Month: October 2019

There’s no intrinsic conflict between language and the numerical. But we do have a profoundly embedded cultural misinterpretation of their relation, one that structurally disadvantages the study of literature and language. This essay outlines the problem and suggests some conceptual and institutional steps toward creating epistemic parity among the technical and nontechnical disciplines.

The year 2019 brought the sixtieth anniversary of C. P. Snow’s famous lecture The Two Cultures. Speaking in 1959, Snow classed scientists as people with the future in their bones, and “literary intellectuals” as “natural Luddites,” people who are too focused on the price of progress to make any progress themselves (22). This idea of the division of human knowledge, and of literary intellectuals as critics rather than creatives, carries on today. Some of us have tried to get rid of the label—by means of the critique of critique, for example—but so far such actions have reinforced our perceived resistance to progress.

I.

In higher education, you’d think we would have solved this two-culture division long ago. Liberal arts education is all about general learning and creating capabilities in multiple domains. The liberal arts might define literacy and numeracy as automatic partners. Every humanities major would, in a proper world, graduate with the ability to use basic numerical techniques. French majors would know the basics of Stata or R for statistics, or of Python or Java for Web design. Similarly, every science major would interpret complex language and have competency in at least one second language. Why not? The world isn’t divided into two cultures such that we must live in only one of them. In many European countries, a version of these dual competencies is assumed to be the outcome of a high school diploma. In the United States, colleges and universities are said to offer an education in the liberal arts and sciences. The fields clustered as the digital humanities show not just the difficulties but also the intellectual reach of quantitative and qualitative methods combined.

There’s another Sputnik-era aspiration to remember, though honored in the breach: liberal arts education was to be available at every type of college or university across the United States. “Today, we are concerned with general education—a liberal education—not for the relatively few but for a multitude,” wrote the Harvard president James B. Conant (qtd. in Meranze 1313). Full arts, sciences, and applied curricula would not be limited to flagships. If you lived in central Wisconsin and couldn’t afford to move to Madison—or didn’t want to—you could get an equivalent quality of liberal education at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. You could study biology before applying to medical school like your Madison counterparts. And you could at the same time become proficient in German or Spanish or Arabic, depending on your interests. You could flip it around and study Arabic to join the foreign service while learning biology to better understand how the world fits together. Having both linguistic mobility and scientific competency was to be the hallmark of the educated person in the modern world. And that is to say nothing of the many practical but nonmonetary benefits of having, say, physicians who speak a second language and negotiators who understand ecology. There was a powerful egalitarian assumption in the university system of the United States: education quality would be spread widely in the student population, to reflect the wide distribution of human intelligence and society’s complex needs.

This egalitarian assumption was rarely supported by action. That began to change through social and political pressures that came from outside universities and inspired students and some faculty members within them. I’m referring to the black civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the antiwar movement, for starters. Many practitioners of liberal arts and sciences learned that they either connect to and study sociocultural and political movements or they do not correctly prepare students to live in their world as it actually is. Academic isolation generates flawed liberal arts research. Universities that aspired to integrate social groups had also to integrate heterogeneous knowledges across their multiplicity.

So how are we doing with this?

II.

Not too well right now. Let’s start with a few crude metrics. College completion rates in the United States have fallen from first in the world in the 1960s to sixteenth or so—middle of the pack—today. Racial disparities remain very large (Shapiro et al. 16). Under the current, half-privatized business model (permanently suboptimal public funding, tuition high enough to create debt burdens), inequality of completion rates across racial groups will get worse rather than better in the next ten years.¹ And completion refers just to whether you get a degree or not. The content of that degree, its quality, its ties to your society and your inner life, are not captured by these statistics.

On the whole, higher education in the United States has an educational mediocrity problem. The response of university leaders has been weak. University officials mostly adopted efficiency measures that conceal the learning issues and then tried to meet them. Universities are scrambling to improve graduation rates and time to degree. For example, the share of college students who don’t complete a degree within six years remains 40% (Shapiro et al. 11). This is indeed a serious problem. But degree completion needs to be fixed without wrecking the education that goes into the degree. This is hard when the goal is narrowed to the metric of degree completion in tandem with time to degree. The easiest way to increase degree output is to reduce the requirements for learning. Universities are under continuous pressure to make degrees as fast and as cheap as possible. Administrations in the mass public higher education sector have not produced a counterdiscourse that explains the need for high-quality learning for large numbers of regular people. This has allowed the dominant media question to be, Why don’t they just get on with it, trim the custom features of higher learning, and crank out more degrees?

Fast, cheap, and more are not bad things, in themselves; it depends on how these attributes affect people and what they lose in getting them. To repeat, the fastest and cheapest way to get more degrees is to make the degree easier to get. Language study is an excellent example of the problem. Monolingual adults mostly find language learning to be difficult and embarrassing. Consequently, many English departments are trying to rebuild major numbers by diluting their foreign language requirements. The same is true of literary history: truncating requirements is thought to increase enrollments, especially when it is the earlier material that is truncated.

I’ve been thinking about the effects of metrics on language instruction since I lived through the supposedly unavoidable weakening of foreign language standards in the late 2000s in a study abroad program, the Education Abroad Program (EAP), which serves all the campuses of the University of California (UC) system. I started directing programs in France in the fall of 2008, right as the global financial system was collapsing. The Bordeaux center had been UC’s first EAP location in the early 1960s. In the program’s early decades, applicants had to pass an oral French exam and then had to succeed with a year of university courses in French. This was an immersion program in every sense. EAP was also a research exchange: as it happened, California-based professors brought the American concept of black studies to Bordeaux and helped generate a suite of race-focused international programs that continue to this day. Students worked with faculty members who were actively engaged in research. UC professors lived in Bordeaux for up to two years, and conducted individual advising. Though the result was never quantified, the program came closer than most to developing creative capabilities in its graduates. The program created graduates who had at least limited working proficiency in French (classified as proficiency level 2 by the Interagency Language Roundtable) and many who had professional working proficiency (level 3).

This began to change in the 2000s. Applicants no longer had to pass an oral language exam. Time of immersion for most students was shortened to half a year. Then, for revenue purposes, the program began to solicit students with no background at all in the language. Managers created English-language curricula in the UC center that included an intensive local language course like one they might have at home, with much reduced contact with their local university peers. The EAP program’s central office was overseen by UC’s office of the president (UCOP) and by officials who had no direct knowledge of language instruction or of this worldwide program’s intellectual activities. UCOP told the program it would have tuition funds but lose at least 85% of its existing state funds, and redirected other forms of support. The budget targets locked in the dilution of programs—not of risk management strategies, student insurance coverage, legal or budgetary staff, but of educational activities. Faculty directors were removed from most locations, and course expenditures were cut. In the 2010s, under budget austerity, and in the hope of widening recruitment, the EAP office created multisite travel programs that involved limited coursework and little if any language instruction. Although headcount enrollments increased, the typical student stays for a shorter time, so the numbers of students counted as so-called full-time equivalent have been stagnant for a decade. It’s quite possible that administrators underestimated study abroad students: they may be more likely to pay full tuition for the academic distinction of language proficiency but not for another “student experience.” No one seems to keep the data on what this has done to language attainment. The study abroad program has met its modest output metrics. And yet, it’s possible that a majority of the program’s graduates—many working-class students and students of color—get no new language proficiency from the program.

III.

But why do we need the concept of numerical culture to explain a fairly commonplace curtailing of ambition and quality in a widely admired humanities program? Isn’t it just about technology, money, and power? And about neoliberal austerity making a crisis out of competing costs for health care, incarceration, and tax cuts? Yes. But these answers beg the question of why this complex presides over educational processes to the extent that it does. Numerical culture provides axioms, affects, and formulations that weaken claims made about the value of studying literature and language. It is belief system or structure of feeling that allows neoliberalism’s general marketization of relationship-based processes like learning to move readily through academia, even when most academics dislike marketization. I’m reluctant to call it “neoliberalism’s operating system,” but in a sense it is that. Numerical culture has some core features that I’ll reify here for the sake of brevity. I’ll also suggest that humanities scholars can affect if not end numerical culture. But this will require levels of intensive, collective engagement from tenure-track faculty members that we haven’t seen before.

