Professionalization and Reform

[empress-marmot]

The Chronicle writes about professionalization like it's a dirty word they're being forced to use, and I'm not sure why. Professionalization is a way of increasing my power in the workforce. Why wouldn't I professionalize? What part of professionalization is most important for you and your career, and how are you going to address it during your time in graduate school? If you're already in a program, what was hardest/easiest for you to do? Is there anything you would have done differently?

 

Similarly, if we increase our power in the workforce, then we should think about reforming that workforce. How are you going to help higher education? For example, I'm a member of my school's graduate student union, and I want to increase the required minimum stipend (which my department then supplements) to at least the poverty line. 

 

Lots of questions here, I know. I think most of us agree that higher education needs to be fixed. Most of us probably agree that we don't want to walk away just yet. I'd like to read your ideas for professionalization and reform. 

[greenmt]

It might be kind of a wise idea for these programs - or their association, the ADE, or an association of graduate organizations, if there is such a thing - to poll the various programs, to glean best practices in professionalization.  I've been very impressed (at least prospectively) with the kind of support that is provided by the program I'm entering in the fall.  Other programs are probably doing interesting things, too, to support their students' preparation for work after the PhD.  Why not gather and share this info?  Might make for a very compelling MLA presentation.

My little ax to grind is, if there are no tenure-track jobs to be had for everyone entering PhD programs now, why not broaden the notion of professionalization to include experience doing other things PhD students do when they leave school?  It's possible to serve the university by improving its archives or its web presence or landing an NEH grant, as much as by teaching composition to undergraduates.  A lot of the agony people seem to feel - on this board and in magazine articles and blog posts - when they can't get a tenure track job, seems to stem from a justifiable sense of betrayal: they studied and prepared and served the university for five or eight or ten years, and then they were out on their own.  

[empress-marmot]

It might be kind of a wise idea for these programs - or their association, the ADE, or an association of graduate organizations, if there is such a thing - to poll the various programs, to glean best practices in professionalization.  I've been very impressed (at least prospectively) with the kind of support that is provided by the program I'm entering in the fall.  Other programs are probably doing interesting things, too, to support their students' preparation for work after the PhD.  Why not gather and share this info?  Might make for a very compelling MLA presentation.

 

I don't know who has money in academia, but someone needs to get a grant to audit these placement statistics. How many students are in TT/secure NTT jobs, and how long did it take to get them? How many students are in alt-ac or post-ac careers? Was their decision to leave academia voluntary or involuntary? How long did it take them to begin making significant contributions to savings/retirement funds? If some independent organization started reporting those results, I bet we'd see a lot of programs reform. Quickly. 

Even better, if more people could get grants for professionalization. My program director just received way over 50k for professional development, though I probably shouldn't be more specific than that. I'm really pleased with my program's ideas about what I can do with an MA or PhD as well, though I support reducing academia's dependence on graduate/adjunct labor. (I feel awful for writing this. Still, to continue producing such a surplus of PhDs who feel that they are forced into adjunct positions is wrong.)

 

I just don't know why we're having such a tough time discussing all of this. Perhaps I'm naive, but I believe in the mission of higher education. There are a bunch of Awful People doing Awful Things to it, but I don't want to walk away without at least trying to help. I don't want to professionalize just to get a job. I want to professionalize so I can make people listen to me/want to help too. If that means walking into Awful Person's office, looking him/her in the eye, and asking why it is okay to pay adjuncts $16,000/yr to teach a 4-4, so be it.

Edited April 20, 2015 by empress-marmot

[BLeonard]

This is probably more of a cultural thing than anything, but I'd like to see professionalization include a greater expansion of post-graduate school jobs outside of higher education. I'd like to see more resources devoted to placing PhDs in other careers that could use PhDs -- university presses, government, public service, even something like teaching at the secondary level. That's not something I'm articulating particularly well, but it's something that I've thought about. 

