Are the Humanities Doomed?

On the contrary. As someone who has hired ABDs and recent PhDs, it is clear that there is much these excellent graduate students do not know, and that their graduate faculty at R1 institutions don’t have the time to tell them, or help them with. Our undergraduates get more help from Career Services.

You could tell them that if they choose to go into another field, they won’t be considered failures and pariahs by the people they have come to respect in academia (unfortunately, that might be a lie).Actually, what would be really helpful is if you could encourage your fellow faculty members not to look down their noses when encountering non-R1 professors at various professional functions (like conferences).

I think graduate school is a great thing to pursue if one goes into it for the right reasons. I spent nine years working to a PhD and stopped ABD. I don’t regret not finishing the degree, nor the experiences I had in pursuing it. I enjoyed the course work, the reading, the discussions, the research, the conferences attended, articles written, and the intellectual training and thinking I was taught. I also never expected, necessarily, that I would find a job as a full-time tenure track professor. I did in fact get such a job, despite being ABD, and when I couldn’t finish my degree in my first year in the TT job, I had to move on and did so with no professional regrets (except for letting the department down that hired me with the expectation that I would finish the degree). Graduate school is a good place to be, by and large. You meet smart people who care about thinking and learning. You get a chance to explore a field and its ways of knowing and making sense of the world. You get a chance to teach. You meet people like yourself who care about ideas. You find good places to get an inexpensive beer and a bite to eat with your colleagues; you learn to make due with less money and yet live richly in many ways. There are lots of sacrifices and trade-offs for this life. But it’s a good life even if you don’t go on to become a full-time tenure tracked professor. If you go into ready to come out of it not necessarily being a full-time professor, if you see graduate school as having a value and purpose beyond only being a prerequisite to being a full-time, tenured scholar, then it’s a great thing to do. If you can find your way to a graduate program where in exchange for teaching, you get a tuition waiver, a stipend, and some insurance, you can eke through without adding to your debt load. Working part-time during your time there and/or doing freelance writing, editing, or other work that build on your skills, can supplement your stipend and give you valuable experiences for career options other than being a professor. If you find you love teaching, while you’re in graduate school, see about picking up an adjunct job at a community college to round out your teaching resume. If you find you love writing, see about doing some freelance writing, even if you do pro bono writing for a non profit. Ditto with research. While in graduate school, find time, as precious as time can be, to do work that builds on the skills you’re honing in graduate school.Explore. Be open to a life outside the academy and not fixated only a career in it. This is not to say one should give up on being a full-time professor in a tenure track: those jobs do in fact exist and will need to be filled. But there are fewer openings for the foreseeable future, and so knowing that, be ready and willing and able to do something else if that job just isn’t available to you when you hit the market. The life of the mind can be lived in many other ways and places. And a good graduate student, one who is smart, compassionate, disciplined, and inventive, can remain a scholar and teacher in those places.

Ms. Barreca:If you tell them anything other than the essence of what pontanus so eloquently and accurately suggests in his response you will almost certainly come to regret it. Many years ago, with MA in English Literature nearly in hand, I came to realize that English was becoming, as pontanus says, “the major where students are indoctrinated into the ideology being promulgated, this week, by tenured faculty” etc. I applied the thinking and communication skills developed through my love and study of literature and carved out a career in a totally unrelated area. I pursued the “life of the mind” on my own time, in an environment where I didn’t have to be subjected to a regular force feeding of “cross-dressing in Shakespeare.” I cherish my educational experience in English, but I have no regrets at walking away from what I correctly anticipated the “discipline” would become.

The doom, gloom, and probably personal(probably conservative) frustrations displayed on this thread are mildly amusing. And sure, there are some trends in scholarship – guess we got where we are by exploring new trends in scholarship for both good and ill. People have been predicting the end of humanities since I was in high school in the ’80s. But how about this – Google “most popular college majors.” Throw in “Princeton Review” if you are worried about sources.