Reductively, the plot of numerical culture runs as follows. Numbers are better than words. In a head-on conflict with a narrative account, they are more authoritative by default: they enjoy epistemic superiority to narrative. This superiority anchors audit culture, in which managers can decide on the value of people’s jobs because they have a detached and objective knowledge about it that those people lack. One’s nonnumerical retort does not have the epistemic standing to check the usually greater organizational power of the auditor. Expertise or activities that systemically lack numerical grounds will also be in the back of the line for resources, which reinforces their lower status. Nonquantifiable benefits of nonnumerical knowledge creation will stay on the margins, which favors a focus on quantifiable results, particularly monetary returns.

I’ll offer a few details on four elements here. First, numbers are superior to narrative because they claim an objectivism that narratives do not. This claim goes beyond the obvious, multifarious benefits of quantification to equate validity with being free of value. Quantification is good at stripping out context, variation, specificity, individuality, and other qualities people associate with values, standpoints, beliefs, and other effects of not being value-free: one can make long lists of the qualities that objectivism suppresses (Gorur; Davis et al.). The mistake that numerical culture encourages is to equate the two—to equate the purging of contexts with the purging of values that creates objectivity. Objectivism ties the process of knowledge creation to the elimination of what language and qualitative research do, which expresses “interpretation and critical evaluation, primarily in terms of the individual response and with an ineliminable element of subjectivity” (Small). Objectivism insists on truth as invariant, which makes little sense with social and cultural objects and processes. In practice, objectivism puts an impossible burden of proof on nonquantifiable effects. In my example of language instruction, program budgets define a common or objective reality, while the ability to use a foreign language is an intangible benefit whose value will change according to aims, practices, situation, and relation to other types of knowledge.

Second, numerical culture is an audit culture. The core assumption is that work is made more efficient through external controls focused on outputs defined in quantitative terms. Audit gradually came to be seen as a necessary (and often, as a sufficient) condition with transparency and the suppression of self-dealing and fraud. It fits nicely with the internalized self-discipline Wendy Brown and others see as a defining feature of neoliberalism: audit sets the targets and then lets you decide how you’re going to meet them. Audit is managerial in that the targets are set by supervisors and not by you. This is the alleged basis of audit’s objectivity, which grounds its power to override your subjective input (Power; Strathern; Shore and Wright). In the study abroad program I’m discussing, budget cuts were justified by a consultancy report that identified quantitative performance targets without reference to qualitative educational effects. Managers calculated the revenue drop and translated this into center closures and, at least in my remaining centers, doubled French-language class size. Predictably, I fought against this on the basis of my judgment that it would reduce educational quality. But audit always renders professional judgment as secondary to quantitative targets. My advocacy for smaller classes was easily disposed of as special pleading for my programs. Part of the budget plan was to eliminate most faculty directors, so most centers would soon not have an expert to argue in the first place.

Third, numerical culture is structurally indifferent to resource inequality and to concentrations of influence. It is predisposed to influence monopolies. This follows from its first feature, which is its belief in its objective validity in relation to situational claims about values and effects, and the second, which is the efficiency of quantified audit. In research, bibliometric analysis of outputs—citation frequency and location, for example—developed around a scholarly confidence in the Pareto distribution, which assumes that 80% of output will generally be produced by 20% of the researchers (if not fewer). Contemporary bibliometrics always finds that intellectual output and impact are concentrated rather than widely distributed (De Bellis). While citation analysis was often motivated by an interest in tracing intellectual genealogies within complicated intellectual networks, quantification made articulating substantive lineages seem inefficient and unnecessary. Bibliometric practices excel at quantifying and connecting occurrences of the same, while discovery, inventions, and dissent famously break from the same and standard affiliations and are often nourished by subcultures that the mainstream does not notice, approve, or cite. Instead of insisting on qualitative comparisons of highly diverse intellectual outcomes, numerical culture encourages standardization for the sake of ranking or “ordinalization” across difference (Fourcade). It naturalizes (and aims at) bibliometric inequality and sanctions an acceptance of unequal resources that reinforces inequalities between publication in English and in all other languages and between the topics and interests of the global north and those of the global south. Bibliometric practice structurally disadvantages the humanities in relation to STEM fields: book-based fields are undercounted, and arts and humanities disciplines, with next to no extramural funding to assemble research teams, have much lower per-author outputs. On the one hand, a professor of the Italian baroque can have an influential international career publishing three books and some limited number of articles, all of which may be, in terms of publishing metrics, nearly invisible. On the other hand, an experimental physicist I recently visited noted that he is listed as an author on 2,500 articles. Field-to-field comparisons of publication rates (invalidated by scientometrics practitioners but done anyway) increase administrative and social bias against non-STEM fields. A vicious cycle translates lower publication output into lower public visibility. Global academia is experiencing neocolonial research distribution of resources and influence. This will not change without systematic studies of the skewing effects of bibliometrics on minority knowledge production and resource inequalities, which numerical culture discourages.

Fourth, numerical culture’s elevation of quantification biases it toward the monetary effects of education. In this framework, the problem with teaching language proficiency is that there’s no money in it—except for the money universities spend helping make it happen. This is how it should be: laboratory research also loses money. Language proficiency and laboratory discoveries often have great value, but that value mostly takes nonmonetary form (or what economists call nonpecuniary value). Complicating things further, most of the value of research is indirect and external, meaning that it appears later, dispersed in society, and its returns often accrue to other people. This is particularly true in non-STEM fields, since these have no sight line to direct market returns down the road (McMahon). Put these factors together, and you have often nonmonetary and often nonindividual effects that simply can’t be quantified as a return on an individual investment. So numerical culture discourages interest in it: it’s not opposed to people learning other languages, but it can’t project a value.

Hence we have endless studies of the value of a college degree in terms of salary increments over high school diplomas, or of earnings by major. We know a great deal about the private-market benefits of higher education. And yet we have “no comprehensive system . . . for identifying public goods in higher education,” in part because the thing numerical culture insists that we do, quantify outputs, doesn’t capture the value of goods that are nonmonetary, collective, diffuse, or created through a series of steps (Marginson 105). The result is lower general interest in using public funds to pay for goods like foreign language proficiency: numerical culture has largely destroyed the public understanding of both nonprivate and nonmonetary effects that benefit the wider society in diffuse and uncalculable ways. Absent an understanding of public goods, institutions don’t know how to defend the funding of fields like language study, which are rich in personal and social nonmonetary effects but poor in direct cash value. The logical consequences continue to unfold: the conversion of literature and language departments into service units; further reductions in tenure-track faculty lines, which is deepening our employment crisis; and reduced university funding for all research that lacks quantifiable market returns, like all research in literature and language.

These four features obviously have many sources. But they are integrated and synthesized by this descendent of Snow’s two cultures, numerical culture. These features systematically disadvantage efforts to bring the numerical back to epistemic respect for the kind of knowledges produced in the study of languages, literatures, and culture.

IV.

The last broad point I want to make is that the situation must and can be fixed. But we can’t continue to fight one local battle after another—saving French-language class size here, departmental status there. After cutting nearly all humanities departments at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, they spared English and Spanish in the final round, but not French (Flaherty). Ongoing fiscal and demographic pressures will make piecemeal defenses less likely to succeed.

I propose instead a radical and persistent reframing of numerical culture. This does not mean a purging of the numerical; quantitative data are as essential as language, and they are as potentially progressive, and transformative, as language. I’ve personally spent quite a bit of time trying to get numbers into debates about university policy. The problem is numerical culture, not numbers or their analytical use.

I’ll summarize four counterprinciples to numerical culture and then go back to the example of language instruction to explain how they might work (see table 1).

