Graduate Education and the Crisis in the Humanities
A report from the MLA Conference on the Future of Doctoral Education
by Barbara Ladd, Associate Professor of EnglishJoin an online discussion of the issues raised in this article.
Editor's Note: Professor Ladd wrote an informal report on this conference for the Department of English. She has graciously revised it for a broader audience through The Academic Exchange.
Recently I attended the Conference on the Future of Doctoral Education, sponsored by the Modern Language Association and held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Most of the attendees were directors of graduate studies and chairs of departments. Ours couldn't attend, so I went as an impostor. I thought I'd pass on some of what struck me as memorable.
The conference was largely devoted to exploring the crisis in the humanities and its impact on doctoral programs in English and the modern languages (although as a member of an English department I did not attend many of the sessions devoted to the other modern languages and cannot say much about what was discussed in those workshops). As those of us working in these areas know, this is a crisis of national scope and has had a profound impact on funding in the humanities and on the make-up of departments of English nationwide (with many more adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty being hired to teach--especially at the lower levels of the curriculum).
Most of the strongest criticism was directed not at legislators who have cut support for colleges and universities or at administrators who see financial advantages to hiring part-time and adjunct labor whenever possible, but toward those of us working in departments of English who have failed to communicate very effectively to the public and to university administrators exactly what we do, why (and how) both our research and our teaching are important, and why (and how) what one speaker referred to as the "casualization of labor" is a serious problem--not only for those of us who work in the humanities but for everyone. The phrase "casualization of labor" refers to the increasing tendency in humanities programs to rely on adjuncts, graduate students, and others who do not hold tenure or tenure-line appointments to teach courses formerly taught by tenure-track and tenured faculty. These teachers are hired (and fired) with less deliberation, often to staff courses or sections of courses added at the last minute. There is considerable cause for concern that the quality of education in the humanities suffers as a result.
In his welcoming remarks on the first day of the conference, University of Wisconsin Chancellor David Ward told us that academics in the humanities project "anxiety," that administrators and the general public have started to believe that "there is something wrong" with us. The gist of his message was to "stop whining" and work on ways to be "creative and happy." We felt warmly welcomed. (Note: at a follow-up workshop, another attendee noted that angst is part of our professional identity and somebody has to do it.)
The chancellor also addressed the issue of interdisciplinarity, acknowledging that multidisciplinarity or cross-disciplinarity is intellectually viable but presents a structural problem. For Ward, this means finding ways promote cross-disciplinarity without weakening departments through making "split appointments," i.e. by asking departments to "share" faculty lines. (This is, apparently, the happy dream of a number of administrators--weakening departments, that is--by making a lot of split appointments). In short, Ward suggested, it is entirely possible to pursue crossdisciplinarity without the infamous "split appointment." He suggested, as one possibility, enabling departments to coordinate searches with other departments--so that English departments and history departments, for example, might coordinate searches to make the most of interdisciplinary possibilities without sacrificing faculty lines.
Robert Weisbuch of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation said that "real dollars for research in our discipline have decreased," and suggested that to solve the problem we would need to "open the doors and windows of academe to the world." He also said that no real improvement would be seen for the humanities within academe until powerful options for academics exist outside academe.
To that end, Weisbuch mentioned a new program of the Wilson Fellowship Foundation: $10,000 awards will be made to departments interested in trying out ways to open non-academic career paths for graduate students; and $1500 practicum grants will be given to graduate students for short periods to enable them to undertake internships in related fields outside academe. The foundation will award 15 to 20 postdoctoral fellowships beginning in September for graduate students who want to spend some time working outside academe (and doing things commensurate with their talents and education; he gave examples, which I would be glad to pass on).
Gerald Graff of the departments of English and education at the University of Chicago spoke as part of a panel entitled "Excessive Professionalization of Graduate Students," devoted to a discussion of whether we are pushing graduate students to become active professionals (to present papers and to publish, among other things) too soon. Graff said that "excessive professionalization" is not the problem but that "narrow" or "uncritical" professionalism may well be. He suggested that we don't "overprofessionalize" our students but rather that we are so ambivalent about our profession that we end up hiding our professional culture from graduate students. Instead we should be working to professionalize our graduate students in the broadest and best sense of the word; they should be critical, aware of the ethical issues central to scholarship and teaching, and confident enough in the significance of what they are preparing to do to take their work seriously.
