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IF WE were to poll graduate students about the jobs of their dreams, the students would probably describe several visions. Perhaps the most common ones would be set in large research universities very much like the ones in which the students are now. They would teach mostly literature courses, be immersed in complex literary research, and publish heady articles and books. Others might envision working in small liberal arts colleges—with architecturally distinguished campuses—where teaching all levels of literature and languages is the norm, as is collaborating with colleagues on curriculum design and institutional priorities. A third group might imagine careers at large urban institutions whose students are the first in their families to attend college and where the chief intellectual charge is teaching and advising. The central question in this issue of the ADFL Bulletin is, How well do graduate schools prepare students to achieve these dreams?
There are marked differences between the concerns of a graduate student and the responsibilities of a professor. A graduate student's primary duty is to research and write a dissertation with little distraction except a teaching assistantship as a kind of sideline. To be a professor is to be a member of a department and to act as part of a cooperative hierarchy. The chief duty of newly arrived PhDs is teaching, and they have primary responsibility for decisions about curriculum and students. Entering the academic profession—and academic citizenship—from graduate school is, to say the least, a transforming experience. In Profession 95 , for example, Seth Katz describes his awakening into the academic culture of a non-PhD-granting university, where he learned about the values assigned to research, for which he was well prepared; to teaching, which was far more important than he had been led to expect; and to service, which was largely unfamiliar to him. Real jobs may present challenges—and rewards—that were never part of the career dream.
The first wake-up call comes when the graduate student confronts the current job market. Bettina Huber's analysis of the 1993 placement survey in this issue shows that roughly two-thirds of PhDs in English and foreign languages found jobs in colleges or universities: in foreign languages, slightly more than two-fifths found tenure-track positions. The MLA is well aware of this predicament. The association has established a new Committee on Professional Employment, which will examine the job market and seek to identify long-term strategies for improving professional opportunities. Further, we are revising A Career Guide for PhDs and PhD Candidates in English and Foreign Languages to offer better advice for these trying circumstances.
In this period of declining numbers of available positions, it seems reasonable to tailor graduate programs to offer students the broadest range of options possible. How then does graduate education give students control over the discipline and, at the same time, the flexibility to adapt to a variety of situations? How do the needs of undergraduate departments relate to the definition of graduate education? To what extent should graduate education in foreign languages and literatures be driven by the market? These are some of the questions that generated this special issue on the junctures and disjunctures between graduate education and undergraduate teaching.
For the 1995 ADFL Summer Seminars we invited papers that together function as a descriptive dialogue about the range of graduate programs that produce the job candidates and about a variety of teaching situations in the two-and four-year colleges that do most of the hiring. We hoped to air all sides of the debate without necessarily offering any single solution. There is agreement that in many crucial areas, the graduate schools are doing a good job—that is, in producing students with a mastery of languages, literatures, and cultures. But are graduate schools preparing students to teach? Our authors report some lacunae. New PhDs, as Nicolas Shumway points out, have experience at “both ends of the academic spectrum,” in beginning language courses, in specialized graduate courses, but not in the center. The representatives of the undergraduate programs and the graduate schools also agree that graduate education needs to be altered or slightly expanded if it is to meet the requirements of today's undergraduate curriculum—and therefore the job market.
What has happened to the undergraduate program that makes this alteration necessary? Foreign language and literature departments, more often than other humanities disciplines like English and history, face the contention that they are not fundamental to the aims of general education. The perception that knowing a language is merely a skill gives administrators with constrained budgets a reason to replace teachers with technology and, given the availability of part-time help, to view full-time faculty members as expendable. Thus a department needs student enrollments to maintain its validity, and students today are different from the eighteen-to twenty-two-year-olds that used to inhabit college classrooms. They probably have spent far less time reading than have previous generations of college students. They may not speak English as a native language, they may have learning disabilities, they may have jobs and families, and they may want to learn languages for practical ends or for access to kinds of knowledge not offered by a curriculum that focuses only on literature. The rationale that language study facilitates international trade, for example, may encourage some students to continue to the upper levels, but it tends to discredit the intellectual or educational value of the enterprise, which once was taken for granted. Further, students, parents, institutional administrators, and segments of the public are insisting that departments provide functional, measurable language skills that enable the student to get along in another country. To accommodate such interests, departments are building alliances with other disciplines and professional schools and within their own confines are placing greater emphasis on cultural studies. Russell Berman notes this movement in this Bulletin issue; he cautions that, if we want to ensure that foreign language and literature study remains recognized as an essential part of higher education, we must tie any such changes to “an overarching project of scholarship.”
