A Voice in the Hinterlands

Sharon O'Dair wrote "The Lies Graduate Programs Tell Themselves" recently over at the Chronicle of Higher Education.  I'm sure O'Dair is absolutely right in some of her analysis, especially in recognizing that graduate school acceptances for PhD programs are driven by the needs for cheap labor to teach introductory and writing courses.

And yet I can't help but feel my hackles rise when I read the following sentence:

The decades-long overproduction of Ph.D.s has spilled highly trained graduates of elite programs into assistant professorships in the hinterlands, "places like East Podunk University or West Jesus State College," as Jeffrey J. Williams memorably put it in 1995.

Does she not think that students at schools in rural areas or the Midwest (which is what I think she's after with her "hinterlands" comment) deserve to be taught by highly trained graduates?  Or is it graduates of elite programs?  (Surely she doesn't think only elite programs produce highly trained graduates.)

Who does she think should teach at our schools?  Unqualified people?  People who didn't go to elite schools?

Well, [expletive deleted] that.  My students deserve great scholar/teachers every bit as much as anyone from whatever elite university you can think of.


NWU also benefits from the abundance of stellar graduates from PhD programs.  We don't tend to get many applicants from Grand Old Ivy type places, but we get really superb applicants from public R1s.  And that means we have highly trained graduates coming to become highly trained assistant professors, and developing into associate professors and so forth.  Even our non-tenure track  colleagues tend to be pretty darned amazing.

If PhD programs all agreed to accept only 10% of the students they currently do, we'd have troubles down the line.  But at 50%, we'd probably still be in great shape.


I'm guessing economically, the only ways R1s could do that would be by increasing the teaching loads of faculty or by hiring even more non-tenure track faculty.  So, R1 folks, you can make that choice.  Everyone teach an extra class or two a semester, and cut your grad program acceptances in half.  (No worries for O'Dair, since she's retired.)

I'm in total agreement that PhD programs should produce fewer graduates.  And yet, I don't want that to happen at the expense of people such as myself or my students.  As it is now, I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the PhD students in English at Yale or Harvard come from pretty elite educational backgrounds.  They don't come from places such as NWU.  And if PhD programs reduce their graduate student acceptances by cutting off people from less elite undergraduate schools, then that seems totally wrong.

But whatever happens, don't think that just because we don't live on the coasts or live more rurally that we're somehow less worthy of educational opportunity than someone from a coastal or more urban (or, really, suburban) area.

Independent Studies and/vs Sexual Harassment

Last week, The Little Professor wrote in "In Which I Declare Independence" that she disagreed with Rebecca Schuman's Slate article suggesting that universities ban independent studies.

In her beautifully calm way, The Little Professor explains why independent studies are beneficial to students in her program, and not rife with sexual harassment problems, though she does note that most faculty aren't paid for the extra work involved.

Like The Little Professor, I also think independent studies have their place, especially for graduate students.  And like The Little Professor, I don't think independent studies are where most sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior are taking place.  That's not to say no one has been sexually harassed during an independent study, of course.  Rather, most independent studies are times when students can get extra help, delve more deeply into an area of interest, or have a chance to complete their degrees in a more timely way (especially in this era of budget constraints and cancelled courses).

Let me say this:  I probably wouldn't have made it through graduate school if it weren't for the kindness of a professor who was willing to do an independent study with me in my second term. 

During my first term, I'd taken a course on "The Renaissance" during which the instructor assigned an explication.  I'd never done an explication, never heard of one, even.  So, like a good little graduate student, I went to office hours.  Unfortunately, this one faculty member didn't think it was worth his time to explain what an explication was, and basically told me so.  He said, just explain how the verse is doing what it's doing, or something similar.

You should know, about this time in the story, that our program's qualifying exam included an explication which was reputed to be graded rather harshly.  And I was supposed to take this exam in the fall of my second year (I think that's the timing).