[Wonton Soup]

I'm fine with taking a good long look at what PhD programs train for and asking whether they train for the right things. But I must challenge the partial myth that there is a surplus of PhDs, and that the problem with academia is that there are too many graduate programs. That may be true for some fields, and particularly fields that the university seems to be moving away from (and of course we can challenge whether they should or shouldn't be moving away from those fields), but a large number of courses in higher education are taught by people who have merely masters degrees. A large number of courses in higher education are also taught by people who aren't even in the field that the course is in. We need to be clear about where the problem in higher education lies--in legislatures, in board of trustee meetings and certain administrative offices, in Scott Walker's head, etc.--and not shift the blame somewhere else. 

[Wonton Soup]

To be frank, I think "professionalization" should include activist work, organizing, and training in both theory and practice. Higher ed needs to learn to fight back. 

[greenmt]

I agree with all of this. I'll just say that from what I have found there is already a fair amount of data available, in the form of the MLA's annual reports on the Job Information List; in periodic reports from the Association of Departments of English on the state of the profession, polling and reporting on who is working and on which track (it's time for another one, as the most recent was in 2007); and in various other places I've cited elsewhere, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  I found the ADE site particularly interesting, because it's the place that the faculty-managers of departments talk with each other.  Among the facts cited in their 2007 report (which tracked faculty numbers between 1995 and 2005) was that the *number* of tenured faculty increased during that time, but the *percentage* declined.  This is because much of the growth in both faculty hires and the student population was at 2 year colleges.  If that's true - and from what I read in the papers it might be even more the case since 2008 - it kind of makes sense that tenure-track hiring is declining.  Community colleges tend to be underfunded, to have fluctuating enrollments (because students drop out at a higher rate), and to focus primarily on survey courses in the Humanities.  In any case, maybe the place to organize would be in that subsector of the overall field.  

 

I think the main thing for me is to get away from the alarmist tone that predominates in popular articles on the subject.  In order to solve the problem, I agree, it's necessary to look at it directly, and that might be difficult for people whose future professional lives rely on their reputation within fairly small, fairly personal networks (compared with the workforce at large), or whose professional lives are more or less settled.  In other words, there may be disincentives to speaking plainly, related to the structure of the tenure system.  I'm speaking as someone currently outside that system, so I'd be interested to hear what others think, who are closer to it.  There are lots of other pressures.  At the small, private college where I work, things are desperate: competition for students, lots of unfounded notions about online education, flat or diminishing student aid, increasing expenses, and outright hostility from some quarters for any kind of education that doesn't lead directly to the help-wanted ads.  I have some sympathy for the administrators, having seen what *they're* up against.

[empress-marmot]

This is probably more of a cultural thing than anything, but I'd like to see professionalization include a greater expansion of post-graduate school jobs outside of higher education. I'd like to see more resources devoted to placing PhDs in other careers that could use PhDs -- university presses, government, public service, even something like teaching at the secondary level. That's not something I'm articulating particularly well, but it's something that I've thought about. 

 

I cringe every time I read one of those "PhD at Starbucks" articles, because it just reinforces the popular myth that PhDs (and the people who have earned them) are useless for anything in the "real" world. We can inundate the media with "PhD Making World Better" stories, but those aren't as sensational as Starbucks.

 

To be frank, I think "professionalization" should include activist work, organizing, and training in both theory and practice. Higher ed needs to learn to fight back. 

 

Agreed! I'm amazed that somehow I've managed to get a high school diploma and a BA, and yet I've never been taught anything about social justice. How can we change that for future students?

 

At the small, private college where I work, things are desperate: competition for students, lots of unfounded notions about online education, flat or diminishing student aid, increasing expenses, and outright hostility from some quarters for any kind of education that doesn't lead directly to the help-wanted ads.  I have some sympathy for the administrators, having seen what *they're* up against.

 

It's really easy to blame administrators, I agree. I have to admit that I'm jealous of their ergonomic furniture and offices with windows, but the administrators at my school were constantly being fired without notice. They had to deal with a thousand petty complaints. Someone in student affairs once told me that she had to find first-year students on Facebook and ask them why they hadn't returned to school for the second semester. If I had to do stuff like that, I'd want ergonomic office furniture too. 

Perhaps the real enemies here are the anti-intellectualists? 