[a "paragraphed" version of the post above. Sorry: I don't normally post on these things and didn't realize that continuous type made for an unreadable block of print]What you tell them is this: in the next few years, English departments as such are going to have disappeared. Within 25 years, universities will have large Freshman Comp programs — parents and legislators still subscribe to the whimsical notion that students who have watched 20,000 hours of TV before coming to college, and who have by and large never read a book on their own, can be “taught to write” in two semesters of remedial comp drill — and those who teach in them will be the faculty members presently teaching upper-level courses like “Homoerotic Performativity in Postcolonial Poetry.” There will be no graduate programs and no PhD students in traditional areas of English and American literature. The spurious “specialties” that have taken over English departments –”queer studies,” “disability studies,” feminist ideology, “postcolonial studies,” “popular culture,” etc — will have dried up and blown away. A few universities will have programs grinding out PhDs in “Composition and Rhetoric,” to replace the turnover of faculty in the new English-As-Service-Department that will have then emerged. These programs will try to disguise the fact that they’re preparing people to teach 3rd-grade English (subject-verb agreement, use of the apostrophe) by giving their courses grandiose titles (“Writing Across the Curriculum,” “Cognitive Approaches to Apostrophic Dysfunction,” etc), much as “Departments of Kinesthesiology” today try to disguise the fact that they’re teaching volleyball. The only “English PhDs” in the country will be produced by these Comp and Rhetoric programs.I’ve thought all this for a long time, but it was only the last issue of the Chronicle, with a long article about the wholesale elimination of departments and majors at colleges and universities across the country, that lit the light bulb for me. Right now, it’s departments like American Studies and Oceanography that are taking the hit. BUT the article made it clear that it was only the notion that English departments “have respectable enrollments” that was keeping them off the list. Once you realize that (1) 95% of the enrollment in any given English department is Freshman Comp — in courses taught by graduate student TAs on a slave-labor basis, and that (2) it’s only a matter of time until some administrator, somewhere, figures this out, the next step becomes glaringly obvious. If you abolish the English graduate program at your university and put the tenured faculty to work teaching Freshman Comp, you’ve at a single stroke saved an enormous amount of money and improved the institution. No provost or Vice President, once this is pointed out, will be able to resist the advantages of such a simplification: get rid of a costly graduate program — whose graduates aren’t getting jobs anyway — put the tenured faculty to honest work grading freshman papers, and redirect the huge amount of money you’ve saved to stronger departments in genuine disciplines.In English departments, the mistake was ever to have given in, bit by bit, to identity politics — that is, English as the major where students are indoctrinated into the ideology being promulgated, this week, by tenured faculty and the few assistant professors who have managed to find jobs. If English departments had kept on teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton and Dickens and George Eliot — not “sodomy in Medieval literature” or “cross-dressing in Shakespeare” or whatever, but literature against the background of its own time –a couple of top programs might have survived. But right now PhD programs in every department in the country are indefensible. People in other departments know this. Students know it. It’s only a matter of time before administrators figure it out. The party’s over, and that may not be altogether a bad thing.

Tell them they should only go to graduate school if they know that they are totally unfit for any other career than the scholarly one. Then tell the ones who answer affirmatively that they should only go to graduate school if they figure that spending 7-9 years and incurring debts of over $100K with no prospect of a job with which they can pay back the debt looks like a good life choice for them.

I loved pontanus’ (#12) and newsoffice’s (#15) comments. If “English” is to survive, “… real knowledge … [must be] taught …” instead of identity politics.

You teach graduate students not first-graders. They should be able to understand and work with the current context of the academic domain. Help them in the same ways you have helped previous students; honestly answer their questions, and search for answers you do not know with them. Good luck in the future when tackling difficult to answer questions! The three extremely negative posters should take a less subjective view of the question (as roguerogue does in providing a pragmatic answer to the broad question). Literature departments will most certainly survive (while continuing to change)and thrive. Most English departments do not only offer literature classes focused on identity politics/cultural topics; classes focused on artistic movements, genre, and other literature-focused topics are still quite prominet (if not dominant) in English departments. While required classes can limit graduate students, most still have plenty of open choices to make. I hope they choose better than the “better read than many college proffesors” poster who apparently did not choose well according to his likes/dislikes. “Native American Literature,” “‘reading protest literature,’” and “modern poetry” sure seem to build upon each other and one’s knowledge of literature/language. Also, your strangely shared “cross-dressing in Shakespeare” courses do not fit in English departments complaint is specious. Shakespeare’s plays were to be viewed not read, and he purposefully used gender identity (including cross-dressing cross-dressers/actors) to create irony and enhance his plays’ characters and plots. It sounds like an interesting and valuable class; thankfully, it is offered in several English departments.

