Dec. 16, 2005

Setting New Priorities for Graduate Education

By Donald E. Hall

This summer, I had what was probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — one that very few writers are ever afforded. I discovered, by chance, a blog that had just been created by a group of students and faculty members who were about to begin reading and discussing my book The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual (Ohio State University Press). I followed their commentary as it was posted and found the entire experience of overhearing the unfiltered responses of two dozen or so readers at once incredibly intimate, somewhat unsettling, and extraordinarily illuminating. Of course, I had read many reviews of my books before, but they were usually delicately expressed and carefully edited, and certainly were temporally separated from the actual reading experience. Few of us ever get to experience our readers’ reactions, more or less, as they are reading. I never revealed to the bloggers that I was listening in, and no matter how much I wanted to say, “No, no, that is not what I meant at all…” I simply let the discussion continue.

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But one comment has stuck with me because it revealed just how much things have changed and are continuing to change on some of the very issues that my book addressed. On June 10, one blogger posted the following comment and questions:

Hall complains early on that the 4-4 loads that come with many available jobs “were never even mentioned” by grad school professors. While I take his point that grad school professors implicitly or explicitly train their students to replicate their own research careers and that grad school typically offers little direct preparation for teaching-intensive jobs, I’m flummoxed by the notion that one could get all the way to the job-search stage of a Ph.D. and have no idea what was out there waiting. Did Hall pay no attention at all to the job searches of those a few years ahead of him in his program? Did he have no contact with alumni of his program? Were his interactions with professors limited to those old and sheltered enough not to have passed through less glamorous jobs on the way to the exalted positions in which they were privileged to teach the (no doubt extremely irritating, if highly self-motivated) Mr. Hall? (Sorry, I’m getting a little crabby here.)

In retrospect, I probably was extremely irritating to some of my professors, but the larger concern expressed here is that there must have been professional development opportunities that were available and that I (and many others too) simply ignored.

Actually that was not the case, and demonstrates thankfully how far we as a profession have come in just a few years. In 1989 and 1990 there were no professional development talks, panels, or visits by alumni. Any discussion of jobs that entailed a 4-4 load was muted or nervously avoided because the University of Maryland at College Park, at that time, was interested in raising its profile nationally and certainly did not want to be perceived as a feeder program to teaching colleges. One of my mentors (and the job placement advisor during my two searches) wrote later in a dialogue we published on graduate education (in my collection Professions: Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies) that she had always seen herself as “preparing students for a very narrow band of jobs, from the equivalent of my own at a large research university to posts in four-year liberal arts colleges or branches of state universities, preferably not in departments with four-course-per-semester teaching loads unless the student clearly doesn’t want to do writing or research.”

Those teaching in the graduate program at Maryland who had actually moved up through the ranks, so to speak, of “less glamorous” jobs — and I know now there was at least one — never discussed that history with those of us on the market; if their silence was partly attributable to shame or lack of concern for us is something that I will never know. But, frankly, no one else on the faculty spoke to us about their careers either. I and others certainly were self-motivated in many ways, but questions about the wide variety of jobs out there as possibilities simply never occurred to any of us. The writer above goes on to say in the same posting that I seem to have moved through my Ph.D. program in “a very blinkered way,” but truthfully many of us were blinkered in 1990. I’m certainly not blaming the (mostly) good folks at Maryland for any of the above; it was simply a different time and a different mindset that has largely been supplanted. Inside of one paradigm today, it is hard to imagine that another was operant just a few years ago.

As is surely apparent by now, I believe that the rise of professional studies and professional development in Ph.D. programs over the past two decades have been very positive things generally. Yes, it means that student anxiety levels have increased in some ways; graduate students no longer simply worry about acquiring knowledge and planning a dissertation, but also about giving conference papers, publishing, and otherwise building a vita. But by encountering those stressors now, students are certainly better informed about the stress that they will encounter for the rest of the careers they are contemplating. And through programs that do inform students now about the range of career paths possible in and outside of the academy, we are doing a much better job generally at recognizing our students’ needs and the realities of their future work lives. After all, the vast majority of students exiting the Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland in the early 1990s entered jobs exactly like the one I found, at regional comprehensive universities or small colleges with teaching, not research, missions. I would say that we in graduate education, and students exiting our graduate programs, are far less “blinkered” today than was the case just a few years ago.

