Romanista

I would check out Tim Mayers' work. He's the big name for bridging the fields of creative writing and comp rhet.

I know of people that went there and got TT jobs but I would not recommend CUNY. No other school in NYC even offers a rhetoric and composition graduate degree (the closest would be Stony Brook on Long Island), so the consortium thing does not help you as much as it would in literature. The other problem with CUNY is that I think they give out first year fellowships to some exceptional candidates but beyond that they don't fund you. They give you a tuition waiver and you have to make a living through adjuncting at other schools, which is extremely time consuming since commuting in NYC takes forever, especially if you cross boroughs. And obviously, even if you did get a fellowship, it probably would not be in your best interest to not teach for the first year of your PhD. Nobody should underestimate the fact that most US universities are not research intensive, so the search committees of such schools will want those that have as much teaching experience as they can get in their PhD programs.

Are you implying that comp rhet in particular can help you get altac jobs that actually use the skills you learned in graduate school? If so, I'd love to know where and in what sorts of jobs your program has placed graduates outside of academia.

The previous responses are excellent but I would add that the more your research is tied to pedagogy the higher the chance of getting better odds of finding a job than you would have in literature, if only because literary studies doesn't really focus on pedagogy. So even though the field is far bigger than just teaching writing, if you focus on that part of it you will likely be a more attractive TT applicant.

I don't doubt this, but law is still a more secure path than academia for me, because with the former you can always solo. It's difficult to do as a newly minted JD and there's the threat of malpractice but plenty of people do it despite the bad job market. There are far more solo practitioners than there are independent scholars. Both fields have the same problem of transitioning away from that specific type of labor if they can't make a living because prospective employers see you as a failed lawyer or professor and not as someone with an interesting set of skills to apply to whatever.

This is sad and irresponsible. If RC professors across the country recruit people to the field because of the slightly better job market at a fast enough rate, and if more PhD programs in RC start up, the job market advantage will shrink. RC as a field should not sell itself as "kind of like literature, but with jobs". The two fields are different enough in terms of research for that to not make sense. As others have said, you should choose the field with the most interesting research according to you. But one advantage of choosing RC is that you can still read literature and literary criticism on your own time. Running a writing center or a writing program usually requires degrees in RC, and those experiences can't be encapsulated in just reading about them. If you're into collaborative research, then RC is probably the better choice, likewise if you like the idea of doing research projects that include IRBs.

I haven't actually seen a professor defend unprofessional behavior in that way, I'm just saying that I could see a professor doing that for two reasons. First, the academic job market is difficult, so prospective tenure track applicants have to put up with things they don't like because there are so few TT offers in comparison to PhD holders. Second, the line between what a graduate student should accept and what a graduate student should complain about is thin. It's ambiguous, sort of like how graduate students aren't employees even though they do labor for the department. But as an example of what I said in my previous post about how some professors are avoided because of their lack of interest in service work, our department had an assistant professor leave last spring. I don't know why she left exactly, because I never took any of her classes. She had a reputation for being an excellent, responsive mentor who was also a strong researcher and an interesting teacher. Word got around that she was more helpful than the other professors and so a lot of students wanted her to serve on their committees. In her five years at my program, she was either a committee member or the chair of 26 masters theses and 2 doctoral dissertations. I can't speculate about why she left, but when you have a system where professors can get away with doing the bare minimum about service work, particularly when they are tenured, what happens is that work is passed onto others that care more about service work. If anything, this isolated example shows that academia should continue to reward service work, and I'm glad that you've seen this happen in a way that isn't minimal.

I agree with this but my experience has been that it just doesn't work this way. As long as the system is in place in which a university grants tenure in exchange for excellent research and a token level of professionalism in teaching and mentoring, there will always be professors that shirk their mentoring and service responsibilities. And if they get tenure despite this, they actually get rewarded in a way. Once they get a reputation for not being helpful about LORs and stuff like that, graduate students spread the word and PhD applicants just avoid these faculty. And if a professor spends a year not writing a single LOR (regardless of whether they were asked or not), will they get in trouble? I doubt it. If they have tenure, they may not be the most popular person in the office, but that doesn't detract from their research because research in the humanities is usually an individual process. The system may not aim to protect unprofessional faculty who are good researchers, but it does precisely that. Also, these shirking faculty can always reason away their unprofessionalism by saying something like, this is what the real world is like, if you want to be an academic you will have to deal with being micromanaged by your department chair and the administration. Being unfair to graduate students, these professors might argue, prepares them for for tenure track life.

