Vocational Ph.D. programs
The story is that Drew University, a small liberal arts college in New Jersey, recently rebuilt its entire history Ph. D. program with a decidedly vocational bent. They have striven to assure that each student, of the few they will carefully choose, will teach their own course for a year as part of their programme, which will be closely constrained to take no more than five years and be tested throughout with historiographical essays that are more like what they're actually going to have to do after they graduate than the exams they used before. They also aim to haul in all kinds of help from other departments and contribute as much as they can back in exchange.
A lot of this makes sense for a very small university running a graduate program; to do so at all, which the article emphasises is unusual, requires a lot of pooled resources and selectivity about they're trying to achieve. In fact I wish big departments in the UK would do more about this kind of sharing of aims between schools and periods, perhaps they could benefit from some similar pressures. That said, there are a lot of things that strike me very oddly, and I don't know how many of these are just a difference between US and UK practices. Testing, first and foremost. In the UK most Ph. D. students have to pass an upgrade at some point in their course, without which they can only attain a Masters degree; there isn't really any other form of testing, because the ambitious ones will already be working on conference papers and publications, which one could see as the real tests. And while I'm familiar with the archetype ofthe never-finishing grad student from the USA's pop culture, this doesn't stop me thinking that five years is still a huge chunk of one's life to use on a doctorate. I took five years to do mine, but three of them were part-time and I was an Assistant Lecturer on a course with the time of two fewer teachers than it had been planned for during some of that; I also spent much too long on a first article, though I guess the work paid off at the time. In the UK it is conventional to over-run, but since one usually has to do so on one's own money, rarely by more than a year; someone who over-runs by more than a year either has a private income, or probably isn't going to finish, because they have already had to start in on a real-world career to make ends meet and stop needing the doctorate or enjoying the study. It takes unusual bloody-mindedness to continue to defy one's normal employability in those circumstances. So there is obviously something basically different about the experience in the USA that means I don't know how weird the bit that unsettles me is...