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I START with what may seem like an egotistical gesture, for I shall quote from something I published earlier:
With universities in financial trouble, and with general enrollments not growing, the humanistic disciplines, which even in good times are second-class citizens within the American academic community, will be fighting for their very existence during the foreseeable future. Compound the general situation of the humanities with the special problems of language departments—the dropping of university-wide requirements in recent years, the decreasing need for teachers both at the secondary-school and college levels, the difficulty in attracting top-flight students as undergraduate majors or graduates.
(“Confronting” 4)
You may wonder whether I simply did a word processing cut-and-paste job to move these lines from their earlier context. To tell the truth, I wrote these lines some years before computers were first used in our profession. The lines come, in fact, from a talk I gave to what was then called the “Germanic section” of the MLA, and it was delivered fully twenty-two years ago and published the following year in the ADFL Bulletin . The talk and the essay resulting from it were entitled “Confronting Our Crisis: A New Identity for Departments of Language and Literature.” Many of the recommendations I made in the essay for establishing a “new identity”—for example, that departments cultivate interdisciplinary frameworks and offer courses of interest to students from a variety of fields—were also recommended by colleagues at the time and have been widely implemented.
The crisis that this essay evokes, however, is still very much with us—indeed, the situation may be even worse today than it was when I first spoke those words. Those of us who have served on the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Employment during the past year and a half have become accustomed to dealing with an employment crisis that, we realize, has actually been going on for a quarter of a century. To be sure, things looked better for a brief period during the late 1980s, when not only were there more jobs than before but we were also anticipating an employment boom by the mid-1990s to accompany the many expected retirements of the generation that had entered the profession after World War II. Moreover, a few fields such as Spanish and Japanese have actually experienced increasing enrollments.
But the total picture, as any graduate student can tell you these days, seems bleak. As I look back at the passage I quoted above, I recognize that certain elements characterizing the situation of 1975 no longer hold. College enrollments, unlike in the 1970s, have been increasing, not decreasing. As a result, the need for teachers has also been increasing. The academic recession of the 1970s and early 1980s was above all a demographic one: indeed, had student numbers been comparable to the 1960s, it is likely that jobs would have been created to accommodate student needs.
The current recession, as we have found in our committee discussions, is of a different sort altogether. Yes, we continue to be in crisis, though the causes of this crisis are new. Universities throughout the present decade have come to adopt a corporate model of employment that seeks to minimize fixed costs and allow administrators a maximum of flexibility in disbursing the increasingly limited funds at their disposal. (You may note that I am employing the lingo that characteristically accompanies this corporate model.) The result, as we all know, is an academic workforce with a decreasing proportion of tenured or tenure-track faculty members (these, after all, constitute the fixed costs that must be avoided within the model) and a correspondingly increasing proportion of part-timers, full-time adjunct faculty members, and graduate students who are entrusted with much, sometimes even most, of the teaching at our various institutions. We can no longer, for that matter, count on faculty numbers within a department remaining in a steady state, for in many universities today, a slot vacated by retirement is often converted into several part-time jobs or a full-time, non-tenure-track lectureship—or, as all too often happens, it is shifted into some other field that is deemed hotter than that all-too-venerable territory labeled language and literature.
Our professional-employment committee has used the term “jobs system” to describe the current phenomenon, for we feel that we are dealing with a systemic problem created by policies governed by an institution's balance sheets regardless of the social harm, the human cost, the intellectual loss that this system is creating for us. Whereas the earlier, demographically caused crisis could be experienced on a supply-and-demand basis—the fewer students one has to teach, the fewer teachers one needs for them—the present crisis at first seemed inexplicable. Although it started during the recession of 1990–91, it did not, like this recession, come to a quick end. Indeed, with college enrollments growing in the course of the decade, educational institutions, like corporations, have come to depend on temporary labor that they can rid themselves of without trouble whenever their need for teachers decreases. The result, as those of us caught up in this system know all too well, is an embittered proletariat of PhDs who are unemployed or employed temporarily or part-time and who fear they may never have the opportunity for the professional development and security that they expected when they started out years ago as graduate students.
Must we always be in crisis? During the earlier crisis we could at least look forward to a time when the baby boomlet of the late 1970s would create a new surge in college enrollments. Moreover, twenty years ago the coffers of state governments, as well as of the federal government, had not yet felt the stresses under which they operate today. And, at least as important, the public had not yet shown itself skeptical of humanistic study to the degree that it came to be, as a result of the so-called culture wars or, to be more precise, of the right-wing attacks on the humanities brought about by those culture wars.
