Month: December 2017

John Horgan, who teaches engineers at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in New Jersey, published a blog post for Scientific American titled “Why Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering Freshmen.” He writes:

We live in a world increasingly dominated by science. And that’s fine. . . . But it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In science, mathematics and engineering classes, you’re given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, “This is how things are.” They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism. . . . The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. . . . Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we’re learning more every day. But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deceiving ourselves.

I agree with Horgan’s assertion that “[t]he humanities are more about questions than answers.” That’s why I will keep coming back to ethics in what follows here. The humanities invite us—indeed, they require us—to deal with the persistent, inconvenient ethical questions for which fact-based, empirical approaches to the world don’t have the time, or the stomach.

This is a point that Martha Nussbaum likewise made when she wrote in 2010 that the disciplines we associate with the humanities are infused by “searching critical thought, daring imagination, empathetic understanding of human experiences of many different kinds, and understanding of the complexity of the world we live in” (7). This is precisely why, for Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics, “science, rightly pursued, is a friend of the humanities rather than their enemy” (8). The Penn State mathematician Kira Hamman was thinking along similar lines when she wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in 2013, that “[b]oth the sciences and the humanities require deep creativity and intellectualism, an ability and a desire to use reason, and a willingness to change your mind.” These are too-often overlooked but undeniably important connections and affiliations that Nussbaum and Hamann cite, and so I want to press them further still.

From my own field of Romantic-era British literature, let me offer Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, one of the perennial icons of popular literature that abounds with both intellectual and ethical questions about science and creativity, about stretching rules, crossing boundaries, and living—or failing to live—with the consequences of individual or collective decisions. Shelley’s friend and Europe’s first superstar poetic icon Lord Byron wrote about the intellectual and emotional high that comes with creative activity. Why write? Byron says:

 ’Tis to create, and in creating live

A being more intense, that we endow

With form our fancy, gaining as we give

The life we image … (canto 3, stanza 6; 416)

Recently I asked a young doctoral student, who is also a poet, during the formal defense of his dissertation on poetry and critical theory, “Why write poetry?” “Why even bother?” I asked. His answer, instant and candid, was: “Why breathe?” Like Byron two centuries ago, he understands the liberating potential of all imaginative activity, of creation, regardless of discipline or context. Creative activity, as Byron put it, enables us to “live / A being more intense” and fill our days with greater passion, greater life, than what our ordinary daily routine provides. And in creating, according to Byron, we gain and give, in equal degrees, life itself, lived intensely and imaginatively, with all its passions and pains.

But there is more to it than that: we need to live with what we create—and to take responsibility for it, too. After all, everything we say and write publicly is inherently political. It carries ethical implications for each of us and for everyone who encounters our work. That’s the terrible lesson that Frankenstein teaches. Ethics lies at the center of the humanities, both as an academic subject and as an intellectual engine of social thought in the broader culture.

The humanities remind us that we are all passengers together on this planetary ship called Earth. In our local social and professional units as well as in our collective citizenship in that ethical society to which we aspire, we need to open avenues to greater ethical awareness, not shut them down. But the so-called war on the humanities turns out to be a phony one, when we look more closely, an ideologically constructed conflict that does neither side any good—and both sides a lot of harm. Perhaps we need more thinking like that of the biologist Edward O. Wilson, author of the 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Wilson coined “consilience,” which he defines as “literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common ground of explanation” (7). As examples, he offers phenomena as diverse as environmental protection and the neurobiology of aesthetics. And he lists among people who practiced this habit of mind Charles Darwin and Francis Bacon, Albert Einstein and the Marquis de Condorcet. To this list we might add Norbert Wiener, who coined the term cybernetics; Gregory Bateson, who famously applied it in anthropology; and Barry Commoner, whose first law of ecology neatly epitomizes it: “Everything is connected to everything else.”

