ComeBackZinc

Yes. Take the money.

thestage, Fishbucket, you guys are aware that you can study some things, and other people can study different things, and that's okay, right?

And you get mad when people call you a troll.

Yes! I always tell my skeptical friends: employers weren't exactly beating down my door before I started a PhD. I'm going to school full time, teaching, learning, and researching, and they're paying me for it. If it doesn't work out for me (and it very well might not), then I will look at these years as some of the best of my life. Which is why I'm so adamant about not taking on any more debt.

But, I will shut up about it all. I don't mean to abuse the forum or make it less pleasant for people who enjoy it.

Michael Berube, PSU endowed professor and former MLA president: A Seamless Garment of Crisis' Mr. Bérubé opened his remarks by saying that every aspect of graduate education in the humanities is in crisis, from the details of the curriculum to the broadest questions about its purpose. "It is like a seamless garment of crisis, in which, if you pull on any one thread, the entire thing unravels. It is therefore exceptionally difficult to address any one aspect of graduate education in isolation," he said. Among the problems he cited were high attrition rates among graduate students, the many years it takes students to get their degrees, the need to revise the content of graduate courses so that students are prepared for jobs outside of academe, whether alternative forms should replace the traditional dissertation, and if some programs should be reduced in size or eliminated altogether. Mr. Bérubé also noted the glut of Ph.D.'s in the academic-job market and the 1.5 million people now employed as adjuncts, with no hope or expectation of ever getting a tenure-track position. "For what are we training Ph.D.'s in the humanities to do, other than to take academic positions in their fields?" Mr. Bérubé asked the audience. "What does one do with a Ph.D. in philosophy or history, other than aspire to teach and conduct research in philosophy or history?" Some deans here said that one response to the shrinking number of available tenure-track jobs has been to guide graduate students to seek jobs outside of academe. Though that approach has generated much debate in the humanities, Mr. Bérubé said that, so far, there is little sense of what viable alternatives to academic employment might be. There also appears to be a sharp disconnection between student expectations and the realities of the job market. "One criticism is that we can't simply announce that alternative academic careers are now OK without rethinking the graduate curriculum accordingly," Mr. Bérubé said. "If indeed our programs are designed to produce teachers and researchers, perhaps we need to remake them from the ground up if we are going to see them as producing teachers and researchers and something else." Many of the deans were surprised to hear that much of the current opposition to alternative careers has come not from faculty and deans, but from students who are nearing completion of their dissertations. Mr. Bérubé said that Ph.D. students in the humanities feel betrayed because they "have spent their 20s and perhaps their early to mid-30s in graduate programs hoping for tenure-track jobs. They have spent their youth in the lowest reaches of the tax code, and some of them have put off having families." He also acknowledged that some frustrated job seekers have blamed the MLA for not doing more to improve the working conditions of adjunct faculty. At the end of his talk, Mr. Bérubé left the audience with more questions to ponder: In the future, should there be two doctoral tracks, one hard-core, old-school research with a traditional dissertation, and another more like a rigorous four-year master's program? Should academic jobs be confined only to Ph.D. holders to eliminate the "overproduction" problem? Or would that produce a shortage of professors? Should doctoral candidates who stopped short of completing a dissertation be "frog-marched" back to graduate school to finish their degrees? There's no consensus on any of those questions, Mr. Bérubé said. But one thing is clear: "When we look at the academic-job market for humanists, we can't avoid the conclusion that the value of the work we do … simply isn't valued by very many people, on campus or off."

I'm sorry if that's how I've made you feel. It is never, ever my intent to hurt anyone's feelings or degrade them. I apologize for it, if that's what I've done. I have to tell you: that is literally the opposite of what I see here generally. I find the general tone around here to be one of optimism and support. And I'm glad it is. But I also find that there is a broad disconnect between when people say, "I know how bad the numbers are," and their actual behavior. That's fine. People are adults. They can make rational decisions. But I have lots of friends in the humanities at lots of universities, some of them from those "top five" schools we keep talking about. And nobody is getting jobs. Even many of the absolute tippity-top literature programs aren't doing much better than getting two thirds of their PhDs hired in TT jobs. Meanwhile, because TAs are cheap labor, departments are not adjusting the number of acceptances they give out to reflect the market. Departments everywhere are flooding the market with PhDs, making the competition harder on everyone. Ask around, and you'll find departments who can't get their star students hired. That's not me being mean. That's reality. If you don't want to take my word for it, Google around a bit. You'll find plenty of angry, embittered posts from people who were just like the people here, did their 5 (or 6, or 7, or 8....) years, and found no job. And now they're trying to stitch six sections of adjuncting together or applying to entirely different jobs. I'm not making that up. Look around. Find the numbers. Ask your professors! The realistic ones, the ones who are willing to say the harsh truth. If it's crap to point out what is the plain truth, then I'm guilty of spouting crap. Either way, everyone here can't afford to just think of themselves now. You've got to think of yourself 6 years from now-- older, tired, broke, and facing a brutal (and worsening) job market. I just don't want one of you guys to someday be the ones writing those embittered blog posts about how you were bamboozled, how nobody every told you. Everyone cannot be the exception to the rule. Most people are going to be the rule.

http://gifsoup.com/http://gifsoup.com/

For the theory people, object-oriented rhetoric and post-process theory seem to be really in. Ecocrit and posthumanism, too. On the empirical side (which is my side), there's been a push for RAD research in the meaning of Richard Haswell-- Replicable, Aggregable, Data-Driven. Also, interface with Second Language Studies/TESOL stuff just seems more and more necessary, given the changing demographics of the university. Pedagogically, digital and multimodality still rule the day, I'd say.

