Keep Calm and Carry On: Finding and Building PhD Career Paths

This title slide is a copy of the famous 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster, with a CC-BY license and my name.

At the end of March this year, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Purdue University and talk about alternate careers for people pursuing the PhD. Throughout the day I enjoyed a number of interesting discussions with graduate students and faculty. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in the last 5 or 6 years in being willing to talk about what faces PhD students upon graduation.

In addition to these less formal discussions, I gave a talk and led a workshop focusing on the nuts and bolts of looking for and applying for different positions. If you’re interested in getting the full “Brian experience,” you can watch videos of the talk and the workshop on YouTube. But since I get fidgety watching a five-minute video let alone an hour talk, I wanted to share the text of the talk here. A portion of the talk drew on the short comments I gave in September 2014 at Penn State’s Symposium on #Alt-Ac. I was glad to get a chance to expand on that line of thinking here. My comments also drew on thoughts that I had had as I worked on a forthcoming article about alt-ac issues and the CLIR postdoctoral fellowship with Meredith Beck Sayre, Marta Brunner, and Emily McGinn. For the title, I of course have to thank the Internet without which none of this would be possible.

And of course, I need to thank my hosts at Purdue: the College of Liberal Arts, the Department of English, and the School of Languages and Cultures, and in particular Nancy Peterson, Madeleine Henry, and Hyunyi Cho, head of English, head of Languages and Cultures, and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education, respectively.

Continue reading “Keep Calm and Carry On: Finding and Building PhD Career Paths” →

Two Job Markets in Every Pot: My Platform for the MLA Executive Council

Earlier this year, I sent Rosemary Feal, the Executive Director of the MLA, a direct message via Twitter. In the last couple of years I’ve had the chance to get to know her as we’ve spoken together on panels and as I’ve served on the MLA’s Committee on Information Technology (CIT). In this DM, I suggested that the MLA should host a job fair alongside the academic job interviews that take place at the annual Convention. I followed up with the observation that if the MLA needed to hire someone full-time to implement this strategy, well…I knew a guy.

Her reply came a few days later and not in the way that I expected. Instead of an offer of employment or (as was much more likely) a good-natured jibe about my need to show up to the Convention first, she instead conveyed the news that I had been invited to stand for election to the MLA’s Executive Council. I was both flattered and floored. As noted on the Association’s Governance page, the Executive Council “has fiduciary and administrative responsibility for the association” and works in partnership with the Executive Director and all of the MLA staff to steer the organization according to the concerns of its members, all 27,736 of them [PDF].

As I said, I was completely surprised by the invitation. But at least I already had the beginnings of a candidate statement. Here, then, are the 250 words that I could include in my platform, with some links thrown in to contextualize things:

I am a former adjunct who now works off the tenure track building digital humanities projects and programs. My experience—shared with countless others—suggests that the MLA must lead graduate education reform that includes thoughtful preparation for nonprofessorial employment. The MLA must help its members believe about themselves what we say about our undergraduates: that the study of languages and literatures prepares one for many careers.

On the Executive Council, I will work to introduce something new at the annual convention: a job fair with government and private-sector exhibitors. In so doing, the MLA will put its imprimatur on nonacademic outcomes for graduate training, which will help individual departments institute the changes necessary to reimagine graduate studies.

Concurrent with this expansion of what graduate training means, the MLA should expand how it conceives of its membership. At present, our association is largely composed of those who research and teach modern languages and literatures. We must reframe the organization to represent and advocate for those who have studied these subjects in the past. Those in other career paths need to feel not just welcome but valued as continuing members of the MLA.

Once we expand representation, the MLA will be better able to demonstrate the many outcomes of an education in language and literature because our members will be everywhere. By making visible the many pathways available to those trained in modern languages, we will show the public and ourselves the usefulness of a humanities education.