The humanities and the STEM disciplines are fundamentally necessary to each other, both in academia and in our broad contemporary culture. When either side tries to go it alone, the other side is proportionally diminished, and everyone loses. “Without Contraries is No Progression,” William Blake wrote in the 1790s; he also wrote that “Opposition is true Friendship” (Marriage 34). The Romantic-era Irish writer and educational reformer Elizabeth Hamilton wrote in 1811 that “[i]magination is not a simple faculty, but a complex power in which all the faculties of the mind participate.” Therefore, “the imagination of the person in whom they have all been cultivated will be rich and vigorous” (157, 158).² These observations are remarkably prescient and instructive and offer a clearer vision of what makes the world tick than many of our own empirical bean counters can manage today.

So how did our contemporary culture come to believe there’s something monstrous about the humanities? In our economically challenged and increasingly corporatized notion of education, the humanities have emerged as a sort of vampire sucking the lifeblood—that is, the funds—from a public body apparently better off were it rid of this imposition, cured of this disease, exorcised of this demon. “What good are the humanities, anyway?” their political, economic, and cultural detractors ask. At the heart of the question is that matter of “good.” What is “good”? Is it the same thing as “good for”? Asking what the humanities are good for implies that we can measure them in terms of what they do, how they do it, presumably how well, and perhaps especially for whom. After all, we can—more or less—do that in manufacturing, in construction, in the creation of genetically modified foods, and even in those educational programs that we now call STEM.

What happens, though, when the field can’t be measured in that way? One answer is simply to follow the money. In colleges and universities, students in the STEM fields (and their parents) assume that their investment of time and funds will lead not just to jobs but to good jobs. There’s that word again. What makes a job good? Salary, perks, options for advancement, general job satisfaction? Good gets measured in material ways. So too for the faculty members who teach those students. Reputation, professional advancement—and of course salary—are often tied to one’s success in attracting and keeping major financial support, whether federal, state, or corporate, and there’s no question that the lion’s share of funding goes to STEM disciplines. Max Nisen wrote in Business Insider in June 2013 that “humanities get a tiny fraction of the federal funding that STEM programs do. Many schools, public ones in particular, are already under huge financial pressure, so they’re going to focus more of their energies on the things they can get others to pay for.” According to this familiar formula, if a discipline attracts and generates money, it’s good; if it doesn’t, it’s superfluous. In 2012 the National Science Foundation’s budget was over seven billion dollars (NSF Requests). In 2013, on the other hand, the combined budgets of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts amounted to less than what the Pentagon spent on one, ultimately unused, spy dirigible intended for deployment in Afghanistan (“National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Funding Levels”; “National Endowment for the Arts Appropriations History”; Brinkerhoff). More recently, the 2016 and 2017 appropriations for the NEH and NEA, requested at about $148 million each, continued to be dwarfed by those for the National Science Foundation, which totaled well over seven billion dollars in those same years (“National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Funding Levels”; “National Endowment for the Arts Appropriations History”; NSF Requests). Meanwhile, military funding was budgeted at approximately $593 billion in 2016 and $602 billion in 2017, according to the Department of Defense (“Current US Defense Spending”).

Financially incentivized measurement has become inseparable from how the humanities are regarded. Increasingly familiar instruments like the Common Core, standardized testing, and mathematically matrixed outcomes assessments reflect the push to quantify subject areas. Sadly, this debate has positioned humanists and the STEM people in the public discourse as adversaries—often unintentionally and certainly against the best interests of both—competing with one another for the ever-dwindling pot of gold.

The overspecialized but uninformed citizen is not just a modern phenomenon. Nearly a century and a half ago, lecturing in the ugly, polluted factory city of Birmingham in 1880, the British socialist manufacturer William Morris observed that even a supposedly well-educated man will “sit . . . down without signs of discomfort in a house, that with all its surroundings is just brutally vulgar and hideous: all his education has not done more for him than that” (88). How had this narrow and desensitized citizen evolved in a supposedly enlightened era? At the beginning of the nineteenth century his fellow Englishman, William Wordsworth, had written:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away . . . (568)

