Graduate Education Is Losing Its Moral Base

By Cary Nelson and Michael Berube

The depressed state of the academic job market is hardly news, but tenured faculty members show little inclination to confront its implications. So far, the only people prepared to take drastic action are job seekers themselves. One of our students sardonically asked if he should attend a recent academic convention wearing a signboard. On the back, photographically enlarged: his vita. On the front, in block letters, the motto of the homeless unemployed: "Will work for food."

The New York Times reported last month that 813 physicists had applied for one faculty position at Amherst College. Tenure-track jobs in English regularly receive 800 to 1,000 applications. Even the most accomplished young scholars and teachers often remain unemployed. For in the 1990's, many colleges are finding that they lack the money even to replace retiring faculty members, and graduate programs that had expected boom times suddenly find that they are drastically overproducing Ph.D.'s.

What's more, several factors suggest that the academic job market will remain depressed for at least the next decade. First, the end of the cold war removes one of the major anxieties fueling political support for higher education. All academic programs, not just those in the sciences, benefited from the post-Sputnik panic that fostered the growth of research universities and led to such programs as the National Defense Education Act's humanities fellowships. That postwar enthusiasm for higher education now appears to have been a brief aberration in American cultural politics. Second, elementary and secondary schools, which are facing complex new social responsibilities (and are in a state of near-collapse in many locations), will absorb most of the public money available for education.

Third, other economic and social needs, such as health care and the decay of roads and public facilities, have more visibility and more politically effective constituencies. Fourth, continuing public attacks on higher education have discouraged many legislators from allocating new money to colleges -- or from even sustaining current levels of support. Sparked by purported "scandals" over teaching loads, misused research funds, tenured radicals, and by controversies over "hate speech" and sexual harassment, these attacks have stimulated taxpayers' anger and galvanized resistance to tuition increases.

In this climate of hostility, college and university budgets can often be cut without political cost. But tenured faculty members have rarely displayed real outrage about retrenchment, primarily because it does not usually put their own careers in jeopardy. Indeed, faculty members have yet to acknowledge the real victims of the fiscal crisis: new Ph.D.'s seeking jobs.

What does it mean to face an academic future in which many graduate students will have none? What are the ethics of training students for jobs that few of them will ever have? Thanks to the dramatic collapse in the humanities job market, for example, many graduate students and newly minted Ph.D.'s teach more than 30 different courses at two or three institutions and publish articles in refereed journals, before they earn a tenure-track position (if they do so at all). It is time bluntly to name the consequence: Graduate education is losing its moral foundation.

In years past, graduate students served not only as colleagues of lesser status but also as apprentices. The tradition of underpaying and overworking apprentices is older than capitalism itself. But throughout its historical transformations, apprenticeship typically held out eventual full-time employment and better working conditions as delayed compensation. Yet now the promise of a job at the end of a long apprenticeship is more than a long shot: It's often an impossibility.

This leaves us in the position of promoting not apprenticeship but exploitation. We overwork graduate teaching assistants for seven years, then cast them aside. The money we pay them each school year is usually not enough to live on in the summer. The health benefits are often marginal, the retirement benefits non-existent.

Yet at those institutions with large graduate programs, all faculty members benefit from the work that graduate students do. Many faculty members are freed either from teaching or from grading in introductory courses. At some institutions, hundreds of sections of such courses -- from basic language instruction to introductory calculus, from composition to introductory logic -- depend on graduate-student labor. These so-called teaching assistants may have as much responsibility for these courses as would any tenured professor. Those faculty members who do little or no graduate training thus have an almost parasitic relationship to graduate-student employment: Their own salaries and privileges are sustained by exploiting teaching assistants.

These problems have no easy solutions, but we need to discuss them frankly. We need to recognize that the collapse of the job market makes the logic of graduate apprenticeship morally corrupt. To begin this discussion, we make a number of preliminary suggestions. Some offer responses to the pressures of the job market; others offer ways of enhancing the quality -- and reclaiming the purpose -- of graduate study.

* Many graduate programs should reduce the number of students they admit, especially those programs that maintained their size through the 70's or 80's. During that period, several programs reduced admissions by as much as a third to a half. Others now should follow suit. Doing so will require institutions to be tougher on graduates of their master's programs, allowing fewer to go on for Ph.D.'s. Further, marginal programs should be closed. Professional associations need to become involved in making these tough recommendations, since neither departments nor institutions can be counted on to do so.

