#thehumanities

I've been a fan of Michael Bérubé's for quite some time.  I've always enjoyed the way that he mixes keen intellectualism with sharp—sometimes biting—humor.  I've also always appreciated his willingness to engage directly with his biggest critics.  In fact, the simple fact that he no longer writes for Crooked Timber is the precise reason why I no longer read Crooked Timber (that and the way CT's editors seem to relish banning and disemvoweling their commenters).

I sort of hate myself for just using the word "disemvoweling," BTW.

It is for all of these reasons—yes, perhaps even including a sense of self-loathing—that I eagerly read Bérubé's recent piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Humanities, Unraveled."  As always, Bérubé is sympathetic to the plight of adjuncts everywhere, and he quite rightly expresses a cautious suspicion of the digital humanities (and the MOOCs that will entirely colonize the whole of higher education if the digital humanities are embraced uncritically).

Regrettably, articles like these, no matter how accurately they hit the mark, are ultimately powerless to accomplish much of anything.  I'd like to believe that if Bérubé, acting as the Former Dark Lord of the MLA, could perform a few spells, he would instantaneously transform employment in the humanities from what it is—exploitative and humiliating—to what it (arguably, allegedly) was  years and years ago—equitable and gratifying.

Obviously, though, he cannot do that.  And so here we remain, apparently our only recourse being to write inane responses to his article.

After a few years of writing on the Internet for PopMatters, and for several years longer than that reading articles on the Internet, I have no idea why I continue to look at reader comments.  All too often they are spiteful and ill-informed.  The best kind of reader comments, IMHO, are the ones that are sort-of ironic and jokey (the readers of Stereogum usually get this style right).  Still, if we're being honest, those comments don't often accomplish much.

For the most part, the comments at the end of The Chronicle article are gracious.  Some are critical, but are still constructive.  Some, as should be expected, are outright angry.  Again, Bérubé, bless his heart, has taken some time to respond to those comments (I honestly don't know why), and his responses are on point.  Nevertheless, I've spent the first part of this week actually sympathizing with the angry commenters, and this particular post is a first attempt to rationalize why I'm feeling this way.

The theme that stands out to me—the concept that I understand even though I know better than to understand it—is the resentment that adjuncts often have of the tenured professoriate.  (Sidenote: we have no way of knowing how many of the commenters over there are actually contingent faculty members, which leads me back to my original premise about the overall utility of Internet comments.)  There are a few places in these comments where either explicitly or implicitly Bérubé—and all tenured professors, by extension—is colored as an Ivory Tower elitist, someone who rolls up to his expansive office (the two or three times a decade that he has to demean himself by teaching) in a custom Rolls Royce paid for entirely by student tuition dollars.  This is a dramatic fantasy that is conjured by the Public at Large whenever the opportunity arises to show how disconnected academic life is from life in the Real World.  Usually, I can ignore arguments that begin with this premise, because I've been actively involved in higher education for the better part of 18 years—a stretch of time that dates back to my days as an undergraduate in 1995—and I, quite simply, know better (and so should you). 

However, as I've sat pondering this article, the current state of the humanities, and my current professional position as an adjunct professor at two different universities (at this very moment), I've found myself a little less willing to overlook the kernel of truth that is swaddled deep inside these rhetorical phantasms.  Looking up—way, way, way up—a huge portion (and by "huge portion" I mean every last one of us) of the contingent ranks watches various tenured faculty get shuttled around from conference to conference, often throughout the entire world.  In many cases, these people get honoraria for their appearances.  They also often get things like free lodging and meals and shuttle service to the airport.  Full disclosure:  I do not have a faculty mailbox.  A mailbox—a glorified hole in the wall.  I don't have one.  I've been met with resistance when I've asked for one, because, as I've been told, I could just have my mail delivered to my department chair's box, and then I could just rifle through that person's mail.  I have been told this, in those exact words.  The person who told me this in all likelihood gets paid a salary that far outshines what I get paid to teach.

When that is someone's lived experience, it is hard not to allow jealousy to seep into discourse about the professors who have some measure of job security and whose work is actually valued—valued enough to be financed, even if that form of financing pales in comparison to what enormous corporations pay to their experts.  Seriously, I won't be greedy.  I'll take either an honorarium or a mailbox.  One will suffice. 

The related matter that some of The Chronicle article's commenters raise is suspicion of—and jealousy about—the nature of the work that the tenured professoriate does.  Again, I'm of two minds here.  I'm not so naïve as to believe that the pressures of researching and publishing are not huge—and that they don't present all kinds of psychological agony that could likely stultify actual thought.  On the other hand, I've also passed the point of dignifying the former concern while having to acknowledge passively that some—certainly not all—of that labor is accomplished by professors on research leave in Europe, or in the corner café where said professor can work productively for long stretches of uninterrupted time, or even just in a dusty musty library cubicle.  Laboring—to use the term that we in the humanities fetishize much too much—under those conditions is a far different thing than attempting to produce scholarship while working three jobs (which I've done, and still do) or while loading trucks at UPS (which I've also done) or suffering the horrible abuses of being a belt supervisor at UPS (which I've also done, because the Earn and Learn Program, for most of my graduate career, funded me much better than the graduate departments that I was paying to attend).

The bullheaded refusal of a sizeable majority of the tenured professoriate to take on these matters in explicit and in very public ways is no longer forgivable, particularly because these employment conditions make it impossible for those of us who are contingent to have a fighting chance to professionalize in the way that the tenured people—and the administrative people—who reside on university hiring committees demand. 