Community colleges are probably the least well known terrain for our job seekers, partly because their hiring patterns differ from those of four-year colleges and because they do not typically advertise their openings nationally. But since so much foreign language study takes place in two-year colleges (38% of foreign language courses are in two-year colleges) and since these colleges form a rapidly growing segment of higher education, it is important for job seekers to consider them. We hear from our authors in community colleges that their institutions prefer job candidates who are pedagogically prepared and who love to teach. New two-year-college faculty members can expect heavy workloads, mostly in introductory language courses; they can also expect to touch and change the lives of their students. Donna Wilson calls for apprenticeship programs in graduate school to promote “a positive pedagogical environment.” After outlining some practical suggestions for classroom training, Yanick Daniel asks for more work in pedagogy to “combine the theory and the practice of language learning and teaching; future teachers need to see a clear relation between the two.” Patricia Dickson, working in a four-year program that is forming alliances with programs in business, law, and engineering, reiterates the need for teaching experience. She believes there are three criteria for job candidates in her department. The first is linguistic and cultural competence, which, as I have noted, graduate schools provide very well. But the other two desiderata—the ability to collaborate with students and colleagues inside and outside the department and the commitment to serve the department and the institution—are not part of the usual course of study but rather are part of the attainment of academic citizenship. Where does this kind of education fit into graduate school? She advocates courses and programs, some of them outside the university's walls, to introduce graduate students into the culture of academic life. In Karen Kossuth's four-year institution, however, the curriculum is being pushed in yet another direction. Noting that literature courses were underenrolled, she reports that literature courses with a cultural studies emphasis were gaining much student interest. For this reason, she says, her institution has hired more candidates in comparative literature because they are more likely than those from single literature programs to have studied social sciences or other humanities fields. As Kossuth says, literature is still important, especially as a field for research and publication, but her department is “recruiting candidates with an interdisciplinary bent who will be able to work with members of other departments” as its programs expand.
Do the changes that our authors representing graduate programs suggest meet the requests for greater exposure to pedagogy and cultural contexts? In the aggregate, yes, but individually, not exactly. I draw your attention to the need for good language teaching, which is mentioned in all four papers from two- and four-year colleges. Many graduate programs offer their students the opportunity to teach first- and second-year language classes as TAs. While there may be good supervision, this arrangement carries many inherent difficulties, of which I mention only one. If those of the lowest departmental rank teach language courses, how can those courses be perceived as anything other than the department's least important offerings? We might argue that they are the most important: they are the most broadly enrolled and therefore afford the greatest opportunity to attract students and capture student interest. They are also where students develop the competencies necessary for advancement to the highest levels of study. Furthermore, when much of the profession's effort today goes toward integrating the teaching of language, literature, and culture and when the perception that language teaching as mere skills is undermining the position of departments, it seems as though this system is due for modification.
One way to strengthen language teaching and graduate employability is to recognize expertise in second language acquisition as desirable in candidates for tenure-track positions and therefore worth providing in graduate programs. Responding to the paucity of jobs in undergraduate language and literature departments and the substantial number of advertisements in second language acquisition, Leona LeBlanc's department developed a new track for PhDs in foreign languages and literatures that combines pieces of the traditional program with instruction in second language acquisition. It is intended to “demonstrate to employers that our graduates would make flexible faculty members who could meet the broader needs departments have expressed—they could, for example, teach advanced literature courses for majors, participate in language-across-the-curriculum programs, serve as departmental advisers to students preparing for teacher certification, and so on.” Such programs (and LeBlanc mentions six others), not only should help students find jobs and improve the status of language teaching but can add a significant dimension to PhD programs.
Edward Friedman discusses preprofessional training for scholarship and research and considers whether students should devote time to writing and delivering conference papers. He proposes that they should, so long as they receive adequate preparation, “so that professional activities complement rather than compromise the educational process.” Another area that seems to be left out of graduate student education is, ironically, the teaching of literature. Because TAs usually teach only language courses, they have little if any experience in teaching what they study most. As Nicolas Shumway says, they are unprepared to teach “an introductory course in civilization, an advanced grammar and composition course, or a literature survey course,” even though they will undoubtedly have to teach these courses in their first years as professors. The graduate students at his university (on the advice of their friends in their first full-time positions) requested instruction in the teaching of upper-division literature courses. The minicourse that resulted covered questions of course design, text selection, testing, the literary canon, the place of theory, and advanced grammar and composition and proved “pertinent to the highest level of literary research and criticism.” To experience this excitement in teaching, resulting from the closeness of the pedagogical enterprise to the scholarly one, is a wonderful validation of intellectual and academic life.