In the four months since I wrote this statement, I’ve been thrilled to see that the MLA, along with the American Historical Association, is continuing, as a Chronicle headline puts it, to “chip away at [the] taboo of nonacademic careers.” The MLA’s Task Force on Doctoral Study is just one example of such efforts. If elected to the Council, I’ll advocate for the above-mentioned job fair and ever-increasing attention to pathways beyond the professoriate. Making all alternative careers—and not just alternative academic jobs—part of the discourse during graduate study will help those who work outside the academy understand that their work makes sense within the context of the MLA.

But it turns out that 250 words are not enough to adequately capture everything that I would have liked to say about the MLA. The Association must absolutely continue to work for equitable working conditions for all those who work in academe, which includes graduate students and adjuncts. It’s critical to remember that faculty working conditions are student learning conditions. The MLA must do all that it can—and constantly ask whether it can do more—to change what has become the status quo in higher education. We must also think about those who work alongside faculty. To this end, I’m proud to have worked with the MLA’s CIT to revise the Association’s Guidelines for Information Technology Access and Support for the Modern Languages. These guidelines make it clear that it’s a responsibility of scholars to “recognize academic technology staff members as vital collaborators.”

As a result of my service on the CIT, I will also work to find ways to allow the MLA to make more of its data open. One example of this might be the Job Information List, which was made free to all users this year. There are good reasons why not all MLA resources can be made open in this way, but many kinds of data might be made available for research. The result could be explorations about the history of the profession and scholarship similar to the analysis of PMLA that Ted Underwood and Andrew Goldstone undertook and reported on in December 2012.

I do hope to be elected. I’m excited about continuing to serve the MLA which is a forward-thinking organization with great leadership. So if you’re into people who have gone on record as being very enthusiastic about the Convention, please consider voting for me. I’m interested to respond to any questions you might have for me. Comment here, on Twitter, or on MLA Commons!

And then vote!

Culinary School vs. Graduate School

I listen to NPR most days as I commute, and I found yesterday’s story about the difficult job prospects and debt facing culinary school graduates very familiar. The similarity between the circumstances of those training to be chefs and those training to be faculty members was so striking that I couldn’t resist writing NPR and commenting on the story. Since I know the chances of Robert Siegel mellifluously reading portions of my comment on the air are about the same as getting a tenure-track job in 20th-century American literature (read, 1 in 500—at least the last year that I was applying for jobs), I’ve decided to just post my thoughts here as well:

I enjoyed the March 15 story about the problems facing graduates of culinary schools. The problem of spending years of training and thousands of dollars on an education only to be faced with a minimum paying job prospects is daunting. And unfortunately it is familiar for many of us who have pursued PhDs. After six years of schooling and $48,000 of debt, I graduated with a PhD in English literature. I applied to every job in North America for three years in a row–all 150 of them. At most of these jobs, I was told that I was one of 300-500 applicants, and naturally all of us had PhDs, publications, and teaching experience. In those three years, I received a total of three first round interviews, none of which led to second rounds. My first year after graduate school, I taught at my graduate institution for $32,500/year, less than half of what a regular faculty member earns. I was only allowed to have that job for one year, and the following year saw me driving 120 miles one way to get to my job where I earned $27,000/year. Again, I earned half of what regular faculty earned and taught twice as many courses per semester. That being said, I’m still one of the lucky ones. “Adjunct faculty” often have to cobble together courses from many different institutions to make ends meet, earning in the neighborhood of $2,000 per course for an entire semester. Teaching full time (4 or 5 courses per semester) nets you an annual income of $20,000.

I’m sympathetic to the culinary graduates, whose debt rivals that of most PhD students. But the time that they invest in their studies falls far short of what a PhD program requires. NPR’s shedding some light on the subject of post-graduate school employment and the casualization of the faculty in higher education will help bring to light labor issues in higher education that differ from but parallel the recent troubles in Wisconsin.

Perhaps the most interesting detail in the story is that culinary school graduates can expect to earn $12-15/hour as a line chef when they finish culinary school. If they work 40 hours/week and 50 weeks per year, that’s an annual income of $24,000…just about the same as what an adjunct might earn. Teaching college and working as a line cook are very different jobs (as my time working in a high-end restaurant taught me), but neither appears to be a very safe investment.

