Grad School: the Institution

We’ve seen how grad school serves the student by providing apprentice training and serves the faculty by perpetuating the profession with its values, hierarchies, and myths.  But what about the institution?  Like fish in the sea, both students and faculty live, move, and breathe within the institution that supports and surrounds them, yet remain largely unconscious of how it operates.  It’s an environment that we take for granted.  But the economics and politics that govern the “real world” also govern the institution and through it the real lives of students and faculty alike.

Marc Bousquet, who blogs for the Chronicle on labor issues in academia, argues that one’s most employable years as an academician are the years of grad school, when there are plenty of teaching jobs to go around.  You would think, he says, that getting the degree would make you more employable, but the reverse is true. Once you get the degree, your chances of finding a job drop sharply, and the older you get, the less employable you are.  The reason?  Market forces.

Bousquet maintains that grad students provide cheap labor for the university to staff introductory courses that regular faculty don’t want to teach.  In addition, doctoral programs enhance the institution’s prestige, thus attracting star faculty as well as grant money.  Although the students obviously benefit from this arrangement – they gain knowledge, skills, and entry-level credentials – the profession and the institution benefit more.  The university does not take responsibility for the lack of employment opportunities once they have done their job of training.  Degree in hand, you are out the door and on your own.

When I went through grad school back in the 1970’s we got no training in how to teach and no professional coaching at all.  Happily, much has changed for the better in this regard.   At the University of Nevada-Reno, for example, grad students in the Literature and Environment Program receive many hours of instruction in professional skills such as networking, publication, conferencing, and applying for jobs, as well as in teaching, research, and scholarship; the faculty take an active interest in each student and provide intensive coaching.  As a result, their students fare comparatively well once they leave.  But no amount of such effort can erase the dismal job market figures or alleviate what Bousquet calls the “great depression” from which academia currently suffers, where two thirds of recent PhD’s will fail to secure full-time, tenure track jobs.

Under such conditions, many will settle for part-time or adjunct positions, which do not pay a living wage, others will sidestep into administration, while others may quit the profession entirely and reinvent themselves in some other line of work, anything from law to business to driving a cab.  This may well happen to you.  But for now, while you are in grad school, the question is how to live a balanced life under the exploitive tradeoffs of apprenticeship.  How can you make it work for you?  How can you feed your spirit while feeding the rat?

(For more on the ideas and writings of Marc Bousquet, visit his video blog site.)

 

Grad School: Training for the Profession

During my first year in graduate school, I was amazed at the low grades I got on papers.  After routinely receiving A’s for original thought and dynamic writing, I was now getting B’s with brief, discouraging comments.  Back in college we had been encouraged to do our own thinking first and look at the criticism only later, if at all.  I had always felt gratified and affirmed when some critic’s interpretation matched my own, and my professors had apparently felt so too.  But all that changed when I got to grad school, and the reasons remained maddeningly obscure. On the surface, everything looked the same, but underneath, something else had to be going on, because it all felt different. I spent most of an increasingly neurotic year before stumbling upon the truth.

That spring, in a seminar on Renaissance literature, I was assigned a paper on John Skelton’s “The Tunning of Elinour Rumminge.”  Skelton was Henry VIII’s court poet and wrote bawdy doggerel that must have pleased his sovereign but sounded, to my twentieth century ear, like something out of Monty Python, minus the wit. “The Tunning of Elinour Rumminge” describes with relish how three hags disgrace themselves after getting drunk in a tavern. I am no prude, but I had to gag it down, and after cudgeling my brain could come up with absolutely nothing worthwhile to say.  That’s when criticism came to the rescue.  In despair, I searched out the three extant articles, summarized their contents, did a simple comparison/contrast, and reported the results.  Imagine my surprise when the paper received an A with the comment, “This is the most mature work of yours that I’ve seen.”

That’s when I realized that grad school and college had very different goals, even though they employed similar means. College aimed to educate and develop the whole person toward a life of responsible citizenship, whereas grad school aimed to train professional scholars.  College served society; grad school served the profession.  That’s why the professors cared more about our mastery of the secondary literature than about our appreciation of the wisdom and beauty of the poetry itself.

Every profession needs rites and symbols of initiation to perpetuate itself. Grad school takes naïve lovers of the arts and sciences and turns them into serious professionals, well-versed in the lore, the lingo, and the rules of their chosen game.  It takes people and makes them into players.  In the process, it provides high-status jobs for the elite and low-status, low-paid labor for the institution.  As for the students, how they play once they graduate, and how they fare in the game, is up to them.

