Unravelling the “Ponzi Scheme”? A Different Approach to Graduate Education in German Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Graduate Studies in German: A Terrible Idea? The rhetoric of crisis has been common currency in discussions on graduate studies in the humanities for as long as I can remember. And there is no question that, then and now, our graduate programs in German churn out far more PhDs than there are tenure-track or even limited-term positions at Canadian universities. Add to this picture the fierce competition for faculty positions from PhD holders from the United States and Germany, and it cannot surprise us that many commentators see graduate school in the humanities as a pyramid scheme perpetuated by faculty members and administrators alike, in the interest of keeping their own classes populated and retaining cheap labour for lowly undergraduate courses. Should we follow the example set by Thomas H. Benton (the pseudonym of William Pannapacker, himself a tenured associate professor) in advising prospective graduate students: “Just don’t go”? Is getting a PhD in German a “terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct,” as Rebecca Schuman writes in Slate magazine? Are we tenure-track or tenured professors abdicating our responsibilities as teachers? Are we indeed promoting “the self-interest of faculty members at the expense of students” as Mark Taylor would have it, if we don’t shut down our graduate programs or, at the very least, reduce enrolment to a trickle? Well, yes – and no.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".