For Wordsworth, subscribing to a materialist worldview governed by an economics of “getting and spending” had cost us our hearts. Human life and experience were being reduced to a balance sheet, a double-entry ledger of the sort to which Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge had sold his hard heart before the three spirits warmed it and brought it back to life. What Scrooge had lost, of course, was his humanity. Here, then, is the connection—right at the level of language—between that individual, personal humanity and those interrelated areas we call the humanities. Ironically, when I teach A Christmas Carol, which Dickens wrote in 1843, I always ask my students how old they think Scrooge is. The usual answer is mid-fifties, which, if we do the math, means he was born in about 1790, the year in which Byron was born and only a few years before Percy Bysshe Shelley and Felicia Hemans were. So, I ask my students, why is Scrooge not a passionate Romantic, like them, but rather a hard, heartless, penny-pinching materialist without human kindness? What was different? The usual answer is that he chose money and materialism (his usurious countinghouse) over beauty and aesthetics (his lost love, Belle). It’s an answer whose moral significance is perhaps best measured not by the Keynesian formulas of the economist but rather by the imaginative calculus of the humanist.

Wordsworth and Morris—and surely Dickens—believed the increasingly materialist, mechanical, product-centered nineteenth century had cost us the infinitely responsive human heart: not just feelings or emotion but also passion and imagination. In 1821 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote A Defence of Poetry in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical essay The Four Ages of Poetry. Peacock claimed that all the arts in the modern age are hopelessly and irreversibly deteriorated and that contemporary artists and their works are consequently less and less valuable, both as art (and artists) and as practical—that is, useful—products of culture. What good is art, Peacock says, when technology, science, industry, and profit now gauge value? Shelley’s response addresses the growing cultural prioritizing of empirical data at the expense of something else:

We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated . . . by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. . . . We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. . . . [M]an, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. (530)

Shelley’s point was that by 1821 society had become so enamored of data it had lost the capacity to see how they figured into any larger social, moral, intellectual, or cultural calculus.

What’s to be done? Here is what Shelley suggested:

The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. (517)

Similarly, Albert Einstein declared, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research” (97).

Such a statement from one of the greatest scientific thinkers of the modern era seems out of character with our cultural stereotype of the empirical scientist buried in the laboratory. But Einstein understood that strict factual knowledge does not offer the only route to the destination: as he put it, “I believe in intuition and inspiration. . . . At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason” (97). Indeed, in an apocryphal remark attributed to him he asserted that “creative imagination is the essential element in the intellectual equipment of the true scientist” (cxxx). Nor was Einstein alone in the priority he placed on the creative imagination; Thomas Edison supposedly observed that the inventor must first imagine that which she or he then invents. The imagination is a singularly vital part of anyone’s intellectual makeup, because, as Shelley put it, it “awakens and enlarges the mind” by presenting it with “a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought” (517). This domain of the “unapprehended” is the arena in which the humanities operate.

Many years ago, as an undergraduate student, I read E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End. I have never forgotten Forster’s epigraph: “Only connect.” That simple phrase has guided me through more than four decades of inseparably intertwined teaching and scholarship. It’s the imagination, finally, that encourages us to discover—and then to explore—the often unsuspected relations that exist among things we might not normally place in the same frame. Blake demonstrated the limitations of empiricism by pointing out that if people are made up of nothing more than the combined data provided by their senses, as some eighteenth-century philosophers had proposed, then “[f]rom a perception of only 3 senses or 3 elements none could deduce a fourth or fifth.” Blake says because “Man[’]s desires are limited by his perceptions . . . none can desire what he has not perceiv’d” (“There Is No Natural Religion”), which would seem to rule out everything from God and heaven to pleasurable air travel or government without taxation.