To achieve and sustain balance under such circumstances takes deliberate imagination.  Stay tuned the institutional perspective, followed by more tools and lessons from the ASLE workshop.

 

Balance in Grad School: Challenges

Balancing in grad school require, first, recognition and naming of the extraordinary challenges one must face.  Grad school looks like college but does not feel like college.  You go to classes, take seminars, write papers, and work with professors, just as you did before and with great success.  After all, it was high grades and glowing recommendations that got you into grad school.  It was supposed to be more of the same only bigger, better, and more prestigious. What happened?  Why all this anxiety and confusion? Why is it suddenly so hard to write those papers and speak up in class with confidence?  Why does life feel as if it’s narrowing instead of opening out?  Maybe if we just work harder …

Grad school has an undeniable allure.  First, there’s the dream of a university position, both now and later on.  A teaching or research fellowship does constitute a paid position, even if you are still an apprentice and therefore, by definition, exploited.  You can still wrap your ego in the cloak of a prestigious research institution and nurse the hope that a regular, similar position will magically follow once you finish your dissertation, despite the terrible numbers reported on the job market.  Grad work allows you to stay in school, insulated from the economy and postponing the cold bath that comes with entry into the “real world.”  Moreover, there are tangible payoffs in terms of the work itself, which you love: you get to read, conduct experiments, write and publish papers, teach, all of which feed your spirit while buffing your vita.  What’s not to like?

It’s not long before reality begins to intrude.  After only a few weeks, you may begin to awaken from this sleep of reason.  The professors, who in undergraduate school basted you with interest, encouragement, and constructive criticism, now seem critical, skeptical, and demanding.  They often seem more impressed with your mastery of the secondary literature, which too often seems clogged with second-rate ideas, than with original thinking.  After dreaming of studying with the greats, you now despair of finding a mentor.  It’s baffling, bewildering.

Consider, however, that if brilliance and originality got you into grad school, they are  also what got your professors to the top of their field.  What are the chances that your brilliance and originality will coincide with theirs?  To gain and maintain the big-league reputations so vital to the continuance of their programs, grad professors must constantly generate and publish cutting-edge research.  The care and feeding of stardom is a more than full time job. There are only twenty four hours in a day, and grad professors are only human.  Few of them have the inner security or ego strength to set aside their own agendas and enter with wholeheartedness into the growth of their students.  Especially when they know, deep down, that these students’ work will eventually make their own obsolete.  They have the unenviable job of training the competition.  Talk about a double bind!

Think for a moment about the professors you knew in grad school.  How many seemed to be leading convincing lives?  How many were balanced themselves?  You may have known a few, either personally or by reputation.  Some had learned to be true mentors, mastering the arts of tough love and empowerment, guiding without directing, able to let go at the right time.  It’s an extraordinary sacrifice.

Meanwhile, most of us have to navigate grad school without true mentors.  We have to find our own way, working toward balance as best we can.  The good news is that this struggle, pursued with deliberate imagination, can become an invaluable part of our education.  It can make us strong and graceful.

 

Grad School: An Example of Balance

Here is a detailed example of balance in grad school that was presented at the June ASLE workshop, reprinted here with the author’s permission.

“I remember grad school as competitive and neurotic, with everyone obsessing about their work and generally bent to the task.  In this unwholesome environment, Tom H. stood out.  He was physically healthy, smart, good looking, and seemed remarkably sane.  He climbed mountains, played hockey, lived in a neat and tasteful apartment, grew basil and tomatoes in a backyard garden, and studied hard but not too hard. He never complained or put anybody down in conversation.  Intellectually, he engaged issues vigorously but could also be convinced: he was that rare thing, a truly rational person.  He focused on mainstream literature of the Renaissance and seemed generally skeptical of literary theory, although he was well-informed.  Overall, he struck me as very well-balanced and emotionally secure, something that I myself certainly was not.  He had a good sense of humor and a diverse and loyal circle of friends; I believe that he inaugurated the tradition of dinner parties where each guest would bring an offering to the evening’s entertainment, perhaps a poem to read or an instrument to play.  He got involved with one of the undergraduate colleges, coaching intramural hockey and organizing faculty-student get-togethers.  Later, when he was denied tenure despite prize-winning publications, he reinvented himself, first as a dean and then as a lawyer.”

In discussion the group derived several key tools from this story: pay attention to your bodily health, cultivate diverse friendships, get involved with undergraduate life, make room for self-nurturing activities such as gardening, cooking, or entertaining, and above all treat your career with a light but sensitive touch.