[Wonton Soup]

I agree that some nuance is necessary when we think of "administrators" and what their role is in higher education's problems. Ideally, administrators would work to solve those problems, and some do. But we should also not lose sight of the university officials who hire union-busting firms and who intimidate adjuncts who speak up. In my local area, leading up to and after National Adjunct Walkout Day, university admins went to a lot of trouble to identify the "troublemakers" behind it all, going so far as to hold fake solidarity meetings with moles in them. One of my friends and fellow organizers has essentially been fired after the semester ends. My attitude towards administrators is critical and demanding. 

[kurayamino]

This was a great positive essay about ending the dichotomy between "applied" degrees and liberal arts degrees. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/04/20/essay-calls-ending-divide-between-liberal-arts-and-practical-education

[greenmt]

I agree that some nuance is necessary when we think of "administrators" and what their role is in higher education's problems. Ideally, administrators would work to solve those problems, and some do. But we should also not lose sight of the university officials who hire union-busting firms and who intimidate adjuncts who speak up. In my local area, leading up to and after National Adjunct Walkout Day, university admins went to a lot of trouble to identify the "troublemakers" behind it all, going so far as to hold fake solidarity meetings with moles in them. One of my friends and fellow organizers has essentially been fired after the semester ends. My attitude towards administrators is critical and demanding. 

 

That's awful.  Whether or not you have a union, I'd suggest contacting the NLRB.  Your friend might have a case.  

[ToldAgain]

This was a great positive essay about ending the dichotomy between "applied" degrees and liberal arts degrees. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/04/20/essay-calls-ending-divide-between-liberal-arts-and-practical-education

This is such a great article. And my favorite thread.

 

Thanks, everybody. I have nothing of substance to add, but when I do this is where I will come.

[greenmt]

I like that article a lot.  On the topic of "the two sides have much to gain from each other," here's a story about an art education method used to improve the observation skills of Harvard Med School students.  Disclosure: I worked with the folks behind Visual Thinking Strategies for a few years, before this project got underway: http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/07/20/monet_gauguin_using_art_to_make_better_doctors/?page=full and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2517949/

Edited April 21, 2015 by greenmt

[VirtualMessage]

This was a great positive essay about ending the dichotomy between "applied" degrees and liberal arts degrees. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/04/20/essay-calls-ending-divide-between-liberal-arts-and-practical-education

 

God save the Humanities!

Edited April 21, 2015 by VirtualMessage

[ToldAgain]

Moving on...

 

Another interesting article about the impact humanities have in the medical field: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/nyregion/30medschools.html?_r=0

 

It is about Mount Sinai's Humanities and Medicine Program and the skills humanities students bring to the profession.

 

I liked the section in the IHE article that compared the different methods for considering what is behind the act of buying a gallon of gas. An engineer talks about X, a humanities student talks about Y. Neither is really a full answer, and maybe together they aren't, either. But they are both closer to being complete when combined.

Edited April 21, 2015 by ToldAgain

[ComeBackZinc]

One thing I would like to offer as a way to increase your post-graduation options is writing some things for non-academic audiences. Try and get some professional freelance work going if you can. I don't represent this as easy, and I feel a bit perverse telling people to go from one notoriously tough job market to another. That said, even if you remain in academia, universities are placing a premium on public engagement these days, and with good reason, and I think you'll find writing online really fulfilling. It can also put (a little) money in your pocket if you do it well and are savvy about it.

 

The tricky part is when to write for free and for how long. I think it's legitimate to do some free writing early on, while you work to build a name for yourself. Some people, like Yasmin Nair, are very critical of people writing for free, and I largely agree, although I find her polemical nature rubs some people the wrong way. (Full disclosure is that Yasmin is a personal friend.) But it's also true that you can get some early exposure by writing for  free and then move on to paid gigs. 

 

There's tons of advice out there and I can't summarize it by myself, so seek out opinions and perspectives on getting started. You might start looking at non-academic sites that use a lot of academic vocabulary and theorizing, like the New Inquiry. Also, Scratch Magazine is a really good resource for reading about how writers do money and make these things a professional enterprise. I genuinely think that if you graduate having built up a meaningful portfolio of popular website publications you will have more potential job outs. You could freelance or look for a staff writer job, and because you'd be using different parts of your brain, you'd likely find the actual work isn't too much to take on in addition to your academic duties. Just a thought.