I emphasize this point because it is where we can begin deciding what good the humanities are. It’s not easy, because the primary disciplines among the humanities have always been less interested in good—that is, empirically verifiable—answers than in troublesome and often provocative questions. This kind of imaginatively questioning attitude lies behind the line that John F. Kennedy borrowed from George Bernard Shaw when, in a speech to the Irish parliament in June 1963, he said, “Other people . . . see things and say why? But I dream things that never were and I say, why not?”³

Because the imagination is inherently both playful and curious, it disrupts expectations by thinking in ways that today we call outside the box. Critics of the imagination—and of the humanities, which are presumed guilty by association—overlook that the world is filled with things whose nature, identity, and even value are often relative and shifting rather than absolute and stable. It’s the duty of the humanities to teach us about ourselves as flexible moral, ethical, and spiritual citizens. They do this by teaching us about those people and those things that are not us, by sharpening our abilities to observe and to learn, by stimulating that variety of love that is grounded in selfless interest in the well-being of others who may be complete strangers to us. The humanities empower us to “imagine intensely and comprehensively,” as Shelley put it, and in the process they make us not just better citizens but also more humane ones. Teaching us about our own and others’ humanity is a goal that is more worthwhile—indeed more essential—if we are to survive in a world whose ever-increasing fragility is in our hands.

I ran into a striking application of what Shelley is talking about in an article by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas McGuire called “War Literature, the Constitution, and Fostering Reluctant Killers.” McGuire, who teaches at the United States Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs, writes that the study of the literature of war “puts a human face on war, an individual human face” (25). In doing so, the literature of war reminds us that “war always squanders humans, a fact that complicates our commitment to the sanctity of the individual” (26). For McGuire, the professional soldier charged with training others to conduct warfare and in the process to take lives, humanists need to ask the troubling questions of defining and conducting what he calls “just wars.” For him, “rather than being antithetical to the military profession the humanities constitute an indispensable component of the military professional’s formation.” They help give the military professional—as they help give all of us—“a deeper appreciation of the value of human life and culture, an appreciation that can translate into more humane and compassionate leadership” (29). The humanities counteract war’s tendency to depersonalize the combatants on both sides by reminding us of the human faces and the sanctity of all life and thereby making each soldier at least a reluctant killer. For McGuire, as for Shelley and his Romantic-era contemporaries, “[t]he humanities keep us honest and human” (29); they teach citizens to recognize and appreciate the bonds of fundamental, ethical humanity that link us all, regardless of party, faction, nation, gender—or whatever—even when we must do battle against our fellow citizens of Earth.

It’s my strong conviction, then, that the humanities are good for taking us out of our isolated selves and situating us among others who are both like and unlike ourselves, helping us see and measure, imagine and create. The humanities foster creative, critical, and ethical thinking in every area of our individual and collective lives. They help us engage actively with the fundamental issues—the core questions—of individual and collective liberty. They don’t just help us think; they require us to do so. If there really is a war on the humanities in our culture, then the humanities themselves offer the best antiwar medicine I can think of, and the most humanely useful and restorative one. They humanize us. That—among so much else—is what the humanities are good for. And that is why they must be courageously fought for, passionately defended, and resolutely preserved.

I’ve been in grad school for seven years, and while my friends from undergrad were out getting work experience, I was sitting in seminars and visiting archives. I have no work experience. How am I supposed to compete for a job?

—Anonymous University of California, Los Angeles, history PhD

Deflated, depressed, and undervalued, many humanities graduates finish their degrees with little confidence that they will have anything to offer employers outside the university. When students have the space to engage such frank feelings of frustration and disappointment, they identify lack of work experience as one of the most challenging barriers to employment beyond the academy. Humanities graduate students labor for five, six, seven plus years on course work, conference presentations, comprehensive exams, archival research, fieldwork, language study, and dissertations. Because of variable degree requirements and funding packages, most students also teach, organize conferences, write grants, navigate a myriad of campus resources, and incorporate rapidly changing technologies into their classroom pedagogy and individual research or information management systems.¹ Yet conversations with humanities graduate students about professionalization often elicit comments, like the one above, that fail to recognize students’ own active contributions to the university as a result of their labor. Many students do not know how to articulate their time in graduate school as work experience. And what’s worse, academic mentors, administrators, and institutional pressures discourage them from translating their academic activities into a language that attests to the rigorous and varied work they perform while pursuing advanced degrees.

