"cruel programs"?

[CarolineNC]

I'm on my recruitment weekend at Chapel Hill and several people have mentioned certain other programs that use "cruel" (their wording) "pedagogical methods" like embarrassing students, yelling, treating them horribly, and encouraging graduate student competitiveness. Apparently Vanderbilt is one, and there are others. Has anyone heard of this? They assured me Chapel Hill is not like this, but nonetheless, even knowing this exists scares me. 

[Wonton Soup]

I am not aware of this as a method or pedagogy of the field. However, I do notice that some graduate students develop a tendency of "cruel" methods. They do a lot of student bashing both outside the classroom to colleagues and in the classroom (presumably, from their own stories). Speaking frankly, usually these are literature graduate students, especially literature graduate students who are not connected with a rhet/comp community or who come from MAs where they were not connected with a rhet/comp community. 

 

Grad student competitiveness is something else entirely. Luckily I have managed to avoid it =)

[echo449]

I've heard of this. Major school X has a rep for being like this, though across all graduate departments not just English. I've heard horror stories about Small Elite Program Y in the 90s, though by all accounts most of that has cleared up since. Large State School has a rep of being a sort of nasty place, but I think this is just due to the way that funding is something a lot of students compete for. But! I don't think most programs are like this, and the ones that are change over time. Never mind that people can probably go through a program the size of X's and never have a bad experience, and, conversely, someone could choose precisely the worst person at a department known for its warmth. It's a hard thing to judge ahead of time. 

Edit: eh, I'm just going to remove names because it's a small world.

Edited March 27, 2015 by echo449

[__________________________]

I've heard of this. Chicago has a rep for being like this, though across all graduate departments not just English. I've heard horror stories about JHU in the 90s, though by all accounts most of that has cleared up since. Washington has a rep of being a sort of nasty place, but I think this is just due to the way that funding is something a lot of students compete for. But! I don't think most programs are like this, and the ones that are change over time. Never mind that people can probably go through a program the size of Chicago's and never have a bad experience, and, conversely, someone could choose precisely the worst person at a department known for its warmth. It's a hard thing to judge ahead of time. 

I've heard funding has a lot to do with nastiness and competition.  Having visited and committed to going to the University of Chicago, when I mentioned the reputation you mention, no current students knew what I was talking about.

 

Many programs have funding structures where students compete with each other for funding from year to year.  About a decade ago, Chicago had such a structure, but now they make it a point to fund all their Ph.D students equally.  From what I can tell, the atmosphere is incredibly nurturing and cooperative.  At least at Chicago.  Reputations linger for a long time though, and I'm sure a lot of that is because of professors at other universities trying to sell their own programs.

[echo449]

 

Many programs have funding structures where students compete with each other for funding from year to year.  About a decade ago, Chicago had such a structure, but now they make it a point to fund all their Ph.D students equally.  From what I can tell, the atmosphere is incredibly nurturing and cooperative.  At least at Chicago.  Reputations linger for a long time though, and I'm sure a lot of that is because of professors at other universities trying to sell their own programs.

No doubt! I do think it comes more down to the faculty that you choose to work with rather than the program as a whole, for most people. And current grad students, if you ask them in person at least, will tell you who you should not have on your committee. 

[__________________________]

No doubt! I do think it comes more down to the faculty that you choose to work with rather than the program as a whole, for most people. And current grad students, if you ask them in person at least, will tell you who you should not have on your committee. 

Yeah, I'm sure it can vary within programs too, especially at well endowed schools with some "stars" (who may or may not be more snooty and who may or may not have grad students competing for their attention) in their midst.

 

I suspect there's going to be at least little competition wherever you go -- the job market sucks and, within a program, part of "professionalizing" entails developing a kind of big ego maybe partially as a survival tactic and partially out of just becoming a "real" scholar.  From people I've talked to, though, usually the thing that makes it nasty is money.  Which doesn't surprise me.  