Stanley Fish (now an administrator at the University of Chicago and former chair of the English Department at Duke University), speaking later the same day, warned us to beware of any administrator (or any academic) who says, about anything, "that's not within my purview"; he noted that universities are traditionally "ramshackle" organizations and "incoherent," but suggested that we be grateful because all kinds of wonderful "spaces" can be found in these ramshackle, incoherent organizations for individual action (and, presumably, inaction, or genuinely dumb action, although he didn't mention those possibilities).
Several speakers acknowledged that some universities need to eliminate doctoral programs in English altogether or scale down their doctoral programs. Universities with poor placement records or with records of placing people in jobs one could get with the Masters degree should consider such action. (Point of information: Emory University's English department has a very good record of placing Ph.D.'s in academic positions.) Schools might also consider reviving the master's degree (especially if they can come up with ways to place these students in non-traditional jobs--i.e. publishing, nonprofit organizations, jobs in corporate America). Rethink the master's degree.
Exciting Suggestions (exciting to me, that is)
* From the director of graduate studies at Princeton, a description of a required course in the Fall semester of the 3rd year of graduate study--a seminar on methodology/professional issues/writing the prospectus. This is a required, for-credit, course taken by all students who have passed their exams. The purpose is to provide students guidance with the theoretical/conceptual/methodological issues that confront them as they begin to define a dissertation project and to introduce them to some of the professional issues they will confront. Students are not separated by specialization and the requirement of the course is that participants must complete the prospectus. The student's dissertation advisor has no role within the seminar itself, although students do consult individually with their advisors while working on the prospectus during this semester. (It should be noted that Princeton students are on a strict schedule and are required to have completed all coursework and exams by the fall semester of the 3rd year.) This idea struck many people as interesting because a big issue at this conference was the relative lack of methodological/theoretical knowledge among graduate students; and many departments seem to have grown disillusioned with requiring courses in methodology or theory or professional issues during the early years of graduate study when other coursework is more pressing. "Give the information to them when they most need it."* Examinations: one university director of graduate studies reported that each graduate student at his school is given a special topics "orals" question a week before the oral examination is held and is required to prepare a 25-minute presentation on the topic for the oral exam.
Other Suggestions
* Offer a workshop in which students work on producing a publishable paper--and sending it out.* Collect syllabi from regular faculty and keep them on file for graduate students to use when constructing their own syllabi for courses.
* Apply for research funds to hire research associates (and the money should come from the college or university, not from the department) to help with scholarly projects. This help should be substantive and valuable for the student as well as the professor. Research associates should share credit for the project when it is completed. (See graduate students' ideas below.)
* Survey alumni of graduate programs to find out what aspects of our programs work and do not work. Alumni who are working in academe are in a better position to know what we are doing right and wrong than current graduate students.
* Give graduate students the opportunity to teach the courses they will most likely have to teach when they do get jobs.
* Consider team-teaching arrangements between advanced graduate students and faculty in their area of specialization in order to promote strong intellectual foundations for courses taught by graduate students and to continue the education of advanced graduate students in combining teaching and scholarship.
There were a number of graduate students in attendance at the conference and on the last day of the conference, many of them spoke about what they had heard and urged departments to
* Clarify the purpose of a dissertation
* Give graduate students help in developing papers for publication
* Provide fair remuneration for teaching responsibilities
* Put graduate students on all departmental committees
* Talk to graduate students before drawing conclusions about who they are and what they want
* Find out whether the decreasing number of applications from minorities this past year is the beginning of a trend and, if so, reverse it
* Mentor graduate students
* Consider unionization for graduate teaching assistants
* Be careful when advising universities to shut down programs
* Fight both individual and institutional sexism
* Provide more guidance to graduate students in the middle of their degree programs when it is more likely that they can lose focus
* Make use of the models of mentoring developed in composition/rhetoric programs; they are exemplary
* Set standards for living wages for all graduate students and others who are not on the tenure-track.
* Provide opportunities for "research apprenticeships" with graduate students sharing the burdens and getting some of the credit of authorship. (See above for "research associateships")
There were many more ideas that I can do justice to here. The Modern Language Association is planning to provide some information on their website for those who are interested.