The Wrong Problem

Nothing jolts me out of the midsummer shallows like lots of smart people linking to the same misguided solution to the wrong problem.   Did you think the MLA report on reforming graduate education was done and dusted?  No: prepare for another round of handwringing.  Once again, those who resist the call to cut down graduate humanities education find consolation in the hope that it can be retooled as a sort of vocational philosopher's stone, a magical Ph.D. that allows anyone who touches it to both embark on an exciting career in a nonacademic field AND to eschew narrow careerism.

Doctoral recipients have a rich set of skills — in communication, research, and leadership....Nonetheless, doctoral study should not be viewed exclusively as the pursuit of a career-oriented credential. It must also involve an intellectual passion for languages and literatures, as defined by our evolving disciplines....The qualities cultivated through intensive, long-term research and thoughtful, extended writing are not just transferable to other careers; they are valuable in their own right, just as it would be valuable to our culture as a whole — and particularly to the future of the academy — to have highly educated professionals who appreciate scholarly thoughtfulness and humanistic perspectives working throughout society.

One would think that, without such stirring words, prospective graduate students might slink off to MBA programs, entry-level digital marketing jobs, and whatever other tedious fates awaits those who have failed to develop "intellectual passion."   They might enter graduate programs warily, with one foot already in the alt-ac/post-ac camp of their choosing, sacrificing hours in the library to opportunities to build their network or gain a marketable skill.

Cheer up!  There's no shortage of young people willing to fall on the sword of "intensive, long-term research and thoughtful, extended writing."  Despite ample evidence that academic careers are dwindling, enough continue to apply to graduate programs to sustain the exploitative academic labor market.  And so long as R1 faculty are willing to fight tenaciously to preserve their graduate student funding and research support (and so long as faculty at other kinds of institutions are encouraged to emulate the research model and productivity of the R1s), the economy of prestige will sustain the Ph.D. pipeline and keep graduate programs in business.

What there IS a shortage of, the problem that we need to solve, is the declining number of people who see "an intellectual passion for languages and literatures" as "valuable in their own right" and "valuable for our culture as a whole."  The long-term survival of the academic humanities doesn't need retooled programs; it needs more undergraduates who are drawn to humanities majors, more parents willing to pay tuition for a nonprofessional degree, more taxpayers willing to fight cuts to higher education, and a broader recognition of the public value of all of the liberal arts.

The proposed solution to the oversupply problem will only make the demand problem worse. Broadening the scope of Ph.D programs in order to prepare students for careers outside academia may make graduate faculty feel better about accepting more students for whom there are fewer academic jobs, but it will do little to draw undergraduates to study their fields.  What does a BA in literature or language equip a college grad for, other than (a) grad school of whatever flavor or (b) alt-ac/post-ac work minus the additional debt and time for the "ac" part?

We promise incoming majors that they are not limited (as they often assume) to high school teaching or low-paid writing/editing drone work.  Instead we point to the same kinds of possibilities now being dangled in front of contingent malcontents and worried ABD's by those who would preserve graduate education at all costs: grantwriting! museum work! nonprofit arts organizations! management consulting! internet journalism! entrepreneurship!

We're not wrong to do so. Grappling with centuries of literature, negotiating between close reading and broader contextual understanding, writing arguments involving complex ideas, chewing over dense and unfamiliar texts--all these are practices that give literature and languages majors the creativity, broadmindedness, and intellectual agility that are both a public good and a career asset.   We as a profession, though, have done a piss-poor job of convincing anyone but ourselves and the already-converted of that truth.  Obviously, we owe it to the Ph.D's already in the pipeline to give them the support they need to be paid what they're worth, in whatever line of fulfilling work will make that possible.  But changing the shape and focus of the literature and language Ph.D. will not save the academic humanities.  Changing the shape and focus of the BA (and concentrating our energies there) just might.

MLAngry

Suppose the Modern Language Association were a professional organization that reflected the lives of most people teaching modern languages and literatures.  The annual convention would be a very different thing.  Instead of taking place in a cluster of upscale convention hotels in a major American city, it would be centered on a interstate offramp somewhere in the the middle of the country, one with a huge concentration of cheap motels.  Even so, there probably wouldn't be enough rooms for everyone attending, so some people would have to reserve rooms at the next few offramps, but that's okay--a lot of them are used to commuting.  Sessions would take place in the party rooms of McDonalds, Applebees, and the like.  In some cases, tables in the regular seating areas of the Bob Evans or Arby's could be pushed together to accommodate smaller groups. A hat could be passed to cover the cost of ordering enough food to justify taking up the space--and after all, everyone's got to eat, right?

