No. Seriously. What did you study?
What possible use could there be for it? Are there any career options at all?
Did the school board get drunk at a kegger one weekend and decide to see if they could come up with a degree program more useless than a major in liberal arts?
The jokes are writing themselves here when David Letterman get’s a heads up about it.
Teaching it, while you write journal articles/books? It’s like a literature degree but more specialized, AFAICT.
I went to college for Film Studies - took a ton of classes with professors with doctorates in Film Studies. Don’t see much difference.
No, there will not be a lot of jobs. But there are some doctorates that really aren’t about jobs. You teach, you write, you curate…that’s about it for jobs.
Why does there have to be a use for it? Why does a career have to come in to it?
Manga is a multi million dollar industry.
Besides, career options are not the problem of the university. Attracting students is. From the Universitie’s POV, a manga study is smart business.
Pretty much this. I studied poli sci because I enjoyed it. My career will likely be pretty generalized, but that doesn’t bother me at all.
Because landlords and grocers have very little interest in academic articles
:dubious:
I.E., journal articles won’t pay your rent / feed your children
Which is only somewhat true.
I don’t guess there has to be a use for it. But the last time I checked, doctorates of any stripe don’t come cheap. So unless someone already has all the money they want, a doctorate is usually an investment against future income.
Oh, I get it. It’s lame because manga is lame. Oh, those silly otaku. Haha.
Well manga is lame, but that’s besides the point. I don’t know the situation in Japan, but here, humanities Ph.D’s are a dime dozen. How likely is it that someone with a doctorate in manga studies will really be able to get a teaching position or research grant? I’d really be amazed if anybody with this degree ended up doing something other than becoming the Japanese version of Comic Book Guy.
I had a friend that was doing his PhD in English, but it was actually about pictures, too. He ended up producing the Best Picture of 2005.
PhDs aren’t only about how they can directly link you to some kind of professor-track employment in some obvious way. They also serve the general purpose of letting you demonstrate an ability to think differently and originally in a rigorously “refereed” setting. While we all know that the majority of the work is the drudgery of jumping through academic hoops, it requires you to do something that no one else has done before, and there’s value to that that bridges to other things that often aren’t so obvious at first.
Most faculty would disagree very strongly with this statement.
It seems that self-selection is at work here. Articles with advice to PhD students in journals such as Nature sometimes/often say not to only go to professors for advice if the student wants to get an industry job.
And. fundamentally, the meaning of a PhD is that you are a full scholar in your own right and can research, design curricula, or lead a school all on your own, right? Isn’t that the theory?
Doesn’t the Comic Book Guy have an MA? Or am I misremembering?
How many humanists are reading Nature?
If that were the case, there would be no need for the tenure track. Having a PhD means that you’ve completed at least one research project. Over the course of an academic career, you’ll write the equivalent of thirty dissertations (at least in my field).
I did not interpret your post, and the post that you quoted, as referring specifically to Humanities and otherwise non-science PhDs and professors.