This is backwards

This essay is an interesting take on the problem of graduate education in the U.S., but it also exemplifies an annoying tic of the humanities [bold added]:

[An academic discipline] is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields. [. . . ]The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.


Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well. This is why, for example, you cannot take a course in the law (apart from legal history) outside a law school. In fact, law schools urge applicants to major in areas outside the law. They say that this makes lawyers well-rounded, but it also helps to ensure that future lawyers will be trained only by other lawyers. It helps lawyers retain a monopoly on knowledge of the law.
[. . .]
Disciplines are self-regulating in this way for good academic freedom reasons. The system of credentialing and specialization maintains quality and protects people within the field from being interfered with by external forces. The system has enormous benefits, but only for the professionals. The weakest professional, because he or she is backed by the collective authority of the group, has an almost unassailable advantage over the strongest non-professional (the so-called independent scholar) operating alone, since the non-professional must build a reputation by his or her own toil, while the professional’s credibility is given by the institution. That is one of the reasons that people are willing to pay the enormous price in time and income forgone it takes to get the degree: the credential gives them access to the resources of scholarship and to the networks of scholars that circulate their work around the world. The non-academic writer or scholar is largely deprived of those things. This double motive—ensuring quality by restricting access—is reflected in the argument all professions offer as their justification: in order to serve the needs of others properly, professions must be accountable only to themselves.

What annoys me about this is that it gets everything upside down: it talks about the institutional organization of the discipline as being all about the monopolization of knowledge, while completely disregarding the fact that the actual carrots and sticks held by the discipline depend on its control of the material resources without which knowledge production is possible. The "unassailable advantage" of the "professional" academic is not that they have a PhD but that they receive a salary for producing academic work. Indeed, a very large proportion of professional academics (professors at lower-tier state schools and adjuncts everywhere, many of whom do in fact have PhDs) produce very little academic work at all, because they aren't paid to do research at all but instead to cover a heavy teaching load. The reason "people are willing to pay the enormous price in time and income forgone" for a PhD is that the alternative is to read thousands of pages of scholarship in one's spare time--i.e., not terribly realistic.

The example of law is awkward for his case, because legal scholarship is a side-show. "Future lawyers will be trained only by other lawyers" not because of the organization of the discipline of the law but because of requirements of being licensed to practice law, which are built into the very judicial system in the u.s.

So, it's not that social authority follows from an exclusive disciplinary organization, but instead it is the ability of a discipline to monopolize resources that enables it (or, really, even gives it a reason to) create an exclusionary structure. It is true, as the essay does mention, that as resources become scarce, the natural reaction of the discipline is to make its entry procedures ever more exclusive, and, as the essay argues, this might lead to irrational results, including an excessive conformity in the discipline. There might even be something to the essay's conclusion that it might make sense to make the whole degree-granting process less restrictive, but that would do nothing for the fundamental problem that the "pie" of resources for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is just not all that large. People go into debt to get MDs and JDs, because they are professional degrees that promise a desirable and lucrative career path. Who would do that for a 3-year PhD? After all, "the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having" already do have a post-grad option: getting an MA. The MA is a joke in the academic world precisely because it is insane: students have to pay for it, and it leads into a career neither in academia nor anywhere else.