Table 1. Elements of Numerical Culture

First, qualitative fields include endless amounts of irreducible, unquantified detail. They are both theoretical and empirical. But their empiricism is often small-scale, case-based, and focused on individual interiority. The methods of qualitative fields cannot be purged of the subjective—nor should they be, since the presence of detailed subjectivity is much of their strength. I think of this feature as subjective empiricism, and my point here is that it should be explained to other academics, professionals, and the public not just with clarity but with complete confidence and pleasure. There is much to be said—again and again—about the epistemological links between supposedly objective and subjective fields. Some will be critique, and some pursuit of claims about mutually constitutive relationships. Alain Desrosières’s work on the history of statistical reasoning is a leading example of the literature that studies the inevitable presence (and benefits) of subjectivity in quantified forms of knowledge. He shows that the calculation “that introduces rigor and natural science methods into human sciences” itself rests on the “reuniting of two distinct realms,” one a formal mathematical technique like probability calculus, the other a social or administrative practice like classifying and coding (10). The process of objectification is real, and yet it always occurs by denying while also retaining the results of a “joint conceptualization” between the numerical and society (52). Subjective empiricism includes those nonnumerical data in quantitative analysis. It also means tracking the continuous presence of empirical complexity in the flow of consciousness itself.² Being open about subjective empiricism does not by any means insure my own longer-term goal, which is epistemic justice among disciplinary cultures. But it establishes a starting point—a kind of epistemic equity among the wrongly polarized modes.

Second, surpassing numerical culture requires assimilating audit into professional life. The accounting theorist Michael Power noted twenty years ago that using the numerical for arms-length management damages performance and managerial judgment together. Audit also makes democratic group relations seem unnecessary, or pointless, and impossible. In his recent survey of metrics applications, Jerry Muller found only one class of metrics that actually achieved the gains it sought to achieve. Metrics for transparency did not, and accountability metrics did not, both being administered externally. Metrics for improvement did improve outcomes, when used as information about the effects of various options and analyzed within a group.³ I would posit, as the basis of further research, that metrics causally improve performance only when they are routed through professional expertise by people directly involved in delivering the service—people who are guided by intrinsic motivation (for example, to improve patient benefits rather than receive a salary bonus) and who are possessed of enough autonomy to act on audit information according to their professional judgment. Audit can be useful but it also can and should be subordinated to—incorporated into—professional practice, which in turn should be self-managed in workplace groups that remain in continuous interaction with skeptical others.

Third, we live in a paradoxical time, when technology is supposed to rescue us from ourselves and the numerical is the foundation of technology, yet the interpretation of our lives in common has never been more rampant. The widespread public love of culture as such—novels, stories, movies, pop music, long-form television, quality journalism, terrible journalism, Reddit narration, YouTube meme roundups by Internet divas, infinite public explainings of various crises, endless online posts and articles of eight hundred to two thousand words on everything—is consumption turned into new forms of mass culture production. Where is the academic study of culture in all this? We need not be on the sidelines of efforts to make connections between the incomprehensible tech complexity known to mandarins and the unstoppable generation of meaning by the seven billion. The current default is that technological truth rescues politics and cultures from their backwardness (Davies). It would help for literary and cultural scholars to build the systematic case for epistemic equality between qualitative and quantitative analysis. These are familiar issues in the human sciences—pioneered by black studies avant la lettre (descending from slave narratives, music, and black Christian practices, among others), feminist standpoint theory, race studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and poststructuralist critique of various kinds. This work that diverse critical theories have been doing for decades now has a wider public role to play in the relegitimation of historical and literary reason. The powers of this reason need to be made more explicit. At times it will feel like the 1990s science wars all over again—we will need renewed critiques of tech objectivism among other things. But the cases for epistemic parity need to be made again, and better. The outcome I hope for is the coexistence of divergent epistemologies and their various conclusions, brought into relations of nonidentity. I don’t see how we can understand all the different things we need to grasp, in the different ways in which they are exclusively graspable, without the reciprocal respect for knowledges that depends on parity.

Finally, we will need to defeat the nearly exclusive focus on the private, pecuniary benefits of intellectual work. We can and must critique that focus, but we must also specify—reconstruct—the nonpecuniary benefits of literary and cultural study. There are many benefits—involving health, democracy, happiness, peace, reduced racism, literacy in climate statistics, children’s education, neighborhood problem solving—all of which are affected by college education. There are others in which literary and language study are deeply involved, including those that reflect the specific achievements of the last fifty years of literary criticism, ranging from reading methodologies for complex and contradictory texts, to knowledge of nondominant identities.

An example to which I often return is a process of embodied and situated cognition that I got from my three years of advising several hundred study abroad students in the program I mentioned above. The process identifies an intellectual interest and turns it into a research project that one pursues, completes, and then fights for in one’s divergent communities. For my own purposes, I’ve codified the main steps in the list below. Students need to

1. have knowledge of what a research question is;
2. have basic subject knowledge in a chosen topic area, e.g., its major research questions;
3. develop a capacity for being interested in questions where the answer is nonobvious;
4. have the ability to inquire into one’s own core interests;
5. develop the project topic research question (with self-reflexivity and metacognition);
6. identify a thesis or hypothesis about the topic (one that is interesting and nonobvious);
7. plan the investigation (identify steps and continually revise methods);
8. organize research (including recording and sorting of conflicting information);
9. interpret research results (including results that are contradictory, disorganized, unsanctioned, or anomalous);
10. develop one’s analysis and narrative into a coherent narrative (gaps included);
11. publicly or socially present findings and respond to criticism;
12. have the ability to reformulate conclusions and narrative in response to new information and contexts; and
13. have the ability to fight opposition, to develop within institutions, and to negotiate with society.

I have a pair of views about this list. First, once people see their point, these capabilities are widely desired. Second, having spent decades teaching and having reviewed the limited-learning literature that tries to estimate this, colleges and universities in the United States impart these capabilities to the happy few. The key reason is inadequate funding, which in turn doesn’t materialize, because (in part) not enough people know that universities are supposed to help create these powers and thus there is no public pressure to produce them. (This weak public grasp of advanced learning also underwrites the shocking overuse of contingent teaching labor.) People know about gaining specific units of practical knowledge, and earning the degree that will help with a future salary—the pecuniary gain—because universities and legislatures talk about these all the time. They know little about the individual nonpecuniary benefits of these complex cognitive capabilities, and even less about the collective impacts of these capabilities. Humanities disciplines furnish benefits that are largely nonpecuniary, in contrast to computer science, accounting, and statistics, among other fields.⁴ Explaining nonmonetary effects is in literary study’s direct self-interest. But in a broader sense, explaining these effects will help build a constituency for the full range of the university’s nonmonetary benefits to society, which needs all of them.

Had my university and I been less trapped in numerical culture as I’ve sketched it, we would have had an easier time maintaining and enhancing language study in the programs in France. I’ll quickly invoke the four counterprinciples.

First, transcending fiscal objectivism, I had dozens of detailed descriptions of student development: to name just two, there was the architecture student who figured out the historical reasons for Lyon’s variety of city grids and learned interview techniques in a new language, and the political science student who designed a multilingual research project comparing postcommunist economic changes in Russia and China.⁵ In a postnumerical framework, such benefits would have been as important to the program’s management as were the budget figures, and would have continually registered with them.

Second, in contrast to reshaping by audit, better decisions would have been made had local staff members, including people in our host institutions, been central to the deliberations that happened at a great distance at the Office of the President. The home office had the power to decide, but not the knowledge to decide well. Our local staff members and I had little problem developing an alternative budget that would have kept open a center that the program management had decided to close, while keeping up teaching quality. We worked through the numbers ourselves, and we reinterpreted them in the light of our situated knowledge of what we knew we couldn’t do without, given our specific educational goals. We used our detailed knowledge of the actual programs to make better savings than their cuts could, and also built interest in the programs to avoid cuts. Reconnection of managerial and professional expertise, and linking quantitative and qualitative knowledge, would have given our plan a real chance to succeed and, ironically, also attract more STEM majors to the strongest science center in France, which the program did indeed close.

Third, on the question of epistemic parity, had senior managers in the UC system held language study in as high regard as they did STEM and economics, they wouldn’t have been continuously squeezing the program in the first place. They would have been bragging about it as cutting-edge global education and trying to build it up. They would have tried to support the institutional sources of intangible benefits, even if some of them, like one-on-one faculty advising, were expensive. Epistemic parity would have at least made the administrative decision process multivocal and kept basic language instruction principles (small class size) in the discussion.

Finally, had nonpecuniary goals been front and center, the program’s narrow cost analysis wouldn’t have decided the fate of the program. It would have been more obviously a good investment to support the language learning in other countries that accelerates more or less every aspect of personal intellectual development. Study abroad is the dictionary definition of why anyone should go to college. This was particularly true, in my experience, of my working-class and first-generation students. They were the most likely to feel changed forever—to have new autonomy, new confidence, a new sense of equality with more privileged students, a new conviction that they could survive on their own and set their own direction. I think these are effects of literary and historical study in general—under the right conditions. They help people see where they fit into a world that this study helps them understand concretely, in its variety and detail, and feel some agency in it.