I want to clarify that I'm not suggesting that BlackRosePHD was lazy like I was. I'm just saying that if her unprofessional LOR writers have research to do, then that will always take priority, and I'm not convinced that the department would chastise faculty for putting research in front of service, even if it harms a graduate student's professional development.

I had a similar situation last cycle, where a letter writer took about two weeks to respond to my emails, and because of this I missed the December deadlines for some programs I was interested in. The truth is, I could have planned everything earlier but I didn't. I depended on prompt responses, which was kind of unreasonable, and I paid for that by not applying to certain programs. I'm not saying I don't have sympathy for BlackRosePHD's situation, but what you're saying about how faculty don't appreciate ignoring student emails, this is unprofessional to me, but I don't think that it's necessarily looked down upon. Faculty, at least those that teach graduate students, are assessed based on research, not helping mentor graduate students. Ideally faculty should do both, but if they can't, if they are too busy, well then research always takes priority. I'm not saying this is the best way but this is the way it actually happens. Let's just say for the sake of argument that the professors BlackRosePHD asked for LORs are each of them working on an upcoming deadline for a journal article in a prestigious publication. The correct way to deal with that situation would be to get the articles submitted, and then deal with the LORs, if there's time left. If there's no time to do both, it is unacceptable to put writing LORs over research. Because the graduate student could have always asked for a LOR at an earlier time, but the journal submission deadline is firm. Part of the problem with the unprofessional argument is that it depends on BlackRosePHD complaining to someone about how her LOR writers weren't helpful. She's a graduate student and TA, which means she has less clout than other people in the department. But the complaint shows that there's a problem. I didn't complain about how one of my letter writers wasn't particularly helpful. If a graduate student doesn't complain about unprofessional LOR writers, does the department have a problem? Probably not, because I assume that faculty spend more time discussing and dwelling on research instead of service. Writing LORs is not completely formulaic, but it's certainly more formulaic than composing essays about one's scholarly interests.

I wouldn't balk at using a paper that received an A-. Grading is so subjective that an A- from one strict prof may mean more than an A from a prof who gives out As.

I'm really against tailoring your research needs to the market. Partly because, as has been mentioned before, the market is fickle. But also because I believe that you can't specialize in a subject without a pressing interest in it that goes beyond economics. You have to love your subject matter even if few people outside of academia care about it, otherwise you simply will not finish your dissertation, or get your article published, or make the connections needed to succeed in academia. Maybe there are exceptions to this, but I believe that you can only devote yourself fully to one area because you're consistently interested in it, and not because you hope to find a job in that field afterwards. It's like being a fan of multiple teams in the same sport...you will never be a diehard fan of multiple teams, so it's best to concentrate on one at the expense of the others, so that you are a knowledgeable fan of that one team who can watch other games as a neutral without forgetting where your allegiance lies. When I switched to this field, I had to convince myself that I wasn't doing it because the jobs situation is better, and I tell myself that that is still true. I'm in comp rhet because the research can (sometimes) be rooted in praxis more so than theory, at least as compared to literature. Comprhet at least attempts to answer the "who cares about this research besides other people in the same tiny subfield as me?" question. Often it's a stretch to think that whatever you publish will later be used in the pedagogy of your reader, but it's nice to believe that it could happen. I'm not saying that the job market is to be ignored. Rather, PhD students should focus on selling themselves as non-academic labor after they graduate, assuming that they don't get that TT job in their field of choice. I think it's better to have a firm scholarly identity that may go against the labor market (more like probably it will considering how bad it is), but also to be ready to take the general skills relevant to any humanities PhD and apply them in the non-academic world.

I do have experience with MFAs as my MA institution probably has as many MFAs as MAs in the English department, and we have MFAs in creative nonfiction, poetry and fiction. I've taken classes with MFA students and Creative Writing faculty. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about how creative writing differs as a field from literature or comp rhet. I just think that creative writing is kind of split into the MFA world and the NYC world, as Chad Harbach explained in his book, and that helps to separate these disciplines, but you may see it a different way. I've been pretty repetitive about my opinions on this subject, but most of what I've written here isn't fact, just my own views.

I never said it was sound. It's extremely risky. It's a terrible idea. The opportunity costs are enormous. Most people will never get a TT job. I'm active enough on this forum to know all that. I'm just saying that we are privileged enough to follow our dreams by going into those scholarly fields, and the only real way into a full-time job in those scholarly fields requires graduate degrees. If I was really hypocritical, I would be spouting off some nonsense about English is different from Comp Rhet because the latter's job market is better. I'm not doing that. English and Comp Rhet, regardless of the terrible job markets for both fields, require graduate degrees if a person wants to work full time in either field as a researcher and or teacher.