I asked other grad students, the ones from places where "explication" was a thing, including the one already deemed our crown prince by our Renaissance instructor.  But, of course, they were beginning grad students, and even if they could do an explication, they weren't inclined to teach me, or didn't know how.  So I muddled through, and didn't do very well on the assignment.

Before the next one was due, I went to another faculty member, one I'd felt comfortable with during my interviews the spring before, and talked to him.  And in an hour, he taught me the basics.  And on that one, I did much, much better.

And the next term, he agreed to do an independent study with me on reading poetry.  Each week, he'd set me a poem, and I'd work it up, and then we'd talk about it together. 

I credit that independent study with teaching me how to read poetry, how to explicate, and perhaps most important, how to teach others to read poetry.

So, while I now recognize how much of an imposition my request was on a junior faculty member, I remain eternally grateful for his help, his brilliant teaching, his kindness, and his willingness to take on a rather dim student.

But what about the other side, the sexual harassment?  The biggest sexual harassers in my graduate department didn't need independent studies.  One was the grad director of our program.  So he had power and the ability to call students into his office and wield that power or not (he didn't always, of course).

At mixed social events, the big sexual harassers would start drinking and park themselves at the drink table, and any woman who approached alone was pretty much assured that she'd be harassed.  The other male faculty who were hanging about didn't seem to think this was a problem.

Female students complained about both behaviors to other female students and to female faculty, but at the time, only two or three female faculty had tenure, and none was willing to stand up to the male faculty (for all the reasons you could imagine; the same reasons no female student went to the chair or beyond).  So the female students got the word out to other female students: no female grad student went to the drink table alone; we went in pairs.  And eventually he wasn't grad director any more.

I guess what I'm saying is that sexual harassers don't need independent studies to harass.  What they do tend to need is complicity from other faculty members, especially senior faculty folks.  I hope my old grad program has changed in that respect.  I know there are more senior female faculty.

But some students, people like me, perhaps, really do need some extra help to do well in grad school and beyond.

Now, even as I write this, I have to admit that I've said no to more requests for independent studies than not, especially in recent years.  That has to do with the increases in class size, in assessment paperwork, and so on that really force us to stretch our time in all sorts of ways.

The Little MA Program that Couldn't

We have a small MA program here at NWU, and the colleague who's been ill has been teaching a course, and since we're sort of in the same field, I'm helping with that one, too.

Last week about half of the students gave their presentations (which we taped for my colleague's grading pleasure); my job was to oversee and to make suggestions to help with the final write up.

This week, the other half of the students did their presentations, and we did the same taping, and I made suggestions.

So, last week, I suggested to some of the students that they should look at EEBO for some texts, and they gave me blank looks, so I showed them how to look at EEBO, and then they vaguely remembered that they'd already been shown EEBO and taught how to do a search earlier this semester, but they'd forgotten.

This week, I asked a student who was presenting if they'd looked at their text on EEBO, and they gave me one of those looks like I was crazy for asking, because what was EEBO anyway.

And another student talked about the one critical essay they'd read, and how it quoted another essay, and so on, and when I asked if they'd looked at the quoted essay, they looked at me like I was crazy for asking because why would they want to do that?

When I first got here, I was very supportive of our grad program.  I taught the basic research and bibliography course several times with great success.  (We also had an intro to grad studies in our field course, and a theory course required.)  And then when some budget decisions made cutting one of the three required courses out (the research and bibliography course was the cut, of course), I revised the other intro course to include some research and taught it a couple of times. 

But over the years, I've grown progressively more frustrated with the program for two interrelated reasons.  First, we don't have the resources to give our students a really good grad experience.  I'm not saying they need to have the sort of experience someone at an R1 doing a phud needs, but having gone to a pretty good MA only program, I'm thinking that they need to have a certain variety of course options, certain resources, and so on available.

Second, our students mostly aren't very focused on their graduate work, and because the program's so very small, there isn't a culture of focus, and many students go away while they're writing their thesis and then either do a panic thing and write something or take a lot of professorial time and then decide not to bother finishing because it's too hard.  I've experienced this side of both of those, and I'm not given any sort of time reassignment or extra pay for the ton of extra work it is to respond to graduate work; now one of those was pretty rewarding, but mostly the quality of rushed work isn't at all rewarding, and the students who decide not to bother finishing are even less rewarding.

