Embittered by a Bleak Job Market, Graduate Students Take On the MLA

They want the association to lead a campaign against the use of part-timers

Hundreds of graduate students will pour into the annual convention of the Modern Language Association this month, but they won’t just be looking for jobs or chances to play up to academe’s heavy hitters. They’ll be looking to take on the M.L.A.'s leadership, if not take it over.

Frustrated by a bleak academic job market and by what they view as the association’s lame response, a growing caucus of graduate students is poised for a confrontation with M.L.A. leaders at the San Francisco convention. The looming showdown, some professors say, is reminiscent of protests that disrupted the national meeting 30 years ago, when female and minority professors accused the association of elitism.

Behind the campaign is the M.L.A.'s Graduate Student Caucus, whose membership has soared in the last few years, from about 20 students in 1995 to nearly 5,000 today. Within the association, graduate students now make up 27 per cent of the membership, and are pushing for a greater voice in the way the group is run.

“Our agenda is to at least get proportional representation on each and every one of the M.L.A.'s governance committees, if not to take over entirely,” says Mark R. Kelley, incoming president of the caucus and a Ph.D. student at the City University of New York Graduate School and University Center.

The deterioration of the academic job market in the 1990s has left Ph.D. students in the humanities fearful that, after years of training, they will be unable to find tenure-track positions. As universities have increasingly replaced full-time jobs with part-time ones, caucus leaders say, the M.L.A. has not done enough to counter the trend, and has focused too much on urging doctoral recipients to look outside of higher education for work. That advice has incensed students and their supporters within the professoriate.

“Graduate students don’t need the M.L.A.'s help in finding non-teaching work,” says Marc Bousquet, an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville who was president of the caucus in 1997. “Graduate students need the M.L.A. to make sure that people holding Ph.D. degrees are doing the teaching in today’s college classrooms.”

Mary K. Refling, who earned her Ph.D. in Italian from Columbia University last spring, became known as the “godmother” of the caucus, in part because of her success in helping to increase its membership. Now a visiting assistant professor at Fordham University, Ms. Refling says the M.L.A. needs to reposition itself as an assertive professional organization, along the lines of the American Medical Association. The A.M.A. “has enormous impact on the setting of policy at the national level,” Ms. Refling says, and so should the M.L.A.

As part of the caucus’s effort to reposition itself within the association, the group is fielding four candidates for office at this month’s convention, and plans to push 10 motions before the Delegate Assembly, the M.L.A.'s chief legislative body.

“It was exactly 30 years ago this year that the M.L.A. had its last revolution,” says Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who is the graduate students’ strongest faculty ally and one of their candidates. “The M.L.A. is once again clearly not serving the needs of its constituents.”

But other professors, even those who sympathize with the graduate students, believe that the M.L.A. has become an easy target. The students’ anger over the job market is misdirected, they say. “My own opinion is that the M.L.A. is not a cause of the crisis in employment, and I wish it had more power over institutional hiring practices than it does,” says Margaret W. Ferguson, a professor of English at the University of California at Davis. “But we see over and over again that the M.L.A. makes recommendations to universities that are very rarely listened to.”

Ms. Ferguson predicts that doctoral students, regardless of how much clout they wield within the association, would not have much influence over universities either. “If the M.L.A. were radically reformed and the Executive Council became totally composed of graduate students, how would that improve the job market?” she asks. “I would love to know.”

Leaders of the association say graduate students seem to believe the M.L.A. can bully English departments into changing, but it can’t. After all, they say, it is a voluntary organization, and has no real power over how its members carry out business on their own campuses.

In their anxiety over the job market, graduate students have miscast the M.L.A. as the enemy, says Elaine C. Showalter, a professor of English at Princeton University who herself has been cast as Public Enemy No. 1 during her one-year term as the association’s president. She and other M.L.A. leaders say they know how bad the job market is. “I am very committed to the idea that the humanities need regeneration, that graduate education is out of touch with reality, and that the Ph.D. has become too narrow,” says Ms. Showalter.

By the M.L.A.'s projections, fewer than half of the approximately 8,000 graduate students who have earned or are expected to earn doctorates in English and foreign languages between 1996 and 2000 have found or are expected to find tenure-track positions within a year of finishing their degrees. At the same time, the academy has limited access to the tenure track, and has begun relying heavily on adjuncts. Currently, only 4 per cent of first-year writing courses at Ph.D.-granting institutions are taught by tenured or tenure-track professors, the M.L.A. has found. The rest are taught by graduate students, part-time instructors, and by full-time teachers who are off the tenure track.

