I generally don’t remember decade-old blog posts, but Adam Walker Cleaveland’s “Is the D.Min. a Fluff Degree?” is one that I vividly recall, not so much for the post itself—which is quite brief—but for the copious discussion it inspired, in some cases over the course of years, in the comments section (and Portland seminary wrote an article partially in response to that discussion). Many people came in to defend the rigor of numerous programs that offered a Doctor of Ministry degree—the degree I just earned on Sunday at Seattle University’s graduate commencement.
At the same time, I attended seminary for my master’s degree alongside several now-Ph.D. students, whose trials were—and are—significantly different from mine. While they were not necessarily writing theses while engaged in full-time ministry, they still were required to pass comprehensive examinations that I did not. The nature of our theses also varied—while I still tried to make an original contribution with my thesis (namely, a microcosmic examination of Christian attitudes towards organized labor in the contemporary Pacific Northwest), it was still fundamentally praxis-oriented, rather than striving to cover a sliver of the humanities at unprecedented depth to make that original contribution.
That lack of comprehensive exams and a dissertation of unprecedented depth does—and should—differentiate the D.Min. from the Ph.D. But I also would (as humbly as possible) propose that the future of doctoral degrees—in the humanities, at least—should look more like the D.Min. and less like the Ph.D.
For this, I would turn to Jacques Berlinerblau’s recent book Campus Confidential, which he safely writes as a professor with tenure and all of the protections it entails. Because of that, he is able to be honest in this book about many of the obstacles that graduate students face. Perhaps the biggest obstacle is that in terms of job prospects, the value of a Ph.D.—at least in the humanities—may well be at an all-time low. Tenure positions are being dropped in favor of underpaying adjunct faculty, or retiring faculty are not being replaced, meanwhile universities continue to mint Ph.D. graduates, alongside all the student debt and limited income from those degree-earning years.
One of Berlinerblau’s proscriptions is for universities to fundamentally alter the way Ph.D. students are taught by condensing the coursework and dissertation, which (if a grad student is lucky) takes a full decade on average, to just five or six years, with courses in pedagogy, public speaking and oratory, and writing well.
Honestly, that sounds a lot like own course of study, which entailed a Bachelor of Arts degree in religious studies, a Master of Divinity degree, and now my Doctor of Ministry degree.
Pedagogy? My Master of Divinity curriculum required a course in Christian Education, which I dutifully took from a Ph.D.-credentialed specialist in the field, and subsequently spent the next six-plus years teaching three adult education classes per week in the parish: an adult Sunday school, and two weekday Bible studies.
Public speaking and oratory? Besides my decade of experience in both competing in and coaching speech and debate, my M.Div. curriculum required a course on homiletics—preaching—as well as a field education component, which I served in a parish that afforded me several opportunities for further preaching and public speaking. And writing well? Those sermons I wrote were graded not just on the basis of their delivery, but on their writing as well.
Research? In my D.Min., I became not so much an academic expert in an infinitesimally micro-speciality of my field so much as a professional expert on the practice of a profession (parish ministry and labor activism) within a particular chronological and spatial context (the present-day Pacific Northwest). I have sacrificed a significant amount of depth for a similarly significant amount of breadth in that area of expertise, but in theory, it should still qualify me to teach undergraduate courses in Biblical studies, history, and theology (perhaps with a crossover into the philosophy of religion), and probably a graduate-level seminar on American Christian religious practice and social values.
What Berlinerblau proposed—a shortened course of study (I will have spent six years on my post-bachelor’s education) replete with coursework in public speaking, pedagogy, and accessible writing—already exists in my field and, I’m willing to reckon, likely in a number of other academic fields in addition. And it is the course of study that I just completed, and so can speak to from extensive experience.
Should, say, a Christian or liberal arts college find such a swath of expertise valuable? I have to think so. Berlinerblau’s end goal—and what he argues the academy is in desperate need of—is the production of more professors who are equipped for, and are passionate about, teaching at an undergraduate rather than a graduate level. An undergraduate who is taking, say, Introduction to the New Testament is likely not going to care much about the intricacies of the differences between individual scholars, but that student will really need a professor who is enthusiastic, effective, and patient about actually explaining the two-source hypothesis to them.
The problem, I think, is that whatever the teaching passion and gifts a D.Min., it matters not because our research agenda is so drastically different than that of a Ph.D. It is not as though we are incapable of academic research—I took a yearlong sequence on qualitative research and dissertation proposal writing as a required component of my D.Min, and my thesis’s bibliography was of a truly obscene length—but that we are not necessarily apt to do the sort of research for which academics get a semester’s or a year’s sabbatical or fellowship to cloister oneself off in the archives of the systematic theology of rutabagas during the papacy of Clement V or somesuch.
I already had to cloister myself off in the seminary for three years to become an ordained pastor in the first place; I’ve done my time, thank you very much. No, the doctorates envisioned here would, could, and should combine academic rigor with rubber-hits-the-road experience and immersion that is required as part of a degree like the D.Min. I can say without reservation or hesitation that, with few exceptions, my professors who had at some point served as pastors before becoming professors were more effective teachers than many of my professors who had not. I do not think that phenomenon is merely coincidence, or even correlation without causation. It is at the heart of what makes someone good, or even great, at teaching what they know.
I think my D.Min. made me better at teaching what I know, and at expanding that knowledge base for me to teach from. I knew when I went to Longview in 2011 that I was not done with education, and I promised myself that I would go back to the academy one day. But neither did I believe a Ph.D. was right for me. The D.Min., though, matched my need to add what was not in my master's program without demanding the sort of micro-specialization of a Ph.D.
So, to answer Adam's original, decade-old question, no, the D.Min. is not, and should not, be a fluff degree. But yes, the D.Min. and the Ph.D. are very different degrees. I do not fancy titling myself as Dr. Atcheson, in part because my M.D. wife is the real Dr. Atcheson, but also because I don’t feel the need to demand the same deference as a Ph.D., and especially a Ph.D. who may have had to overcome institutional, financial, gendered, racist etc. obstacles which I did not.
But that does not mean my D.Min. was without rigor or merit. There surely are D.Min. programs out there with less rigor, just as not all Ph.D. programs are uniformly demanding and rigorous. What I would hope, though, is that the D.Min. could push the Ph.D. to be better and more applicable, just as the Ph.D. can demand more of the D.Min. And, ultimately, our own searches for learning might all be better off as our better-equipped scholars in turn better equip our future pastors, chaplains, teachers, and activists.