I hope so! And I wish you well.

I appreciate your candor and your passion. But a community college wasn't going to cut it for a lot of people who ended up not even being able to get community college jobs.

If it's an exaggeration, it's only by a very small amount. Fishbucket: the vast majority of the people who read and post here will never get tenure track jobs. Never. The numbers are staggering. Getting a tenure track job in literature is punishingly bad odds. If you've convinced yourself that that isn't true, you should do some research and reconsider.

I'm not interested in post-humanism myself, but it's odd to me to see people talking about it as if it doesn't resonate outside of the academy. With the rise of Google Glass, smartphones, and ubiquitous and wearable computing, posthumanism is more relevant now than ever. I read people referencing it in popular press publications like The Atlantic all the time.

Right, that's a good point. And while we get a few of those, to be the sole compositionist at a school like that, we place far more people in mid-tier state schools, with huge student populations and a need for remediation vertical integration with high school. It's a different professional life, for most of us, than that which many people think of when they think "English professor."

It's a sticky conversation. I think one thing that we have to remember is that for most people here, the goal is not just "get into a PhD program," but rather "get into a PhD program and go from there to a tenure track job in English." And those odds are very, very low. What's more, most of those who want to get tenure track jobs don't want to be teaching 4/4s for the rest of their lives, so their goal is actually "go from there to a tenure track job in English at a research institution where I'll only teach a handful of classes a year." And the odds of that are far worse than the odds of getting into the most exclusive English PhD programs in the country. And they're only getting worse. For myself, I have a very strong chance of getting a tenure track job, given the numbers game within rhet/comp writ large and Purdue PhDs specifically. I am aware that the job I get is likely to be at a teaching university, not considered prestigious, where I will teach 3 or 4 classes a semester. Not that I won't reach for a job at a research university, and I have a shot; we place people in those jobs all the time. But I'm perfectly happy to work at an open-enrollment teaching university. But then, I love to teach, and I love to teach composition, and I'm looking forward to being a Writing Program Administrator. So my goals are different; what I'm hoping for is exactly what a lot of people here are trying to avoid. If your goal is to get a TT job in literature at a prestigious research university, I think it's a dream worth pursuing if you are totally mercenary and realistic with yourself and still decide to go for it. But you have to understand it as a dream in the same way that becoming a celebrity or professional athlete is: reserved for a tiny fraction of the people who pursue it.

Maybe; maybe not. But "reputation" is never a static or easily-understood notion, and is more or less important depending on a great number of factors. And the reality is that all Americans with MAs have significantly better economic conditions than those with just a BA, both in terms of income and unemployment rate. Most people who get MAs get them without any funding at all. Your typically brusque response isn't wrong, but it leaves out a lot of nuance and complexity.

English writ large, or lit in particular?

Funded MA programs are rare. I would definitely consider taking that offer. Getting an MA at 85% of the cost with a stipend is a great opportunity.

People are awfully optimistic about the economics of the humanities around here.

That movie makes Ann Arbor seem like a hellscape, instead of a lovely college town with a lot of cool restaurants, bars, and culture. Also I don't get why she would extend her postdoc if her first two years went so well.

It feels so weird to not be signing up for coursework right now....

Fear the turtle!

Congratulations, you guys.

Ugh. That's exactly what they're not supposed to be doing, if they're CGS Resolution signatories.

I think your mind is already made up, and you should celebrate! You clearly like Maryland the best, you have well-articulated reasons for choosing to go there, and your instinct is matching up with those reasons. It's true that I would name both Illinois and Arizona among the top handful of programs, and I would not name Maryland. And prestige and program reputation certainly matter. But if you genuinely believe that Maryland is a program that's coming up, and I think you make a good case, then it's better to get in early than to get in late. And coming home from CCCC just the other day, I can say with great confidence that people come from outside of "name" programs, or outside of explicit rhet/comp programs at all, and are taken just as seriously. (As well they should.) For myself, I would probably go to Illinois, given your choices-- which are awesome, by the way. But that's kind of irrelevant! I do think that having a broad choice of courses is one of the best things I like about my program; my old peers at URI love the program with the exception of the lack of choices in course load. But if you know you can mitigate that by taking courses from outside of the department, or in classes in linguistics or SLS or similar, then that's not a big problem. As fall as the small cohort, I agree that it has its good sides and bad sides. The most important thing is that the department set up the structures so that you feel included and respected, and I'm sure they will. Go to Maryland. I look forward to reading your work in the near future.