Last week, the association released the first good news on the job market for English Ph.D.'s in years, finding that the number of positions advertised in the field has increased by 28 per cent over last year. But the association cautioned that the market was still flooded with Ph.D.'s who have been unable to find permanent jobs.

The M.L.A. has taken several steps to address the labor problem, publicly acknowledging it as a “crisis” at last year’s annual convention, says Phyllis Franklin, the group’s executive director. The association’s Committee on Professional Employment recommended that institutions reduce their reliance on part-time instructors and consider trimming doctoral enrollment. The M.L.A. also has established a Committee on the Future of Graduate Students in the Profession and, at the recommendation of Ph.D. students and others, will hold a conference in April -- at the University of Wisconsin at Madison -- on the future of doctoral education.

Ms. Showalter says she finds it particularly ironic that graduate students have attacked her when she has spent her presidency trying to deal with the job crisis.

In the most recent issue of the M.L.A.'s newsletter, Ms. Showalter wrote that people who insist that the academy make room for every Ph.D. recipient are naive. “We can’t afford to waste our collective energies anymore in competition for the dwindling job market, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and fighting about who gets into the lifeboats first,” she wrote. “The job ‘crisis’ has been going on for at least twenty years, and it still seems as if some people in the humanities would rather die than change.”

In the newsletter, Ms. Showalter wrote that about 20 research universities have begun offering career counseling to help doctoral students find jobs outside higher education -- advice that has been her mantra throughout her presidency. And she noted that English Ph.D.'s have found satisfying work in the federal government, in publishing, and even in Hollywood.

Not all graduate students are disdainful of her advice. At a meeting of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students last month, several of the nearly 200 graduate students who attended agreed that Ph.D.'s who don’t look beyond academe for work are in denial.

But within the M.L.A., many graduate students have mocked Ms. Showalter for singing a one-note tune -- relentlessly urging graduate students to change their career goals, and failing to talk about changing the profession. Many dismiss her as elitist and insensitive.

This month, an electronic discussion list maintained by the Graduate Student Caucus, known as “e-grad,” has been buzzing with attacks on Ms. Showalter. In one such posting, Laura Sullivan, president of the caucus, wrote to Ms. Showalter: “Most of the types of jobs you suggest do not even require Ph.D.'s in the first place. Graduate students do not find it appealing when tenure-track professors with secure jobs, especially ones with high-profile careers and large salaries, suggest that we look elsewhere for our career choices.”

The Graduate Student Caucus hasn’t always been in the thick of M.L.A. business. Until a few years ago, it was primarily a social club for students who attended the national convention each year in search of jobs. But when graduate teaching assistants at Yale University staged a strike in 1995 seeking the right to collective bargaining, the protests energized the caucus.

The caucus has already had some success maneuvering for power in the M.L.A. For the first time last year, the caucus pushed for the election of one of its own to the association’s 17-member Executive Council, which acts like a board of trustees and has the final say on M.L.A. business. Kirsten Christensen, who finished her Ph.D. last summer in Germanic languages at the University of Texas at Austin and is now a visiting assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College, was elected to serve during 1998.

This month, when professors gather for a meeting of the M.L.A.'s 250-member governing body -- the Delegate Assembly -- they will see four more caucus candidates on the ballot. The graduate students have nominated two people for seats on the Executive Council -- Mr. Nelson, the Urbana-Champaign English professor, and William Pannapacker, a graduate student in the history of American civilization at Harvard University. The caucus is also backing two other candidates for the association’s seven-member nominating committee -- Michael Berube, who is also a professor of English at Illinois, and Greg Bezkorovainy, a Ph.D. student at the City University of New York Graduate School and University Center. The committee nominates an academic to serve as the M.L.A.'s second vice-president, who eventually ascends to the presidency.

The caucus will also bring 10 motions to the floor of the Delegate Assembly. Among other things, the caucus will:

* Ask the assembly to recommend that graduate students be nominated each year as candidates to the Executive Council and nominating committee.

* Require the M.L.A. to collect information on salary and benefits for part-time instructors.

* Direct the M.L.A. to pressure universities to require full-time professors to teach introductory writing and language courses, thereby reducing the need for adjunct instructors.

Says Ms. Refling: “We are demanding that the whole profession take our problems seriously, rather than just wring its hands.”

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