[kurayamino]

This is a great piece about professionalization from the MLA in 2013. There's a lot of information about the "downturn" in English positions and the harsh realities we face. What I think is great is some of the stuff at the end where it talks about what grad students can do themselves, what types of things to look for in their programs, etc. https://www.mla.org/professionalization

 

The word on the street is apocalyptic: there are hardly any jobs, and to get one students must have c.v.s of the dimensions that used to get people tenure--or even promotion to full professor. Such is the rumor, recognizably (and understandably) driven by anxiety. The reality is somewhat different. There are jobs, even if there are not enough for all in the academy, and to get one students need to have c.v.s that show their engagement with a variety of elements of the profession, but not to the extent or depth that rumor would have it.

[ToldAgain]

I second the advice about freelancing. I do that kind of horribly commercial writing you see on financial blogs all over the internet, but it pays well. When I'm in grad school I will be able to pay my rent and then some by working ten hours a week writing that kind of stuff.

 

I never worked for free, but what I did do was offer one "sample" article to customers. I have never had somebody turn me down for a project after I gave them a customized sample.

 

As for where to go to get this kind of work: Elance-type websites are not your friend, in my experience. My advice is to get on them, get customers, then run as fast as you can the other way (electronically, of course) and take those customers with you. Seriously, don't rely on places like that.

 

I will attempt to nudge the writing career I have now on a more fulfilling path, but this is definitely a good way to get started.

[kurayamino]

I second the advice about freelancing. I do that kind of horribly commercial writing you see on financial blogs all over the internet, but it pays well. When I'm in grad school I will be able to pay my rent and then some by working ten hours a week writing that kind of stuff.

 

I never worked for free, but what I did do was offer one "sample" article to customers. I have never had somebody turn me down for a project after I gave them a customized sample.

 

As for where to go to get this kind of work: Elance-type websites are not your friend, in my experience. My advice is to get on them, get customers, then run as fast as you can the other way (electronically, of course) and take those customers with you. Seriously, don't rely on places like that.

 

I will attempt to nudge the writing career I have now on a more fulfilling path, but this is definitely a good way to get started.

 

I think another way to get other work experience is through your program in some ways. I started working on transcription of audio interviews for a professor, but I can see that this type of skill will be useful outside of academia. Not that journalism is another field where jobs are abundant, but doing some of the background work such as transcribing interviews, might provide better opportunities than creative content. 

If you're not sure how to get this work, I would say you look to the history and anthropology departments. I've never had a problem finding some work doing this and have worked on a number of book length projects throughout my undergraduate career. If you get one job doing it and do it well, chances are that professor will recommend you to others.

[ComeBackZinc]

Here's a cool, worthwhile initiative from MLA along these lines.

 

https://connect.commons.mla.org/

[greenmt]

Here's a cool, worthwhile initiative from MLA along these lines.

 

https://connect.commons.mla.org/

 

The "resources" section of that site has a great deal of recent - very recent, as in this spring - data and related related material about placement.  I haven't had time to look at everything, but among other things are some charts showing the results of a study the MLA has done that tracks actual employment outcomes for modern language PhDs over a roughly 20 year period. To my eyes, it shows that things are not so dire as the public discourse ("Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!") would lead one to believe.  Though of course it would be better if everyone who wants a tenure-track job could find one, and everyone ought to keep fighting toward that.

[ComeBackZinc]

Yeah one point that I try to be very nuanced on is that a) the academic job market is very very bad, but all for all recent humanities PhDs aren't doing as terribly as we've been told.

[ExponentialDecay]

This was a great positive essay about ending the dichotomy between "applied" degrees and liberal arts degrees. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/04/20/essay-calls-ending-divide-between-liberal-arts-and-practical-education

 

What a bullshit article.

 

 For instance, an English major might complete a co-op with a national magazine, applying ideas she encountered in a Technology of Text class to the creation of content for new formats in publishing.