Next up:  More tools from the ASLE workshop

 

Balance in Grad School: Examples from the ASLE Workshop

We asked participants at our June 2009 workshop to think about people they had known in grad school who were leading convincing lives.  They had to scratch their heads for a moment.  Most of us remember grad school as a period of anxiety and stress, when we are all bound up with ourselves, studying for exams, trying to finish our dissertations, and arming ourselves to face the hopeless odds of the job search.  Among survivors, grad school is hardly remembered as a time of fun, fulfillment, or healthy relationships.

Our yoga balance posture for grad school is the Eagle  Pose.  When you are all wrapped up in yourself, how can you stay on your feet, and even stretch upward, without toppling over?  How can your energy be oriented around the emerging self without strangling it or flying outward in all directions?  It is not easy, but it can be done.

One person remembered a colleague who worked on building a canoe in his spare time.  Another recalled a friend who spent time socializing, often at a local watering hole where he played darts. Another had a friend who liked to act.  Another maintained “two identities,” doing research and playing sports.   Still another, a woman in her 40’s, seemed to “glow” even though her free-thinking put her at odds with prevailing intellectual fashions; she was stressed but not up tight, and she seemed happy amid the “creative chaos” of her life and work.

In discussion the group decided that convincing lives in grad school seemed to “radiate outward.”  These people did their work but also connected to something else.  Some brought family or regional traditions with them, such as the fellow from the South who held “bream cookouts” for his colleagues.  Another described one friend who took a menial stocking job at Target and would bring back  “really refreshing” stories. “These kinds of things buoyed us,” she said.  Reaching beyond your work, connecting to a larger community, and self-nurturing activities seemed to be key tools for balance here.

Up next: a detailed case

 

Welcome Back

With the turn of seasons an the start of a new academic year, we are now back with more ideas and insights for staying alive. Stay tuned for weekly postings that explore the four stages of academic life, unpack the master metaphors of our profession, and offer tools for balancing suggested by participants at our recent workshops.

Because we hope to grow a online community of thoughtful people pursuing balance and integrity in their academic lives, please do not hesitate to share your own ideas and stories by posting comments. Wisdom can lead to empowerment only if we pass along the gifts of experience and insight. Grace does not work in isolation!

As a way to get started, we invite you to try the writing prompt from our recent ASLE workshop that Mark described in his previous post. Pick a phase of your career, anywhere between grad school and retirement, and write about someone you knew who appeared to lead a convincing life. Just write for five or ten minutes, no more than a page.

What can this example teach us? Feel free to share in a comment to any of our forthcoming posts on the various phases of a career.

 

A Writing Prompt

Write for five minutes about one person who you believe lives a convincing life in the academy.

I’m grateful for John’s recent summary of our workshop in Victoria. I thought I would follow with this specific writing prompt for those of you interested in the conversation about staying alive. As John mentions in his post, the most illuminating part of our workshop was listening to one another describe people we knew who live convincing lives in the academy. If you take this up, you might consider writing about someone in one of the four phases of academic life we identify: 1) graduate school, or apprenticing (immersed in culture; involvement and engagement; observing culture and persons; learning and growing; choosing work you love; investing in the self; 2) the warrior phase (creating Place, in the tenure stream, outside tenure stream, administration, nonacademic; looking to colonize structures and spaces; diversifying options; keeping moving; 3) the settler and householder phase (inhabiting places, or degrees of permanence; thinking within and beyond institution; learning and growing with students; cultivating a beginner’s mind); and 4) the eldering phase (sharing experience, story, wisdom; modeling health, growth, vitality; giving back to the community though mentoring).

The stories we shared in Victoria corresponded well to what we believe are seven virtues for living a fulfilling life in academics: centeredness, wholeness, compassion, forgiveness, generosity; imagination; and collaboration. Do you have a story to share?

 

Report from ASLE Victoria

We offered an updated version of our “Staying Alive” workshop at the biennial conference of ASLE in Victoria BC earlier this month.  About twenty faculty attended, representing every career stage and variety of institution.  We piloted an enhanced format and a new series of ideas.  It was great fun and encouraged us to think about taking our show on the road.  For those of you who attended, we hope you’ll keep reading this blog and use it to carry on the conversation.  For those who missed it, here’s a brief report.

We began with a circle and introductions.  Mark then read our “recently discovered fragment of a draft of “Walden,” which supposedly details Thoreau’s disenchantment with academe.  Knowing smiles did not begin to break out until he was about halfway through, and he laughingly explained that, when he read it as part of his acceptance speech for a teaching award back home at Keene State, no one got the joke until he had finished and remarked, “Of course this is only a parody.”