A tiny riposte: #18 above, in his or her defense of “reading protest literature” and identity politics and “cross dressing” courses, fails to grasp one important point.The issue of whether or not English departments are done away with over the next 25 years, with their graduate programs being abolished and tenured members put to work teaching Freshman Comp, isn’t going to be decided by exchanges on chat boards. It’s going to be decided by the cold realities of an academic marketplace in which most English departments have debased themselves so drastically as to have become the laughing stock of the teaching profession.Here’s an example. I was talking last week to a graduate school friend who teaches in what used to be one of the great “literary” departments in the country.This was a department with numerous academic stars, great classroom teaching — one boast of his department was that even the most august senior professors, established scholars and winners of numerous academic prizes, annually taught the introductory course in the close reading of poetry — and English as one of the most prestigious majors on campus. That prestige was directly connected to the perceived rigor of the major, which was heavily weighted in favor of earlier English and American literature and drew a large percentage of the brightest students on campus.As my friend put it,”bright undergraduates can see immediately that they need expert help to read authors like Chaucer and Donne and Milton and Samuel Johnson. They don’t need it to ‘read’ TV sitcoms or talk about Paris Hilton.”My friend did a bit of research. When he arrived in his department over 25 years ago, he told me, English had just under 1700 majors. Last year, though the total number of undergraduates on his campus has increased, it had fewer than 400. The curve he worked out showed that, if present rates of decline continue, it will be only a few short years before the total number of English majors will match that of tenured faculty in the department.The word I’ve gotten in talking to friends in other departments is similar. What this suggests is that #18′s cheerful prediction that “literature departments will continue to grow and thrive” is little more than whistling past the graveyard. It’s when the English major has dwindled to the point that there are more tenured professors than majors that you can look for the transformation of English departments into Comp & Rhetoric service departments. That was the point of my original post.If anyone can come up with hard statistical evidence that “English departments will continue to grow and thrive,” by all means let’s hear it. The legions of unemployed English PhDs now acting as greeters at Walmart and fry cooks at Burger King could use a bit of good news.

To pick up on Potanus’ comment above, it’s interesting to see how humanities programs are trying to adapt to the “cold realities of an academic marketplace.” When I read the title of this blog post, it reminded me of this email I received the other day with a call from the University of California “Commission on the Future,” which has basically the way to justify the humanities research is to promote it like scientific research. The call asked humanities faculty come up “with examples of UC ‘research breakthroughs’ and ‘discoveries’ in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and related fields that might be listed alongside those in sciences, engineering, medicine, agriculture, the UC national labs, etc. in an advocacy argument for UC research.” (If you’re interested in this call, my friend and I have written more about it on our blog.) I don’t know if the humanities are doomed, but it sure sounds like they are having an identity crisis, at least at the UC.

Tell them to read Derrida and understand that the humanities, having positioned itself so close to the center of higher education as to become foundational, has thus neutralized itself into a mere skill in the realm of the real, and has reified it’s more advanced thought into the realm of the hyperreal. Thus there is now no connection between how language is used and how language is studied.Or you can simply tell them that the red visor hangs on the peg next to your locker, make sure you wash your hands before leaving the bathroom, and that you’ll need to get a manager’s key in order to issue a refund for any burnt fries.Or, you can make sure they have all the appropriate information about the reality of their job market prospects and the future of the profession, and let them make their own decisions. They’ve achieved (I hope it’s achieved and not just given on a piece of paper) a liberal arts education and supposedly have gained proficiency in critical thought. If you did your job, they’ll evaluate their individual chances and then make an appropriate decision, accepting the consequences and moving on if things don’t work out. It could be worse, they could have studied philosophy rather than English.

