Sidonie Smith, director of the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities and former president of the Modern Language Association, has authored a manifesto for the transformation of doctoral education in the humanities: Anxieties about the vitality of the humanities within higher education run high. So, too, do anxieties about the evolving conditions of our work as academic humanists. For some, talk of change, with its rhetoric of urgency, becomes a trigger for holding fast…