[fuzzylogician]

I know nothing about your field, so this is just a general rumination. I attended a school that has a very persistent reputation for being competitive and unfriendly. You hear it said all the time by professors and students at other schools. When I visited, I kind of thought I perceived it too. Since I started there, it's been a recurring theme in conversations with prospective students: are people really always trying to one-up everyone else? can you make any friends there at all? When you expect to see something, you find it in places where it doesn't exist. Because let me tell you, my program is anything but competitive and unfriendly. It is full of wonderful friendly and supportive people who became very close friends. So, the moral of my story is, rumors have wings, and people at other programs have good reasons to try and convince you to come to their school and not others, and besides how can they really know? I'd suggest actually talking to people who are attending now or recent alums to get the true story. 

[lifealive]

I don't think you even have to censor the names--it's common knowledge that Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley are shark tanks.

 

Having said that, I would have no problem going to any of them. The psychological toll aside, those "hardball" programs get you ready for academic conferences and readers reports like nothing else. Not to mention job talks. Job talks can be feeding frenzies of a spectacular sort. Better to be exposed to that in the seminar room, I guess, than somewhere where it counts.

 

I know a lot of people from Johns Hopkins, actually, and the reputation is deserved. That's a rough crowd.

[poliscar]

As far as I know from a friend at Chicago, the department is incredibly collegial and friendly. Columbia used to be considered a highly toxic program, but that was because of unequal funding, which is no longer an issue. 

 

One thing that doesn't surprise me, however, is that a lot of these rumours tend to stick to schools with terminal MA programs, and competitive PhD admissions. This applies to both Chicago and Columbia, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some level of resentment or antagonism between MA and PhD students. 

Berkeley has also always had a reputation having a far heavier reading load than other programs. A professor of mine, for example, will quite happily tell students that she read "3000 pages a week at Berkeley in the 90s." I think some of this is overblown, but hey, Berkeley is a phenomenally intense program. Whether you want to categorize this as cruel is another question. In terms of collegiality, I have only heard good things about Berkeley, and the students in the program seem to be very supportive of one another. So who knows? 

[Wonton Soup]

I don't think I could contain myself if someone claimed to read 3000 pages a week. That would be like reading Capital Vol 1 three times in one week. And then some. Uh huh, sure, she "read" that much

 

The only way I could imagine it being true is if she were in lit and a majority of those pages were fiction. Even still, trying to hit that many pages in a week will lead to something that can hardly be called "reading."

Edited March 28, 2015 by Wonton Soup

[Appppplication]

the 3000 pages claim may be another form of the age old "when i was your age I had to walk two miles in the snow barefoot to school everyday and the snow never melted, even during summer school, which lasted 12 hours a day".

[poliscar]

I'm not saying she wasn't being hyperbolic to a degree, but sometimes I look at course descriptions like http://complit.berkeley.edu/?page_id=10171and I wonder...

[__________________________]

I'm not saying she wasn't being hyperbolic to a degree, but sometimes I look at course descriptions like http://complit.berkeley.edu/?page_id=10171and I wonder...

"Take a deep breath–and then realize that, depending on how you feel at any given moment, it gets better–or worse: that is, what you’ve just read has been, incredibly enough, a very minimal listing!"

 

[CarolineNC]

I'm not saying she wasn't being hyperbolic to a degree, but sometimes I look at course descriptions like http://complit.berkeley.edu/?page_id=10171and I wonder...

Mother of God. Reading that course description... Is that an onion article?

[Wonton Soup]

I'm all for rigor in a program, but let's be real. That course description was specifically written so that people would read it and be like "oh man Berkeley so rigorous much superior." I got my MA at a (plebian!) mid-sized state school, but I'm fairly certain the profs could have hyperboled up the language of their course syllabi so as to appear pretty close to this without changing very much in the course at all. They just didn't. I wonder if, in the Berkeley department, the course syllabi are in sort of an arms race and the profs feel they can't possibly "normalize" their syllabi without appearing unrigorous to their colleagues. So they spend their otherwise valuable time throwing in phrases like "knowledge of German would be helpful," "of course, this is just a minimal listing," and long lists of aesthetic movements and lit texts. 

Sorry all, but I can't help but make fun of Ivy League (or Ivy League-esque) pretentiousness. 

Edited March 28, 2015 by Wonton Soup

[echo449]

I certainly don't go to a Berkeley right now, but I've had syllabi that look like that. The assigned reading will be from maybe a 3rd of each of those books, perhaps more of the easier ones like Notes on Literature. It's nice because those courses give you an excuse to buy so many great texts, but it's a pain because you'll often read like 100 pages of a 300 page book you bought used for $20. 