An increasing number of critical works call for the reevaluation and professionalization of doctoral program requirements and pedagogies, with some arguing that both must be radically altered to cut down on time to degree and equip graduate students with more desirable work skills upon graduation.² To be sure, national humanities funding bodies such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have made resources available to professional associations like the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association and subsequently distributed grants to universities for professionalization programs within specific departments and institutes.³ It is worthwhile to note, however, that a number of these initiatives are programmed by faculty members who, by and large, have never had to navigate the current market or translate their intellectual work to potential nonuniversity employers. Many of the resulting events do not incorporate the experiences of current graduate students and fail to recognize the variety of skilled work they already performed throughout their degrees. Surely, while the majority of the UCLA graduate student’s undergraduate cohort have been “at work,” she has been engaged in an intense and specialized kind of work that has value and potential for application beyond the university. When it comes to acknowledging and articulating the value and volume of contemporary graduate students’ humanistic labor, doctoral humanities programs have a serious public relations problem on their hands. This is a problem that underestimates the need to support specialized administrators and advisers at the graduate level, does a disservice to the general conception of the role of the humanities in contemporary society, and plagues recent grads as they seek gainful employment outside the university.

As one of three partner organizations involved in the MLA’s Connected Academics Project,⁴ Humanists@Work (Humwork) is an initiative organized by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) that includes current and recent graduate students in the development of programming that makes career paths and training opportunities accessible to humanities MAs and PhDs. Humwork hosts an online publishing and resources platform (humwork.uchri.org), provides paid summer internships for graduate students, supports a paid graduate advisory committee, tracks the employment placement of those with PhDs from literature and language departments across the University of California, and runs biannual statewide workshops. Humwork programming encourages students to voice common misunderstandings and frustrations with current articulations of graduate education, labor, and professionalization. The resulting dialogues have raised serious concerns around the visibility of humanistic labor and have urged us to critically reconsider the institutional project of professionalization as collaborative and intellectual, expanding far beyond the job placement of graduate students.

There are a few specific strategies that the Humwork initiative uses to identify and target the concerns and goals of humanities graduate students. To facilitate conversations between individuals who work inside the academy and those who do not, the workshops purposefully inhabit nonuniversity public spaces, like museums and libraries. The conversational format of the daylong events encourage students to challenge speakers and generate broader questions about barriers to translating their studies into gainful employment. Humwork also keeps channels of communication open with past and present participants and fosters a community of increasingly empowered voices that has already demonstrated its capacity as a valuable professional network. As members of the advisory committee, graduate students are involved in every stage of programming for Humwork events and also serve as critical reviewers of each workshop. The benefit of including graduate student input during the planning stages is that Humwork’s sense of professionalization programming changes based on what students identify as their needs, interests, and goals. Current graduate students have knowingly entered graduate school saddled with debt in an uncertain market, and they think about the words professionalization and labor in ways that are distinct from their advisers and administrators. The debt, work, and life experiences that these students bring into their programs contribute greatly to their academic goals and expectations. Responsible programming benefits from investigations into what motivates these students to pursue doctorates in the first place. What are they hoping to do or are already doing with their time in the humanities doctoral program? As we at Humwork have become better at listening to graduate student participants, the answers to such questions have been surprising and have informed our progress with dynamic programming around professionalization.⁵

Such strategies have generated a space where enlightening moments can occur in conversation with invited experts from outside the university. Although our local career centers offer related assistance to graduate students, we work with Jared Redick, an expert in crafting résumés for clients seeking midlevel career changes in a variety of nonacademic and academic settings. At all the Humwork events, Redick provides a practical set of tools, concepts, and document formats that inform students how to translate their graduate school activities into a legible language for employers who may not view extra schooling as work experience. But our engagement with his expertise has changed dynamically over the past three events. The first résumé workshop with Redick was designed to be a pragmatic tutorial. During the workshop students were trying to figure out how much of what they had achieved in graduate school counted as work experience, and the tension in the room rose whenever Redick articulated potential translations of activities related to the dissertation and teaching. At one moment, participants realized that certain details about the dissertation, such as page length or the nature of literary and historical research, are misunderstood and often irrelevant to employers. The room filled with a collective and somewhat disdainful groan. An identical moment occurred at the workshop held six months later, and, instead of quashing the outburst in favor of practical lessons in résumé writing, we paused to discuss what was going on in the room.