Randolph Pope celebrates exactly this kind of scholarship. Noting that the departments that grow are the ones with the most majors, he describes the scholarship needed to teach upper-level courses as “the spirit of inquiry, the fearless exploration of the unknown, the vast erudition, the patient effort, the enthusiasm for the subject matter, the joy of discovery, and the engaging dialogue.” It is the graduate school's business to give its students the opportunity and encouragement to become practicing, active and creative scholars, who will then be equipped to be excellent teachers. Jean-Jacques Thomas strongly reiterates Pope's vision. Recognizing that students need pedagogical training, he suggests it should be collaboratively organized by foreign language and education departments and should provide training in linguistics and pedagogy. But he sees the current attack on higher education as part of a utilitarian attack against intellectual values, and he sees the increased emphasis on preprofessional training for undergraduate education as contrary to the mission of graduate education and of the universities themselves, which, he notes “were conceived to escape the tyranny of the here and now, not to foster nationalist or regionalist concerns.” Foreign language programs are necessary, he writes, so that “a critical discourse informed by different modes of intelligibility can emerge on campus.” Such a department, representing an entire culture, is inherently inter- and multidisciplinary, and provides foreignness as a counterweight to nationalistic mind-sets. It should be “free to pursue intellectual matters, to preserve its foreign-speaking identity in its teaching, and to train students in the critique of texts and documents.” These two examples of graduate education argue forcefully for graduate programs that are traditional in the best sense, bastions of free intellectual development—but having completed these heady courses of study, newly hired PhDs must have much to learn by trial and error on the job.
Russell Berman argues that our humanistic project is “a passionate interest in alterity” that reiterates the need for learning about a whole culture through the acquisition of expertise in the overlapping and tightly linked fields of its language, literature, and cultural phenomena. The heterogenous and interdisciplinary move toward cultural studies, he argues, requires that we rethink “the inner logic of the field” and the way we train our graduate students to teach language, literature, and culture. He advocates a broad understanding of language study that, in moving towards sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, can help strengthen the connection between language instruction and literary study. The effects of such ideas for the undergraduate curriculum should percolate up to graduate school, where “a cultural redefinition of the field and a greater emphasis on language” will provide the basis for changing the education of undergraduate teachers.
These essays, all strong and well argued, represent various points along a spectrum extending from an emphasis on the pragmatic and intellectual requirements of available jobs to a vigorous defense of scholarly endeavor as the best and most suitable preparation for college teachers. Ultimately it seems that combinations of these perspectives best form the intellectual equipment of those who will lead undergraduates in the pursuit of understanding of at least one other culture and language.
The last section of this issue revisits the great duets of teaching and research and of language and literature and the quartet of language, literature, culture, and teaching in regard to the duration of the career. Andrew Debicki and John Kronik present variations on the theme of creative scholarship as the inspiration for good teaching. They suggest various enlightened means of measuring faculty strength by evaluating research and publication by quality, not quantity. They also advocate appropriate credit for acquiring expertise in, for example, language learning, applied linguistics, or interdisciplinary or cultural studies. Debicki suggests the chief criterion for scholarly work be that it involve “the discovery of significant knowledge,” and Kronik explores that idea that scholarship can flow from teaching.
At Alice Berry's university the “model is that of the teacher-scholar, with the emphasis on the hyphen—both sides of the equation are equally significant.” With this principle in mind, her department created colloquia that have transformed the faculty from an inactive to an active scholarly community and provided a good venue for sharing information about teaching. Useful and stimulating as these interactions with colleagues have been, they have not been enough to accommodate today's curricular changes. Berry urges that institutions make funds available for faculty development in new areas of expertise, such as language for business, a broader range of cultural studies, and instructional technology. As she says, faculty members should not be expected to keep up with their fields completely on their own. Sylvie Debevec Henning presents yet another take on the teaching-scholarship dilemma. In her department morale was declining as the result of a “lack of commitment to and support of intellectual activity on campus” in favor of “student-centered” activities. It became necessary to defend the teaching of literature mainly because of lack of student preparation. Turning adversity to advantage, Henning set out to plan courses interrelating language, literature, and culture from the lowest through the more advanced levels. In her questions about curriculum it is possible to see how the courses and their design became for her faculty members “areas for experimentation and hence research fields.” A department can, in other words, “transform impediments to scholarship into scholarly investigations.” By incorporating faculty research interests into departmental service and curricula, she concludes, departments can help their members remain creative and intellectually vigorous.
The articulation of graduate and undergraduate programs involves every sector of the field in higher education and every issue we face. Crucial to maintain out departments as vital and central components of the liberal arts is the willingness to change, not just by responding to the job market or to undergraduate whims but by seriously taking into account undeniable demographic and social changes. Among these developments in our language and literature programs, three stand out: an increase in the emphasis on language learning, an expansion of cultural studies and of the notion of culture, and a move toward more utilitarian rationales for language learning. As we have seen, these changes are not happening by chance or in isolation. Building on traditional literary programs, new subject matters and approaches enrich and overlap one another as they do the study of literature. We are fortunate to have as many different kinds of universities and colleges in this country as we do, because one shoe is definitely not going to fit all the feet that are currently bringing students to our doors. But any program, whether its focus is mainly pedagogic, pragmatic, scholarly, or literary, is undoubtedly undergoing some sort of change. Judging by the essays published here, I believe that any such change will be intellectually stimulating and educationally honorable.
Huber, Bettina J. “Latest Job Information List Figures Available.” MLA Newsletter 28.1 (1996):1–2.
Katz, Seth R. “Graduate Programs and Job Training.” Profession 95 . New York: MLA, 1995. 62–67.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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