Last year, more budget decisions, and the faculty voted to cut out the theory requirement, and some other folks revamped the one required course to include some theory.   That makes our program even weaker, so far as I'm concerned.

And this last couple of weeks has really reinforced my sense of how weak our program is, and how weak most of the students are.  You really can't run a strong program with two strong students a year, and six weak ones.  And if you try, you spend a lot of resources that you could use elsewhere. 

So, this course has ten students enrolled.  The other grad course this semester has thirteen.  (And yes, other, as in there are only two.)  (Across all the upper level undergrad courses that are cross-listed, there are 7 students.)  If those two faculty members taught GE courses with even 25 students, that would help our GE numbers a lot over the course of a year. 

Chatting

I had a long phone chat with a friend and former roommate from grad school this morning, and it was just great to talk.  We haven't much talked for years, not because we had a falling out or anything, but because other things happen, and we're both busy, and so on, but talking was great, and I hope we talk more sooner rather than later.

This roommate was one of the sanest, most common sense, down to earth people I knew in grad school.  She was really smart in all sorts of ways, but also really decent and thoughtful.

Of course, chatting with my former roommate also got me thinking about some other grad school folks, many of whom were (and are) wonderful in their own ways, but few of whom I have much contact with these days.

Begin Again

There's another new article on Slate about how one shouldn't go to grad school.  Despite what the author, Rebecca Schuman, says about the "boom" in jobs in the late 1990s, as a survivor of that time, I'd like to say that things were bad then.  They're worse now, with the recession and all, but they were plenty bad then.

It's like every year someone new realizes for the first time that the job market for humanities sucks, and they think because they've just noticed it that the suckage started recently.  It didn't.

Yes, grad school is hard, and the rewards uncertain and often not nearly enough to make up for the opportunity cost.  Don't go.

Schuman builds off a nice analogy with smoking when she notes "In 2005 when I began my own Ph.D., I should have known better, but I didn’t. Now that you know better, will you listen? Or will you think that somehow you can beat odds that would be ludicrous in any other context?"

Yes, she in effect says, we all know smoking is dangerous, and we should know better than to do it, yet people still smoke.  And people should know better than to go to grad school in the humanities, but people still do it.

I'm not actually sure most of my students have heard anything about the job market or grad school in the humanities, though.  Most of them don't come from academic backgrounds or have much experience with academics until they get here.  About 40-50 percent of our students are first generation college students.   They don't know about academic stuff until and unless someone teaches them, pretty much.   I don't push grad school, but when a student asks, I try to be honest about the difficulty and the potential rewards, and about their potential.  (Usually, the students who talk to me about it are excellent students and fine people, so I get to tell them that even as I warn them.)

Three things about Schuman's article stood out to me, one only tangentially.

The more important was the dig at "satellite campuses of Midwestern or Southern universities of which you have never heard."  Yes, here I am, at a regional midwestern school, right in the middle of the target of scorn.  I am indeed sometimes frustrated at living in the land of long winters and at the distance it takes to go pretty much anywhere.  But there's no need to diss us from the privileges of Vassar, NYU, or even Irvine (See Note).   If you've never heard of us, perhaps you need to get out more and take that responsibility yourself?  There are these whole parts of the country that aren't just for flying over.  (Maybe, though, that attitude accounts for her sense that she "should have known better," and my sense that my students don't just know, about the difficulties of the phud market in the humanities?) 

