I was recently reading Dr. Seuss to my 2-year-old daughter, when, bored of The Cat in the Hat and The Lorax, I picked up a lesser book from the Seussian canon: I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew. To my surprise, the plot of that little-known children’s book reminded me a great deal of the current crisis of American higher education. The characters search for a mystical place “where they never have troubles, at least very few.” We in higher education—particularly graduate education in the humanities—have long believed that such a place existed, and have spent decades plotting and replotting a course.
In their search for Solla Sollew, humanities disciplines have looked inward, isolating themselves from the world. They have been dedicated to recreating the past rather than reinventing themselves. Humanities graduate students—three generations of them—have been trained for worlds that no longer exist, in disciplines that are often tone-deaf to social needs. Many of those students feel lied to, cheated, and abused. It is time to accept that Solla Sollew does not exist. We have only the here and now.
In the past few years, Thomas H. Benton has written three provocative and well-reasoned articles for The Chronicle about the state of graduate education in the humanities. Based on the volume and passion of responses to those articles, he clearly hit a collective nerve. Benton’s essays deal with the twin desires of academics in training: to pursue the so-called life of the mind and to make a decent living. Too many enter graduate school blinded by the appeal of the first and do not realize the difficulties of the latter until it’s too late. They do not calculate the shortage of jobs and the emotional and financial strain of attending graduate school until they are in too deep to turn back. They are convinced they can game the system, that with the right combination of pluck and luck they can get to the Promised Land.
Much of what Benton says resonates with me. In his most recent essay on the topic, “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind’” (February 8), he states that more and more graduate students are from working- to lower-middle-class backgrounds. They were raised to believe that the more education they acquired the better they would fare in life. And yet a starting professor’s salary in the humanities is barely lower-middle class. And far fewer than 50 percent of newly minted Ph.D.'s ever find such a job.
There is, however, a problem with Benton’s analysis. His solution to the crisis seems to rest on limiting the supply of Ph.D.'s—hence the title of another essay, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go” (The Chronicle, January 30, 2009)—at least until demand increases. He has a point, but discouraging would-be applicants will not change graduate education in the way it needs to change. As a graduate dean at a school rooted in the humanities, I spend a great deal of time thinking about this. The common problem for too many in the humanities has been, how do we return to a way of life that is, to be honest, completely lost? Those academics might as well be plotting toward Solla Sollew.
We can lament the decline from some imagined Golden Age, but that will not change our circumstances. We might shrink graduate programs, but that will only treat the symptoms, not the disease. We all believe that the liberal arts are important. Our challenge in the coming years is to reconnect the arts, humanities, and social sciences to the world, to make them matter again. We need to break down the barriers that isolate us, some of which we erected ourselves. What if we opened up the possible uses for humanities-based graduate education and in the process redefined both our mission and how we measure our success? There is such a crisis in secondary education and within cultural institutions. We live in a world where life-long learning is a reality, yet we respect only a narrow spectrum of education. Why not build bridges between humanities graduate programs and the world?
Higher education is at a crossroads, one only heightened by the current fiscal crisis. The ground has shifted. Public institutions realize that they will never return to the days when they were “adequately” financed by their states or cities. Private institutions now have to convince cash-strapped students that they are worth their high tuition rates. And everyone realizes that tuition and fees cannot continue to rise.
We are all trying to survive the current economic crisis, but survival alone should not be the goal. Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, has said, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.” We must take advantage of the crisis we now face. I fear that if the humanities do not find a way to re-engage the world, too many of us will die the death of a thousand cuts.
To develop new models of graduate education, we must give up the status quo and answer the question of how the humanities can best serve the public—and we need to be concrete. As suggested by a 2008 report from the Council of Graduate Schools, “Graduate Education and the Public Good,” more and more students will be attending graduate schools in the coming years as the M.A. becomes the new B.A., and they will surely turn their backs on humanities education unless we give them a good reason not to. The life of the mind, while important, can’t be all we offer. Students want and deserve a way to make a meaningful and comfortable life.
At one time, the arts and letters were central to the university and an educated public. What we now see as professions, such as business and education, sprang from the liberal arts until we kicked them to the curb as vocational. Now they are eating our lunch. Furthermore, they are incorporating more of the liberal arts than ever before. Maybe we should find ways to partner with professional schools within our universities rather than sneer at them.
It wasn’t too long ago that society looked to the humanities to help explain and shape the world. A half-century ago, intellectuals such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Lionel Trilling spoke to larger audiences than just their seminars or professional associations. We have lost so much ground, and retreated into the university—marching, as they say, on the English department. And what did that get us?
If we want to attract smart, able students and want them to be successful, after they graduate, in the world, we need to rethink what it is that we do. And we need to broaden the conversation to include our students and community partners. We need to develop new models and new partnerships to open opportunities for students. In short, we need to realize we no longer have all the answers. We need to ask what we are training our students for and work backward. Smart, highly trained people are needed in careers beyond university teaching, for example, in secondary education and at cultural institutions. But too many humanities professors hold our noses at such work. It is as if we think life as a perpetual adjunct is far better than teaching high school, or becoming a leader in elementary or secondary education, or working in a museum. But the latter options pay better and have health and retirement benefits.
Too often we overvalue a mirror image of ourselves. In the social sciences, for instance, graduate students have always had opportunities beyond academe. In graduate school, I held a fellowship at an interdisciplinary research center. Today two fellow graduate students at the center, both social scientists, work beyond the academy. One works in private equity and the other is one of the highest officials in New York State’s Department of Labor. Both use the skills they learned in graduate school every day. They are published authors and respected intellectuals. They don’t think of themselves as failures, nor do their professors. And they aren’t. Yet if they had degrees in history or English, how would their disciplines see them? I am afraid to say we would see them not as successes; we would most likely simply forget they existed. Look at graduate program Web pages, highlighting tenure-track student placements while ignoring those teaching at community colleges or working in museums—or, God forbid, in business or government. We define success so narrowly that, given the tight job market, we push out the majority of our own alumni.
There is something sad and terribly wrong with that. We need to find a way to recognize more than one successful outcome for graduate education. Our job is to train smart, able people to contribute to the intellectual and cultural life of the nation, and we have failed.
My hope is that we emerge from this crisis with a firmer connection between graduate schools and the world than we had when we entered. Our students should be trained for careers that allow them choices, not cut them off from the world. Opportunities for traditional academic jobs will continue to decline. We must not train our students as we were trained; look where it got us. Maybe the top Ph.D. programs can continue as they have—although I doubt they have as much time as they think—but the rest of us need to be honest. We must tell students what the world really looks like, and develop new curricular innovations and partnerships that can point to new opportunities for our students. And when they pursue those opportunities, we need to celebrate and embrace them as successes.
This generation of college and graduate students has spent an enormous amount of time and energy volunteering and participating in other forms of experiential learning, only to find that form of education not valued or practiced in graduate schools. Undergraduate education is adapting, and now it is our turn.
At Drew University we have made painful decisions to cut graduate programs that couldn’t adapt. We have also redesigned existing programs and designed new programs, including a new Ph.D. in history and culture. We have developed partnerships with medical centers, school districts, and cultural institutions to provide our students with opportunities to apply their knowledge in real-world settings. I hope that our graduate students will expand the avenues of possible success and take their knowledge and learning into the world. Drew University might be small, but I believe we are heading in the right direction, and might, in fact, be leading.