Expanding the Musicology Ph.D.

Here's a topic for discussion, my fellow blogging or blog-reading musicologists:

What are some ways in which a Ph.D. program in musicology could be adjusted so that a student could potentially find a career outside of academia?

Never fear, I ask not for myself (at least not yet; give me a few more years!) but because over at Tenured Radical, the illustrious Prof. Potter pointed out that her own doctoral experience, in NYU's History Department, produced scholars who "work in film, archives, libraries, labor organizing, museums and administration as well as in full-time tenure track lines." And she goes on to suggest that one way to facilitate this would be to create certificate programs that accompany the Ph.D. in history, in such things as public policy, museum studies, journalism, etc.

So, again: any thoughts on what a musicological equivalent would be? A certificate in music criticism? (Probably not the best field to latch onto!) Arts administration? Critical Rastrum Studies?

I'd be curious to know your thoughts. I (hopefully obviously) don't mean this to say that any of this alone would solve employment issues, or our field's relative invisibility in the public sphere, or our inability to throw a good discipline-wide party. But it seems worth thinking about.

Fieldwork and Archival Research in the Age of Terror

One of the toughest hurdles we must surmount as young academics is the extended trip. Ethnomusicologists generally spend between 6 months to 2 years in some place outside of their comfort zone, ranging from foreign countries to a field site on the other end of the city. Musicologists may do this as well, or they might spend months on end in an archive. As many Americanists know, international travel grants are among the most highly prized funding sources out there for our fields of study while domestic travel grants are difficult to obtain. It looks like the Americanists now have a new advantage of not having to worry about the TSA rummaging through their research notes.

In recent years, we've been hearing an endless stream of headlines about how our endless War on Terror influences what we do: if you wish to study Arabic or Farsi, odds are there is a government grant out there for you; if you happen to be a non-resident of the U.S. employed by a U.S. institution, you will probably have new troubles with your visa (we all know of the infamous case of the musicologist denied re-entry by the Department of Homeland Security). There is now a new hurdle for young traveling scholars that I don't think anyone adequately anticipated: the search and seizure of written documents upon re-entry into the U.S. after a lengthy research trip. The AAUP reports that as of 2008, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has directed customs and border control agents to seize electronic and printed materials upon re-entry into the U.S. without individualized suspicion. The TSA has been able to search and/or confiscate computers for some time now, but it is only getting news now due to a high profile subpeana and seizure that the TSA later withdrew. The Obama administration is keeping this policy. This morning I heard that many returning Fulbright fellows have had their boxes of research materials opened and returned in disarray – sometimes with the wrong contents, sometimes missing large quantities of research materials – without warning. The message came out over SEM-L that young scholars should be careful when returning from a research trip. Needless to say the AAUP and the ACLU are fighting this.

People, this is huge and terrifying. Speaking from personal experience, we all have enough hurdles to jump through when it comes to international travel and research. Visas on their own can be tough to get. Now we have to worry that our data might be seized without individualized suspicion?! I know we have plenty to be upset about these days (budget cuts, pay cuts, ballooning class sizes), but this particular policy will have a directly negative affect on all international research.