I can attest to that firsthand and from a couple of different angles. Chairing hiring committees at California State University at Northridge, a teaching-centered university, for almost a decade (1995-2004) and interviewing hundreds of candidates for the 20 or so new positions that I hired for, I saw a dramatic shift in candidates’ abilities to discuss their priorities and a new depth to their understanding of careers at teaching schools. Over the years, they generally became far less likely to expect careers exactly like those of their graduate school mentors. And now that I teach in a doctoral program preparing students for possible careers in the academy, I see how different the discussion and training are compared to what I encountered as a graduate student. Alumni do return to talk about their jobs to aspiring academics, and we on the faculty often talk with students about our careers with the vagaries, joys, and disappointments on relatively full display. I believe that we have largely de-mythologized the position of “professor,” especially compared to the heyday of the academic “star” in the 1980s when certain privileged academics were treated like, and often believed themselves to be, beings worthy of near-religious worship.

Thankfully, that is no longer the case. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham, who ran Tulane University’s Program in Literary Theory during the star system’s height, has remarked (also in the collection Professions), “what we now call the ‘profession’ is not generating stars, so that yesterday’s stars remain today’s, but older and fatter and generally less stellar than they used to be.” If the process of “professionalization” killed the star system, as Harpham elsewhere in the same essay implies, then that is yet another reason to be thankful for it. For all academics to be seen as human rather than other-worldly is better for students and the professorate alike. No one benefits from a system that encourages even more inflated egos among a group that already has a tendency to think of itself as much smarter than the general population.

Nevertheless, I still think that there are ways that we can continue fine-tuning our processes and goals in graduate education. Reading job applications and conducting interviews has given me a good sense of new Ph.D.’s and having been involved now in about two dozen hiring processes in the past decade, I applaud our successes but also want to point to some opportunities that present themselves still. Through their processes of professional development, our graduate programs today are usually creating researchers and writers who know — or are clearly learning — how to disseminate their work in print and conference presentation, teachers who are increasingly up to the challenge of educating diversely-skilled groups of undergraduates and integrating new technologies into their classrooms, and thinkers who are beginning to see their careers as ones not tied to a simple or fixed narrative of what constitutes “success” in the academy. These are strengths that we can build upon because several challenges remain.

Indeed, one useful way to further refine our expectations for graduate training is to recognize that we are engaged in training in well-informed and highly-skilled participants in the conversations that comprise their fields of study. And to be a responsible participant in a conversation is, in effect, to be a responsible member of a community or set of communities. Indeed, for those graduate students training for an academic career, it is vital for them to recognize that certain communal/conversational dynamics and responsibilities link the work that academics do in the classroom, in their scholarly fields, and in their institutions. And it is that last aspect of our work lives in the academy that deserves even greater attention in the professional development process. Even as we have developed teaching and research workshops, and even manuals, for our students, collegial interactions and activities are major professional responsibilities that still receive far too little notice in our discussions with aspiring academics.

Of course more training in service and other forms of collegial interaction is occurring in graduate programs now than was the case a generation ago. It is much more common today for students to sit on major department committees, including some hiring committees, and for students, themselves, to put on conferences and other events that require committee work and hours working collegially with other students and faculty members. But, still, little is written or said about collegiality as a concept and activity that is vital to our institutional health and one connected intellectually and intimately to the other work that we do.

We might clarify our own terms here by recognizing first that “service” as a professional practice is a putting of communal needs above our own narrow interests and desires. Whether in department committee work, in the mentoring of students and junior colleagues, in work on program oversight bodies, in participation in senates or assemblies, or in activity as readers or evaluators, it requires a deflation of the individual ego in the service of broad social rather than narrowly self-interested values. In a sense, it represents the opposite of the bloated self-regard of the “star” or “diva,” because it demands humility, a sacrifice of time and energy that could be used instead for careerist purposes, and an ability to reach consensus, or at least agree to disagree, and then to move forward with a group process. If, as Harpham implies above, professionalization killed the star system, then a deepening emphasis on service and collegiality as valuable and necessary components of our professional lives can put the final nail in its coffin.

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