(Omni?)Present at the MLA

Last year I gained some attention for not attending the Modern Language Association’s annual convention. The notice that was paid to my situation and to the paper that was read on my behalf took me completely by surprise. That feeling of surprise persisted throughout 2010 as people occasionally sent emails or told me at events that they had heard of me. Standing in for the present absence [paywall] of many contingent or non-tenure-track at the yearly meeting of the MLA—and all the other conferences or department and faculty meetings—was not what I had had in mind when I stayed home. But I’m grateful that my paper resulted in increased attention being paid to the effects of labor casualization in the university.

Because I’m lucky, I have a job now. And because I’m even luckier, I’ve just finished attending my fifth MLA convention, where I spoke on two panels. I say “my” MLA with good reason. Previous to the 2006 MLA Convention, I’d heard that the yearly meeting wasn’t especially enjoyable: people only went for the job interviews; the presenters always took too long and there was never time for Q&A; the lobby was full of the dead gazes of nervous candidates; and conversations were stunted by the sizing up of one other’s badges—their names and affiliations. So I was stunned when I got to Philadelphia, where I was slated to give a paper. For three days straight, there was something fascinating and fabulous happening. Every hour of the day there was something that I wanted to attend. I saw Michael Bérubé and Bitch PhD (RIP) speak about their blogging. I saw Dave Parry (although I didn’t know him at the time) and others talk about the Wikipedia. I attended talks about the authors I was writing about in my dissertation and talks given by friends in my program. I met Katherine Hayles, someone whose work intrigued me and who chaired the panel that I spoke on. I bumped into one of my favorite undergraduate professors in the book exhibit and caught up on the last 4.5 years. I hung out with friends from grad school, met scads of new people, and ate one of the best meals of my life. What had been billed as a soulless gathering at a terribly inconvenient time of year turned out to be quite possibly the most interesting three days of my academic career to that point.

I was hooked. I planned to go back to the MLA the following year since I would be on the market for the first time. But I was very much looking forward to it. In Chicago in 2007, I had two interviews, but I went for the fun of it all. I met Matt Kirschenbaum and Joe Tabbi for the first time, the latter offering me the opportunity to work some on electronic book review and the ELO Directory. I caught up with Jason Jones and his family. I ate a montecristo. In 2008, I hit San Francisco with one job interview, but I was also moderating a panel on Twitter with Dave Parry, Matt Gold, and John M. Jones. The first MLA tweetups took place, and I met so many people whom I had come to know online that listing them would verge on the obnoxious. And the work of my peers continued to keep me rushing from one hotel to the next, as I tried to decide between incredible When I decided not to attend the 2009 convention, then, I was as disappointed by my missing out on what I suspected would be both a great intellectual feast and a fabulous party.

Although any notoriety I was enjoying in March 2010 had come my way primarily by my not attending the conference, I knew that I could pull a(n accidental) stunt like that once. So I began submitting paper proposals with the hope that I could speak in this year’s program. Others kindly invited me to participate in round tables that they were organizing. And after Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the MLA, wrote to threaten (in a tongue-in-cheek manner) to not accept my panels unless I showed her an airplane receipt guaranteeing I would be at the 2011 convention, I learned that I would have the chance to speak on two different panels. I’ll blog the talks from those panels in a day or so, but I wanted to quickly recap some of what my MLA looked like this year–to the best that I can recall, at least.

