My in box has recently been besieged by a flood of articles decrying the death of graduate education in the humanities. As a literature student at a state university, I’m told my future career prospects are apparently not good, according to a number of prominent academics.
For instance, Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, wrote in the January/February 2010 issue of Academe that “the only thing the Ph.D. now reliably confers is the potential for lifetime poverty and underemployment.” Apparently, though my program is excellent, I will be among the snookered, vagabond English adjunct scholars milling around the countryside, doomed to a life of the vicissitudes of enrollment and discretionary spending. Or, more likely, I will pursue my second career choice: swamp hermit. I will scream my Lacanian analyses at unsuspecting families hiking through my territory. There will be some dignity in my bog.
Or consider how, in an interview this past January on National Public Radio, Louis Menand, the writer and Harvard professor of English, talked about his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Norton). He asserted that the nine-year national average for completion of the Ph.D. is “an astonishingly long apprenticeship in a profession that really shouldn’t require that much training,” when more lucrative fields like law and medicine take significantly less time in school. Wildly reductive assertions that we can cut the time in graduate school neglect the fact that we spend enormous time developing syllabi to reflect the changing needs of students we help teach; that many of us have to supplement our incomes; that we mentor students and colleagues, all the while working on our own scholarship.
Then there is William Pannapacker (writing under the pen name “Thomas H. Benton”), in an essay titled “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go” (The Chronicle, Careers, January 30, 2009). Benton wrote that “humanities Ph.D.'s, without relevant experience or technical skills, generally compete at a moderate disadvantage against undergraduates, and at a serious disadvantage against people with professional degrees.” The argument that the skills of a Ph.D. are generally nontransferable to alternative workplaces, and its related condemnation of academic specialization, is flawed in two ways. The first—and the most troubling, coming as it does from highly educated individuals—is that knowledge labeled “nontransferable” necessarily casts doubt on the value of that knowledge. The second is the fact that we graduate students are still advised by our mentors to specialize. They did so under different conditions, while most of us don’t have a prayer of getting today’s jobs, which are often for generalists who can teach a wide range of subjects.
Benton goes on to criticize both professors who offer such encouragement to their would-be graduate students, and graduate students themselves for their “angry and incoherent” responses to his critique. While I understand that he and his ilk may be trying to help, I’m still confused about how they mean to do so—particularly with regard to those of us who did not benefit from their wisdom before embarking on our grad-school enterprise—since they largely fail to offer any meaningful solutions, or the ones they do are cavalier (for example, calls for graduate unions that garner little commitment from tenured faculty members).
Such pundits need to do what we TA’s tell our composition students to do: Offer potential solutions for the problem at hand. Writing the same meandering, pointless first draft of an argument does not constitute a valid contribution to the work of finding solutions. While our profession regularly excoriates the news media for overblown rhetoric, we seem to be better at articles that induce panic about our prospects than about, for example, jobs outside academe for which we might be suited. Just because we may not all get jobs at research institutions doesn’t mean we can’t contribute, and make a reasonable income to boot.
It is true that there are drawbacks to certain careers commonly proposed for Ph.D.'s. Certainly, being an adjunct is not appealing. Most adjuncts still hover somewhere around the poverty line. So do graduate students. Yet who among us could strike? There are thousands of would-be students and other adjuncts, equally disadvantaged, who would flood in to fill our recently vacated positions. We could shout “Scabs!” until our throats were hoarse, but plenty of people would fill in, thinking, “Thank God I’m not working at Barnes & Noble anymore.”
Teaching in public-school systems seems like a logical alternative, but that would require an extra degree for many of us. Why are certificates in education studies not more widely promoted as a tool of professionalization and a marker of preparedness? We are offered certificates in women’s studies, English as a Second Language teaching, and a host of other programs, so that would seem to be a relatively easy way to credential our graduates for careers outside academe.
A cynical answer would be that such an offering would dry up the available pool of adjuncts at economically disadvantaged universities, not that (as Benton suggests) we poor graduate students in the humanities are misguided to pursue a Ph.D. Obviously universities also want some of their students to get tenure-track jobs at institutions that will reflect well on the departments whence they sprang. But what is it about jobs outside academe that supposedly reflects poorly on a department? Is it elitism? Is it the need to justify the continued drive toward unreasonable specialization? Is it that we’re not attempting to create teacher-scholars but an entirely different monster—say, a beast of burden or a chronically distraught failure?
Why not discuss options for work at nonprofit groups, which would be happy to have access to a motivated, educated work force? That might not solve the poverty problem, but it would certainly give former grad students the chance to move up to a good position over time. But of course, working at nonprofits carries with it the same stigma as teaching in public schools. Actual nonprofit work is undertaken by a relatively limited number of people who have a professed political investment in it. And most of our efforts in grad school veer toward a particular, different kind of professionalization.
The English Graduate Organization at my university has been more mature than our betters in some respects. In an effort to help in the academic profession, the EGO has run workshops on publishing, conferencing, and applying for both academic and nonacademic jobs. The group has offered helpful advice, including appropriate attire for the job market and how to write a grant—all of which has been invaluable. I should note that the workshops have included participation by tenured professors, who have happily given as much advice as they could.
Rather than abusing the already abused graduate-student population, perhaps more professors could write articles that say: “Yeah, you’re all screwed in terms of work for a research institution, but there are these other things out there that are great options. Your degree is not useless, and you are doing valuable work.” (Even if many of them don’t believe that.)
We, the humanities graduate students of the United States of America, do not want your pity, or your smug, self-congratulatory admonishments of our choices. What we want is your help formulating a path that will lead us into careers where we can be useful, not exploited.
