlech. I turned up at Coleg Harlech almost exactly ten years ago, an eager but nervous student desperate to make a new start, get to university, prove something (to myself, mostly). We had a couple of weeks of gorgeous weather – I kid you not, we were sunbathing on this beautiful beach in north-west Wales in October. And then the wind and the rain arrived, and stayed (or so it felt) for the next six months. (I’m sure there were sunny non-windy days, but I don’t remember them.) Most of us lived in a twelve-storey tower block (known as The Block, or, when we got more stressed out, The Pressure Cooker). I was entirely unaccustomed to high-rise living, and was at first totally puzzled by a small phenomenon on the tenth floor: the water in the loo seemed to move. Or was that me being drunk and stoned? (Which happened a good deal, I should point out.) It dawned: the water wasn’t moving, and I wasn’t imagining it in a drug-addled haze. The building itself was swaying very, very slightly. Ah.

We didn’t spend all our time getting drunk (and laid, ahem). We worked damned hard; until quite recently the college’s diploma courses had lasted two years, until the government had decided only to allow funding for a year. And we were packing much of the two-year course into one year; good if you were as impatient to get to university as I was, bad in many other ways, not least the loss of continuity when every year was a fresh cohort. (And it meant that the college had to recruit twice as many students each year to remain viable, of course.) It was a small, close-knit community with no more than 150 students or so, even at full capacity. The walls were thin, we were living in extremely close proximity; it all tended to encourage sociability. (Our crowd on the tenth floor didn’t need much encouraging, come to think of it. Of course, it could all get a bit much too, which is why the Block had its other nickname.) And, unless you’re a real outdoors-activity type of person, there isn’t too much to do in Harlech except study, go to the pub, hold raucous parties (in the rooms and the Common Room, in the houses of students – and sometimes staff – who lived ‘out’, on the beach). We did all these things enthusiastically; and to anyone who thinks young undergraduates can be wild, you should see a bunch of twenty-something-plus students when presented with such an opportunity.

But it was first and foremost about the study (and the Diploma that was my key to getting into university); and it was much more than a standard FE college access course. I did a programme in ‘Literature, History and Ideas’ (which gave you the opportunity to range widely or to focus on a particular discipline, depending on what suited you); we were taught by experienced tutors (many of them respected academics and writers in their fields, although we didn’t really know that at the time) whose generosity with their time and understanding of the anxieties of mature students – who often came with a lot of baggage, personal problems, past negative experiences of education (all too many were dyslexics who had been written off as ‘stupid’), fear of failing again - was matched only by their teaching expertise and knowledge. It was a space in which the stirrings of academic and creative talent could be nurtured, supported, developed.

Few of the staff who taught me are there now. There have been a lot of changes.

Of course, it was obvious to everyone back in the mid-90s that Harlech was going to have to adapt in order to survive. But I’m none too happy about some directions taken since the college merged with (the official language: ‘was taken over by’ seems more accurate) the Workers’ Educational Association (North Wales) in 2001.

For one thing, you will no longer find Literature, History and Ideas in the prospectus. If you want to study ‘traditional’ arts and humanities subjects, you’ll have to go elsewhere, even though the website still proclaims that ‘Coleg Harlech and WEA share a common tradition of liberal arts adult education stretching back over many years’. The only remnants of the one-year programmes offered in 1994 may be in social studies (from the ‘Work, Politics and Society’ programme) and IT (there was IT, wasn’t there? Must try to find my handbook), now to be found alongside art and design, music technology and access to nursing. Even the then thriving drama and media studies programme has disappeared (and I didn’t think you got much trendier than that). And – hang on – what’s happened to Welsh studies? (Relegated, it would seem, to short courses.)

