BYU graduate studies in history

[_kairos]

Will someone inform us of the Jeffrey Holland acquisition of a graduate degree in history I think -first a masters at byu in xx doing a study of the Book of Mormon then heading east to yyyy university where they told Holland that Book of Mormon BS would not cut it so he had to do a masters in zzz. I just don't know the particulars but sure someone here does-thanx!

k

[_Chap]

Will someone inform us of the Jeffrey Holland acquisition of a graduate degree in history I think -first a masters at byu in xx doing a study of the Book of Mormon then heading east to yyyy university where they told Holland that Book of Mormon b***s*** would not cut it so he had to do a masters in zzz. I just don't know the particulars but sure someone here does-thanx!

k

Google God will help you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_R ... _education

Holland transferred to Brigham Young University (BYU) where he graduated with a BA in English. He received an MA in Religious Education from BYU, while also teaching religion classes part-time.[2] After earning his master's degree, Holland became an Institute of Religion teacher in Hayward, California. He worked as an institute director in Seattle, Washington. Holland attended Yale University and earned a second master's degree in American Studies, and later a Ph.D in the same subject.[7] At Yale, Holland studied with American literary scholar and critic R. W. B. Lewis and authored a dissertation on the religious sense of Mark Twain.[8]

I think that since he wished to do a PhD in American studies, the demand to do a Master's in that area first was could probably be easily explained on the basis that the MA from BYU was in an irrelevant subject area, without the issue of quality being raised.

If I had nothing better to do, I might amuse/inform myself by looking at his thesis on Mark Twain. Wonder how he deals with Twain's references to Mormonism? But it is not available online, and I don't feel like wasting resources on requesting it by other means. They have it at BYU, Yale, and for some reason Göttingen. Also a small and rather puzzling group of small municipal libraries. The result of requests by local Mormons?

[_Symmachus]

If you do a PhD at Yale, you get an MA and in certain departments and MPhil (probably no MPhil in a program like American Studies though) after you finish your exams and submit your dissertation prospectus. These are consolation prizes in case you don't finish the PhD.

So, he probably did the MA at BYU, then went to Yale for a PhD program, picking up his MA/MPhil. I wouldn't read any more into it than that.

[_deacon blues]

I don't know, are they trying to be more "practical", having graduate courses that can be more benefit for more people career minded?
Not exactly many careers that a Graduate degree in History can provide. Likely other colleges that have better programs for that.

But history is important. I mean, its a field where research should be done. It seems that there is more to a university than teaching people how to make money.

[_kairos]

Thanx for the information on Holland-he probably sleeps with that phd under his pillow next to his Book of Mormon.
I had no idea Holland started out in the religious ed system of the church-surely it was a good springboard for him to rise rapidly (anyone know his lds mentor) to be prez of byu for pete's sake and become an aposltle- no real job experience in his journey -just stepping through the theocracy where its all about "looking good".

is his spiritual conversion story anywhere to be read.

and finally how can we get to his phd- it would really be worth reading or maybe not.

k

[_Symmachus]

and finally how can we get to his phd- it would really be worth reading or maybe not.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/faithpromo ... sertation/

(links to ProQuest in comments, but it might cost you depending on what kind of library access you have)

[_cinepro]

for what it's worth, his Master's Thesis at BYU was on changes to the Book of Mormon text between 1830 and 1920:

http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/ref/co ... M/id/13996

[_hagoth7]

I don't know, are they trying to be more "practical", having graduate courses that can be more benefit for more people career minded?
Not exactly many careers that a Graduate degree in History can provide. Likely other colleges that have better programs for that.

But history is important. I mean, its a field where research should be done. It seems that there is more to a university than teaching people how to make money.

Important, yes. But it would appear, based in part on MsJack's first post in this thread, that BYU was responding responsibly to the reality that a number of its upper-level graduates weren't able to provide for their families with such an advanced degree. Based on that, it seems like the ethical thing to do was to pull the program, rather than keep on charging tuition for unmarketable degrees. (Meanwhile, other institutions are more than happy to keep on charging tuition for unmarketable careers - if recent headlines are any indication.)

[_Fence Sitter]

One has to wonder that if 19th century history was more faith promoting than it actually is, if the church would be more interested in producing BYU trained PhD's in that area?

I suppose they are taking BKP's advice that somethings that are true are not useful like a history PhD focused on Mormonism.

[_Symmachus]

Marketability is certainly an issue, but I think this thread is getting it backwards.

On "marketable" degrees: if you think an MA in history is less marketable than, say, an MSc in Organic Chemistry these days, then go find me a master's level organic chemist with a salaried job and benefits who graduated after, say, 2008. Same goes for biology, physics, mathematics, etc. The so-called STEM shortage is a political cliché, at least as far as any STEM job isn't just technicians. There are few research jobs in this country anymore, and the manual labor side of research (lab work) is very easy to outsource.

But in any case there isn't a university in this country that cares all that much about how marketable the degrees they offer really are. BYU would hardly be exceptional on that point. That, indeed, gets to the central problem of higher education: it's run like a business in a free-market system, and yet it is almost entirely insulated from any consequences of the business cycle. When university administrators face questions about what kind of jobs students get, they will pull out padded numbers or, absent those, the humanist cliches about expanding minds etc. etc. But when they need some money to fund a new student entertainment complex to keep enrollments increasing (usually pushed by boards made up of business people alumni with a passion for college football), then they switch cliches to tough economic times etc. etc. and gut some program with low enrollment—all the while using as many poverty-paid adjuncts as they can. Marketability is a consideration, but it's not the marketability of degrees that is at stake.

Lots of schools are getting rid of master's programs in traditional academic subjects (although they seem to be ballooning in non-research subjects, like school counseling and higher education administration; these are just cash cows for universities, since they are never funded don't require departments with the traditional apparatuses for graduate education). A master's just doesn't mean what it used to mean, and these days a PhD is the bare-minimum for any research position, either in academia or industry. That is equally true at any level of academia at the post-secondary level. Even for teaching at something like a community college will require a PhD—for those in the job market who were born after 1980, anyway. No, the marketability problem is not that graduates of an MA program in history would have a hard time getting employment in academia; the problem is that there aren't many who would sign up for an MA degree in history when what you need is a PhD. And unless they were going to fund the history MA and start expanding the program, they definitely will not get many applicants. BYU is committed to expanding graduate programs only in areas with profit-potential (in the forms of patents), and that will never be in a history program.

So, before we assume that everything BYU does is motivated by faith promotion, let's not forget that other cliché about the Church, one nearer the mark: it is a business. No way in a hell are they gonna waste resources funding an MA in history that few will apply to, and if it's going to be unfunded, why even put it on the books at all? If there are serious historians, they will go on to schools with much better programs or skip a master's and go for the PhD.

A plus side to this in the case of BYU, though, is that they still have and want to maintain a first-class research faculty, and that faculty does channel some of that research energy towards advanced undergraduates, which can give those students a leg-up when they do apply for PhD programs. So, getting rid of a low-enrollment MA with little potential for expansion wasn't probably such a bad thing. I very much doubt it had anything to do with faith issues.