In view of the continuing crisis, our professional-employment committee is presenting a number of strong recommendations to the MLA Delegate Assembly. One of these recommendations aims for a reduction in graduate student admissions by individual departments commensurate with their ability to place their students in jobs. A recent MLA Newsletter contained tables listing the numbers of PhDs produced in English and foreign languages by various universities during the two-year period between 1993 and 1995 (“Modern Language Market” A7–A8). To cite only the figures in the foreign languages: three universities produced over fifty doctorates each during this period, while two others produced nearly fifty each. One does not need to undertake any elaborate demonstrations to indicate that many of these recent PhDs have little if any hope of regular academic employment.
Yet reducing the number of students we produce is a more complicated matter than it would seem on the surface. Within the framework of the jobs system, it suits everybody to have a goodly number of graduate students around. They make it possible, after all, for us to teach our seminars and to direct dissertations; they serve as our research assistants—indeed, they often seem to justify our very existence as scholars. From the administration's point of view, these students supply cheap labor to supplement the work of adjunct faculty members in teaching beginning-language courses—or, in English departments, teaching freshmen composition.
Let me recapture some of the objections I have heard voiced whenever faculty members in the foreign languages face a sharp reduction in graduate student admissions. “How will I ever be able to teach my seminar,” those in research universities may ask, “if I don't have a critical mass of students to engage in discussion and to test each other's and my ideas?” Or colleagues may ask, “What do you expect me to spend my time teaching—undergraduate introductions to literature, or even language courses?” They may even add, “The situation for language faculty members is completely different from the situation in English or, for that matter, in all other fields: for one thing, beginning-language courses and freshman composition, unlike beginning psychology or beginning chemistry, have next to nothing to do with advanced work in my field.” And, if asked about teaching introductory courses in literature and culture in their language area, they can rightly protest, “Our students have so imperfect a knowledge of the language as undergraduates that it's impossible for us to get the same stimulation out of our teaching that faculty members can achieve so easily in fields where the reading, the lectures, and the discussions all take place in the student's native language.”
To which I must answer in all honesty, Those are real problems. But if we try to solve these problems by continuing to train graduate students in the numbers that many institutions have been doing, we are simply putting off some painful changes in the way we do our business. Up to now we have been pursuing a model of graduate education that developed beginning in the late 1950s, in the wake of Sputnik. Within this model, graduate programs kept expanding or at least remained relatively large, in order to provide the nation with sufficient college teachers to minister to the needs of growing numbers of undergraduates and also, as the ideology surrounding Sputnik suggested, to maintain America's intellectual place in the world. Those in the research universities who called themselves professor often made the graduate seminar and the dissertation the center of their teaching activity. If they taught undergraduates, they kept the load down and often restricted themselves to a few advanced courses that they deemed sufficiently stimulating.
This model persisted in many universities throughout the demographic recession—though a number of universities, including my own, drastically cut admissions numbers over these two or more decades. My university also reduced the number of faculty slots in each department, with the result that faculty teaching patterns did not themselves radically change.
But if we are still overproducing in some universities, what changes must we make within our academic culture? Let me say here that the MLA Executive Council has set up a task force on graduate education to plan a conference for the fall of 1998. Certainly the problem of how we design graduate programs for the jobs climate we are likely to face in the coming years will be much discussed at this conference, and I do not seek to anticipate the results of this discussion here.
What I can say at this point, however, is that none of our accustomed ways of doing business should be seen as sacred, eternal, or natural. Take the notion of the graduate seminar, for example. Seminar instructors demand a certain number of students, to provide the means for stimulating dialogue. I remember some years ago when a relatively small private research university recruited a distinguished faculty member from a large state university. His research centered on topics that did not ordinarily draw students, though his teaching was known to be splendid. Whereas he Could invariably Count on fourteen to fifteen students on even the most obscure topic at his former university, a the smaller institution he could draw at best three—certainly not enough, he explained, to create the right seminar environment. After two years he quietly returned to his earlier place of employment, to get the teaching stimulation he felt he needed. Yet it was clear that very few of the many students who went through the PhD program at this large university ever received regular faculty jobs when they finished. One hopes that in their eventual nonacademic jobs they were able to cherish memories of exhilarating discussions around the seminar table.