Graduate students claimed this moment to explain their feelings and engage in meaningful debate about if, how, and why the dissertation should be featured on the résumé at all. As we listened to students talk out their feelings, we realized that this repeated outburst is not meant to be whiney or hostile. Students are expressing frustration as they face a reality in which the dissertation, the very ticket to a PhD, is not currently presented as the result of humanistic labor on job application documents. While Redick asks participants to articulate all their other (mostly voluntary and service-related) graduate work experience besides teaching, the dissertation becomes an optional add-on to the résumé and is transformed into an unintelligible or decorative fact. By groaning or laughing out loud, students acknowledge that the transition out of graduate school highlights paradoxical absences in the expression of their work history. Getting upset about that is a valuable exercise as long as it doesn’t happen during a job interview. What we’ve learned from these moments is that graduate students have limited space to unpack truly upsetting feelings that arise whenever they negotiate aspects of their deemphasized graduate school labor. When students challenge the decorative appearance of the dissertation on the résumé, they generate complex questions worth answering for anyone who works in the humanities. Is the dissertation truly destined be an addendum to the professional résumé? Indeed, why hasn’t humanistic work at the doctoral level and beyond been adequately described to audiences outside our community?

By inviting experts like Redick to collaborate with us, we’ve forced students and administrators to reckon with the fact that university-oriented work is often viewed as substantively different from other kinds of work. This limited viewpoint reinscribes a condition of mutually exclusive worlds, adding to the difficulties already inherent in humanities PhDs’ struggle to communicate the value of their training to potential employers. The issue at hand here is understanding the ways in which the university capitalizes on, and benefits from, invisible labor that is couched in terms of passion or service, which for graduate students is largely unpaid, and labor that disconnects the work of students, junior scholars, and even professors from the world of work and workers more generally. Redick’s résumé workshops have made clear the degree to which graduate students must actively labor to articulate the value of a humanities PhD for an audience beyond the academy—as well as for themselves. If our students are unclear about how to translate their degrees into nonteaching careers, we cannot expect hiring organizations to understand the experiences recent graduates will bring to nonuniversity roles. Nor should university institutions expect graduate students (or perhaps even faculty members) to perform this kind of publicity on our behalf. Though tracking data shows that humanities PhDs have been successfully transitioning into a variety of careers for decades, more must be done to describe the experiences, accomplishments, and labor performed by graduate students to those outside academia.

The acknowledgment and articulation of labor performed within the current structures of the university must be at the forefront of our national professionalization efforts. As part of our ongoing reevaluation of the professionalization of the humanities, we must actively forge channels through which to communicate the existing labor and accomplishments of those who are granted PhDs from our institutions. We must do this for our students but also for the sake of our own posterity in a society that too often dismisses the humanities as a pursuit that doesn’t lead to a job. Although some Mellon-funded partners are already collaborating with one another, there is a need for more sustained collaboration with graduate students and their prospective employers, especially as it pertains to developing professionalization best practices. The university’s existing reach into a variety of sectors and relationships would be a place to start, though we need look no further than the American Council of Learned Societies’ Public Fellows Program to understand that substantive one-on-one work experiences can communicate the value of an advanced humanities degree. Of course, this marked turn to collaborating with organizations outside the university asks us not only to go beyond ourselves but also to invite different forms of knowledge into the university. To do this well, and to keep the individual and collective concerns of our students at the center, we must be thoughtful about who we choose as guardians of these dialogues. This past year, the National Endowment for the Humanities made its first round of Next Generation grants,⁶ and a new cohort of departments and institutes have begun planning and programming around these issues. The ongoing activities and dialogues of the past few years have generated energy and hope around opening up the university to a variety of career outcomes for our PhDs. Our graduate students have chosen to pursue degrees despite the obvious lack of tenure-track jobs. They can be light on their feet, and many of them are excited to bring their university experience with collaborative mentorship, multimedia research, and project management into new professional environments. We hope that as additional public funds flow into departments and programs around the nation, we can empower our students to value the work they have already contributed to the university and share their innovative and thoughtful accomplishments with various communities.