Obviously, a postnumerical culture will be decades in the making, and it offers no guarantees. But the humanities now lose at games of allocation that numerical supremacism has rigged. With premises that acknowledge not only the value of data but also the value of complementary interpretive systems, outcomes will become less skewed.

While he was insulting them, Snow also paid literary intellectuals the compliment of having influence over society’s debates about its future. Snow was right about this. But he forgot to add: though cultural and historical study should (and does) embrace the numerical, the dominance of numerical culture must be abolished.

Notes

1. On the built-in problems with privatization, see Newfield, Great Mistake. For a comprehensive modeling of future graduation rates under conditions of a projected decline in student enrollments, see Grawe.
2. Elsewhere I use the opening of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as an example of subjective empiricism (“Student Debt”).
3. In this paragraph I draw on my review of Muller’s work (Review).
4. See the debatable but suggestive calculations of McMahon.
5. For more detail, see Newfield, “Humanities Creativity.”

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Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and a Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Kindle ed., edited by Stefan Collini, Cambridge UP, 1964.

Strathern, Marilyn. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. Routledge, 2000.

Community has long been one of the selling points of language programs: with introductory courses that tend to have lower enrollment caps than courses offered in other departments and that—especially where strong language requirements exist—attract a disproportionate number of first-year students, the language classroom can serve as an unofficial gateway to the university. In addition to offering opportunities for students to interact with a small group of peers as well as with an instructor who is accessible and knows learners well, the focus on “familiar and everyday topics” (NCSSFL-ACTFL 1) in our communication with novice speakers uniquely positions faculty members to teach the whole student. The tight-knit communities that may form in beginning language classrooms often continue in more advanced levels because the comparatively small number of majors and faculty members in languages allows for a mentorship level that may be unavailable to students in more popular STEM disciplines. Embracing our smallness¹ has, to some extent, been a successful survival strategy: our students and faculty members delight in multilingual chitchat in the hallways, on the lawn, or in the local grocery store. Students often comment that we are the only professors on campus who know their names. We rightly take pride in the number of our students who go on to earn prestigious scholarships, including Fulbrights. Leveraging smallness as a strategic advantage, however, has limits that go beyond the obvious concerns related to program cuts and closures.

This warning against smallness may sound cynical in a time when the profession is still reeling from the net loss of 651 language programs (Looney and Lusin), when the number of advertised faculty positions continues to decline (MLA Office of Research), and when many language programs rely on the work of part-time faculty members who are underpaid and often underappreciated.² Let me be very clear: the use of smallness in this article does not refer to student enrollment or faculty size, areas in which we are naturally not small by choice. Rather, the term addresses the danger of a certain form of contentment with the tight-knit communities that we have built as well as the nostalgia for traditions and the “but this is how we have always done things” mind-set that it can breed. At a time when the humanities feel under siege (Schmidt; Hayot), retreating into a bubble, while comforting, not only puts programs at risk but also stands in the way of vision and leadership.

Specifically, we need to ensure that our small language communities are at least as diverse as our institutions (Murphy and Lee) and that students from all financial backgrounds feel empowered to take our classes. We need to be aware of the minefield that seemingly harmless discussions about self and family can present for some of our students, including those exploring their gender identity or experiencing complex family dynamics. We need to ensure that the labor of building communities is fairly distributed among all faculty members and does not rest primarily on graduate students and non-tenure-track instructors. Because both groups tend to teach primarily in the lower-division classroom, a department’s full participation in mentoring and extracurricular activities is both a labor and student retention issue.³ We need to be mindful of the benchmarks that our institutions have established for evaluating departments while advocating for academic metrics that take the quality of teaching practices into account alongside majors, minors, and bodies in seats.⁴ Finally, it is imperative that we do not make ourselves too small. Bluntly put, we should not be baking pretzels for the German club’s annual Oktoberfest while our colleagues in chemistry are having beer with the trustees. I believe that the long-term success of language, literature, and culture programs depends on solidarity among language programs (Porter 18–19): forging strong connections with other players on our campuses, including with colleagues in STEM, and integrating our work in authentic and meaningful ways with the communities in which we are situated positions us well for leadership roles on campus and in the national conversation concerning the future of higher education.

Without a doubt, building strong communities is an important aspect of managing an undergraduate language program (Calkins and Wilkinson 13–17), and many colleagues featured in this article excel at this work. But they are also doing something else—radiating outward. Specifically, striving programs tend to view their curriculum as a work in progress that periodically needs to be adapted to new national standards, changing local and institutional circumstances, and our current and future students’ needs. Their faculty members pay attention to pathways into the program and welcome into their programs high school students, heritage language learners, community college students, and others interested in continuing their language education. These programs are equally concerned with students’ pathways after graduation and seek to equip learners with the skills and confidence to pursue fulfilling careers in diverse fields. Finally, language programs that drive innovation tend to see themselves as part of a broader humanities ecosystem and are intrigued by the big questions: What does the future of work look like? What skills will our students need? How will the university of the future be organized? Will institutions retain departments and majors, and if not, what will take their places? This broader perspective enables faculty members in languages, literatures, and cultures to think outside the box, contribute to reimagining the humanities for our current age, and position themselves for leadership positions on their campuses and beyond. In all of these endeavors, the most successful language programs embrace collaboration and actively contribute to building new communities and connections.

Curriculum: Accessibility, Diversity, Interdisciplinarity

It all started with a trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. When Rhodes College’s German program began to seriously consider a redesign of its major and minor in 2015, the program’s faculty team happily accepted Jennifer Redmann’s invitation to spend a few days at Franklin and Marshall College. Under the leadership of Redmann, the German program had recently undergone curriculum reform, including what some may have viewed as a radical decision to count every single course—yes, even German 101—toward the major (Redmann). Faced with the problem that only a small number of its students entered the program with training in German and that this number was even lower among underrepresented students, the Rhodes College’s faculty team was eager to learn more about a model that would allow all students, irrespective of their language placement, to complete a BA in German. The newly designed tracks would also make it easier for students limited by inflexible schedules in their primary major⁵ to complete a secondary major in German. Paired with a literacy-based approach⁶ that places authentic texts—broadly defined—at the center of the curriculum at all levels, counting language courses toward the requirements of a language major also has symbolic significance: it contributes to overcoming the “two-tiered language literature structure” that was first critiqued in the 2007 MLA report Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World (MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages)—a structure that has proved persistent in its grip on the curriculum and intradepartmental hierarchies (Rifkin; Lomicka and Lord). Wonneken Wanske, assistant professor of German at Rhodes College, and her colleague Elizabeth Bridges saw the overhaul of their major as an opportunity to design a more inclusive curriculum that would organically incorporate diversity and representation into all courses instead of treating them as isolated units, starting with the introduction of nonbinary pronouns in the beginning language classroom and continuing through courses that “create a more realistic image of German-speaking countries as they exist in contemporary Europe: that is, as multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic societies” (Wanske).

Decolonizing the curriculum and diversifying her classroom was crucial to Siham Bouamer’s success at Sam Houston State University as well: “When I arrived at Sam Houston, I was (pleasantly) surprised about student diversity in my first-semester course. I also noticed that it was less the case in the third or fourth semester.” Bouamer, assistant professor of French and coordinator of the French program, improved retention of underrepresented students by working with the French club (later renamed the French and Francophone club) and by moving away from a Paris-centric curriculum toward one that did not delegate francophone culture to the periphery. She also created access points to French studies for students in other disciplines, including guest lectures in film studies courses on France’s multicultural reality and sessions in the honors college on topics such as Islamophobia and the French #MeToo movement. “We have a lot of students who are first-generation and work full time,” Bouamer explains, so making French accessible to all students was a high priority to her. Recognizing both the benefits of and barriers to studying abroad, the French program started sending students to Quebec as a more affordable alternative to France and began working on creating a program in southern Louisiana. She developed an innovative online course based on the popular concept of the escape room that significantly improved completion rates. The increase in minors that these various changes brought about allowed Bouamer to successfully advocate for the creation of a major in French, which will roll out in fall 2019.