[VirtualMessage]

I'm all for rigor in a program, but let's be real. That course description was specifically written so that people would read it and be like "oh man Berkeley so rigorous much superior." I got my MA at a (plebian!) mid-sized state school, but I'm fairly certain the profs could have hyperboled up the language of their course syllabi so as to appear pretty close to this without changing very much in the course at all. They just didn't. I wonder if, in the Berkeley department, the course syllabi are in sort of an arms race and the profs feel they can't possibly "normalize" their syllabi without appearing unrigorous to their colleagues. So they spend their otherwise valuable time throwing in phrases like "knowledge of German would be helpful," "of course, this is just a minimal listing," and long lists of aesthetic movements and lit texts. 

Sorry all, but I can't help but make fun of Ivy League (or Ivy League-esque) pretentiousness. 

 

The assumption is that you're curious about Frankfurt and want to know more. I don't think that Kaufman is interested in his regalia; he's a passionate scholar of this material who left a law practice to teach and study it. Overwhelming? Yes. Rigorous? Yes. But there is real substance in that course: he obviously wants his students to encounter that material with an intimacy previously unknown to them. Can you imagine the amount of work that goes into leading that seminar? I think the substance of intellectual discovery and inquiry is one of the few things we have left in English. It's good to see someone enforcing it in a graduate seminar. This is why Berkeley is Berkeley.  

[unræd]

Eh, I am very much with echo499 and VirtualMessage on this one. I mean, maybe he didn't need to enumerate every single one of the theorists, questions, or aesthetic texts Adorno is responding to in those three long paragraphs, but he was also very careful to reiterate that knowledge of none of those things would be assumed or expected. And I'm not quite sure why pointing out that knowledge of German is indeed helpful for a course devoted to the close reading of the work of a German-language thinker counts as pretentiousness? Also, note that that is just one course description (and from comp lit, not English). Having recently read, well, pretty much every one of their archived English course descriptions, it doesn't seem to me like an "arms race" so much as professors trying to develop rigorous, thoughtful seminars and then accurately describing their content and motivating questions. And there are certainly plenty of more terse, telegraphic, "we'll read a selection of secondary literature" course descriptions, as well!

 

Obviously I'm a bit biased; I'll be starting at Berkeley next year. But a big part of the reason I made that choice--aside from the people: as many others mentioned above, the grad students currently at Berkeley are very warm and supportive of each other and each other's work--is, yeah, the explicit emphasis on rigor. I see a description like that, and I get pretty damn excited for getting my ass kicked around by my reading lists in the fall.

 

ETA: There is of course rigor all over; I don't mean to imply Cal's got a monopoly on it, at all. That's why I still just don't quite get the evidence for Wonton Soup's "That course description was specifically written so that people would read it and be like "oh man Berkeley so rigorous much superior." As echo499 says, there are certainly other syllabuses at other schools that read like that.

Edited March 28, 2015 by unræd

[Wonton Soup]

Some fair points. I don't mean to sound anti-intellectual. I think I am especially sensitive to issues like this because I have witnessed a number of situations where invocations of rigor and intellectual inquiry became an excuse for elitism and dismissal of whole people, methods and ideas. I become automatically quite suspicious when I hear people like the prof who claimed to have read 3000 pages a week at Berkeley. Sure, there's an ethos of rigor the professor may be trying to communicate, but I also hear in that an implicit claim that anyone who doesn't read that much (didn't go to a Berkeley) is inferior, that there is a stratification in the field between quality programs and everyone else, and that that prof is one of few worthies from a quality program who thus deserves a TT job. Is this what the prof is saying? Maybe, maybe not, but that's what I hear, mostly because, as I said, I've heard those things before. I had all this in mind when I looked at the syllabus. 

 

It's interesting to me how the two fields--lit, and rhet/comp--experience this differently. There is nowhere near the level of stratification in rhet/comp that exists in lit. Yes, there are programs that people recognize as top tier because of the professors there, but I do not see the same positioning of social and cultural capital, or crises of rankings. It is in a way good to hear people resisting my interpretation, because it could be a sign of improvement. 