Over the past three years Humwork has strategically engaged in dialogues that have empowered students across the University of California system, and the impacts of our programming can be felt broadly, if unevenly, on all ten campuses with whom we collaborate. The graduate students who participate in our workshops have emphasized their gratitude for the sustainable sense of community that they have built by attending our events. Every year student voices have become stronger and more articulate, and we have seen graduate communities throughout California help one another navigate opportunities through collaboration, dialogue, and newfound confidence. For those of you building professionalization programs with similar goals at your campuses, we offer some basic principles that engaged graduate students in critical dialogues that are responsive to the voices and experiences at our campuses.

1. Thoughtfully Involve Graduate Students as Collaborators

Your current graduate students are invaluable cocreators and vital ambassadors. The incorporation of graduate students as valued contributors will be essential for building trust across the entire community. From the moment you begin to evaluate your campus resources, assess the concerns of your graduate community, and identify learning objectives for programming, always include graduate students as collaborators and critics. Since your students already juggle a number of roles and navigate multiple supervisors across campus, they may be wary of taking on additional engagements with administrative superiors. As part of your mission statement, be sure to articulate collaborative opportunities for graduate students in institutionally supported program development roles. We strongly suggest that you determine best practices for scheduling around existing graduate requirements and set aside adequate funds to compensate your student collaborators for their time and commitment.

2. Evaluate, Acknowledge, and Communicate the Work of Your Students

Outside the university, perceptions of work are constantly changing. It is widely acknowledged that the daily tasks of employees adjust rapidly in the light of new administrative, social, and analytic technologies. We encourage you to generate programs that evaluate and express the strengths of your students for a new set of audiences, as well as for one another. Though the language used to describe graduate student work responsibilities has not changed, the very nature of teaching and research has been dramatically reframed by nonacademic methods of labor. To conduct their daily work and reach the expectations set by the university, graduate students often navigate a myriad of administrative bureaucracies, funding opportunities, and communication or research softwares made available to them through campus contracts with third parties. Before you identify learning outcomes for your professionalization programming, get to know how your students already manage their daily work routines. What are the defining features of the research, teaching, and service roles that they take on while pursuing their degrees? Perhaps your students use tools and systems in ways that mimic existing practices in the private sector. During your evaluation of current graduate work, you may identify the potential to develop programming around existing technologies on campus in a way that will simultaneously enrich students’ doctoral responsibilities and translate into jobs outside the university. Make sure that members of your graduate community, as well as potential audiences inside and outside academia, understand the value of contributions made to the university as the result of graduate students’ labor in various campus roles.

3. Think Capaciously about the Audiences and Outcomes of Professionalization

We are certainly among those who aren’t sure what distinguishes “professionalization” from already available continued education opportunities on our campuses and more generally. In the context of national conversations about higher education and the humanities, the project of professionalization has many audiences and potential outcomes. Though there is a range of content that might seem fundamental to any programming related to professionalization for humanities PhDs, we suggest that you determine and describe exactly who your events serve and what you’d like to accomplish in your community. Considering our intended audience, which we have designated as graduate students in the humanities and social sciences at the University of California, for example, we define professionalization in response to student articulations of perceived gaps in training. As a result, workshops have included sessions that address mental health, debt, mentorship, values-based career exploration, alumni networking, and specific sectors of employment. Alongside these variations, every year we consistently program around basic concepts of community building, and that is what has set us apart from other opportunities that students have on their individual campuses. By generating a sense of belonging, our workshops empower students to express their individual needs, accomplishments, and desired outcomes as a group of people who are collectively learning to identify and articulate their own capacities in order to secure gainful employment.