The MLA Task Force on Being Nice to People Leaving Academia But Otherwise Keeping Things the Same

If modern languages and literatures survive as academic disciplines, it will be because students (and the people students become when they graduate: tax-payers, tuition-payers, and folks who make decisions about allocating public resources) recognize that taking these classes in college makes a difference.

But you wouldn't know it from reading the Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature.  The document has been well chewed over by now, and the indigestible truth lies strewn in tatters around us: there are far more qualified potential professors than there are jobs for them and Ph.D. students ought to be supported (not vilified) for their efforts to find work outside academia.  The bulk of the report's recommendations, though, have been slurped down like the tasty morsels of cluelessness that they are: alt-ac training?  technological know-how? watered down dissertations?  five years to degree?  Doctoral education confronts a supply-and-demand problem.  As many academic bloggers have pointed out, fantasizing about some alternative demand (that only a retooled supply of literature and language Ph.D.'s can fill) won't fix it.

Will Nobody Think of the College Students (Especially the Non-Majors)?

This is me, whenever I read yet another blog post about dealing with the academic jobs crisis by finding other things for humanities Ph.D's to do:

It's not, ultimately, about the Ph.D's.  It's about the college students those Ph.D's are trained to teach.

Let's grant the following:

• Getting a Ph.D. in whatever field doesn't entitle anyone to anything. 
• Fulfilling, meaningful work is available outside academia. 
• Researching and writing a dissertation can hone transferable skills. 
• Grad school can be fun, regardless of where it takes one. 

Are there still people out there who think that there's "something wrong, something dreadfully wrong, with leaving the ivory tower"?  Perhaps, but when I stand up to be counted among "these people who complain about the fact that we don't just make tenure-track jobs for everyone with a Ph.D.," it's not because I think "PhDs can’t possibly work outside academia like the rest of the hoi poloi. They shouldn’t have to, what with their lily white hands and all."  No, there's other interesting stuff to do out there in the world, and anyone who surfs around the academic blogosphere will quickly find people who have made their way out of academia and are doing it.

Should departments be more receptive to the idea that their graduates may not work in academia? Absolutely, but that's a more discipline-specific solution than many acknowledge.  The Grumpies are responding to a commenter, "Miriam," who points out that, despite the reality that "User experience research is cultural anthropology," many anthropology departments (unlike STEM departments) are unwilling to acknowledge corporate and public-sector applications for their research methods.  That does seem an oversight, one attributable to knee-jerk snobbery.  There are fewer obvious applications, however, for doctoral-level research in history, philosophy, and literature.  Turning doctoral education in those fields into training for corporate and public sector jobs would entail radically reimagining entire disciplines, in ways that the people running graduate programs are poorly prepared to do, even if it were desirable.  And is it?  Other pathways to those jobs exist without diverting resources from higher education.

The Grumpies see the oversupply of humanities Ph.Ds as an inevitability:

So yeah, it would be lovely if, as a society, we took money from Exxon (and you know they’d take it from children’s mouths before they cut corporate welfare) and funded education again, but that won’t solve the problem of the humanities labor market, because the more attractive you make those positions, the more people will want to have them. There will be more jobs, but there will be even more applicants for those same jobs. Heck, even if we cut off all production of new PhDs, folks with humanities PhDs who had given up would return to academia if there were a demand for their services.

Elsewhere in the same post, the Grumpies argue that

But… maybe tenure isn’t all that. 

Maybe, sometimes, it’s worth grabbing that golden ring and throwing it away. 

One of us lives with someone who made the jump (though before tenure), and he’s so much happier.

But setting aside how academia can be both overrated AND so desirable as to warrant abandoning other employment, why is it so unimaginable to tackle the academic labor question at both the supply end and the demand end?

In the utopian world where Exxon profits go to higher education, let's staff lower-level courses with tenure-track faculty instead of Ph.D students, convert adjunct position into tenure-track positions, and only admit as many students into Ph.D. programs as are needed to maintain staffing levels.  Will those humanities Ph.D's come flocking back once they realize that the tenure-track job consists of FYC and required gen eds., with little prospect of teaching senior majors, much less grad students? I honestly don't know.

Hell, let's go nuts here, and make sure that the Ph.D. students we do admit recognize that they are being trained for the profession of teaching college students, and let's structure Ph.D. programs to reflect that outcome.  Let's acknowledge that many humanities departments are, in fact, largely service departments.  Let's recognize that the centrality of research to many tenure-track jobs in the humanities is a fiction sustained by the rank exploitation of adjuncts and graduate students.

