training for nothing, reprint,
- From: "Aging_Recycled_Scientist" <biker3a@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 8 Dec 2005 00:36:46 -0800
http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05nd/05ndheat.htm
Web site also has links to other critical articles on the academic
pyramid scheme.
Trained for Nothing
Why do we still structure doctoral training around tenure-track
positions in universities? The PhD can lead to so many other places.
By Joseph Heathcott
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dreams deferred and hopes dashed make for heart-wrenching personal
narratives, as we see weekly in the Chronicle of Higher Education. No
other trade publication reveals such pathos in the industry it watches.
Stories abound of tenure cases capriciously and unfairly decided,
budgets shredded owing to fiscal austerity, departments rent by raging
canon wars, and burdens borne unequally by faculty members. Few topics,
however, elicit as much anxiety as the crisis in the academic job
market.
Week after week, graduate students, adjunct instructors, and recently
hired tenure-track professors recount harrowing stories of applicants
who go in search of tenure-track jobs only to find themselves locked
into a series of low-wage temporary positions. I have been moved many
times by the witness of the talented men and women who spill their guts
to the paper of record for higher education. Yet the time for witness
is past; it is now time to act. The tenacity of the job crisis means
that it is time to rethink the nature of graduate training in America.
Dimensions of the Crisis
The numerical mismatch between seekers and jobs in academe is now well
known, and it cannot be explained through anecdotes about behavior. For
most applicants to any given tenure-track position, rejection has
little to do with biography; it is rarely the result of inadequacy,
poor preparation, personal defects, or wearing a bow tie to your
interview (which I was warned against doing by well-meaning advisers).
Rather, the job crisis is a structural problem, produced by the
introduction of scarcity through real, identifiable, and thus
reversible policy decisions. The contour and durability of the crisis
are shaped by state legislative priorities, tanking endowments,
declining endowment payout rates, and blockbuster investments in campus
plant that divert funds from classroom instruction. Within these
parameters, university and college administrators seek to balance
budgets on the backs of a growing casual labor pool. With high levels
of PhD production and a shrinking number of tenure lines in American
universities, academe has settled in for a long period of struggle over
the terms of intellectual labor. It will take sustained pressure from
multiple stakeholders to redress employment grievances in today's
university.
Still, just and equitable employment policies will mitigate only half
of the problem. The number of positions available in higher education
might rise slightly, but the number of applicants will remain high. A
fundamental problem will remain: departments continue to run doctoral
programs on an outdated guild model in which professors and
matriculants tacitly agree that the only worthy outcome for the
apprentice is to land a journeyman position in academia, eventually
becoming a tenured master. No amount of restructuring can address this
problem. It is time we reevaluate our system of doctoral training to
exorcise the guild model once and for all.
I am not suggesting that we replace the guild model with a bland
careerism that reduces graduate education to an exercise in job
training. Graduate programs must not aim to produce workers alone; they
must also help shape students into balanced, well-adjusted colleagues
capable of living good lives. A sense of passionate vocation once
called all of us to be historians or anthropologists or theologians. It
is around this sense of vocation that we should reorient graduate
education. After all, there are many places to practice our
disciplines-many potential vocations-and the academy is not
necessarily the best. We need to root out the assumptions embedded
within the guild system that make the tenure-track academic job the
central trajectory of doctoral training.
Purpose of the PhD
Dismantling the guild system requires that we unravel the underlying
correspondence between the PhD and the professoriate. Obviously, the
doctorate is the gateway degree to a career in academia, but it is also
a gateway to other possibilities.1
Why, then, do we structure doctoral training so closely around the
increasingly ephemeral reward of a tenure-track position in a
university or college? On balance, little in the way of ordinary PhD
training prepares graduate students to become professors. The PhD
qualifies us to do original research, but it does not necessarily
prepare us to teach. It qualifies us to undertake large and complex
projects, but not necessarily to become university faculty members. It
qualifies us to develop conceptual frameworks and to contribute
original work to our disciplines, but not necessarily to be good
mentors, collaborators, and colleagues. It is a necessary but
insufficient condition for the reproduction of the professoriate.
If we want to dismantle the guild system, we are going to have to
recast the purpose of the PhD, broadening its scope as a degree. Doing
so will require graduate educators to embed doctoral training within a
much broader range of professional possibilities. To do this, we need
to rethink our role along two lines: first, as intellectual mentors and
colleagues to our students and, second, as professional mentors willing
to do the work needed to introduce our students to multiple
possibilities and to help them succeed in whatever fields they pursue.
