University of Wisconsin-Madison will offer a two-year fellowship program for people holding doctoral degrees starting next year, according to the university’s Center for the Humanities Director Sara Guyer.
The fellowship, which will follow an already existing program for students presently pursuing doctorates, will select one fellow to work with Wisconsin Public Radio’s show “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” Guyer said.
The fellow will receive a yearly salary of $65,000, becoming one of 20 program participants working on various personalized and job-specific fellowships nationwide, Guyer said. She added that the program, which is sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, aims to address a declining number of humanities doctoral students.
“If we look around nationally, universities are changing, especially enrollments in the humanities have shrunk,” Guyer said. “Many of us are worried about the future of Ph.D. programs and one way of helping to ensure the longevity of these programs is to create ways for thinking about more than one outcome of the Ph.D.”
The fellowship’s goal is to help facilitate students’ transitions from traditionally academic careers, such as university teaching positions, to careers outside of scholastic sphere, Guyer said.
“The broader vision behind these kinds of fellowships is that the Ph.D. in the humanities is training for a wonderful career in academia, but also is training for a much broader range of careers that historically academic departments haven’t recognized,” she added.
This sort of recognition is a relatively novel concept, Guyer explained, and one which has the potential to “help foster a society in which individuals with a deep understanding of history, literature, language [and] philosophy [help] shape institutions, governments [and] public conversations.”
She continued, saying a major goal of the fellowship is to make people aware of the diverse prospects offered by a doctoral degree.
“We have so many bright, talented, wonderful Ph.D. students who are having a really, really hard time finding jobs in academia and also some who don’t want jobs in academia,” Guyer said. “Rather than look at them and say having a job in academia is the only thing that we’re gonna recognize, [we want] to start to create institutions and opportunities that recognize that a range of careers are not just an OK outcome, but a really excellent and even natural outcome of the Ph.D.”