The redesign of the major has implications for proficiency goals. For example, Rhodes College’s interdisciplinary German track aims for students to achieve “upper-intermediate German language proficiency” rather than advanced proficiency (“Requirements”).⁷ The focus on interdisciplinarity, a shift often signified when departments and majors drop the term language and literature and add the term studies, moreover denotes a change in the organization of knowledge. Recognizing that a miniscule number of undergraduate students will enter the professoriat⁸ and that, according to Eric Hayot’s provocative analysis, humanistic disciplinarity no longer attracts students, departments have shifted away from a coverage model with its focus on epochs, genres, and authors toward theme-based courses and interdisciplinary offerings. Given that our colleagues in physics are not asked to reinvent their course sequences in a similar manner, this may strike some as selling out and as diametrically opposed to my invitation to think big. I certainly do not want to glorify patchwork degrees that are often borne out of the necessity of scraping together enough courses from neighboring disciplines to sustain a major. Rather, I agree with Patricia K. Calkins and Sharon Wilkinson that “[i]t is the responsibility of the faculty to create a structure in which courses lead to ‘an enabling, empowering competency.’”⁹ Yet the way we define these competencies might be shifting as the value that humanities expertise can bring to interdisciplinary collaborations—if pursued with intention and purpose—comes to the fore. Instead of equating rigor with coverage and disciplinary boundaries, we should embrace the foundational work that faculty members in languages are contributing to the environmental humanities, digital humanities, public humanities, and medical humanities. Such a stance, I would argue, is not ahistorical but rather shows awareness of the history of disciplinary specialization as a product of the modern research university (Monteil and Romerio). In the eighteenth century, before disciplinary boundaries had been firmly established, it was not uncommon for thinkers to contribute to both the arts and the sciences. Christina Gerhardt, associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, argues that the environmental humanities not only harks back to eighteenth-century Germany, where intellectuals like Humboldt, Forster, and Goethe pursued studies in both the humanities and the sciences before the fields were rent asunder, but also aims to overcome this artificial divide, bridging disciplines in the humanities with those in the social and natural sciences.

With the strong support of her deans, Gerhardt and her colleagues have established a cross-disciplinary curriculum in the environmental humanities that integrates experiential learning opportunities:

The exchanges between colleagues in the humanities and in the STEM disciplines aims to make students aware of climate change and its related impacts and to seek solutions to them, be they ones coming from engineering or from art. The curriculum places a heavy focus not only on interdisciplinary learning but also on experiential learning. We take students outside the classroom for projects such as the High Water Line Project [a public arts project that visualizes future shoreline forecasts of rising sea levels], inviting colleagues in the sciences, people from local government agencies and non-governmental organizations to join us on this site specific walking tour. These site visits and the exchanges students have with the aforementioned people complement our classroom teaching and help prepare students with creative critical thinking skills and a network of contacts for potential future internships and employment. (Gerhardt)

Both our teaching and research profit when faculty members go outside of their comfort zones, push the limits of the humanities, and practice the study and teaching of languages and literatures as “rigorous cultural engagement” (Madsbjerg xxi). With complex, global challenges such as climate change that require all hands on deck, insisting on disciplinary purity poses the danger of rendering us irrelevant.

Pathways: Where Do Our Students Come From?

William Nichols, chair of the Department of World Languages at Georgia State University and former ADFL president, likes to remind faculty members who express skepticism toward the idea of collaborating with high school teachers that “our students are not born freshmen” (Personal conversation).¹⁰ Few college professors will be surprised to learn that the university has no monopoly on teaching languages, yet this awareness of the broader landscape of language education has historically not been reflected in our outreach efforts, curriculum, and strategic planning. Two trends in particular warrant our attention: first, the increased recognition of North America’s existing linguistic diversity as both a cultural and economic asset accompanied by efforts to support speakers of heritage and indigenous languages in maintaining their proficiency (Commission on Language Learning 22–26); and second, the increased value that parents, even those who do not speak a second language at home, place on bilingual education as reflected in the proliferation of dual-language immersion schools and the exponential growth of the Seal of Biliteracy (Commission on Language Learning 14–15; Jaumont; “State Laws”).

When considering where our students come from and where they aspire to go, four-year colleges can learn from conversations with colleagues at community colleges as well as with K–12 teachers. Two-year institutions that are evaluated in part by transfer rates are accustomed to thinking about their students’ pathways after graduation. They also serve a disproportionate number of immigrant and first-generation students and thus have rich experience in teaching heritage language learners. Furthermore, compared to selective institutions that are situated in a given locality but educate few locals, two-year institutions tend to have deep ties to their communities. According to the results of Per Urlaub’s recent survey of students who transferred to the German program at the University of Texas, Austin, learners with community college experience outperform their peers, but the number of former full-time community college students who declare a German major is quite low. Conferring with colleagues from two-year institutions can help us better understand how we can make our programs more accessible and attractive to transfer students. Urlaub’s own analysis indicates that affordable study abroad programs are one factor that increases accessibility (76). Regular conversations with high school language teachers can help us anticipate what our future students will look like and what their needs will be; these conversations also offer mutual support in times when one-person language programs, especially in smaller languages, are becoming more common in high schools and colleges alike.

Casilde Isabelli, professor of Spanish and chair of the world language department at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), analyzed where her language programs were losing potential students. She noted that between 2013 and 2018, twenty-five hundred students with four years of high school language study waived the foreign language requirement and did not continue with a language at UNR. Given the proliferation of the Seal of Biliteracy, she realized that even more students with significant high school experience in a second language would be entering the college and thus communicating the value of continued language study would be vital for her program’s sustainability and growth. To address this critical transition point, she and her colleagues recently revamped the department’s annual awards ceremony to honor high school students alongside their college peers. During the event, which parents are encouraged to attend, short video clips of alumni career pathways are shown, including a clip of a Chinese minor who is now fighting human trafficking in his nonprofit work and a clip of a local news anchor who draws on his university-taught Spanish skills when interviewing members of the Reno community. The department also eased the transition from high school to the college language classroom in a number of ways. Spanish immersion students, who often have difficulty finding advanced classes in high school, are given the opportunity to take those classes at UNR. Also, faculty members now visit state high schools to inform students, teachers, and advisors about AP and IB credits when transitioning from a Nevada high school to UNR’s world language program. These credits frequently place students in the department’s upper-level courses. Finally, there has been attention to creating continued pathways for heritage language learners to advance their formal Spanish through their dedicated tracks. According to Isabelli, all these initiatives take time and effort, and therefore course releases were given for faculty members who serve as in-house advisers.

All these changes are paying off. In 2010, UNR’s world language department was among those that made national news about program closures (Foderaro). Whereas one  of the programs lost in 2010 did not make a comeback—German—students at UNR today can choose from nine languages, including Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, and Paiute; the number of majors and minors has steadily increased; and UNR is among the top ten degree-granting institutions for French majors (“Which Colleges”).

Career Diversity: Where Do Our Students (Want to) Go?

It is no coincidence that most of the models featured in this article, even if selected for entirely different reasons, address in one way or another students’ postgraduation career pathways. Since 2008, our profession has undergone a culture change in the way we talk about humanities expertise on all curricula levels, from BA to PhD.¹¹ The occasion is a somber one: realizations that surfaced a decade ago about the drop in job postings, the decline in enrollments, and students’ and parents’ preference for STEM disciplines were not temporary phenomena but rather the beginning of a marginalization of the humanities on our campuses and beyond that has outlasted the economic recovery. The perceived impracticality and nontransferable nature of our research and teaching, paired with the rising cost of college, has undoubtedly contributed to the precarious state of world language departments after 2008. As a result, the conversation has shifted from whether we should prepare students for diverse careers as part of their undergraduate training to how we could accomplish this. Yet, although a more career-oriented mind-set has its origin in an ongoing crisis that continues to threaten the very existence of language programs, this mind-set has inspired positive change in our profession—including a more responsible approach to graduate education, improved ties to our community, and more systematic efforts to track and engage with our alumni. I believe that all students profit from increased attention to transferable skills and career pathways, and that a curriculum designed to prepare majors and minors for a range of fulfilling careers has the potential to bring in a broader array of students.

