VCU’s Media, Art and Text (MATX) PhD

Most discourse about doctoral education makes certain assumptions and builds funding structures, timelines, and expectations around them. Specifically, it assumes a fulltime student in their 20s or early 30s, and in most humanities and social science fields, it assumes that person wants an academic position. 

Virginia Commonwealth University’s Media, Art, and Text (MATX) PhD makes no such assumptions. Alongside traditional students, the MATX program serves mid-career professionals who don’t want to leave their jobs but do want meaningful graduate education. It reimagines the PhD for midcareer professionals who already know themselves and have strong professional identities. 

The MATX program, which turns 20 next year, was born at a pivotal moment when VCU was transitioning from being an R2 commuter school to the R1 urban research university that it is today. At the time, both the English and Communications departments sought permission from Virginia’s state governing bodies to start PhD programs. They were denied on the basis that such programs already existed at other state institutions. Faculty from three separate units then collaborated to create a truly unique program: an interdisciplinary PhD that bridged the department of English, the School of the Arts, and the Robertson School of Communication. This gambit worked, and Virginia approved a program that was genuinely different from anything else in the state. Since 2007, the program has graduated 85 students (a graduation rate of 77% that is considerably higher than average in humanities fields).

Today, the MATX program, led by Associate Professor Mary Caton Lingold, is the only humanities PhD program at VCU and also the only one in the metro Richmond area. It requires a Master’s degree – any Master’s degree – for entry, and students are expected to arrive with a mature idea for their dissertation project. The program has a unique student population that includes: traditional fulltime doctoral students doing interdisciplinary research that would be impossible in a single-discipline program; artists interested in developing a substantial research practice alongside their creative work; and midcareer professionals who cannot and will not put their established careers “on the shelf” for the better part of a decade. 

One example of this last category of part time student is a graphic design professor at a nearby university who is using methods of digital ethnography to study the impact of game design on user experience. Another student is a massage therapist with 15 years of experience, who pursued an MS in psychology only to discover that that discipline “does not recognize the body at all.” She came to MATX to study mind-body connections in collaboration with an artist who creates wearable, movement sensors. Yet another student is a museum professional who left her career as a curator to come to the program full time and study the history of men’s pants, with an ultimate goal of turning her dissertation into a trade book in fashion history. These examples illustrate the range of experiences, interests, and goals that students bring to the MATX program, and the flexibility the program affords them to pursue those interests and goals.

When Lingold inherited the MATX program in Fall 2023, it had a great deal of potential but also very low stipends and unclear timelines. She negotiated with the university to offer fewer but more generous stipends, going from $18,000 per year to $26,000 per year. She also set very clear timelines: funded students get four years, and the expectation is that they will finish in that amount of time. Funded students also take exams at set, predictable times, rather than waiting until the much more nebulous “when they’re ready.” Since making these improvements, Lingold says, “our fully funded students have finished in four years. It’s been incredible.” Regular cohort meetings have helped reinforce the timeline expectations.

At the same time, Lingold also came to understand that the program’s nontraditional students – who are not all funded – “bring a wealth of experience and maturity to the program.” The number of those students in the program has steadily increased; today, roughly 15 out of 23 currently enrolled students are either mid-career or returning to a PhD program after years in the workforce.

There are some trade-offs for these changes. The program does not have any language requirements, but it does require “competencies.” These are flexible and depend upon a student’s own work – for example, someone might learn audio editing techniques for podcasting, or develop skills in conducting oral history. Since COVID-19, there have also been negotiations around the number of in-person classes and meetings versus virtual ones. Part-time students do not tend to have the time for in-person interaction and socializing that full-time students do. The disparate backgrounds that each student brings can make building a cohesive intellectual community more difficult. Regular program meetings mitigate some of this, as does a 4-course core that is taken simultaneously by all first and second years.

Despite the challenges, VCU’s MATX program addresses several longstanding issues with doctoral education. It appeals to a student population that has historically been underserved by higher ed more broadly: midcareer professionals who want a degree they can see the impact of more or less immediately and who don’t have seven years to give to a program. For both full-time and part-time students, it demonstrates that arts and humanities PhDs need not follow the traditional, protracted model. The uncertainty of PhD funding and timelines, Lingold says, makes the degree “unattractive” to professionally oriented students. Eliminating that uncertainty opens “a whole range of students who otherwise are not interested in doing a PhD.” At a time when many institutions are looking for new ways of doing things, the MATX degree demonstrates the importance of flexibility, clarity, and openness.