If we should no longer be able to count on doing our accustomed things within the present system, what might our professional lives be like? Certainly we would always have some, or at least a few, graduate students whom we could train for the relatively few positions that open. If we could no longer mount regular seminars, we might pool resources with other language departments to offer seminars that would draw students from these departments; this approach would be especially workable in areas such as literary theory, with the German department, say, offering a Frankfurt school seminar and the Russian department offering one on the formalists and Bakhtin. In comparative literature at Stanford we have rarely admitted more than three or four students a year, but we have always been able to fill up the single theory seminar required of our comparative literature students with students from English and the various foreign language programs.
If a language department starts taking in only two, at most three, students a year, much of its work will be more tutorial, as it already is at Stanford in the smaller language departments. In fact, let me indicate the numbers we took in for fall 1997: Asian languages, a field that encompasses both Chinese and Japanese, five students altogether; French and Italian, one student, who happens to be doing French; German studies, two students; Slavic, one student; Spanish, five students. My own department of comparative literature admitted four, and presumably they will add a bit to what little critical mass there may be in classes in the individual languages. English, let me add, this year admitted ten, down from the twelve to which we had limited ourselves beginning with the earlier, demographically caused recession.
Some readers may protest that their administrations, perhaps even their state legislatures, will give them no teaching credit for doing a small tutorial, that they need, say, ten students to Count a course as part of their regular load. Indeed, all the arrangements by which we operate—the relegation of much, perhaps most, lower-division teaching to adjuncts, the need for graduate students to supplement this labor and also to participate in our seminars—all these arrangements and rules are so securely attached to the current jobs system that it is difficult to make any changes without rethinking the system as a whole. What if we all began to devote ourselves mainly to undergraduate teaching? What if every regular faculty member taught at least one course each year in first- or second-year language? I know how bitterly contested such a policy can be at a research university, but the German department at Stanford is starting to do just that. I might add that we are trying to make first-year language courses in German more appealing to faculty members by beefing them up intellectually with cultural readings in English such as Gordon Craig's The Germans and even some Goethe, Rilke, and Kafka, also in English, to help motivate students to advance to the point where they can read these authors in the original.
Up to now I have been describing this system from the way it looks from above—that is, from the perspective of senior professors who have built their careers within a particular system that is now being called into question. Permit me to shift gears a bit and to look at the matter from the point of view of the graduate student. A couple of years ago I spoke at a conference on the current job-market problem at a large Midwestern university. This was before we had created our committee on professional employment at the MLA, and I simply described some steps that I thought needed to be taken in order to bring the number of graduate students into line with the number of likely jobs. I suggested that all of us—faculty members, graduate students, and prospective graduate students alike—need to undergo a change of consciousness, to rethink the way we've been pursuing our careers during the past generation (“Surviving”).
Although the other faculty members speaking at the conference had on their own been thinking along the lines I suggested, I was surprised to find that many of the graduate students who came to our sessions told me that throughout most of their graduate training they had not been made aware of the bleak prospects they faced after completing their degrees. I asked a group at one workshop if they had been warned of these prospects when they were admitted to graduate school. All of them replied that no warnings had been given. A goodly number of these students were single mothers who had gone into debt to supplement the inadequate compensation they received for their part-time teaching. As they neared the end of their degrees—often after years of study, for they had little if any chance for fellowship aid to supplement their teaching—they realized that their chances for tenure-track jobs were small. “I guess I'll have to go to work at Wal-Mart,” I heard several of them say independently, which led me to believe that working at Wal-Mart had become the topos in that community for what they feared lay in store for them.
The first conclusion I'll draw from this is that prospective graduate students must be kept fully informed of what their employment prospects are likely to be (even if this means projecting some six years hence) and that they should know the job-placement records during recent years of each program to which they apply. We are, in fact, asking that departments routinely send their applicants specific data on the placement of their PhDs during the last three to five years, including names of institutions, numbers of placements, and fields of specialization. Not only that, but among the so-called good practices that the committee recommends is one calling for departments to admit no more students than it can fully fund—and by funding we mean not simply part-time teaching but a combination of fellowship and teaching or research assistantship; moreover, we ask that a graduate student, while teaching, have primary responsibility for no more than one course per term. We recognize that a policy of this sort may not be implemented immediately, especially in those large institutions that rarely if ever give fellowship aid to graduate students in the humanities. But it is at least an ideal that we can work toward while reducing the number of admissions to accord with the department's ability to find graduate students jobs.
But let me approach the graduate student's point of view from still another angle. I recently talked to a young cell biologist who has been on a post-doc during the last few years, trying to produce enough research to qualify for an academic job. She spoke of the overproduction in her field and said she would feel herself content, if necessary, to take a job in a small liberal arts college in which she would be primarily an undergraduate teacher, with little if any opportunity to continue her research. As you can see, the problems we face in language and literature are essentially no different in other academic fields, even in a field that looks as glamorous to the general public as cell biology.