Which brings me to the digs at theory.   Yes, it's specialized language.  So is medical language, and the language of physics.  We use technical language to talk about sprezzatura and metonymy, why shouldn't we use technical language to talk about difficult concepts such as deconstruction or differance?  (And by the by, why would someone choose to go to a phud program at Irvine [or Duke, for that matter] if you don't find theory interesting and exciting?  Okay, I'm assuming that the strengths in Irvine's English and Comparative Literature area also strengths in other areas.  Maybe I shouldn't.  Still, there are some darned smart people there.  Cough *Julia Lupton* Cough)  

Now for the tangential amusement.  Schuman's article links to another recent Slate article, this one by Ron Rosenbaum (who writes, we learn, about Shakespeare).  Like Schuman, Rosenbaum, too, argues that folks shouldn't go to grad school, especially not in English.  Except he relates his decision to leave his grad program in English at Yale in 1969.

If you're (as I am) even the slightest bit aware of which Shakespeare folks studied where, then Yale in the late 1960s is one of those places you're aware of for the impressive scholars who came out of that program.  (I'm not saying they're all perfect, by any means, but I can name some pretty darned smart scholars who did phuds there in the late 1960s, and they're an impressive set.)

So, yes, the job market sucks.  There's a crisis in education.  In other news, war is hell.  Each of these seems to need rediscovery often, alas.


Note.  Schuman provides a link to her dissertation.  I didn't go searching.

Plagiarize Much?

Interesting juxtaposition of the Harvard cheating scandal and a plagiarism scandal, one among many, it seems, in Europe.  Debora Weber-Wulff writes in the BBC Viewpoint series about "The Spectre of Plagiarism Haunting Europe."  The piece comes on the heels of the German Minister of Education and Science resigning (or being asked to resign) in the wake of his dissertation being found to include a lot of plagiarism.  Evidently, it's fairly common for European politicians, say up and coming in ministries or departments of this and that, to do doctorates along the way.  Or if not common, at least not shockingly uncommon.

Weber-Wulff points out that

Just looking at the CVs of some of the authors who have been exposed as plagiarists, one wonders how it would be possible for them to do research, hang out at libraries, wait forever for inter-library loans, and get everything written up, as a mere sideline to their already very demanding lives as active politicians.

That is to say, these aren't folks like most PhD candidates, who are working towards a PhD near the beginnings of a hoped for career; they're more mid-career, using the PhD as a sort of stepping stone. 

I have to say, something about this smells fishy.

I have to say, I haven't looked at the dissertations in question, or done the research, but from what Weber-Wulff writes, it sounds like this is far more than just a few missed quotation marks, and more substantial parts of arguments being lifted.

I think about my field, about my dissertation, and I imagine that if I'd try to lift a substantial chunk of someone's published argument without acknowledging it appropriately, my dissertation director and first reader would have seen it easily, and I would have heard about it in no uncertain terms.  (Assuming that it was an early draft, maybe they would have just corrected me and chided me and such, but I can't imagine them not taking it seriously.)  They certainly wouldn't have signed the paper that says that I could have a PhD, too. 

But somehow, the dissertation directors of these politicians did sign those papers.  (Well, I'm assuming they sign papers there, too.)  Did they not notice significant plagiarism?  (Are they not up on the other stuff written about their area of study?  Did they not actually bother reading the dissertations?)  Or did they just not care?


If these are mid-career politicians, then they're people with connections, and not, like most PhD candidates in this country at least (and I think Europe's way different, more on that later), who are pretty much full time working towards their degree (most often with some kind of part time or fellowship sort of work on the side to pay rent and eat and such).

That leads me to wonder about graduate programs accepting these folks.  It's not a big leap for me to imagine that a political functionary, with connections in some party or whatever, deciding to pick up a grad degree would be welcome at a lot of grad programs.  If there's money changing hands, then the political functionary is probably paying rather than being paid; and if there's no money, well then at least there's the potential benefit of having a political functionary with some connection to a school or department.  So I can see where a university might welcome a political functionary, and might easily make that welcome known to its faculty.

What I'm wondering, then, is if in addition to looking carefully at the politicians, someone should be looking at the degree-granting institutions and at the dissertation directors/readers.

What's the payoff for them to have signed off or granted degrees to plagiarists?
 