Although the process of developing scalable models and spreading awareness of existing resources is ongoing, scholarly organizations (such as the MLA or AHA), as well as trailblazing individual institutions (“National Endowment”), have made great strides in prioritizing the reform of doctoral education. By contrast, efforts to support career diversity on the undergraduate level are more recent, and we still have work to do in articulating best practices and providing departments with the language and structures to support humanities students in their professionalization efforts. While an insufficient practice on its own, drawing from the rich resources that were so recently developed for PhD programs—as well as for undergraduate programs in neighboring disciplines—and adapting them for the undergraduate language classroom is a starting point; this includes systematically tracking our alumni (Bousquet et al.; Cassuto; Connected Academics 13–14), collaborating with other offices such as career services and advising on our campus (Committee on the Status and Future of the Profession 8–9, 11, 13, 31; Connected Academics 7–9), honing our vocabulary so that we can more clearly articulate the skills we are teaching (Brookins and Fenton; Weise et al.; Committee on the Status and Future of the Profession 45–47), and increasing attention to our role in the humanities ecosystem and how we connect with its various players on and off campus (Connected Academics 9–11).

In a time when our disciplines are viewed with suspicion, graduate programs that lead reform efforts have embraced the public humanities for their potential to connect us with our communities, attract a broader range of students into our programs, and contribute to projects that align with our belief system (Profession’s spring 2019 issue illustrates these points [Public Humanities]). I see job preparation as a side effect rather than the primary goal of public engagement, but participating in those initiatives undeniably affords undergraduate and graduate learners alike a glimpse into the range of career opportunities available to them outside of the for-profit sector. For example, the students in Araceli Hernández-Laroche’s class on translation and interpreting at the University of South Carolina Upstate advocate for vulnerable communities through service learning components, such as helping nonprofit organizations connect with Spartanburg’s growing Latino population or supporting Spanish-speaking parents in their communications with the school system (Hernández-Laroche). As Hernández-Laroche and her colleague Maria Francisco Montesó explain, public engagement also fosters authentic, mutually beneficial collaborations on their campus while training students in a field with projected growth:

Translation and interpreting studies is a powerful bridge to cross over. These fields connect English not only with other world languages and disciplines but also with the linguistic needs of our growing immigrant and international communities. . . . The demand for translators and interpreters will increase by twenty-nine percent . . . in the next few years. . . . The advantage of being trained in translation and interpreting studies is its exceptional applicability in multiple professional fields . . . such as business, law enforcement, and psychology. (151)

I believe that we should empower our students to pursue any career they want—in both for-profit and nonprofit sectors—and that our encouragement should be delivered with the wisdom that modern career paths are rarely linear (Coffey et al.; Humanities Indicators 21). That said, community engagement projects speak to students who pursue a liberal arts degree precisely because these students value a meaningful career more than a high starting salary or because they see our classes as a reprieve from their more applied first majors. Moreover, public engagement can serve as the common denominator in departments where faculty members who promote career education clash with colleagues who are deeply suspicious of forsaking the intrinsic value of the study of languages, literatures, and cultures.

The traditional model of connecting languages and career-related skills—languages for the profession—has also evolved. Although courses such as Medical Spanish or Mandarin for Business continue to be popular, language departments are exploring how to integrate and connect with professional schools on their campuses. Such departments aim for a more integrated experience that spans both lower- and upper-level curricula, including innovative hybrid or double majors that enable students to draw on the expertise of at least two disciplines. Clemson University’s Department of Languages offers several models: the BA in language and international business (LAIB) combines the study of Chinese, French, German, Japanese, or Spanish with a professional stream in economics, business, or tourism (“B.A. in Language and International Business”). The department chair Salvador Oropesa rejects the notion that this approach relegates languages to the status of service departments and stresses his commitment to “substantive upper-level studies in the humanities” for these professional tracks. Like all language majors, the LAIB program requires students to study abroad; in addition, learners complete an internship with an international company.

Other initiatives connect career-related skills with alternative credentials: Christine Garst-Santos and her colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages and Global Studies at South Dakota State University launched the Workplace Intercultural Competence Certificate in 2017. At an institution where the majority of students do not need to fulfill a language requirement, the certificate rewards learners who complete two semesters in either French, German, or Spanish, pair it with an intercultural competence course taught by modern languages and global studies faculty members, and add a management elective from one of the university’s professional schools, such as Agricultural Business Management (“Workplace Intercultural Competence”). Mount Holyoke College’s Global Competence Award is another model that deserves to be widely shared and adapted. The credential, cleverly packaged as an award, requires three semesters of language study at Mount Holyoke along with other achievements such as cultural immersion and cross-cultural learning. In 2018, thirty-six seniors from twenty-seven different majors and minors received the award (“Global Competence Award”). In addition to raising Mount Holyoke’s on-campus visibility and encouraging cross-disciplinary language study, these credentials stand out for changing the conversation; the discussion shifts from the dreaded question, So, what can you do with that? to a confident assertion, Look, this is why all students should be taking our classes.

Vision and Leadership

The unexpected billboard message “Humanities = Jobs” greets drivers on Interstate 10 on their way from Tucson, Arizona, to Phoenix. The billboard and the sleek new Web site to which it points are indicative of Dean Alain-Philippe Durand’s vision for the University of Arizona’s College of Humanities, which stresses the applicability of humanities expertise as well as the importance of connecting faculty members, students, and the public. This approach is reflected in the college’s interdisciplinary degree programs that complement more traditional majors, including a BA in world literature and a new BA in applied humanities. The Tucson Humanities Festival, which last year presented the Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead alongside hip-hop artists, complements academic offerings. Now in its tenth year, the 2019 festival will ask, “How can the humanities shape tomorrow’s world? What’s next?” (“Tucson Humanities Festival”).

These questions also inform Durand and his colleagues’ approach to thinking about humanities careers. In surveying the college’s alumni, Durand found that “[t]here is no such thing as a starving humanist. These people are employed in all kinds of jobs in all kinds of fields, and they are creating successful careers based on what they learned in our college” (Makansi). While drawing on the expertise of alumni is part of the university’s strategy to rebrand the humanities on and off campus, the Dorrance Lecture Series, which the college cosponsors, goes one step further: it explores the future of work and the intersection between the humanities and advanced technologies such as robotics, astronomy, artificial intelligence, and the sharing economy (“Dorrance Lecture Series”). Driving these conversations on our campus helps establish language advocates as forward-thinking leaders vis-à-vis our administration, provides faculty members with the vision and language to effectively promote their programs, and empowers students to confidently respond to questions about the value and utility of their studies. More important, as we are preparing students for the next forty years of professional life, looking beyond the current demands of the labor market is simply the right thing to do (Hartley; Weise et al.).

The future of the humanities does not always fit into traditional departmental structures. Mount Holyoke’s Global Competence Award and South Dakota State University’s Workplace Intercultural Competence Certificate show how languages can leverage students’ and administrators’ increased demand for microcredentialing and badges. According to Dennis Looney, director of both the ADFL and the MLA Office of Programs, interest is growing among departments participating in the ADFL-MLA Language Consultancy Service to learn about alternatives to the traditional single-language major, including models for unified majors that are shared among multiple languages. A major in modern languages can be adapted to serve participating programs’ needs (including concentrations in one, two, or even three languages) and, if desired, may include a common core of introductory classes or shared electives (Dunbar and Rider; Beard et al. 114–17).

