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  3. Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new re

Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new re

admin2019-06-08  22
问题    Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new report from the Modern Language Association. The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track job.
   The core of the problem is, of course, the job market. The M.L.A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that’s wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting—not to mention the older professors who didn’t receive tenure, and who now find themselves competing with their former students. In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That’s why the mood is so dire—why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee’s words, "Why maintain doctoral study in the modern languages and literatures—or the rest of the humanities—at all?"
   Those trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less elite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the G.I. Bill and, later, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly. When the boom ended, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid-seventies, schools were creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students—for instance, women and minorities.
   Those reforms worked: as Nate Silver reported in the Times last summer, about twice as many people attend college per capita now as did forty years ago. But all that expansion changed colleges. In the past, they had catered to elite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts. Now, to attract middle-class students, colleges had to offer more career-focused majors, in fields like business, communications, and health care. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university. Today, they are often regarded as a kind of institutional luxury, paid for by dynamic, cheap, and growing programs in, say, adult-education. These large demographic facts are contributing to today’s job-market crisis: they’re why, while education as a whole is growing, the humanities aren’t.
   Given all this, what can an English department do? The M.L.A. report contains a number of suggestions. Pride of place is given to the idea that grad school should be shorter: "Departments should design programs that can be completed in five years." That will probably require changing the dissertation from a draft of an academic book into something shorter and simpler. At the same time, graduate students are encouraged to "broaden" themselves: to "engage more deeply with technology"; to pursue unusual and imaginative dissertation projects; to work in more than one discipline; to acquire teaching skills aimed at online and community-college students; and to take workshops on subjects, such as project management and grant writing, which might be of value outside of academia. Graduate programs, the committee suggests, should accept the fact that many of their students will have non-tenured, or even non-academic, careers. They should keep track of what happens to their graduates, so that students who decide to leave academia have a non-academic alumni network to draw upon.
What does "that" in the last paragraph refer to?
选项 A、The idea of designing a shorter program.
B、The completion of a degree in five years.
C、The idea of drafting a shorter dissertation.
D、The suggestions given in the M.L.A. report.
答案A
解析 指代题。“that”指代的是前文内容“Pride of place is given to the idea that grad school should be shorter：‘Departments should design programs that can be completed in five years．’”该句提到M．L．A．报告里的一个想法——研究生的学制应该缩短，其课程应该能在5年内完成。A项表述与此相符。原文仅提到完成课程，并没有提及拿到学位，故排除B。C项中的“撰写更短的论文”是缩短学习时间造成的结果，并不是that指代的内容，故排除。D项中的suggestions用的是复数，指M．L．A．提供的所有建议，而that仅指代其中的一条，故排除。故本题选A。
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