[__________________________]

Agreed.  I had one or two undergrad courses that were definitely close to 1,000 pages a week for stretches of time (here! read this 650 page 18th century novel for Tuesday, and a 75 page excerpt from a book on fashion and economics in England and half of another crazy long novel for Thursday) and and in grad school you get to focus more specifically on each course.  In undergrad, I was taking 4-5 classes every semester and at times I would be in two or three classes with similarly heavy reading loads (isn't skimming and selective skipping kind of a skill we all learn at some point in undergrad, even if we don't apply it to all classes/texts?).  It was never 3,000/week, but it wasn't exactly light either and I definitely had a few "1-2 books a week" type courses, sometimes simultaneously.

 

The course looks pretty awesome if you ask me, even if it is intimidating.  I would take it.  I think the course description posted is longer than most I've seen, but it doesn't sound particularly outside the norm for a Ph.D. seminar (it's just more up front about it).  I think these sorts of courses acknowledge that not everything can be absorbed and read/investigated in full; instead they provide students a basic familiarity with the myriad of cultural/theoretical contexts of a central work of 20th century theory and allow people to dive in more wherever their particular interests lie.  It does makes me wonder if Cal is on a semester or quarter system, lol.  Cramming that in like 2 and half months would be intense indeed.

 

In short, I doubt the "elites" are the only schools with classes like this and if they are, I'd imagine it's because those programs have more money to throw around where they can guarantee enough financial support for students to actually have the time for courses like this.  

[cloudofunknowing]

Not to get all New Critical meets Freud, but I smell a displaced straw man aflame. & I agree with unræd, molloy, & virtual: it sounds like an awesome &, yes, fiercely rigorous course. But no more than would a class devoted to the work of Klein & Lacan (that's been taught in my program before). I wouldn't say that the course description is unusually long for a PhD class, either, though I do think its length could be functioning as a disclaimer that the course will be a whirlwind. It is devoted to Adorno, after all.....

[CarolineNC]

If it were me, I'd use a different rhetorical tactic when writing the course description. I'm sure the course and professor are great, though!

[poliscar]

As a sidenote of sorts, I don't want to seem like I'm suggesting that extensively long/excessive reading lists are the only way to be rigorous. There are equally rigorous programs with different pedagogical strategies, but Berkeley, and some other programs like Duke Lit, are known for this sort of front-loaded, wide-reaching course. 

I remember talking to another professor about program "signatures," i.e. he said he could quite easily pick out scholars from the program he had gone to, simply based on their work. Berkeley's scholarly depth & intensity is part of that. It's just like Yale during its heyday; you can tell when students have been through the program because of the tone/content of their scholarship. 

That being said, I think it's fair to say that Berkeley is a really, really, really amazing program, and that students there are pushed further than those at most other programs. I don't know if this necessarily produces entirely superior scholarship in the long-run, but there is a very high standard of output. Like others in the thread have mentioned, this is why I find Berkeley to be really compelling. I think that it holds its students to a model of dedication and intellectual breadth that is becoming more and more of a rarity, but does so without falling into conservatism or decadence or political apathy. 

[allplaideverything]

I'm not saying she wasn't being hyperbolic to a degree, but sometimes I look at course descriptions like http://complit.berkeley.edu/?page_id=10171and I wonder...

 

lol. That is indeed lots of name-dropping, but I mean, you can go through any Marxist theorist (or really any theorist who engages deeply with history & historiography) and make a long list of all the allusions and references involved. Reading Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's introduction to Monster Theory, for example, requires you to either be familiar with or look up at least 5 different time periods, 3 different pre-Modern philosophers, post/structuralism, various discourses of and on colonialism, and a plethora of different cultural mythologies, and yet my fresh'n/sophomore composition students at respected-but-not-elite public university managed to get a grasp on most of his arguments.

 

And just think! In 5-8 years, we'll all be able to write syllabi like this one and actually know, mostly, what we're talking about! Yay!

[poliscar]

Let's be real though, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is such a far-cry from Adorno that I don't think the two are even comparable. Aesthetic Theory is one of the most complex books of the 20th century...