During a recent visit to a Midwestern university, I found myself talking to a graduate student, a dean, and a visiting former foundation president. The conversation turned to the proper role of skills in the liberal-arts curriculum, both undergraduate and graduate. All three objected to the word “skills.”
The graduate student said that “skills” sounds like what you do when you capitulate to the capitalist system. The dean said that word sounds like “something that a robot would do.” The former foundation president said that “‘skills’ sounds like it’s not even school.” To him, the word suggested manual labor.
What makes “skills” such a dirty word in so many campus hallways? The answer points to how we academics see ourselves — and the graduate students we teach.
When professors teach doctoral students, we envision the future versions of ourselves and our disciplines. Graduate teaching encourages us to view ourselves as curators and conservators of our fields. (One major study of the future of doctoral education by the Carnegie Foundation was even subtitled “Preparing Stewards of the Discipline.”) In imagining the future of our field of study, we tend to push back hard against the idea that we teach skills.
In that worldview, “skills” and “content” sit in opposition to each other. Content is literary history, or a curriculum in medical anthropology. Skills encompass what students need to know in order to work in those disciplines — how to read an ethnography (or design one), or how to close-read a poem in its historical context. Of course in actual practice in a classroom, skills and content will always intertwine. A medical-anthropology course will surely spend some time examining ethnographies. And when an English professor teaches literary history, the students will surely spend some time close-reading poems. In that respect, content and skills can never be separated.
But a department’s curriculum tells a different story, one that’s more revealing of faculty priorities. Disciplinary curriculum consistently elevates content and effaces skills. As a collective faculty vision of what matters in a discipline, curriculum relegates skills to the low foundation.
Traditional undergraduate English majors, for example, front-load “basic” skills in courses like first-year composition and “Introduction to Literature.” The intentions there are to: (1) have graduate students teach the intro courses so that faculty members can devote their time to “advanced” elective subjects; and (2) dispense with skills early in the curriculum (like writing instruction) so that there’s no formal requirement to return to them.
So while skills matter, curricular design imagines them as the wheels on content’s chariot. “Teaching what” has always conferred more glory than “teaching how.”
Faculty members don’t want to devote a lot of class time to skills because of our professional identity as researchers. Of course professors with high teaching loads tend to already think of themselves as teachers first and researchers second, but that doesn’t necessarily describe what they value. The prestige pyramid that governs academe privileges research over teaching. Moreover, the research universities that train everyone throughout the pyramid inculcate the research-first values that shape professorial ambition across the arts and sciences.
Many faculty members also suspect skills as a stalking horse for service. The fear is that if our departments embrace a skills-centered mission, they will turn into service centers, doomed to teach lower-level courses for eternity. This fear looms largest in the humanities — that, say, everyone in English will teach composition all the time, foreign-literature specialists will mostly teach beginning Spanish, and so on. Graduate teaching will recede, and research will be just a memory.
I won’t deny those concerns. The research role of professors — especially in the humanities — is surely under threat right now. It’s a decades-old threat that is growing more dire. The opposition comes from critics — including state legislators, and also skeptical students and their parents — who take a blinkered view of what academics do. In their view, we are not doing our jobs unless we are focused on teaching job-related skills to the exclusion of everything else.
This emphasis on the “use value” of faculty work feels new because it’s so pervasive these days, but it actually emerged before the United States was even founded. In contrast with European higher education, American colleges and universities have always competed for survival in the market, so they’ve had to sell their offerings to students. Harvard was founded in the 17th century with a use-driven mission: to train future clergy. One of the founders of Princeton wrote in the mid-18th century that it would not only educate ministers but also “be useful in other learned professions — Ornaments of the State as well as the Church.”
This longtime American emphasis on practical higher education brings us back to the keyword: skills. We should start questioning its second-class status in graduate training, and stop viewing the teaching of skills as a Trojan horse.
Consider that colleges aren’t hiring enough tenure-track professors to support most traditional, content-based curricula. We should protest that — and sometimes do — but it’s our reality. The academic work force is stressed by economic forces that affect curricular choices.
But the goal of content “coverage” is a chimera in any case. The continuous — and salutary — expansion of possible areas of study (that is, more and more content) makes it practically impossible to staff every area. No longer can history departments hire a professor in every geographical and intellectual field of inquiry — there are just too many. Nor is the problem limited to the humanistic fields. The high cost of the lab sciences makes comprehensive offerings rare in those departments, too. The idea of comprehensive curricular “coverage” is not so much vision as fantasy.
Given the current exigencies that beset academe — especially in the humanities — we must welcome more pragmatic formulations of our educational mission. But that’s not going to be easy. Faculty members are “loss averse,” explained Eric Hayot, a professor of comparative literature and Asian studies at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, in an interview, “so much that they won’t make changes even in the face of death.”
Humanists, Hayot said, should “lean into writing and making in a way that we don’t now.” Embrace them instead of just tolerating them. That’s good advice in both concept and practice — but Hayot is one of the few humanists to propose such new ideas.
Yet faculty members rely on their own skills — as opposed to the specialized facts that they know — more than we want to let on. Once we accept that, it gets easier to change. One humanities professor told me that he reconsidered the meaning of his own expertise a few years ago when he taught a professional-development seminar to graduate students. “I thought about the use of my dissertation in my career,” he said, “and I realized that for me, too, it was about the methods, about learning how.”
How, then, can we put more emphasis on skills in doctoral courses?
A new graduate curriculum, adopted by the English department at Marquette University, offers a good practical example of how skills and content can be married under the aegis of learning how. With more and more Ph.D.s coming up short on the tenure-track job market, Marquette’s English professors reconceived their graduate teaching mission in terms of what students need “to help them fulfill their unique goals for their futures.” The new model moves away from “narrow coverage of literary time periods and traditions as its primary organizing principle.”
Instead it centers on skills that can be used in faculty work and in other career paths. The department describes its curricular goals this way:
- Training students in the methodologies of literary, cultural, and writing studies.
- Helping students cultivate high-order critical and creative-thinking skills that prepare them for a wide range of futures.
- Preparing students to teach thoughtful, high-impact courses in a number of different settings.
- Preparing students to perform independent, original research and write up this research in a compelling way that is responsive to the demands of academic and various public audiences.
- Preparing students to be able to translate their skills to a multitude of settings and to demonstrate the distinctive preparation that they have gotten in their English graduate education.
Ben Pladek, the department’s director of graduate studies, added in an email that the department has augmented the qualifying exam to include a “personal and career formation component” that “explicitly asks student, supervisor, and committee to think about career paths before the dissertation stage.” The department, he said, is also promoting “interdisciplinary courses and collaboration, including a public-humanities award for grad students.”
This new curriculum places skills at the center of the enterprise. The language spotlights the pedagogical aim of developing expertise not in disciplinary content as such, but in methods. This version of “skills” doesn’t look like robotics, neoliberalism, or manual labor. And of course it doesn’t consign content to oblivion. Instead, it’s an example of student-centered education — which is something graduate schools need a lot more of.
These curricular changes at Marquette took effect this fall. They were, not surprisingly, motivated by necessity, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad. And they make more sense than a coverage-based approach that we can’t support or sustain. It‘s past time that we gave ideas like this a try.