These tasks may take many of us outside the mentoring roles to which we
are accustomed, but the futures of our students make it worth the
effort.
Active Mentoring
The core purpose of graduate education is to train graduate students to
master disciplines, conceptual frameworks, and research skills.
Graduate seminars help in this training, but a vital graduate
curriculum also includes constant, active mentoring of graduate
students. Unfortunately, we have mistaken master-apprentice
relationships for mentoring. Molding a graduate student in our own
image through a period of indentured servitude does not constitute
mentoring. Although our primary task is to model intellectual rigor and
commitment, mentorship also includes the work that we do to nurture
aspirations, accentuate native talents, impart skills, build
confidence, and direct energies without crushing a set of goals that
may be different from our own.
Within the past few years, many administrators and graduate educators
have mobilized to incorporate training, programming, and support for
the pursuit of so-called alternative careers into graduate education.
This well-intentioned approach only reinforces the sanctity of the
tenure-track job. After years of training students to behave and think
like professors, the idea that we can shove them into "alternative
careers" looks like shutting the barn door after the stampede. We
need to rethink graduate training not by tacking on a few alternatives
at the end of the curriculum, but by changing the basis of graduate
student formation.
New Way to Educate
Rethinking graduate education will require a substantial commitment of
time and resources and trial and error. In the November-December 2002
issue of Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, Jody Nyquist, former
director of the "Re-Envisioning the PhD" project of the Pew
Charitable Trusts, warns that doctoral training must remain a pursuit
tailored to individual interests, needs, and passions. Nevertheless,
she concludes that responsible doctoral training should convey a small
but powerful set of core competencies: disciplinary knowledge;
vocational knowledge; ethical conduct and professional responsibility;
communicative ability; pedagogic skills, broadly construed; and an
understanding of the value of diversity.2
Departments and programs, particularly in the often-understaffed
humanities, cannot accomplish these goals on their own. Students,
faculty, directors of graduate studies, chairs, deans of colleges and
graduate schools, vice presidents of research, and offices of
university presidents must work together to strengthen and broaden the
PhD. Schools must pool resources to create teaching centers, career and
vocation offices, professional development workshops, ethics panels,
multidisciplinary conferences, retreats, internships, externships, and
other opportunities. Doctoral education is, after all, a
self-organizing system-no one is in charge, but many have a stake in
the outcome.
Departments, however, have a central role in one crucial arena: the
culture of graduate education. The most limiting aspect of doctoral
training, the guild model, is embedded in departmental culture-from
the organization of the curriculum and exam structure to the ways in
which faculty conduct seminars and approach mentoring relationships.
The guild model cannot be undone through institutional fiat; it must be
challenged at the level of the department, where we have the most
leverage to make changes.
Graduate educators should orient incoming students extensively,
describing each stage in the program, relating the components of
mastery at each stage, and discussing the criteria for overall success.
Faculty members also should explain to graduate students the procedures
used to make important decisions about admissions, funding, curriculum,
advising, and the allocation of resources. Graduate programs should
establish a coordinated, uniform dispersal of information, bolstered by
clear feedback channels and opportunities for dialogue on process.
Graduate educators should demystify the academy as well, introducing
graduate students to the system of university governance and explaining
to them how the institution handles issues of finance, policy, and
development-in other words, they should teach graduate students how
their workplace functions. Faculty members should also lay bare their
own work lives, including distribution of efforts among research,
teaching, and service; the meaning of research, teaching, and service;
and structures of internal and external reward. Departments could offer
an extensive orientation session, a weekend retreat, a series of
in-service workshops, or a course or cluster of courses on these
important professional concerns.
The debates in higher education over the nature and purpose of graduate
education should be part of the curriculum. Exposing graduate students
to opinions, ideas, and positions on doctoral education socializes them
into the profession and their discipline. We should train graduate
students to recognize the many and varied stakeholders in higher
education, not to produce cynics, but rather to make the mechanics of
the institutions transparent. Shielding graduate students from this
information disempowers them and cheats us out of valuable future
allies. It also puts our students at a disadvantage as they move out
into the world, take jobs, and forge professional lives.
We should also be ready to scrutinize the received traditions of
graduate education. For example, it is time to rethink the tired system
of qualifying exams-the seemingly unbreakable heritage of guild
hazing that we put our graduate students through merely because we had
to go through it. Qualification exercises should evaluate students in
the skills and knowledge sets most closely associated with their
discipline and the profession.