We then spent a half hour presenting basic concepts, some of which have appeared in these blogs: the dimensions of person, profession, and institution, the challenge of leading a balanced life, and the necessity of pursuing your own personal growth.  We used yoga balancing postures as the master metaphor, explaining that balance is a process of entering and sustaining dynamic equilibrium.

Dancer Pose

It is effortful, requiring both strength and coordination, and it manifests internally as aliveness or pleasure while manifesting externally as beauty. There is typically a single axis or center, about which the other limbs configure, so that there are always four “points” in play.  In our model these are the person, the profession, the institution, and the phase of life or career.  We offer tools for balancing, which can be thought of as ways of organizing energy flows.

The four phases of an academic career we correlate to Erik Erikson’s stages of adult life, but also to the traditional Indian model, in which a man (sic) is first a student or apprentice, then a warrior, then a householder, and finally a sadhu or yogi practicing in the forest.  For academic people, the apprentice phase is graduate school, where we are all learning the ropes (age 22-28).  The comes the warrior phase, where one struggles to find a place in the world (28-38).  Next comes the settler/householder phase (38-55), where one exercises leadership and achieves productivity and honor in the community.  And finally comes the elder phase (55+), when one becomes a wisdom carrier and story-teller.  (Mentoring and faculty coaching programs typically target the first two phases and neglect the latter two, but we feel that all are important and worth addressing.)

After this introduction, we moved on to discussions of each individual phase, a half-hour each.  We asked everyone to do a short free-writing on someone they knew who had led a convincing life during that phase.  Then we shared and discussed these impressions, looking for tools we could identify and use.  These discussions proved extremely rich and exciting, no doubt because people seldom have such an opportunity to explore their deepest feelings and personal history in a professional setting free of competition. By the end of our three-hour session we had developed quite a few tools and were able to wrap up with a synthesis of principles and strategies for balanced living.

We’ll elaborate on some of these ideas and tools in subsequent posts.  Please send us your views and let us know if your colleagues might benefit from a workshop like this.

Note:  institutions represented at the Victoria workshop included Lafayette College, Salisbury University, University of Northern BC,  University of Gothenburg (Sweden), Middlebury College, University of Dayton, Mount Holyoke College,  South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, University of Minnesota – Morris, Penn State University – Altoona, and the University of Connecticut.

 

The Bureaucratization of the Imaginative

Among the most pernicious paradoxes of academic scholarship in the humanities is that the demand for publication is most acute in the earliest stages of an academic career when a scholar’s knowledge of a field of study is less developed and the timeline for a writing a book more compressed. As a result of linking publication with the promise of further employment, the stakes are high, and the bureaucratic demand for the publication of books before tenure often produces lesser scholarship—indeed books that are less useful and less interesting to read.

What to do? As John Guillory points out in his most recent essay on scholarship and publication, “How Scholars Read,” the paradox becomes visible as early as graduate school. For graduate faculty know that “the conceptualization of a dissertation project is constrained not by the imagination of the student but by the requisites of a job market that ruthlessly rejects scholarship that does not conform to current models of organization and address current topics.” It is no wonder, then, that many people find themselves doing increasingly specialized work and producing writing that very few people will find reason to read. The costs of doing such work are interesting to consider across the career of a scholar. It would be helpful, for example, to understand how people feel about writing books under duress and without the requisite knowledge and perspective that comes from reading more widely over a longer duration. Unfortunately, I am not able to speak to this condition, as I explicitly made the case to my colleagues in my pre-tenure self-evaluations that I had chosen not to write the book that my dissertation might pretend to be—and that I had chosen not to write one of the possible books that lurked in my dissertation chapters. As my graduate advisor Leroy Searle once generously pointed out, my dissertation pointed to a lifetime of intellectual work. And he was right. For in explicitly rejecting the false expediency that comes out of equating scholarly engagement with publication, I’ve been able to write (and publish) consistently and with pleasure across the first ten years of my career as a tenure-track faculty member. Looking back over the thinking I’ve done that has found its way into print I recall the challenges and pleasures of working to make a scholarly argument. I also see how the thinking I was doing in no way called for a book that I (and others) might very likely have looked back on with far less interest or enjoyment.