Thursday

On arriving at the JW Marriott on Thursday morning, I found myself riding on an escalator behind someone who looked very familiar. He seemed to have noticed me and was looking quizzically at me as well. Neither of us had yet found name tag holders. Right before I could speak, he turned fully to me and said, “Excuse me, are you Brian Croxall? I’m Michael Bérubé.” This is not how you expect your conversation to go with the Second Vice President of the MLA. He was very kind and asked about my new job.
I started Thursday with some media training that I and approximately 20 other people (including many ProfHackers had been invited to. Rosemary Feal and Mark Aurigemma provided two hours of helpful and revealing strategies for how faculty can effectively interact with journalists. Expect a ProfHacker post soon on the subject from myself or one of my colleagues.
For the very first session of the MLA, I attended a panel on labor in the digital humanities (DH), which featured Tanya Clement, Mark Childs, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Amanda French, Carl Stahmer, with William Thompson presiding. The conversations ranged from debating the extent to which non-programmers can really expect to learn code well enough to contribute to a project (Carl said no), to the degradation of digital humanities projects due to the evaporation of labor after a grant ends, to Amanda French’s commonsense (and therefore all the more radical) suggestion that funds from grants be used in part to fund the training of graduate students so they can learn basic programming concepts and therefore become more able to communicate with their DH collaborators. Tanya Clement even read a portion of the whitepaper that she and Doug Reside have been preparing for the upcoming, NEH-funded Off the Tracks meeting that seeks to limn out pathways for DH scholar-programmers (their term, which she pointed out is contentious). At the end of this panel, I was very happy to get to meet Richard Grusin for the first time. His (and Jay David Bolter’s) book Remediation had a profound effect on my dissertation. This, by the way, is what’s cool about the MLA, in case you missed it.
Directly after this panel, Natalie M. Houston, Jason Jones, George Williams, and myself got to speak about hacking the profession on a ProfHacker-organized and -themed panel. Natalie’s posted her talk, and I’ll put mine up shortly. I really enjoyed the Q&A, which featured tales of poems about burritos and George regaling us with his boxing days. In this panel, I got to meet Kathy Harris for the first time—someone with whom I was able to collaborate a bit on a timeline— and Bill “Thomas H. Benton” Pannapacker, who wrote a blog post on The Chronicle of Higher Education about the panel.
Following a one-panel interlude where I’m afraid I zoned out more than anything, having hit a wall, I had my second (and final) speaking engagement. The “New Tools, Hard Times” panel featured Marc Bousquet, Rosemary Feal, Marilee Lindemann, Chris Newfield, and myself talking about the use of social media in the academy in hard times. I will simply say that I was floored to be on this panel with these people. My talk is forthcoming, but Marilee has posted hers and Chris has already blogged his reflections on the panel. And if you want to read the VERY lively tweetstream for the session, look at the hashtag archive for #newtools. During Q&A we were all happy that questions were coming in from people who were not at the convention and were asking about issues of anonymity in the academy. Perhaps the best question came from Matt Kirschenbaum who wondered whether work in social media was actually counterproductive at a point as it too often ends up being uncounted by the academy. This is a good question to keep in mind, but I appreciate the fact that my being presently off the tenure track means that I don’t have to worry as much about whether my contributions online count. Or in other words, while I haven’t grabbed the brass ring of the tenure-track job, I do get to exercise a tremendous amount of freedom in how I spend my energies and time. It’s kind of ironic, then, that I have some academic freedom that the tenured and especially the tenure-track faculty lack.
At this point, I hit a wall, but had a fabulous dinner—and even better conversation—at Cork Bar.
This was eventually followed by some night caps (orange juice for me!) with friends. And Rosemary Feal introduced me to Gerald Graff.