But maybe if the academic humanities, from the lofty heights of the Ivies to the most hardscrabble of community colleges, shared a vision of first-rate undergraduate education as the goal--rather than the production of more Ph.D's and monographs--those future Exxon execs coming up through their classrooms would see more value in it.

Exploitation Is the Problem, Not Entitlement

Having a Ph.D. doesn't entitle anyone to a tenure-track job, argues nicoleandmaggie over at Grumpy Rumblings of the (Formerly) Untenured.  After all, if the world owes no one a living, it certainly doesn't owe one to people who have freely chosen to spend 6+ years studying and researching in a highly specialized field for which there is no demand outside academia.

The language of "entitlement" ignores the role that would-be Ph.D's play in the supply-and-demand of academic hiring.  Humanities programs are notoriously skittish about offering placement statistics for their Ph.D programs, and for good reason.  Many of them take on board more graduate students than they can hope to place in tenure-track jobs because they need the students to teach and TA lower-level classes.

Rather than talking about what people with Ph.D's are and aren't entitled to, we need to be talking about the staffing of college classrooms, and the kind of instruction that college students are entitled to. People with Ph.D's may not be entitled to faculty jobs, but college students are entitled to instruction at the hands of professionals with an ongoing commitment to their subject matter and to higher education, not Ph.D. students destined (whether they know it or not) to be cheap and temporary academic workers.

The Alternate Dimension of Job Market Advice

The Professor is In's advice to job seekers can feel like the wormhole to an alternate dimension. Amidst the breast-beating about turgid academic prose, the many efforts to find alternate employment pathways for Ph.D.'s, suggestions for reforming higher ed, TPII draws coordinates on the narrow and elusive portal to tenure-track academic employment.

The coarse-grained version of TPII's advice is no surprise to anyone: publish!  Publish early, publish often, publish in defiance of misguided advice to do otherwise.  TPII's added value is the way she addresses the self-doubts of the not-yet-employed.  She not only urges them to publish, but shows them in a fine-grained way how to acquire the persona of the sort of established scholar who publishes as a matter of course, starting with (in her most recent post) the choice of a faculty advisor who recognizes the necessity of "the evidence that you are a productive scholar, an original thinker, an active member of your scholarly community" in the form of peer-reviewed publications.  "To go out on the market without at least one [peer-reviewed journal article] is madness."

She's right, of course.

At the other end of that wormhole, though, where many Ph.D's are not landing tenure-stream jobs and where dwindling resources for higher ed put a great deal of college teaching in the hands of poorly paid adjuncts, there is "madness" in the fact that the peer-reviewed journal article is the standard of currency for tenure-stream employment. Of the many problems bedeviling higher ed right now, a shortage of peer-reviewed articles is not one.   In fact, more peer-reviewed journal articles are pretty much the last thing that higher ed needs, particularly when the researching, writing, reviewing, editing, and publications of articles to be read by a handful of scholars takes time away from equally rigorous work that could be raising the profile of higher ed.

There are two things that institutions could be doing to demonstrate the value of higher ed to a public increasingly unwilling to pay for anything beyond narrow vocational training.  One is to put in place mechanisms to recognize and reward public engagement as equally valuable as specialized research. The firestorm of criticism that followed Nicholas Kristof's annoying article laid bare both the existence of a great deal of public engagement by intellectuals and the absence of institutional incentives for doing it.  The other is to plough resources into labor-intensive, inquiry-based teaching that can demonstrate to the future taxpayers currently in our classrooms why a a broad liberal education is of value.

To do either of those things,  Ph.D. training would have to be transformed.  The fact that most academics are, necessarily, trained at R1 institutions very different from those where they are likely to teach perpetuates the self-defeating valorization of highly specialized research.  Moreover, the steady influx of graduate students  that such institutions rely on to meet teaching needs further perpetuates the problem.

What if a year-long residency at a regional public university or community college was a routine feature of every graduate program?  What if the dissertation was replaced by a published peer-reviewed journal article and a successful semester-long gen. ed. course in one's area of specialization?  What if coursework included a semester of securing funding for and completing an outreach project?  However unrealistic these possibilities seem, they are more likely to save the humanities than futile efforts to find alt-ac work for all the Ph.D's coming through the pipeline, even if we succeed in making the Ph.D. a necessary credential for non-academic work, or make it remunerative to piggy-back college teaching on other forms of nonacademic employment.

After all, the students are there, and they need to be taught--a point that ought to ground these discussions.