Guillory’s “How Scholars Read” makes visible the kinds of reading scholars do of one another’s work. As he points out, the proliferation of unread or casually read scholarship in the humanities no longer serves the function of what we might call progress, the discoveries and new arguments and innovative methods we associate with genuine intellectual work. More importantly, such proliferation of monographs, and the system of academic advancement that drives such publication, diminishes the value of teaching. “Would it be healthier in some ways if we scholars taught more and wrote less?” Guillory asks. “When I have tended this modest proposal to colleagues,” he goes on to say, “I have been greeted with the stunned silence reserved for the most intolerable social impropriety. Such discomfort,” he concludes, “betrays what we have repressed so successfully, the origin of the current system of academic publication and advancement. . .that redistributed labor time from teaching to research.”

The stunned silence of colleagues, I will presume, is the silence of those who are most invested in what Kenneth Burke once called the bureaucratization of the imaginative or, to make my case more directly, those most invested in retaining a particular distribution of work in a university job. While this may seem impertinent, I am increasingly convinced that these investments in the status quo cut to the heart of the relationship between success and happiness in the current academe. I think Guillory’s word “healthier” can be read in more than one way. For me, as someone who teaches in a college that values teaching in its promotion and tenure process, an alternative model for scholarly production need not be antithetical to genuine inquiry and the time it takes to do meaningful scholarly work. In fact I have argued for (and will continue to argue for) retaining a rigorous standard for scholar-teachers and for ongoing and meaningful inquiry across all phases of an academic career. I’ve made this case on my campus, in the context of discussions around standards for tenure and promotion, and I’ve published essays that make visible alternative intellectual trajectories. This is why, perhaps, Guillory’s essay resonates for me. Surely it is time for those who are charged with structuring and implementing graduate education in the humanities to move through their stunned silence and join Guillory—and those of us who have been given the gift of shaping the trajectory of our intellectual lives in a system that values both scholarship and teaching—as we work together to move away from the perpetuation of a unsustainable bureaucratic system that diminishes our scholarly commitments to the humanities

 

Teaching as Vocation, Profession, and Job

Mark Twain once memorably remarked, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The same could be said of teaching. It’s what we do, it’s part of our identity, it’s what we get paid for. But do we really understand it? Do we really want to think about it? Above all, do we really want to look closely at our own practice and try to improve it?

My own experience suggest we do not. As a young assistant professor at an avowedly teaching institution, I was put on the “teaching methods committee”, which sounded like a great assignment until our first meeting. After about half an hour it became clear that everyone around the table thought of themselves as good teachers, were comfortable with their own methods, and were reluctant to engage in any surveys, interviews, observations, or discussions that might lead to questioning or challenging the methods of their colleagues. I could feel the resistance build, thicken, and congeal; by the end, it was stiff and opaque as wax. No change or knowledge would be coming from this committee.

What was going on? I liked my colleagues; they were all devoted teachers, well-read and empathic toward students; they were good citizens in the campus community. Why would they resist learning and self-improvement? Why would they not want to engage their colleagues in dialogue about our essential work?

In my own case, the resistance seemed easy to understand. I was young, untenured, and under the gun. It was an anxious state, but I was used to it. Everyone expected people like me to be earnest, motivated, and nervous. But what about the others? Something else must account for their resistance.

In reflecting on this meeting, and many situations like it over the years, I’ve found it helpful to think about teaching across the three dimensions of persona, profession, and institution. As a vocation, teaching is something that many of us love to do for its own sake. It comes naturally, draws on our native ability to empathize and communicate, feeds our spirits with the satisfaction of nurturing our students’ growth. To pursue your calling is to follow your bliss, to feel the joy that comes when your work and your identity move into phase.

Teaching at its most satisfying and effective always rests on a personal transaction between the teacher and the student, where the teacher’s passion and excitement sparks a kindred interest. That is why most learning actually occurs outside of class, and why teaching is so hard to evaluate. What works for one student may not work for another, and the results may not be apparent for years. True teaching arises out of relation, as Martin Buber observed, and how can you measure a relationship?

Evaluation is of most concern to the profession and the institution. The profession consists of one’s (mostly senior) colleagues, who function like a club or a guild: to get in you must qualify and must also be chosen. In practice the boundary between these criteria tends to blur. Much time and effort go into rationalizing decisions about the merits of someone’s work that have been made quite subjectively. And “peer review” is simply another name for professional privilege, besides being a contradiction in terms: how can the parties be considered equal when one has the power to judge the other? All professions work to secure their own existence; they assiduously protect their identity, status, and privileges, and academia is no exception. When you are on the inside, tenured and all, one of your privileges is not having to be evaluated; that’s one reason, I think, that my senior colleagues on the teaching methods committee did not want to investigate. They did not want to rock the boat by challenging, even implicitly, the privilege of their colleagues. That’s how they all got along.

The institution also comes into play. In this context, teaching is merely a job. More on that next time.