Friday

Friday morning started early with a show-and-tell round table of new digital projects. As I tweeted, I was most taken in by some of the new visualizations (still in beta, unfortunately) that John Walsh of The Swinburne Project demonstrated and “For Better For Verse,” an interactive tool for teaching scansion and prosody, which is headed up by Herbert Tucker of UVa. Then I got a personal tutorial on NINES and 18thConnect from Laura Mandell.
I then took in a panel where Ryan Cordell presented on his work on Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad.” Ryan’s work is fascinating, but even more was his ability to present effectively. He really taught the audience about his work, rather than reading directly from the page. He made it plain that even more traditional talks can be shifted from what is supposed to be the norm at the MLA. I hope that Rosemary Feal really does ask him to do a video about effective presentations.
I then hurried over to the book exhibit. It’s always fascinating to see what new books are coming out (not to mention how much money I can save). But the real draw this year was the Narrating Lives project, which participated in the larger theme of the conference established by MLA President Sidonie Smith. There wasn’t a line when I arrived, so I was quickly briefed and waivered, and I recorded a one-minute video that talked about why I look forward to the yearly MLA and what made me go to graduate school in literature and language.
[iframe http://www.youtube.com/embed/fQO7OE_cXzY?fs=1 480 295]
(You can tell from my presentation that the media training hadn’t quite sunk in yet.) All in all, I’m really excited that the MLA is looking for such user-generated content. And I’m even more thrilled that Kathi Berens recorded two videos along the theme of “It Gets Better,” talking to those—like her— that are not on the tenure track.
Next on the schedule was a session on “The History and Future of the Digital Humanities,” which featured Kathy Harris, Alan Liu, Tara McPherson, Steve Ramsay, and Bethany Nowviskie (who, due to illness, was channeled by Steve), and Brett Bobley of the NEH, with Kathleen Fitzpatrick chairing (all links are to either the speaker’s blogged talk or to their Twitter account). The speakers each had about 3 minutes to present their perspective on the Digital Humanities. Perhaps most electric was Steve’s polemic (which appears to be his public persona and one which he performs exceptionally) in which he considered “Who’s In an Who’s Out,” a subject that seems to come up frequently in DH. He suggested that knowing how to code is all but required in DH and presented a definition of DH: it’s “about building things.” Steve has blogged his reflections on the panel, and they’re worth reading. Personally, I very much like his definition of building as requisite to DH. I’d suggest that it doesn’t have to be limited to one’s research, however, since I think DH can happen in pedagogy just as well as research. (See Chris Forster on this important point.) But during the discussion, Alan Liu argued that he’s not so much a builder as someone who steals or is a bricoleur, and I think that that’s possibly closer to my vision of myself than one of a builder. It was a very good conversation, but one that I also felt I’ve heard a lot recently, either in person or in the blogosphere about just what DH is. In the end, I wonder to what extent these questions really come down to wondering about how we should train the current generation of graduate students. After all, if we are to prepare people for DH positions, we need to make sure they will be able to have the skills that programs will be looking for. But I don’t know if we’ll ever get as specific in training as we are in breadth requirements for PhDs. The current (and previous) generation of DH practitioners seem to all have taken idiosyncratic paths, and that’s one of the things that makes the community vibrant. I’d hate to lose that (although I recognize that not everyone has the time or opportunity to pursue these paths). Perhaps this is why we keep talking about it. If you want to see more of the conversation, look at the archive for the hashtag #309. One of the things that I found most interesting about this panel was how packed the room was: standing room only, and it was clear that there were a lot of people there who simply wanted to learn about what the digital humanities were. Due to all reports I saw from last year’s MLA, the digital humanities sessions in 2009 were also packed, but were in much smaller rooms. This year saw DH given larger space, but it still wasn’t sufficient. I saw MLA staffers counting attendance during this session, and I think it’s reasonable to expect that we’ll see still bigger rooms in 2012.
After the DH History and Future panel, I stayed put for a session on “The Open Professoriate” (Twitter hashtag #openprof) featuring Samuel Cohen, Amanda French, Dave Parry, Mark Sample, and Erin Templeton, with Matt Gold chairing. At the moment, only Amanda has blogged her talk, but I am sure that we’ll see more of the talks made available soon given that the openness of faculty’s research, teaching, and lives was the subject of the day. The Q&A was again very lively, and I asked the panel to what extent we should count on large corporations such as Google or Twitter to have our interests of openness at heart. It’s not that they are necessarily more or less profit-driven than the universities most of us work for, but I think that many of us—myself certainly included—forget to consider that we are creating value for the web companies that we contribute to with our searches and discussions. Not that this makes me want to be less open; after all, I’d rather have accessibility. But we need to be aware of everyone with whom we’re consorting in the quest toward openness. I was glad to see the MLA embrace conversations suh as these as well as the standard literary discussions.
I stuck to the same room for one more talk, and got to hear Stanford’s Dan Edelstein talk about the mapping of Enlightenment correspondence in the Mapping the Republic of Letters project. The visualizations and the patterns they have been discovering by building a massive archive of early modern correspondence is intriguing and brought the conversation from the meta level of the #309 panel back to the practical. Fascinating work and well worth following.
Following Dan’s talk, I moved to the Electronic Literature Organization‘s meetup, where I caught up with Zach Whalen and Kari Kraus and met Jentery Sayers and Mark C. Marino for the first time. Again, one of the reasons to attend the MLA in my experience is that everyone is there. And even if you don’t get a lot of time to talk to everyone, simply seeing each other in person helps to make possible new chances for working together or learning about what’s at the bleeding edge of different fields.
After a DH-filled dinner of sushi, the final event of the evening was the MLA Tweetup, which Rosemary Feal sponsored. While it will likely not get the press coverage that 2009’s did, it was still nice to see in person many of the people whose tweets we had been reading throughout the first two days of the conference. I’m sure not everyone there was someone that was on Twitter, since it appeared to include some bleed over from the audience for President Sidonie Smith’s keynote address. Still, it was amazing to see so many people there, who were engaged in the Twitter side of the MLA. And the ambience was something to behold:

Saturday

For my final experience of the MLA, I joined the fun run that Dave Parry had organized for as many MLA participants as were crazy enough to be consider spandex and black turtlenecks at 7am.

Dave and the others at the front of the pack took pity on us and kept it manageable. Fortunately, I had a strategy.

As was the case throughout so much of the MLA this year, it was great to have Rosemary Feal involved. She mentioned before the run how much she appreciated that the run got organized. At the risk of putting words in her mouth, I think she was pleased to see young blood at the MLA. But I also imagine that she enjoys seeing spontaneous organizing taking place: the activities of the underconference.

I don’t want to come off saying that there aren’t any problems at the MLA. There are things that I think can be fixed at the MLA. For one, it would be great to find ways to get those presenting in traditional panel formats (not everything can be pecha kucha, after all) could present rather than read directly from the page. After all, we’re all teachers. Why do we think that we need to communicate to one another in a different mode than we communicate to our students? Second, I think that the MLA can do more to embrace openness. In particular, the MLA should avoid paywalling information related to the conference, such as the program. Part of this trouble is due to the program being published as an issue of PMLA. But it shouldn’t fall to the crowd to hack and republish the simple PDF. If we are in hard times (and boy are we!), then we should be doing everything to make information about ourselves public. How can we expect people to understand what it is that we do in this profession if we don’t let them see what it is we’re discussing? (See Kathi Berens calling for the same openness on her blog.) But these problems are things that we can fix. They aren’t impossible. And on the whole, I’m feeling quite positive about the direction the organization is headed in.

I know that some people think the MLA is stodgy, solipsistic, and stressful. But that’s not my MLA. And I’m glad I was present.

EDITS: Added the photo at the Cork Bar, courtesy of Kathi Berens.

Adjuncts –> The Glenn Beck-ification of Cultural Commentary

One of the Big Issue books to hit academia this year is Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas. The book got some notice at the close of 2009 when an excerpt–“The Ph.D. Problem“–was published in Harvard Magazine. In this article, Menand argues that the production of people holding the doctorate is broken due to the length of time required to complete the degree and the lack of job prospects facing those who emerge. Menand’s solution to the problem is to admit fewer people to doctoral programs and to shorten the time to degree.