Unfortunately, nearly all exam processes place students in unnatural
arrangements, demanding that they model skills (short-term bursts of
test taking, for example) that they will never need in professional
life. Instead, exams could be in the form of writing projects that are
essential to student development, such as an extensive literature
review or an original evidentiary argument suitable for publication in
a refereed journal. Rather than sit for six hours regurgitating answers
to preselected test questions, students could be involved in generating
theoretical, methodological, and evidentiary problems that they pursue
over the course of a semester or year.
Different Models
Most important, however, faculty should expose graduate students to as
many models as possible of satisfying vocations and professional lives.
This exposure begins in the university itself. In the best of worlds, a
student's adviser will serve as a model of the ethical scholar and an
engaged citizen of the academy and the profession. Most students,
however, will need to see many versions of the academic life, from
other professors to administrators, librarians, center directors, and
clinical faculty.
Moreover, exposure to professional models must go well beyond the
academy. Graduate students benefit tremendously from contact with
museum curators, archivists, consultants, journalists, editors,
publishers, agency directors, high school teachers, community college
administrators, cultural resources specialists, and other
professionals. This contact can come in the form of classroom visits,
special workshops, lecture series, or courses. Whether students are
bound for the tenure track or for paths beyond the academy, they will
grow substantially from interaction with people who have taken their
graduate degrees in a variety of directions.
The formation of graduate students must, however, remain an
intellectual endeavor first and foremost; it cannot be equated with job
training. The PhD is a research degree, a marker of significant
intellectual accomplishment, and a mode of knowledge production. Yet it
does us little good as graduate educators to pretend that the PhD is
divorced from the realities of professions, institutions, and
stakeholders. We should embrace vocation as a core value of our
enterprise and nurture the passions, aspirations, and hard-nosed skills
of students. This goal can be accomplished without displacing the
intellectual ground of graduate education and can in fact become part
of it.
As a graduate teacher in a Jesuit university, I embrace the mission to
educate "the whole person." The guild model is incompatible with
this mission. Treating graduate students as whole persons means seeing
them as much more than just future tenure-track faculty. Graduate
students who are disempowered, anxious, nervous, and sick with worry
often reflect divided, disarticulated, poorly conceived and run
programs that treat students as itinerant, one-dimensional characters.
Our efforts to clarify purposes and processes should provide a fuller
context for the development of each student's aspirations, grounding
the student more thoroughly in the business of his or her own
education. Ultimately, when students enter job markets, this broader
training will serve them well. Although we cannot guarantee any student
a job, we can organize graduate training to better prepare students for
the challenges that they will face. Most important, we can restructure
the system of graduate education around a richer set of possibilities,
with a fuller integration of both disciplinary knowledge and vocational
agility.
For much of the twentieth century, the guild model provided a
comforting buffer against the dramatic transformations of higher
education. But PhD programs in the humanities can no longer function as
apprenticeships and remain ethical. The professions have grown far too
complex for our hidebound models of training. We must retain what works
well in the PhD-the rigorous development of knowledge and
research-and jettison what no longer works.
Notes
1. I highly recommend the following resources about alternative
careers, but with a major caveat-they clearly, if unintentionally,
reinforce the auxiliary status of jobs outside of the
professoriate-"Sellout: A Resource for PhDs Considering Careers
Beyond the University," http://www.ironstring.com/sellout; Margaret
Newhouse, Outside the Ivory Tower: A Guide for Academics Considering
Alternative Careers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993);
Maggie Debelius and Susan Basalla, So What Are You Going to Do With
That? A Guide for MAs and PhDs Seeking Careers Outside the Academy (New
York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001). Back to text.
2. Jody Nyquist, a former associate dean at the University of
Washington, directed the "Re-Envisioning the PhD" project until her
retirement in 2003. The project examined the state of graduate
education in America and presented best practices. Much of the material
produced by the project is available at
http://www.grad.washington.edu/envision/. Other national initiatives
include the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation's
"Responsive PhD"; "Preparing Future Faculty," an initiative of
the Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Science Foundation; and the
Carnegie Foundation's "Initiative on the Doctorate." Back to
text.
Joseph Heathcott is assistant professor of American studies and a
graduate faculty member in the Department of American Studies at Saint
Louis University. He is currently a fellow of the American Council of
Learned Societies.
.
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