Pontanus, I think you need to objectively reread your statements (especially the absolutes you confidently offer) to figure out exactly what your argument is (or how many you attempted to make). I definitely grasp that chatboard statements are not going to solve issues; please take a look at my username. I also grasped that “The issue of whether or not English departments are done away with over the next 25 years, with their graduate programs being abolished and tenured members put to work teaching Freshman Comp,” isn’t exactly the issue that Gina Barreca presented. I also agree with you that English departments will have to change to thrive; please look closely at my post if you care to continue thinking about this issue with my actual post as your fuel for “tiny” ripostes. Introductory courses in composition and rhetoric are going to be much more common than literature courses in English departments in the future; however, you should look at your use of language closely (“A few universities will have programs grinding out Phds in [composition and rhetoric]“; “The legions of unemployed English PhDs now acting as greeters at Walmart and fry cooks at Burger King could use a bit of good news”; “English departments have debased themselves so drastically as to have become the laughing stock of the teaching profession”) when making your arguments in the future. My point was simply that you and the two seriously negative posters who grasped onto a few of your ideas didn’t address the question with the same pragmatism as roguerogue (and, more recently, jesor) did and attempted to superfluously insult English departments and push a specious personal agenda. Reread the posts, most people (including myself) seem to share a similar view with you and realize that the cold marketplace culture we have in our nation will decide most every issue. Have a glass of wine, a piece of chocolate, and enjoy reading some Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, or Eliot this Friday’s eve.

Help them realize that no one needs to spend 8 years dissecting Melville in order to teach Freshman comp. Parents of freshmen don’t give a crap about that stuff. You can teach just fine with your B.A. (proven fact as, we all know, most comp is taught by rookie grad students just starting on their M.A., not even all these fancy A.B.D.s, please). How long are administrators going to bother with tenure to support all that useless research? Nobody cares!Oh yeah, and why are these undergrads wasting their time on an English B.A. in the first place? They would be a bit better off in Business, Accounting, Math, Statistics, Biology, or Chemistry. Some fields that might actually be needed in the future.

I once read an article in The Chronicle about a Ph.D. grad telling her experiences of leaving the tenure track job search and looking for work in the real world. It was right around the time that I was deciding to leave academia as well. The story was that she was applying for all these jobs in basically media-related (editing, publishing, and technical writing) and they kept on telling her that she couldn’t write. She was utterly shocked and angry–she had written a dissertation, of course she could write! She knew more about writing than 99 percent of the population. At the time, I agreed. But here’s the really dumb part and the arrogance of grad students that you need to help them with. One potential employer said that they would consider her for a job at a magazine–if only she had published some little humorous article about, you know, cats…something popular and light. Because without something like that they couldn’t be sure of her writing ability. She resisted. She thought them stupid (don’t they know the value of a Ph.D in English! I can write!), but it seems to me that you need to adapt your skills to the real world. Why wouldn’t she just write a little article in a popular magazine–we spend hours and hours editing a conference proposal, but when it comes to investing in other careers grad students act retarded. The truth is this. The Ph.D. gives you many skills–but it does not make you superior to other job candidates in the real world. Tell your grad students to invest a fraction of their time into other skills (like writing an article for a magazine, editing a popular book) and then there transition will be easier. The sad part is that the degree is supposed to be the top of the mountain. Unfortunately, once you are up there, you need to climb back down. And, after a little distance, I think those employers are right. A Ph.D. doesn’t teach you to write better than everyone else. It gives you a cliche, stiff style, that really turns people off. It gives you the arrogance that people will take the trouble to read your work–when in the real world, you have to make people want to read your work. Look at most of the above posts, for example, there are all one big paragraph–they just assume someone is going to wade through all their thoughts because they have something to say. Tell your students that prestigious schools want them because they are smart. Tell them to take that same smartness and invest it into other things. Rid yourself of your prestigious accomplishments. Never use “thus.” Write short sentences. Be interesting. Study what is popular. And remember, people hate a bragger. Put the Ph.D. at the very end of your resume (not up front) and don’t even mention it in the cover letter. And if you do, mock it. You will be more likeable, and it will be more impressive if you underplay it rather than walk in like you know everything about human culture and the language. You don’t. You are about 200 years behind and that shit ain’t selling anything anymore.

Aha, I was once there, a graduating English major, being encouraged to enter a Ph.D. program. To do as my English advisor had done once. Instead I became an academic librarian and have never looked back. Think about it.