I don’t want to knock any of those subjects. But it feels to me as though Harlech is being turned into just another vocational further education college (the only remaining difference being that it’s residential and the students are older than usual), a place to get qualifications for work instead of a space to think, learn, reflect. What happened, most of all, to Ideas? Perhaps (although I wonder about the wisdom of duplicating what every other FE college does) this is what it takes to survive. But the excision of the subjects that I studied feels like a personal betrayal, as well as destroying a large part of what made Coleg Harlech so special for so many years to so many students who got a second chance there.

Dedicated to those unhappy souls who didn’t make it out of the pressure cooker. If we were a community, we were no better than most communities at looking after our misfits; and we should have been better.

I often like John Sutherland’s columns in the Guardian education section. But the latest (from last Monday, although I only just noticed it) ends with a defence of the indefensible.

The most pernicious reform introduced into higher education over the last 40 years is “continuous assessment” (also called course unitation and modularisation). It is the pedagogic equivalent of CCTV, a monitoring and measuring of student performance from freshman to finalist.

Traditionally, you slacked for eight terms and worked like stink through the ninth, “revising” for the nightmare of finals week. Now you are examined from your first undergraduate essay onward. Hell starts on day one. Modularisation does for higher education what the conveyor belt did for automobile manufacture. No more hours of idleness.

Full disclosure: I loathe exams, and never did particularly well at them (both recalling all the stuff I’d revised and getting it down rapidly in a coherent form on paper were agony). I did significantly better at essays, which I could prepare and write - think about, plan, revise, write properly, as opposed to frantic scribbling - over several days. Which hardly means that I spent every waking second of every semester on writing essays, for chrissakes. (Also, to be picky, exams still made up more than half the assessment of most of our courses.)

I’m not saying that exams per se are not useful, however. What is indefensible is this championing of ‘finals’: assessing three years’ learning in a few weeks, with the possibility (as Sutherland says; I think it was probably extremely rare) of doing virtually nothing for over two and a half years beforehand. Does he really think that was something to be praised? (By the way, much of the article is about how great this system was in giving musical geniuses such as Coldplay time to hone their skills instead of being made to do what they were at university for… But, leaving aside whether you concur in his evaluation of the talents of Coldplay, there seems to be an implicit and pretty dubious argument that the university system should be tailored to the needs of a tiny minority of artistic geniuses.)

Besides, it’s absurd to compare continuous assessment to a conveyor belt (I’ve worked on those production lines in my time, and for longer than I care to remember; I doubt that Sutherland ever has). I never had too much difficulty making time off between essays, even though I probably spent a lot more time on them than the average student. It creates, instead, a more continous short-term cycle of work-idle-work. Individual students make their own choices about exactly how much and when, just as no doubt they did in the ‘finals’ system. And very often the results reflect the amount of work put in over the whole course - as they probably did for most students, whatever the mythology, in the finals system.

By logical extension, perhaps Sutherland also thinks that we shouldn’t ask undergrads to do things like read for weekly seminars either? And as for compulsory attendance at those seminars…

Strange to read all the American academic bloggers posting on their preparations for the new academic year, when over here we won’t be restarting for about another month. (I don’t even know the exact date, since I won’t be doing any teaching until after Christmas…) When I go into the department later this week, the place will still be virtually deserted.

And we’re still in the middle of the clearing frenzy anyway, with thousands of places still up for grabs across the country. I don’t have the energy to write a long post about the stupidity of our admissions system. But it is crazy: through the centralised admissions body UCAS, students have to apply to universities (up to 6 courses, if I remember rightly) several months before they take their A-level exams, and universities offer them places that are conditional on achieving certain, predicted, grades. The students then have to choose just one course out of those offers. If, come August, they don’t get the required grades for that place, the offer will fall through and they have to resort to clearing (or re-apply next year). If they get much better grades than expected, they have to decide whether to stick to that original choice or give it up and take a gamble on clearing in search of a course with higher grade requirements (and therefore, they hope, of higher quality), or re-apply next year. The upshot is stress all round for students, for university staff, for everyone involved. Any chance of reform? You must be kidding.