Shamelessness and Hypocrisy <br> at the MLA

A few weeks ago, despite the looming ice, snow, and bitter cold, I boarded a plane for New York City and the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. As I arrived, so did the bomb cyclone. Bombogenesis. Flights were delayed, then canceled. I wasn’t the only one joking about Roland Emmerich’s film The Day After Tomorrow.

I like the annual convention, which I’ve attended regularly for 30 years. A lot has changed in that time, as it should, but not all change is good. The meeting has become less and less scholarly, less and less literary. The MLA, it seems, has adopted new languages — of marketing, public relations, accounting, spreadsheeting, networking, helpful attitudes, and certificates — in teaching, in gender studies, in digital humanities, even in business.

“ARE YOU A GRADUATE STUDENT?” screams a flier. If so, the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession “is here to support you!” It offers to bring “graduate student issues to the attention of the MLA,” and it sponsors “panels about issues related to graduate studies.” (Who writes this stuff? Issues, so many issues.) The MLA provided a meeting room stocked with coffee, bananas, yogurt, and stress balls (appropriately black), all free for the taking.

Twelve percent of this year’s program was devoted to sessions about “The Profession.” In 1987, the first year I was on the program, it was about 8 percent, and few sessions, if any, offered this by-now-predictable range of topics: “A Tool Kit for Doctoral Student Career Planning”; “Academic Writing in Graduate School”; “Administering Feminism”; “Careers Beyond the Professoriate for Humanities Ph.D.s: The Employer Perspective” (which is what counts); “The Circuitous Path Into Higher Administration”; “Getting Funded in the Humanities: An NEH Workshop”; “How to Get Published”; “Humanists in Tech”; and one of my favorites, “What Tenured Professors Can Do About Adjunctification” (could do, but won’t).

I sat on a round table about possible futures for graduate students. My colleagues offered tips on how to make oneself marketable by getting out of the academic job market; how to reconfigure one’s ideas about employment since professorships are gone. The apparent lesson was that whatever you do (spreadsheets, certificate design, networking, squeezing stress balls), in no way expect to emulate your professors, who read a lot of books, think about them, write about them, and talk about them. You will not be able to read a lot of books, think about them, write about them, and talk about them, the logic went, and it’s better to get with the program sooner rather than later.

(Cue Stephen Greenblatt walking slowly out of a room, looking old, stooped almost, from a poorly attended event celebrating “Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Thirty Years On.”)

Instead of assuring the 30 or so graduate students and young Ph.D.s in the audience that it’s best to become bureaucrats or tech workers rather than critics, scholars, and teachers, I tried to direct their gaze to a central fact: Graduate programs continue to produce too many Ph.D.s.

According to the MLA’s report on the federal Survey of Earned Doctorates, the number of earned doctorates in English and literature peaked at 1,414 in 1973 and then began a consistent decline, to a nadir of 668 in 1987. That number then steadily increased, reaching a consistent level of around 1,000 per year, which is just about midway between the figures in 1973 and 1987. This is a rough count, however, and the data are difficult to parse: In its annual reports, the MLA separates doctorates in literature from those in rhetoric and composition, creative writing, and speech and rhetorical studies; if you total all of those, the current numbers are closer to 1,200 per year — closer to the apex than to the nadir. That fact is significant: What would job prospects look like if each year we graduated 500 fewer Ph.D.s?

Put another way, we’re either invested in training academics for academic work, or we aren’t. But the rhetoric of the MLA and of universities is shamefully and shamelessly aimed at getting Ph.D. students out of the professoriate.

Whose interests does that rhetoric serve? Not the students’: If the way to a career with a Ph.D. in English is to take one-third of an M.B.A. program, why not take the M.B.A., a mere two years, rather than the six or eight years for a Ph.D. in English? Why spend all those years studying slave narratives, if your digital-humanities work is going to get you a career in an IT department? #OpportunityCost, if you want to get businesslike about it.

Who benefits from the overproduction of Ph.D.s? Colleges, whose budgets depend on inexpensive teaching labor. This overproduction also serves the interests of tenured faculty members, whose lives are cushioned by reduced teaching loads and research help. John Guillory’s dour judgment in 1996 that “graduate education appears now to be a kind of pyramid scheme” still strikes at the heart of the question. As does the sociologist Randall Collins, who put it bluntly in an essay published in 2002:

Teaching nonintellectual students and indeed undedicated or even alienated students is the price professors pay for the material infrastructure of life on the research frontier. Each professor can pay the price by sharing the burden; or the burden can be shouldered by a lower class of instructors. Structurally either way will work; but the decision has consequences for the ethos of a discipline.

The decision made has been made again and again, beginning in the early 1970s when the job market for Ph.D.s in English collapsed, instituting the brutally competitive market that several generations of graduate students have navigated. The consequences of those decisions have been pointed out again and again. But the shamelessness and hypocrisy of the MLA, our universities, and our tenured colleagues apparently knows no bounds.

Sharon O’Dair is a professor of English emerita at the University of Alabama.