hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way

The song refers to the nation, of course, and I’m thinking of a discipline where perhaps we are not so quiet.

Here’s two tangentially related articles and both are tangentially related to English, so many tangents here. First, an article in Inside Higher Ed about UC Irvine’s rethinking of how they will fund their humanities phd programs: a 5+2 model where the last two years are a postdoctoral teaching fellowship. Irvine’s English hasn’t adopted it (maybe they will in the future), but it is an effort to address generally the challenges of humanities graduate education that many disciplines, including our own, face. In the second article, an editorial really in The Chronicle, Eric Johnson argues against the perception (and reality) that college should be a site of workforce training. It is, in other words, an argument for the liberal arts but it is also an argument for more foundational (i.e. less applied, commercial) scientific research.

These concerns interlock over the demand for more liberal arts education and the resulting job market it creates to relieve some of the pressure on humanities graduate programs.

Here’s a kind of third argument. Let’s accept the argument that specialized professionalizing undergraduate degrees are unfair to students. They place all the risk on the students who have to hope that their particular niche is in demand when they graduate, and, in fact, that it stays in demand. In this regard I think Johnson makes an argument that everyone (except perhaps the corporations that are profiting) should agree with: that corporations should bear some of the risk/cost of specialized on-the-job-training, since they too are clearly profiting.

Maybe we can apply some of that logic to humanities graduate programs and academic job markets. I realize there’s a difference between undergraduate and graduate degrees, and that the latter are intended to professionalize. But does that professionalization have to be so hyper-specialized to meet the requirements of the job market? I realize that from the job search side, it makes it easier to narrow the field of applicants that way. And since there are so many job seekers out there, it makes sense to demand specific skills. That’s why corporations do it. I suppose you can assume it’s a meritocratic system, but we don’t really think that, do we? If we reimagined what a humanities doctoral degree looked like, students could easily finish one in 3 or 4 years. No, they wouldn’t be hyper-specialized, and yes, they would require on-the-job-training. But didn’t we just finish saying that employers should take on some of that burden?

Here’s the other piece… even if one accepts the argument (and I do) that undergrads should not be compelled to pursue specialized professionalizing degrees, it does not logically follow that they should instead pursue a liberal arts education that remains entrenched in the last century.

In my view, rather than creating more hyper-specialized humanities phds, all with the hope that their special brand of specialness will be hot at the right time so that they can get tenure-track jobs where they are primed to research and teach in their narrow areas of expertise, we should produce more flexible intellectuals: not “generalists” mind you, but adaptive thinkers and actors. Certainly we already know that professors often teach outside of their specializations, in introductory courses and other service courses in a department. All of that is still designed to produce a disciplinary identity. This new version of doctoral students would not have been fashioned by a mini-me pedagogy; they wouldn’t identify with a discipline that requires reproducing.

So what kind of curriculum would such faculty produce? It’s hard to say exactly. But hopefully one that would make more sense to more students than what is currently on offer. One that would offer more direct preparation for a professional life after college without narrowly preparing students for a single job title. In turn, doctoral education could shift to prepare future faculty for this work rather than the 20th-century labors it currently addresses. I can imagine that many humanists might find such a shift anti-intellectual, because, when it comes down to it, they might imagine they have cornered the market on being intellectual. Perhaps they’re right. On the other hand, if being intellectual leaves one cognitively hamstrung and incapable of change, a hyper-specialized hothouse flower, then in the end its no more desirable than the other forms of professionalization that we are criticizing.//