Finally, programs such as Fort Lewis College’s new BA in languages and borders completely reimagine what the curriculum of a language major may look like. After Fort Lewis lost all its language majors (Johnson), Janine Fitzgerald, a professor in sociology and human services, worked with the two remaining colleagues in modern languages, David Vásquez-Hurtado and Carolina Alonso. Together, they envisioned a degree with an “entire curriculum [designed] around the concept of borders, whether they be geographical, political, psychological or social,” including course offerings such as Biopolitics on the Borders, Narco Cultura, and The Immigrant Experience (“Studying Borders”). According to the three faculty members, the borders and languages major, which is being unveiled in fall 2019, is “content-based at every level of the bachelor’s degree” and “incorporates successful teaching strategies that are mostly coming out of ESL programs, including community-based language acquisition” (Alonso et al.). As with several other projects mentioned here, the faculty team from Fort Lewis will participate in the Language Innovation Room at the 2020 MLA convention.¹²

Arguably, many of the programs highlighted in this article look more exciting now than they did before 2008. Framing the current crisis as an opportunity, however, would be deeply disrespectful toward colleagues whose programs were closed or cut; it would ignore the exhaustion of faculty members who work tirelessly yet may still find their departments on the chopping block. It would turn a blind eye to the precariousness of colleagues who are barely able to make a living wage despite carrying high teaching loads in fields in which they earned advanced degrees, and it would disregard the threat to linguistic diversity as well as the accessibility of language studies that the net loss of 651 language programs signifies—especially for students at community colleges, which “have taken a disproportionate share of the decline” (Looney and Lusin 6). And yet, it is true that the crisis has liberated language programs to experiment, leading to far more diverse, better integrated, and locally grounded programs. Plainly put, the crisis has also made us less snobbish, bringing with it a growing commitment to communicating our work to the public, an openness to creative collaborations previously dismissed as outside of our discipline, and an increased attention to collaboration with and the role of various staff members on our campuses. It is also worth noting that many of the models featured here originated at institutions that are not commonly thought of as Ivy League; I see this willingness to listen to all colleagues—regardless of institution or rank—who can contribute to moving our field forward as another positive sign.¹³ Funding from the state and from institutions is critical to keep this momentum, and we must have support from national organizations and grant makers to identify strong models and make them scalable. In the meantime, let us thank the colleagues featured here and those countless others who ought to have been included as well; let us acknowledge their generosity, creativity, energy, and passion. Your work inspires us to think big and to be proud participants in the conversation on what the post-2008 humanities can achieve.

Notes

1. Departments or schools of world languages that combine all or many of the languages taught on a single campus (sometimes including English) are becoming increasingly common. My argument here pertains to smaller, language-specific units, whether they are stand-alone programs or part of a bigger department, especially where there is little curricular integration and extracurricular collaboration among language programs housed in the same department.

2. An especially sad example is the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University, which sparked a national labor debate in 2013 and inspired the hashtag #IAmMargaretMary (Kovalik; Ellis; Flaherty, “Non-Tenure-Track” and “#iammargaretmary”; Anderson). According to an analysis of the AAUP based on 2016 data, 73% of college positions are now off the tenure track. This percentage includes a broad range of employment arrangements, but “[f]or the most part, these are insecure, unsupported positions with little job security and few protections for academic freedom” (“Data Snapshot” 1).

3. The MLA has been collecting data on the ratio of introductory to advanced undergraduate enrollments as part of its language enrollment censuses; for the most recent numbers, see the 2016 enrollments report (Looney and Lusin 10–11).

4. HuMetricsHSS is an example of such a push for “values based evaluation practices” (“Outcomes”), including attention to the syllabus as an “unrecognized and unrewarded” form of scholarship (Rhody).

5. Although Kalliney’s 2018 Chronicle article does not address curriculum reform from the perspective of diversity and inclusion, his piece offers valuable insights into the importance of scheduling from the perspective of an English department chair.

6. According to Redmann’s forthcoming article in the ADFL Bulletin, this includes work by Richard Kern, Janet Swaffar and Katherine Arens, Kate Paesani, Heather Willis Allen, and Beatrice Dupuy.

7. To be precise, the focus of the interdisciplinary German track, which allows novice learners to complete a major in the language, is “for students to develop upper-intermediate German language proficiency and a critical understanding of the German-speaking world from interdisciplinary perspectives.” The other track, German language, literature, and culture, which is more commonly selected by students who enter the program with existing German skills, aims at developing “advanced language and cultural proficiency and an in-depth critical understanding of the German-speaking world” (“Requirements”).

8. The 2007 MLA report cites the National Science Foundation’s survey of college graduates, according to which “[o]nly 6.1% of college graduates whose first major is foreign languages go on to attain a doctoral degree” (MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages). Given the subsequent drop in enrollments on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, it is likely that this percentage has decreased (Looney and Lusin).

9. Calkins and Wilkinson quote Porter 20.

10. Nichols recently wrote about his department’s public-facing work, including K–16 initiatives, for Profession (“Embracing Tentacularity”).

11. The 2007 MLA report, which was published just before the financial crisis, responded to another crisis, the terrorist attacks of September 11. The report notably does not mention career-related skills, and can illustrate how the discourse has shifted after 2008 if compared to the other documents cited in this section (MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages; Warner).

12. The other participants are Siham Bouamer of Sam Houston State University, Christina Gerhardt of the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, and Wonneken Wanske of Rhodes College. Stephen Fitzmaurice of Clemson University will be presenting on the department’s ASL-English Educational Interpreting Program.

13. It thus appears that the following observation of the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major should not be uncritically adopted for world languages: “Throughout this report, examples and data are shaded somewhat toward departments at PhD- and MA-granting institutions, since those programs collectively graduate the majority of English majors and since their curricula exert considerable professional influence” (2–3).

Works Cited

ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major. A Changing Major: The Report of the 2016–17 ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major. The Association of Departments of English, July 2018, www.ade.mla.org/content/download/98513/2276619/A-Changing-Major.pdf.

Alonso, Carolina, et al. “The Borders and Languages Major from Fort Lewis College.” ADFL Summer Seminar West, 24 May 2019, Davenport Grand Hotel, Spokane, WA. Poster presentation.

Anderson, L. V. “Death of a Professor.” Slate, 13 Nov. 2019, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/2013/11/death_of_duquesne_adjunct_margaret_mary_vojtko_what_really_happened_to_her.html.

“B.A. in Language and International Business.” Clemson University, www.clemson.edu/caah/departments/languages/academics/laib/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2019.

Beard, Laura, et al. “From Silos to Networks: Reenvisioning Undergraduate and Graduate Programs in a Modern Languages Department.” ADFL Bulletin, vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, pp. 109–21, doi:10.1632/adfl.45.1.109.

Bouamer, Siham. E-mail interview. Conducted by Lydia Tang, July 2019.

Bousquet, Gilles, et al. “Career Trajectories of World Language Graduates: A LinkedIn Perspective.” ADFL Bulletin, vol. 45, no. 2, forthcoming.

Brookins, Julia, and Sarah Fenton, editors. Careers for History Majors. Oxford UP, 2019.

Calkins, Patricia K., and Sharon Wilkinson. “Redesigning the Curriculum for Student Persistence in Small Language Programs.” ADFL Bulletin, vol. 46, no. 1, forthcoming.

Cassuto, Leonard. “Outcomes-Based Graduate School: The Humanities Edition.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 June 2019, www.chronicle.com/article/Outcomes-Based-Graduate/246501.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what student-centered graduate education would look like. But before we can figure that out, we need to ask, Who are those students?

Let’s Talk about Students

When we talk about graduate education, we’re not always talking about graduate students. We may be talking about our careers and legacies as faculty members, the health and reputations of our PhD programs, or the future of our respective disciplines. When we do reference graduate students as an aggregate, there’s often an underlying assumption that the motives, values, and desires of our doctoral students have remained stable over time. As the tenure-track job market has eroded in the last decade-plus, something more worrisome is creeping in: a greater tendency to view these students not merely as static but also as victimized and powerless.

At this moment, the most important and necessary thing to do is to support our graduate students in becoming agents of their own academic and professional trajectories. At institutions across the country, dedicated faculty members, members of staff, and senior administrators have worked diligently to develop resources that empower graduate students. As a result, doctoral students now can tap a slew of resources on campus and beyond their institutions (especially online). These resources have made a discernible impact on the quality of training for many students. And, yet, change has proved incremental and uneven. Too many of these enhancements—let’s call them the “more and better”—sit at the periphery of doctoral training, beyond the core formation that happens within PhD programs themselves.

My position at Duke University—for which a key responsibility is advising humanities doctoral students as a complementary PhD adviser—is an important innovation toward career diversity in the humanities. (A critical point: my definition of career diversity includes a greater diversity of faculty positions beyond the research-intensive jobs for which too many doctoral students are exclusively trained.)

Well before students begin looking for jobs, in my role as the director of graduate student advising and engagement I also provide academic and professional mentoring for students who seek academically informed perspectives (in my case, the perspective of a scholar, former humanities center director, and former tenured faculty member) throughout their PhD training. I have helped many students with both academic and nonacademic job searches; but I also work with students who are still completing coursework, to help them identify and leverage appropriate extradepartmental opportunities at Duke and beyond.