4. Actively Include Your PhD Alumni as Part of Your Community

Inviting your PhD alumni and their expertise back into the university will be critical for developing professionalization activities that translate to the working world. These alumni can speak to the emerging trends in the workforce and offer access to the diverse contexts in which humanities work currently takes place. As you begin to reach out to your alumni, however, it will be important to remember that the relationship between the institution and alumni is often quite complicated. These are students who may never have been recognized by their departments or the university as successful PhDs. When you request doctoral alumni to commit time and expertise to the university, you are also asking them to confront a series of feelings that they have already overcome. You risk offense and additional resentment if you introduce these individuals in university-centric terms such as “non-tenure-track,” “alternative academic,” or “those who pursued plan B.” It is worthwhile to think carefully about the message that you wish to communicate to them and be respectful in both your interpersonal approach and the way that you allow them to communicate their own value to the university. How can you invite these experts back into the community in a way that acknowledges and values the choices that they have made as contributions to the university itself? What might the university offer alumni for their time and expertise? If your alumni are asked to enhance the network of graduate students within the institution, can the university contribute to the continued professional development and success of these PhDs as well?

5. Identify New Partners

If you are not an expert in all areas of additional training requested by your target audience, that is perfectly OK. In fact, the process of identifying new partners and bringing diverse areas of expertise to your campus is key to effective programming. Whether across departments, centers, and services on campus or beyond the university into local employment markets, active engagement with new partners will expand the community of people who understand and value the potential contributions of those with doctoral training. By partnering with career counselors, résumé experts, recruiters, PhD alumni, and representatives from employers and industries already known to value the PhD, you will invite different forms of knowledge onto your campuses. Some of these individuals may serve as guest speakers, but others may become instrumental as collaborative partners in the development of event programming itself. Including new partners will serve as a point of communication that goes two ways. On the one hand, students will become aware of a network of individuals from whom they can gain advice and request informational interviews. On the other hand, by including others in ongoing dialogues about professionalization, as in-progress as they might be, the university will have a chance to shape the way outsiders view it.

6. Make Spaces for Reflection and Critique

Although some professionalization workshops will be geared toward tangible results, reflection and critique are both forms of humanities work that warrant inclusion in your programming. Instead of depending solely on postevent evaluations for this work, you might consider building reflective moments into the events themselves. As you realize your programming, make sure that your staff and workshop presenters are flexible and ready to pause an exercise or use the premise of the activity to switch gears when the audience desires. The conversations that come about when you slow down and listen to what happens in the room can release unvoiced tensions and build a more inclusive language as a community. We’ve found that graduate students and members of the faculty and staff vibrantly engage in collaborative work when we include programmed spaces for the interrogation of activities that are meant to fill in the perceived gaps of academic training. By listening closely during these moments, we’ve found that what is often perceived as unproductive for one audience turns out to be incredibly productive for others, and our programming has changed dynamically in response to these shared realizations.

7. Analyze Your Work and Share It Widely

Universities, departments, and associations across the nation are trying to figure out how to navigate the changing dynamics of labor and training in higher education. Providing discipline-specific and meaningful professionalization programming for humanities PhDs in this context is not easy. As we engage in different practices, we need to continually ask if and how they are effective and what’s left to do. Whether you’ve identified a discipline-specific group or a multicampus community of students as your audience, we encourage you to share the results of your programming and any received feedback as widely as possible among participants, administrators, faculty members, and members of other communities who are engaged in similar conversations. We think that sharing results and feedback is a smart and low-stakes way to provide accountability on your campus and contribute to ongoing responses to changes in the way that universities are run. We are all attempting to answer difficult questions regarding higher education in order to better support the people who receive master’s- and doctoral-level training from our institutions. Despite our specificities, we can share collective steps toward a clearer articulation of doctoral students’ value as effective members of contemporary society and important contributors to the workforce.