(My vague understanding is that graduate work in most European countries is much more research based than in the US, that PhD students don't take classes, but start in PhD programs already pretty much focused in and ready to research because their bachelors' degrees are more focused on their subject area and include far less general education and such.)

What a Grad Student Should Know

Horace over at To Delight and Instruct has asked folks to contribute things that grad students should read. So here's my go:

At my university, we make a lot of effort to help our students see that their liberal arts education has taught them valuable skills that they can actually use to get a job as well as to live a well-considered life. The Dean goes around talking to classes about what employers of all sorts want from college graduates. We faculty learn from resources from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Our career services helps students write resumes that relate what they've learned in classes to the skills employers are looking for.

We have a fair bit of contact with alumni, most of whom leave college and start careers, and they largely seem to tell us that they really do appreciate and use skills in writing, critical reading, oral presentation, listening carefuly, analyzing data of different sorts (numerical, graphic, and textual), understanding cultural and historical contexts, etc. They relate that doing group projects taught them important leadership skills, and encourage students to do more of those sorts of projects. Those who studied abroad talk about the importance of that experience for their education. And those who've been deeply involved in community or university service find new ways to serve their communities and find that service enriches their lives.

In grad school, it's easy to forget that you learned and reinforced a ton of useful skills as an undergrad, and that, in fact, you're learning and developing new skills as a graduate student.

And it's even easier to forget that there are wonderful lives to be lived outside academics.

When you're in a grad program, there's a huge investment in doing that graduate program, emotional, temporal, financial. It's painful to get an A-, to worry about passing exams, jumping hoops, fellowships, teaching. Typically, you're spending your time at an R1 institution, amongst people who've never had a job outside academics, and who really can't imagine other possibilities. And some of those people are total jerks.

Here's what you should know:

1) Getting a PhD doesn't make you a good, moral, ethical, decent, smart person. Sometimes, it has the opposite effect. Look around: see those professors who are jerks? They probably have PhDs (or some terminal degree).

2) If you don't love teaching, get out while the getting's good. Relatively few people end up in R1s, and even those people make appearances in classrooms. (If you love teaching, there are lots of ways to be involved in teaching outside college and university settings!)

3) If the politics of academia make you miserable, leave. Heck, go join the administrative side and change things! (Maybe you can change things from inside as a faculty member, but I really haven't seen that happen except in very tiny ways.)

4) Yes, your work in [enter obscure subject here] is fascinating! But in the grand scheme of things, lots of other lines of work are fascinating. Face it, the person who collects garbage or trucks vegetables from farms contributes more to the basic living of people than most academics ever will.

5) There's a huge opportunity cost to spending 8 or so years earning a PhD, especially in the humanities where, for your labor, you're likely to get an entry level tenure track job starting in the mid 30-40K range.

So, if you're unhappy in graduate school, realize that you can leave, and there's no shame in leaving. Choosing to leave (or heck, even being kicked out of a phud program) doesn't make you a lesser person.

Sometimes, just realizing that you can leave will make it easier to stay. And you'll make the decision, and not just live in misery. Know also that you'll probably find a really good job (or jobs, or careers) outside academics, making a decent salary (probably more than in academics) and doing meaningful, good work. And, most people in non-academic jobs have a LOT more choice about where they'll live, and if that's important to you, that's important. (Not that I don't love winters... okay, I hate winters. Why can't my school open a campus in Hawaii?)

When I was in grad school, I knew a number of people who left our grad program for a variety of reasons, including the smartest grad student I knew. And I knew some great people who didn't get academic tenure-track jobs after they'd earned their phuds. And those people, to my knowledge, have fulfilling and interesting jobs and lives.

All those skills you learned as an undergraduate, all the additional skills you've honed doing grad work, all of those are actually meaningful in lots of jobs and careers. If you're not sure of that, go visit your local career center and start thinking about how you can explain how your skills help you contribute to an employer.

Make up a resume, and maybe even put yourself up for some jobs. It's good to have an alternative and to know that you have that alternative. Knowledge is power.