Nutty PhD in Humanities?

Author Louis Menand On Reforming U.S. Universities : NPR:

an enormous number of new campuses opened up in the 1950s and 1960s. ...Then after 1970, the system started to slow down and even go backwards, and you ended up with an enormous number of PhDs for a declining number of slots.
...the number of PhDs awarded has been going up pretty steadily since the 1970s, and the number of job openings has more or less been going down.
...the time it takes to get the PhD has been increasing steadily since the 1970s so that the median time to get a PhD in a humanities discipline, like philosophy, English, art history, is nine years.
...Now, if you think that you can get a law degree and argue a case before the Supreme Court in three years, get a medical degree and cut somebody open in four years, why should it take nine years to teach poetry to college freshmen?
...only about half the people who enroll in graduate programs in English actually get the PhD - only five percent of those ended up teaching in research universities, which is really what we're training our students to do.