The rationale for reducing programs is clear: We must be able to offer permanent employment to a higher percentage of the Ph.D.'s that we train. Although some faculty members would have fewer graduate students to teach, they could certainly teach undergraduates -- even in introductory courses. No one is well served by over-production that cheapens the value of the Ph.D.

* Institutions should devise legally sound early-retirement packages for those faculty members who are neither effective teachers nor productive scholars. In some departments, 10 per cent or more of the faculty would fail both tests. Ideally, retirement offers should include both rewards for acceptance and disincentives for refusal. We are not suggesting that tenure be abolished, but we are recommending periodic reviews for all faculty members, so that administrators have plausible data to show who is performing responsibly and who is not. For we need to confront the fact that we are driving talented new teachers and scholars out of the profession while retaining some incompetent faculty members with tenure. We must also recognize that some of our lower-paid faculty members cannot afford to retire. Carefully negotiated retirement agreements could help to address these problems.

* Professional associations must find better ways of monitoring hiring practices and must investigate deceptive job searches -- that is, cases where a national search is conducted even when a department already knows whom it intends to hire. Likewise, institutions must be discouraged from converting permanent openings to temporary positions. When new Ph.D.'s are offered probationary "one year" jobs with the promise of tenure-track appointments to follow, colleges are effectively creating a new pre-probationary period in which to scrutinize junior faculty members. Many of these jobs, of course, never become tenure-track positions at all, which helps explain the scandalous fact that nearly 40 per cent of the nation's faculty members are part-time employees. More generally, we need better statistics, by discipline, comparing the number of degrees granted with the number of actual tenure-track hires each year.

* To lessen exploitation of graduate students, institutions should increase their wages and benefits. Those who teach throughout the academic year should earn enough to have their summers free to devote to their intellectual work. Graduate students who teach for six years or more might be given some retirement benefits and unemployment insurance. Universities should offer more extensive child care for all employees, but graduate students with children would benefit particularly.

* Graduate programs should offer serious career counseling, so that students can be advised at a suitably early stage about their prospects for non-academic employment. In a bleak market, we must encourage current students to consider career changes before they have invested the better part of a decade in training for academic jobs. Since few programs now are equipped for effective career counseling, national professional organizations might well help in gathering, evaluating, and distributing information about alternative careers.

* Universities should refocus graduate education to emphasize both its intellectual rewards and its marketable skills. Specific suggestions here will vary widely from discipline to discipline, but in the humanities and social sciences, at least, graduate programs need to give advanced graduate students the right to design and teach their own courses. They will thus be better prepared for teaching jobs at institutions that don't emphasize research -- where many of today's jobs exist.

* Faculty members must be required to do their best for students in the current bleak job market. Those who carry out their responsibilities indifferently -- who, for example, write sexist, lazy, or trivializing letters of recommendations -- should be confronted about their behavior by department heads.

Even if graduate study is to be an end in itself for some students, and not a means to an end, it needs to be fulfilling in those terms. That is a particularly difficult challenge -- and we are far from certain what it entails. At the very least, however, it means being able to leave graduate study with a sense of intellectual work that is coherent and complete.

Our proposals move in several directions at once -- improving graduate education, attempting to increase the number of academic jobs available, and exploring alternative employment. Yet none of these will suffice unless faculty members become public advocates for higher education. We used to leave that role to administrators. But many career administrators have little direct experience (or little memory) of teaching or research. When higher education enjoyed political support, that fact didn't matter. Now it does. Politicians and the interested public need to be better informed about what faculty members do in the classroom, the laboratory, and the library. Many administrators cannot communicate that sort of experience convincingly. Faculty members capable of doing so need to establish contacts with legislators to make their case.

After all, many departments are teaching just as many students as they did 10 years ago with 10 or 20 per cent fewer full-time faculty members. Even if budgets do not increase over the next few years, we need at least to hold our ground and retain the right to replace retiring faculty members. Undoubtedly, steps beyond those we have suggested can and should be taken to cope with the collapse of the academic job market. But good solutions will not emerge until we begin talking honestly about the problem. If we don't, the current crisis may become permanent, as we gradually forget that times were once much better for new Ph.D.'s.

Cary Nelson is professor of liberal arts and sciences and Michael Berube is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They are co-editors of Higher Education Under Fire, to be published by Routledge this fall.