Yes, I will readily admit that there are plenty of tenured and influential faculty who are sympathetic to these matters and who have agitated on the behalf of adjunct professors everywhere.  Yet, I will also readily admit that I once had to tell one of my bosses that I really couldn't spontaneously cover the night shift just because the Redskins were on television because I had a paper to write and even though I was sorry that a lot of people might call in sick because they want to watch the game I really can't afford not to write this paper but please don't fire me because then I won't be able to afford to go to the school that isn't supporting me while I write this paper on American Romanticism.

I'll take the stress of researching a book project in Italy over conversations like those any day of the week.

And yes, that was an actual conversation that I had at one point in my illustrious academic career.  Nothing says, "You're a (budding) professional scholar!" like conversations like those.

All of these matters cohere in the contentious question about fair and equitable teaching loads, and fair and reasonable research loads, for professors—all professors.   As such, these matters necessarily force us to think about the nature of graduate education and how it can be rethought.   At this point, I'm unwilling to toss the dissertation out the window (though I do wonder how much of that thinking is driven by a petulant kind of bootcamp-type consciousness  i.e. I did it, so why shouldn't everyone else have to do it?).  I'm also unwilling—though not entirely opposed—to thinking about establishing the kinds of two-tiered degree tracks (one a traditional academic track, the other an alt-academic track) that Bérubé discusses in his piece.  Instead, I want to focus on a topic that very rarely gets discussed: the actual kind of educating that happens in graduate school.

I'll be clear up front here.  I value my graduate education deeply and wholeheartedly.  I had excellent teachers, and I'm not being critical of them in any way.  I'm merely pointing to what I perceive as some entrenched problems in the way that Ph.D. programs operate.  I firmly believe that addressing these problems can go a long way toward beginning to assuage some of the difficulties that graduate students face when they hit the job market.

For the most part, the graduate seminar operates as some kind of strange hybrid, perhaps even  what I'll call a tribrid.  Usually, the graduate seminar—particularly in the humanities—is one-part salon meeting, one part progressivism think tank, and one-part twelve step support group (because the world at large doesn't take progressives seriously).  The end result is that all-too-often sloppy, ill-informed commentary passes for serious work: "Oh my goodness!  George W. Bush and G. W. F. Hegel have the same initials!  Now it all makes sense!"  The comment is made, everyone LOLz, and the class steamrolls forward.  

This is bad form, plain and simple.  It's also, arguably, a waste of time.  Believe me, I'm a big fan of levity.  I laugh with my students quite a bit when I teach.  The one redeeming feature of Facebook is that it allows me to joke with lots of people all at once. 

However, there are limits to how productive weekly meetings of that kind are.  After twelve or thirteen or fourteen of them, final papers are written, comments may or may not be provided on those papers, and the students move on to their next series of classes.  Oftentimes, the obligatory A is put into the grade system before the final papers are read.

Then, after a few semesters of this kind of thing, graduate students are all of a sudden asked to begin conceptualizing an original piece of research that is independently written and that makes a substantial contribution to that student's field.

And this is the point where the real problems begin.  Time to degree slows way, way, way down; students drop out of school altogether; finances get tight, so students work more hours, and then they disappear—or produce poor scholarship.

To date, most people who have written about these matters have focused on rethinking the dissertation.  That's fine.  My solution, though, is to rethink the seminar.  Why not start there?

Most graduate students I've known are deeply, deeply perplexed when they reach the dissertation stage.  For now, I'll set aside some very legitimate sources of that confusion—how to conceptualize a book-length project, how to budget time, how to balance research with teaching—to focus on an overlooked stumbling block: committee commentary.

The best kinds of committees—and let me say again that I had an excellent committee—take their students to task.  They do not accept lazy claims.  They will not stand for cuteness over originality.  They will harass students about poor mechanics and cavalier semicolon use.  They will demand that their students not always use the word "landmark" when describing Discipline and Punish.  Moreover, they will tell their students to read more Foucault than just Discipline and Punish (or The History of Sexuality, Volume 1). 

These kinds of comments can be deeply, deeply disturbing when they emerge two or so years into a graduate program that, to date, had been all smiles and smirks.  These kinds of comments can send students into a tailspin when they have not been prepared to receive them and, more significantly, when they haven't been taught how not to garner them in the first place.

Discussions like this inevitably raise the question about the "rigor" of graduate degrees.  Those kinds of discussions then inevitably devolve into the kinds of relativistic arguments which endlessly ask, "What, exactly, is rigor?" that, frankly, make me embarrassed to call myself a humanist.  I'm pretty comfortable with citing my Hegel example, which is not an exaggeration, as symptomatic of something that is not rigorous.

One way to avoid those circular arguments is, perhaps, to look practically at how graduate seminars can be restructured to teach students how to become the kinds of scholars that they need to become in order to become professional scholars.  Why not reorganize graduate seminars so that they focus more intently on writing—on the very specific kind of writing that students need to produce in order to stand even a remote chance of getting on the tenure track?  Why not build scaffolding-type assignments into the graduate seminar?  Heck, why not just have a revision or two of the final paper before it is submitted?  Could graduate programs simulate some kind of editorial exercise, where the graduate professors who are teaching during a given semester all read the papers written by that semester's grad students?  Could graduate programs be restructured so that arbitrary measures of progress (read: comprehensive exams) are abolished in favor of a system where students have to demonstrate professional progress e.g. "By the end of the first year, you will have presented a paper at one conference, and you will have revised that paper according to the commentary you received.  By year two you will have expanded that paper and begun shopping it around to journals."

Obviously, I have no concrete idea about how these kinds of things could emerge or what they might look like.  Regardless, some kind of restructuring of this kind could make the leaps from the literary seminar to the dissertation, and then from the dissertation to the job market, a little less wide.  Perhaps if that happens, attrition, time to degree, successful job placement could somewhat improve.