I bring this matter up not simply to place our own dilemma within a larger context but to ponder a moment on another matter that this young biologist mentioned. Before her post-doc, she had completed her degree in one of the most high-powered, prestigious programs in her field. If she should be fortunate enough to land a job in a small college, her hardest task would be to face her graduate school mentors, who, she feels, had been preparing her to continue the sorts of activities in which they were themselves engaged, activities that had made them well-known figures in their profession. Certainly she would be happy if she could replicate their careers, but she knows that in the present climate she will be lucky just to be able to teach her field to undergraduates.
At employment-committee meetings we talked on several occasions about the problem of replicating one's mentor, for we view this as one of the principal stumbling blocks we face in preparing our students for the kinds of careers they are likely to have—if they are fortunate enough at all to be able to pursue careers within our profession. Consider the dynamics within the teacher-student relationship: when we work closely with advanced students, it seems only natural that they should want to imitate what we are doing—in fact, to emulate us. We dole out praise for those intellectual moves that we ourselves should like to make, while they in turn seek our approval in order to maintain the self-confidence necessary to complete their examinations and dissertations. At its best, graduate study involves a master-apprentice relationship, though sometimes also, for better or worse, a master-disciple relationship. One can scarcely blame a student for hoping eventually to succeed the master, which means gaining a senior position in a research university comparable to the master's and turning out one's own students, who will themselves train still more students, to keep the intellectual flame burning for generations to come.
So reads this seemingly ideal script, which, as we know all too well, has no basis in current-day reality. As long as we live in what is at best a steady-state system, in which no significant growth is likely to occur, each of us, as somebody on our employment committee put it, has the right to replicate himself or herself a single time in the course of an academic career. This form of doctoral control sounds brutally like the Chinese system of birth control; it is, of course, less brutal than knowing one will probably never replicate oneself at all, and it is certainly less brutal than leading students on to imagine careers for themselves they will in all likelihood never have.
Once we have come to accept this state of affairs, how do we act on this knowledge? First, we must be realistic with our students from the start of their graduate careers—indeed, we must be realistic with all undergraduates who seek our advice about going on to graduate study. From the beginning of their graduate training, students need to know exactly what would be expected of them in the various positions—whether in small liberal arts colleges, in big state schools without PhD programs, or in community colleges—that they might one day be invited to fill. During our employment-committee discussions, suggestions were made of brief apprenticeships that graduate students might serve in institutions different from the research university in which they are taking their degree. Not only that, but the courses they take as graduate students should be designed to prepare them for a variety of teaching situations. Certainly we want to continue to expose students to the best that is being thought in our field, but we can also expose them to the best that is being taught in that large spectrum of diverse institutions making up academia in North America.
Being realistic about our students' future careers also means knowing how to send the most appropriate psychological signals to those with whom we share a master-apprentice relationship. During our earlier, demographic recession, two of my students decided to transfer to business school. Both needed recommendations from me, and both feared approaching me with their requests because, as each put it independently, I would surely think they had let me down. After I congratulated them on their decisions, they expressed their gratitude that I had taken the news so well. These two incidents early taught me to honor whatever my students feel is best for themselves. By way of analogy, it is often said these days that the children of my generation are not likely to have the opportunities for housing, job advancement, and retirement that people of my generation have had. If we are able to accept this reality for our children, surely we should be able to do the same for our students.
Must we always be in crisis? I ask again. My answer is a firm no, but I believe we can all do more than we've done in the past to stabilize the employment practices in our field. We have little or no control, of course, over the ways that legislatures apportion funds among such competing constituencies as prisons, welfare, and higher education. And we can probably do little to change the corporate mentality that guides much of the decision making in university administrations these days. But we can protest against, and sometimes even refuse to carry out, policies that we know are detrimental to students' educations, and we must never cease arguing our case on these matters. Above all, we can reduce the numbers of graduate students, and we can realign our own and our students' careers to adjust to that steady-state academic economy that may be the best we can look forward to at the present time.
The author is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. This article is based on his keynote presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 12–14 June 1997, in Washington, DC.
Lindenberger, Herbert. “Confronting Our Crisis: A New Identity for Departments of Language and Literature.” ADFL Bulletin 7.3 (1976): 3–6. [Show Article]
———. “Surviving in the Worst of Times.” Centennial Review 40.2 (1996): 253–70.
“The Modern Language Market.” MLA Newsletter 29.2 (1997): A1–A8.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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