 

Dude, what? Publishing is dying. Professional journalism is probably the only field that has it worse right now than humanities academia. Unless you're getting paid pocket money mining Reddit for clickbait, you need to have expert-level experience in the field you write about, be it sports, entertainment, economics, or human rights, because there's a lot of amateurs out there who are willing to write surface-level articles for free. You're getting paid for your experience with the subject, not for the article itself. Nobody's gonna care if you're an English major unless you're writing articles about English literature.

 

 

making us question the ethics of using electronics built with exploited labor.

 

Exploited labor sucks and I'd rather it not happen. There. I questioned it. I'm sure all of you came up with the same conclusion as I and you didn't even need to research the subject on Wikipedia. Newsflash: this hasn't solved the problem of exploited labor. The causes and ramification of labor exploitation are legal, economic, sociological, and it's legal and economic scholars who are making the real difference in these fields. 

 

​People aren't abandoning the humanities because the programs don't offer co-ops. That's surface thinking that's about 20 years old, and this shit is a band-aid solution that's trite and tired. The reality is, there just aren't enough jobs out there for humanities majors. I mean specialized jobs that pay a living wage and resemble something like a career. To get one of those jobs, you have to be competent, when a, most people are not, and b, I suspect the number of competent people still outpaces the number of good jobs. The real struggle of the post-humanities job market is that some small cream of the crop will get these nice jobs, and then everybody else will either transfer to completely different fields or become footnote formatters. This is not to say that you don't have to be a brilliant engineer to get a top engineering jobs, nor to suggest that there isn't an engineering equivalent of a footnote formatter; this is to say that the gap between top job and footnote formatter is so, so much greater than the gap in engineering, in terms of salary, prestige, career prospects, etc. There is a saying in engineering, that if you are an engineer, no matter what, you will get a job; the concurrent fear in the humanities is that, no matter how brilliant you are, you may still get shut out. Because the market is so small. The market virtually does not exist. This is a structural problem that is determined by macroeconomic forces. You're not going to solve it by pushing students into internships. That will only mean that your students are more likely to get one of these rapidly disappearing unicorn jobs, and somebody else's students are not.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love the liberal arts. That is to say, I love all the liberal arts. I love literary analysis, mathematics, history. If you want to be a good generalist (which is what humanities majors, if they don't luck out in academia or at the New York Times, are going to do), you need to be competent in all of those areas - it's still much more lucrative to specialize in some practical field, but hey, if you can't live without taking classes on Proust, it's a living. That was me, and I think going that direction has made me a better person and a better amateur scholar, because that's the way my brain works best. But I harbor no illusions as to how necessary it is for me to be good at math, computer science, interpersonal interaction - all those things no humanities major is expressly taught. I further agree with the author that there is a sad dearth of good statistical applications to, let's say, the less-quantized fields out there. Most of the mathy stuff I see in anthropology or, heaven forbid, literature is drab mode-median-mean stuff that's basically there to say "I spent two days learning how to make pie graphs in excel for information that shouldn't be in a pie graph anyway". I hope and expect the state of things to improve. But don't get me wrong, understanding literature and statistics both well enough to make a contribution to the field of data analysis is fucking hard. It's non-trivial. It's an emerging field. It's not a vocation. I also think this last paragraph mimics the disorganization of the last section of that article, which doesn't really talk about the dichotomy between applied fields and liberal arts - it talks about the dichotomy between people who know math and people who don't.

[ComeBackZinc]

The supposed poor employment condition of liberal arts majors and English majors in general has been the subject of several years of research of mine. In fact, humanities majors do not suffer on the job market. Though the notion that they do is commonplace, it lacks evidentiary basis. Indeed, English majors themselves do quite well on the job market. What you're saying is factually inaccurate. I'm sorry to blow up your spot, but thems the facts.

 

Here's a quickie, for example: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/the-best-argument-for-studying-english-the-employment-numbers/277162/

[ComeBackZinc]

There is a saying in engineering, that if you are an engineer, no matter what, you will get a job

 

 

In fact engineering is undergoing a marketed labor slowdown in some subfields, and the general notion of a STEM shortage is unfounded: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/