A notable commentator once said that prophets don’t get enough honor in their own land. That’s surely been true in the land of the Modern Language Association, and this academic year marks the 25th anniversary of a case in point: the controversial MLA presidency of Elaine C. Showalter. Her year in office, culminating in a tumultuous December convention, speaks directly to today’s conflicted agenda in graduate education.
As one of academe’s largest disciplinary societies, the MLA attracts hundreds of scholars of English and other languages to its annual winter convention. It will do so again this week in Philadelphia. But the topic of nonacademic career options for Ph.D.s is unlikely to spark as much outrage this month as it did back in 1998. The difference illustrates how slow academe is to change — and how far the profession has come.
The bottom had already dropped out of the academic job market when Showalter became MLA president, but most professors at the time refused to acknowledge that fact. Just a few years earlier, William G. Bowen, the respected economist and head of the Mellon Foundation (and also former president of Princeton University) had co-authored a widely read analysis (quickly dubbed “The Bowen Report”) that predicted a wave of retirements and a rebound in tenure-track hiring in the humanities and social sciences.
Showalter, an English professor at Princeton, saw a less rosy picture. She had witnessed firsthand the unhappiness of too many graduate students facing too few professorial openings. “The jobs issue,” Showalter recalled to me in a recent interview, “was why I agreed to run for president of the MLA.” She viewed the presidency as a platform from which she could bring attention to the problem — and her proposed solution.
Showalter wanted Ph.D.s to think of themselves as versatile, not simply as professors in training. “I had a double career myself” at the time, she said. Showalter had started working as a journalist during the 1980s and found it “intellectually exciting, challenging,” and also just “fun.” She did “lots of book reviewing and feature writing,” and even worked as a TV critic for People magazine for a year. “I would show my students the drafts of my columns and show them how I was being edited,” she said, so they could see “the discipline of writing in that format.”
No one else at Princeton ever talked to her about her public work, Showalter said, but she got plenty of attention outside the ivy walls. A profile of her in Lingua Franca, a popular, gossipy, now-defunct magazine that covered academe, was titled “Who’s Afraid of Elaine Showalter?”
Showalter believed that graduate students in the humanities could expand their intellectual ambits as she had. They could use their training in writing and teaching to get jobs in other fields. Publicizing that prospect, she thought, was “something I could do” as MLA president.
We have a name today for what Showalter was advocating: “career diversity.” It’s the subject of wide conversation and of increasing graduate-school policymaking. But Showalter’s ideas attracted other names in 1998 — many of them unprintable in a newspaper. She showcased her vision in a special “Presidential Panel” at the annual convention that year, and in the Presidential Address. For the panel she sought high-profile examples of Ph.D.s who had gained success in other fields, including a Hollywood screenwriter, a television producer, and a scientist turned novelist. Her speech, “Regeneration,” named her goal for the humanities.
Most faculty members at that meeting politely ignored Showalter’s message — but graduate-student activists decidedly did not. The MLA’s Graduate Student Caucus opposed her vociferously, even viciously. Graduate students and their faculty allies boycotted the panel she’d organized and didn’t attend her presidential address, either — they leafletted the seats. They “did not want to hear what I had to say,” Showalter recalled, and they didn’t want others to hear her message, either.
An article in The Chronicle at the time characterized the “embittered” mood: “Graduate students don’t need the MLA’s help in finding nonteaching work,” said Marc Bousquet, the 1997 president of the caucus. The so-called godmother of the caucus, Mary K. Refling, a Columbia University Ph.D. in Italian, argued that the MLA should assert itself to get academic jobs for Ph.D.s.
Bousquet could not be reached for comment, and describes himself on LinkedIn as on “extended sabbatical” from higher education. Refling, now a retired adjunct professor of Italian, remains angry about the workings of graduate school in the humanities, and skeptical of career diversity. “Putting graduate students through the traces all the way to the Ph.D.” in search of a tenure-track job, she said in a recent interview, is “cruel and unusual punishment and exploitation.” Her advice today is caustic: “Do your humanities work as an undergraduate.”
But when it comes to Showalter herself, Refling has mellowed. Showalter “did not deserve the dissing that she got” from graduate students, Refling reflected. Students were “unloading their anger” at their own graduate programs onto the leadership of the MLA, she said. Showalter “was doing the best she could,” but “she was singled out as a target.”
Showalter herself said she “was shocked” by this resistance from students and their allies. “I met with them,” she recalled. “I talked with them. I reached out, but it seemed to make it worse.”
Another of those students was William Pannapacker, later an English professor at Hope College and commentator on higher education. He remembers “getting swept up in the movement” led by the Graduate Student Caucus. “In retrospect,” Pannapacker said in a recent interview, “it was easy to denounce Showalter for not being radical enough,” and for seeing this as “a practical problem rather than an ideological one.”
Pannapacker maintains that “some of the examples that Showalter gave reflected an elite point of view.” But he has regrets now. “She might have been tone-deaf,” he said, “but so were we. We were hypercritical of her.” Pannapacker now acknowledges that today’s career-diversity movement “is traceable to Showalter. She was taking brave first steps and got hit pretty hard.”
Graduate students’ demands in 1998 that the MLA itself should somehow correct the employment market ring especially hollow today.
“Urging the MLA to take stock of the realities on the ground is one thing,” said Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Penn State and a scholar of academic labor who later became president of the association himself. “The headwinds were real,” Bérubé wrote to me in a recent email. But the belief that disciplinary associations like the MLA could accomplish “the rollback of contingent labor” was, he said, “a staggering category error.”
Showalter’s campaign for an early version of career diversity flamed out in 1998. It wasn’t just that graduate students opposed it. They had already been socialized by their advisers to see a tenure-track job as the only desirable career outcome for a Ph.D. More important, professors weren’t ready to hear about reform. “Nothing can succeed without tenure-line faculty buy-in,” Showalter now says — and there was none on offer in 1998.
Today that buy-in is widespread among faculty members, departments, and graduate schools. What changed?
Put simply, things got worse — much worse. And further decline opened the door for reform. The 2008 financial crash decimated what was left of the academic job market in the humanities, reducing job listings to new lows. The national economy eventually bounced back. But for academe, the turnaround was what economists call a “jobless recovery.” It became clear that the Bowen Report had badly underestimated the effects of adjunct labor and failed to account for longer faculty careers prompted by the end of mandatory retirement, in 1994. The report’s mistaken job-market forecast turned out to be one of the biggest errors of its author’s distinguished career.
A tidal wave of disappointment swept away the illusion that the tenure-track market would rebound. Professors and administrators began to acknowledge a “new normal” (never mind that it wasn’t really new). The topic of diverse careers for graduate students lost its taboo status. Long-avoided conversations were joined.
Those conversations have been going on ever since. This year’s MLA convention, as in past years, will feature panels and workshops devoted to diverse careers for Ph.D.s. Numerous graduate schools now devote time, energy, and resources to students’ professional development. Ironically, Showalter’s home institution of Princeton now showcases one of the nation’s best such programs, GradFutures.
But this is no fairy-tale ending. Twenty-five years after Showalter raised the idea, much resistance remains to acknowledging the professional reality facing today’s new Ph.D.s. I travel to many campuses, and virtually everywhere I stop, I encounter graduate students who are afraid to tell their advisers that they intend to explore careers outside academe. This work is far from finished.
Showalter quit teaching soon after the 1998 MLA convention. That conference, she said, “began the thought process that led me to retire early.” She has observed the development of the career-diversity movement and is glad to finally see “more people paying attention to this now.” Does she feel vindicated? Her answer was simple: “Yes.”