I haven’t had the opportunity to read the rest of Menand’s book, but in connection with the recent 10-day seminar for CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows, I did read two different reviews of it. And it’s on one of those reviews–Anthony Grafton’s “Humanities and Inhumanities” in The New Republic–that I want to comment. These comments originate in something I briefly wrote for the CLIR seminar and in kinship with Mark Sample’s assertion that such informal writing is “the first drafts of scholarship,” I’m not going to clean them up that much. I’d rather circulate the ideas and revise as I get input.
——
After reading Grafton’s review of Menand’s book, I’m a bit puzzled. I don’t really take issue with his characterization of Menand’s argument as “curiously apathetic, and almost complacent.” But I don’t really see Grafton making much of an impact himself. After all, Menand makes a suggestion for changing something in the system (to wit, shortening graduate school). Grafton offers nothing except to say that (1) graduate school should be difficult, as “it is designed–badly, and clumsily, but not insanely [sic]–to attract and then to test people who think they have this sort of calling”–with his reference to a sense of a “call” and “conviction” sounding suspiciously close to the “love” that is supposed to motivate humanists and which Thomas H. Benton has skewered in The Chronicle; (2) that humanists must work to collaborate with others to try to create new pathways for knowledge–although he is remarkably (and admittedly) short on the details as to how this should happen; and that humanists “must learn how to use–and to create–new digital tools.” This last point is absolutely correct, but again he’s got no details to work on except for a vague notion of what we should all do and the recognition that including these tools in graduate education is going to make things “harder, since it will require even more skills than before.”

Forgive me if I sound defeated, Mr. Grafton, but I think I prefer Menand’s solution. At least he has the guts to offer us something we haven’t tried in a while. There’s been plenty done to make the humanities Ph.D. as difficult as possible, and it hasn’t really effected change. That being said, I don’t really believe that Menand’s answer is correct. But Grafton seems emblematic of what frequently plagues the humanities: we are far too good at being critics and far too unpracticed in the work of (artistic / tool) creation.

What seems to be called for at this moment of professional and personal destruction created by graduate school in the humanities is a real revision to how things have been done. Unfortunately, I too am a better critic than I am creator. But I know other people with good ideas, and one of them is Ian Bogost, who wrote a fantastic essay in January of this year that posited the problem with the humanities is the humanists themselves. Grafton should read “The Turtlenecked Hairshirt“; it’s shorter than Menand, and it ends with a solution to our increasing irrelevance (i.e., detachment) from the world around us: stop trying to be separate from (read, “above”) most of the rest of humanity.

But Bogost’s piece isn’t a very specific answer to how we’re going to fix things either. For that, perhaps we should turn to Marc Bousquet, who has written about how the university works (blog and book) and has suggested that the problems of the contingent faculty class could simply be done away with if we made all adjuncts into “real” faculty. It’s obvious that there is a great need for teachers since more than 70% of undergrads in the US are taught by contingent faculty. If we would pay people equitably (and then either subsidized or charged students for the real cost of an education), we would solve the problem facing the humanities at the present. No more cannibalizing the young.

I believe that this employment balance has a lot to do with how we are perceived by the nation as a whole. How, in other words, can we expect the nation at large to take us seriously as people who are able to comment on the acts of humans in context of a broader cultural moment if we outsource the teaching of this cultural critique to underpaid non-faculty? If we are outsourcing the teaching and interpretation of this context and history, why shouldn’t the rest of the nation outsource the role that humanists have traditionally played? Talk radio and shout television are, in part, the products of this outsourcing. We have Glenn Beck, in other words, because we have too many adjuncts.

I realize that such a comment may open me up to Bogost’s critique–and in truth, I don’t believe that only Ph.D.s are uniquely endowed to comment on culture. But is it any coincidence that the cultural role of the humanist has become marginzalized as those who teach the humanities become invisible and impermanent? Why should students or anyone else listen to someone whose own institution will not give her a job?

Perhaps neither Menand’s nor Grafton’s solutions (shorter graduate school or persistently lengthy graduate school) will fix this impasse. But it were a far, far better thing to do something than to do that nothing which we have already done.