The most interesting part of this hybrid
book review/editorial for me was the description of the graduate student "Welcome Session" at an MLA conference a number of years back.
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The featured speakers were several senior professors offering sage advice on such matters as targeting your cover letter to the needs of the search committee (as if that could be known reliably from most job descriptions), keeping informed about the latest scholarship, looking out for conferences at which to present your dissertation chapters, and crafting your dissertation as a book from the beginning.
Well, duh.
They didn't seem to know that they were speaking to a cohort that had been manically professionalizing ourselves -- conferencing, publishing, and networking -- from the first semester of graduate school. Moreover, we had been told by our advisers -- thanks to a 1989 study by William G. Bowen that was widely off the mark -- that there would be ample tenure-track openings before the end of the decade. And now it turned out that if you were among the 40 percent who had clawed your way through graduate school, you probably had less than a 50 percent chance at a full-time job in academe -- not just this year but ever.
After all that work, your life was a coin toss.
The speakers were obviously well intentioned, but you could feel the rising anger of the audience. If someone had called for the occupation of the MLA conference headquarters, I think most of the room would have marched.
That was the context in which Bousquet -- then president of the MLA's Graduate Student Caucus -- gave his talk on the "Excremental Theory of Graduate Education." He came out from behind the conference table and stood near the audience, saying that he would need to read some portions of his talk because he wanted to get it right. He didn't look like a radical -- he wore a suit and a tie -- but his talk helped to re-ignite the academic labor movement within the MLA.
Essentially, as Bousquet explained, the "job market" is a fiction that coerces us into competition with each other instead of asking questions about the constructed nature of the academic workplace. The primary purpose of graduate programs, he argued, was not to produce degree-holders but to provide cheap, non-degreed teaching labor for the universities. The predicted job crisis had been solved by an influx of graduate students encouraged by the prospect of future job opportunities. That was the new job system, and it was working perfectly well. As a result, the completion of a doctorate in the humanities now marked the logical end of one's academic career rather than the beginning of it.
We were waste products who needed to be flushed from the system to make way for the next serving of exploited "apprentices."
Higher education -- which I had always assumed to have my best interests at heart -- had become a kind of pyramid scheme with us at the bottom, the new academic proletariat. And the situation would continue until we stopped thinking of ourselves as "students" and started organizing on the local and national levels.
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Bousquet raises some interesting points, though the author's takeaway message - that academia "had become a kind of pyramid scheme - is both a generalization (in good departments graduate students are treated more as colleagues-in-training rather than employees) and a bit hyperbolic.
However, many departments *do* accept an excess of graduate students under what this article deems a 'fictional job market.' By "an excess" of graduate students, I mean more students than the department can properly fund across the board and far more than the job market can sustain. This acceptance of excess graduate students ultimately hurts everyone.
The solution seems simple and elegant: each discipline should set a ratio of the number of TT and tenured professors to the number of graduate students they accept each year. Statistics on which departments meet this requirement and which go over the ratio should be published each year in a widely read organizational document. Degrees from departments that went over the ratio could then rightly be regarded as less valuable than degrees from complying departments. If a department has too many students, chances are they are not getting the face time, class size, and feedback they should be. And in all but a handful of rich departments, it also means not everyone is getting properly funded which leads to competition for funding which tends to lead to antagonism and competition rather than collaboration outside of forced in-class discussions.
This solution also seems rather easy to implement (the President of the AHA or MLA could probably do it with relative ease for their respective fields and others would follow suit if they saw it working) and obvious. Therefore, I must be an idiot. What am I missing here?
