Incorrigible. Intransigent. More dramatically: serially abusive. Less dramatically: complicit. What other ways are there to describe the business of doctoral education in the humanities in the second decade of this century?
Inside Higher Ed’s Colleen Flaherty recently reported that “the Modern Language Association is listening” to concerns over the ethics of training graduate students. On one MLA panel, the familiar and erudite John Guillory of NYU spoke about the absolute necessity of reducing the number of Ph.D.s graduate schools produce. According to Flaherty, Guillory proposed “as a thought experiment” that “the MLA might also help oversee a staggered moratorium on admissions to humanities programs, in which one-third to one-fourth of departments don’t admit graduate students every year.”
The panel, Flaherty goes on to say, perhaps “more realistically” proposed smaller fixes, such as departments’ publicizing their Ph.D. placements more transparently. But even this fix is a thought experiment: The MLA holds no power to impose admissions or transparency measures on the approximately 225 Ph.D.-granting departments of English and comparative literature in the U.S. and Canada. Every such department flies solo, so to speak, beholden only to its own needs for research and teaching assistants, needs that subsidize the research and teaching of the elite, tenured professors.
Outsourcing, privatization, the exploitation of contingent labor — these are the very practices that gird graduate programs.
Like Russian nesting dolls, the academy resembles, in miniature, the larger shell in which it resides. Railing against outsourcing, privatization, and the exploitation of contingent and precarious labor writ large, graduate programs fail to acknowledge that these are the very practices that gird the enterprise.
I presented at MLA this year in a session called “Graduate School, Social Mobility, and the Job Market” but ended up missing Guillory’s talk. Just after MLA, Caleb Smith, a professor of English and American studies at Yale, tweeted: “40%, yes FORTY PERCENT increase in applications to our (Yale English) PhD program this year. What the hell is going on?” It’s difficult to know the answer to Smith’s question, but it could be that applicants have to get into the best programs or they have no chance, even if they have no chance, anyway.
The results of the decades-long labor surplus Ph.D. programs have created are made plain in the book I edited with Timothy Francisco, Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity (Palgrave Macmillan). The collection of essays on teaching Shakespeare includes voices from the gamut of institutions. In the eyes of many, they are the lucky ones for even having academic careers. But are they? In a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, James Shapiro wrote that our book “is, to my knowledge, the first book of its kind: one that gives voice to a seething and justified resentment of the academic elite by those teaching at nonelite institutions.” Though few, if any, of the contributors would claim to be seething with resentment, the frustration Shapiro identifies is, I think, real. The decades-long overproduction of Ph.D.s has spilled highly trained graduates of elite programs into assistant professorships in the hinterlands, “places like East Podunk University or West Jesus State College,” as Jeffrey J. Williams memorably put it in 1995.
Feeling grateful and also terrified, such new assistant professors tell themselves (as they were told by their dissertation advisers) not to worry: “Important work can be done and is found anywhere nowadays.” The able and ambitious can join circles of intellectual power in New York, Boston, or Berkeley and leave their circle of academic hell, another story went.
But most of them are never able to leave the academic hinterlands. Residing in the hinterlands leads to professional isolation, as Randolph-Macon College’s Marisa R. Cull explains in Shakespeare and the 99%. Most of those who find themselves in this situation have “a doctoral education either that explicitly emphasizes research and scholarship as the primary means of preparation for faculty life, or that implicitly suggests (through the mentorship of professors employed at doctoral-granting institutions) that faculty life is largely defined and measured by such work.” At nonelite institutions, however, the opposite is true: Research takes "(a sometimes distant) third place” to teaching and service.
The one obvious solution to our employment woes is to reduce the number of Ph.D.s we produce.
Doug Eskew of Colorado State University at Pueblo, another of the book’s contributors, points out that many colleagues at nonelite universities think “our commitment to scholarly pursuits stands in a direct and harmful relation to our commitment to our students.” Eskew laments a chancellor who claimed scholarship as “an unproductive burden on students.” Professional status depends on research, but professors at nonelite institutions face multiple barriers to producing it. Their institutions require double or triple the teaching and service loads of their former advisers at, say, one-third the pay and a fraction of the research support. Many have to “borrow” credentials to access online databases. So long as professional status is determined by research productivity, many are doomed to have little or none.
It is time to take thought experiments like Guillory’s seriously. The one obvious solution to our employment woes is to reduce the number of Ph.D.s we produce. Instead, for decades graduate programs have offered only amelioration. Certain departments offer transparency. Some now also provide elaborate and supplementary programs to ensure a Ph.D. can find some other job, outside of English or the humanities. Mostly they shift responsibility elsewhere: to the corporatization of the university, to significant reductions in state funding, to the neoliberal and globalized economic order, to overdetermined disaster.
Yes, these factors affect us all. But in shifting responsibility, graduate programs are like Gloucester in King Lear, who sees a failing world and blames everyone and everything except himself. As his illegitimate son Edmund anatomizes,
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, / when we are sick in fortune, — often the surfeit / of our own behavior, — we make guilty of our / disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as / if we were villains by necessity; fools by / heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and / treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, / liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of / planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, / by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion / of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish / disposition to the charge of a star!
Usually outsiders like Edmund are right. We don’t want to realize too late, as King Lear does, “I have ta’en / Too little care of this!” Lear has taken too little care of the “houseless heads and unfed sides” — the homeless and impoverished in his kingdom. Ph.D. programs have taken too little care of those they sent to the hinterlands, to contingency, and to be forgotten. But any rectification requires an acknowledgment that these frustrations are the result of an addiction to cheap labor. And that fixing them requires redistribution — of teaching loads, of research support, and of what counts as criteria for hiring and advancement. In Lear’s words, a shaking of the superflux indeed.
Will it happen? I doubt it. Shortly after MLA, I dined at a lovely Moroccan restaurant in San Francisco. At the next table two late 30-something men blathered on about their enormous homes, their companies, their thises and thats. “This kind of capitalism has worked really well for me,” one of them said, “but I do have moral issues with it.” Theirs is the bind Ph.D. programs find themselves in: The system is horrible, unethical, but it works for them. It is also the kind of thing that should make English professors lose their minds.
