I SENT THIS TO TERENCE THINKING HE RESPONDED OFF-LINE, BUT REALIZED HIS
QUESTION WAS PUBLIC.  I ALSO CONCUR WITH MOST OF LUBOMIR'S COMMENTS.


terence,

i believe that it possible for a student to do a good job in 5 years in
the american system.  2 years of coursework + 1 year of MA thesis writing
and preparing for qualifying exams + 1 year of fieldwork + 1 year of
dissertation writing. (indeed this is how many universities describe their
time lines on their websites).  what does happen in our system is that
students are usually only funded for 4-5 years and then are on their own.
some students may start teaching while writing up, and certainly others
spend time working on grants to fund writing up.  so after this 4-5 years,
students who do not take out loans or are not funded by family or do not
get some of the highly competitive grants, more easily get distracted from
heads-down concentration of their dissertation writing.

i believe that in Design, the research year could be reduced to
potentially 6 months and potentially the writing reduced to 6 months.  so,
for motivated students: who know what they want to achieve in their
research, who hit cycles of external funding just right, and not have any
hiccups in their research, or problems with their committee, then 4 years
is possible.

for anthropology, a calendar year is typical as you are able to get a full
cycle of the seasons--different seasons affect culture and behavior
differently.  also, with the write-up, since you have a year's worth of
data, and that the anthropological process is so interpretive, it is
difficult to quickly make sense of your findings.  in more quantitative
work in the (hard) sciences i believe that more often, the synthesis of
data is quicker, as the research design leads to more straightforward
hypothesis checking.

i would like to think that the situation at UofC was unique, but it is
really only a little above average.  at the UofC they have a formula that
works so there is not much motivation to re-evaluate (the year i
matriculated their students captured 85% of the available tenure-track
teaching positions in the country).  the correlation between time-to-phd
and quality of institution hired at, helped this.  the longer in school
the fatter the resume.  the faculty were not particularly interested in
students moving through on any schedule--they wanted the best results
possible, so if this meant more post-field work then do more work.  this
was a quiet pressure to do more/better.  and of course the bar gets
continually  raised in this kind of system year after year.

right now there is a dearth of design phds, at least in the US.  so, there
is not a great deal of competition amongst phds.  i think that as the
field grows, competition will get greater, and the same kind of thing
could happen.  having the phd is the price of admission, but a real
understanding by those hiring of the particular quality of the research
and other forms of scholarship that applicants have under their belt
become crucial. now since most US schools do not have a phd on faculty, or
have perhaps a young phd who graduated from an only-slightly-less young
design phd program, discrimination of quality is less robust. anthropology
is such a mature field and the numbers of graduates results in competition
for teaching positions being tough.

so, i don't necessarily think that 2-1/2 years could always produce the
'same quality' but i think it is certainly possible to finish a US phd in
4 years and have that be good research that grounds a budding academic
career.

cheers,
bruce