Since starting my position in 2016, I have realized that I’d been carrying around certain assumptions and stereotypes about doctoral students—specifically, that my advisees were mostly in their twenties, that academia was all most of them knew, and that I’d find a high proportion of bookish introverts (in other words, graduate student versions of myself). Growing into my role as an adviser has required me to be, among other things, more attentive to the broad range of students within our PhD program cohorts.

Even in a demographic noted for its relative lack of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity, the diversity among humanities students is staggering. I’ve interacted regularly with approximately two hundred humanities doctoral students over three years (out of a population of just over four hundred), and they are remarkably diverse. They range in age from twenty-two to beyond forty and include mothers and fathers, international students, first-generation students, people of color, LGBTQ students, veterans, the disabled, the formerly undocumented, Marxists, atheists, Buddhists, and evangelical Christians. Many are just scraping by, some are getting financial help from parents and partners, and a few are independently wealthy. Many speak three or more languages (fluently). A few are working on a second PhD; others picked up degrees in law or engineering or medicine on their way to advanced humanities study. Our students include former middle and secondary school teachers, and others have significant prior career experience outside the academy.

If there’s any generalization helpful in understanding the current population of humanities doctoral students, it’s that most of them are millennials. Technology plays a large role in their lives, and many are keen to deploy technology in ways that serve their scholarship, teaching, and other professional interests. They enjoy and benefit from collaborative work (when provided the encouragement and opportunity to engage in that work). And in general, the advisees I work with care greatly for work-life balance and seem far less willing to place everything on the altar of an academic career. I’ve worked with many students who chose not to go on the academic job market at all, because of ties to partners, families, and geography or because of aspirations that led them elsewhere.

What’s standing in the way of this brilliant and diverse group of students? Whether their current professional goals lie within the academy or beyond it, many of these supremely talented individuals show up for advising sessions with a considerable degree of anxiety. The research positions that many have been groomed for simply aren’t showing up in the job postings, and they may be ill-equipped to navigate the market for teaching-intensive jobs. Or they may yearn for something other than an academic career, but six or seven years of doctoral training may have insulated them from broader professional networks—and examples of other ways to occupy meaningful, intellectually engaged professional roles.

Yes, the academic job market is shrinking, and many of the tenured positions that remain look rather different than the ones many doctoral students sought out even a decade ago. Despite this reality, I see some doctoral students leveraging available resources to land comfortably—both within and outside the academy—in ways that make sense for their unique interests and goals. Here are a few real-life examples:

For recent PhDs Mary Caton Lingold (English) and Giulia Riccò (romance studies), digital research and pedagogy programs (the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge and the Bass Digital Education Fellowship, respectively) were critical in supporting scholarship and teaching that secured them assistant professorships at Virginia Commonwealth University (for Lingold) and the University of Michigan (for Riccò).

Stephanie Reist (romance studies and public policy) found that her role as a project manager on a multiyear interdisciplinary research team that incorporated faculty members and undergraduates (see “The Cost of Opportunity”) not only helped her refine a dissertation topic but also led to her current position as a postdoctoral researcher in higher education policy at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.

Ashley Rose Young (history) created her own internship opportunity with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, funded by the NEH-supported Versatile Humanists at Duke internship program (see Young). She is now a full-time food historian at the museum—a position for which she declined a tenure-track job offer.

Scott Muir (religion) sought out Versatile Humanists at Duke advising to support his exploration of nonfaculty career options. He checked in with me at regular intervals as he applied for and settled into a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Humanities Alliance, and again as he transitioned into a Mellon-funded role with NHA as the project director for Study the Humanities, an initiative that provides humanities faculty members, administrators, and advocates with evidence-based resources and strategies to make the case for studying the humanities as an undergraduate (see “Study the Humanities”).

Although it’s often difficult to establish cause and effect with something as complex as someone’s career path, all the students I list above clearly benefited from access to a wider range of academic and professional development opportunities. And they are not the only doctoral students at Duke leveraging extradepartmental resources to enrich their training. But then I look around and see a parallel graduate subculture at Duke inhabiting a condition similar to mine, as I wrapped up my PhD program in English in 1999: hyperfocused on the independent, specialized research projects on which academics still build their careers, carrying a torch for the sorts of R1 positions their faculty advisers occupy, and largely tuned out to perspectives and resources that emanate from beyond their PhD programs.

This is a blunt characterization and possibly a reductive one, but I am not faulting these students. The basic norms, practices and assumptions of humanities PhD programs remain largely unchanged from twenty years ago. Those programs still primarily admit students with a narrowly articulated set of career goals (jobs as tenure-track professors), and their faculty members often presume that their students possess an even narrower set of career goals (R1 tenure-track jobs). Judging by the number of students who seek out one-on-one advising with me as they engage with academic job markets (over the past three years, that’s nearly as many as those seeking guidance on nonacademic job searches), many PhD programs could do better in preparing students for traditional faculty searches (especially those involving intensive teaching).

For a significant number of brilliant and highly committed doctoral students, more and better only contribute to the noise and distractions they struggle with daily. Advanced scholarship in the humanities continues to require deep, focused attention. Despite having more professional development opportunities than we Gen X grad students ever did, millennials must confront unprecedented levels of both professional tension and distraction. Although the job market in Victorian literature was notoriously bad even in the 1990s, I don’t recall having to filter out the hysterical rhetoric I now come across regularly in the Chronicle of Higher Education, articles with titles like “Fanning the Flames While the Humanities Burn” and “Academe’s Extinction Event,” and I certainly did not have to negotiate all of today’s social media platforms, which offer conflicting options and advice on every topic imaginable.

When students hunker down, who can blame them? A resource-rich environment can also become a distraction. There’s a whole constellation of extradepartmental units and programs (both academic and extracurricular) vying for students’ time, energy, and attention. Events and opportunities proliferate exponentially (as well as related newsletters, e-mails, and social media updates), but the overall number  of doctoral students remains the same. Some stop reading e-mail. Nobody on campus can figure out how to get through to all the students. We risk doing more and doing better to our detriment.

The Fallacy of Doubling Down

If the students erect monastic bubbles around themselves, too many directors of graduate study and other faculty members tend to reinforce them. Faculty members (who take a lot of flack in graduate education reform circles) usually do this with the best of intentions. Most know of no other way to serve their students than to get them through PhD programs in a timely fashion and to render them as competitive as possible on the academic job market (which generally takes the form of encouraging students to double down on dissertation research and writing).

But as many of us already know, this system of training is broken. I see it whenever a sixth- or seventh-year student (often one I’ve not yet met) screws up the courage to e-mail me for an advising appointment to discuss nonacademic job options. These students may ask to meet in private, for fear of running into their committee members or even peers. Often, these students have wanted to come sooner but have held off for any number of reasons. The tipping point occurs when the students finally experience the academic job market for the first time, or (almost as common) someone they admire greatly (the star of their cohort) goes out a year before and comes up empty-handed.

But as I quickly discover as I scan their CVs (the résumé as yet a distant goal), more and better work best when they happen early and often. Typically, the CVs dazzle in every way, except they often convey only traditional research and teaching, complicating the task of envisioning a nonacademic résumé. No internships or other nonacademic work experiences. No research experiences other than single-authored papers and conference presentations. Teaching may be limited to a couple of teaching assistant positions or a single semester as an instructor of record for a course on a narrow topic related to the student’s research interests. Little or no community engagement, or other activities that would contribute to the presentation of a well-rounded job candidate.

The truth is that it’s extremely difficult to become a versatile graduate student in year six or seven. And while even these students can (and likely will) go on to do impressive things beyond the academy, a certain degree of floundering is almost inevitable in such circumstances.

I’ve grown much more practical since the 1990s, but I’m still idealistic enough to believe that doctoral training in the humanities should be about more than ushering people into jobs (whether in or beyond the academy). While articulating the ultimate purpose of humanities doctoral training falls beyond the scope of this essay, I think we can all agree that no brilliant, committed humanities PhD student deserves to flounder.

And floundering happens. Often, I don’t see it firsthand, because students who fall into this category are often the least likely to follow up with me for a second appointment (despite my strong urging to do so). The conceptual and actual work required to reframe an entire career trajectory may be too daunting (at least for now). Some drop out of touch. I fear they will move on to a series of plan B fixes that have become all too common: adjunct positions, one-year lectureships with heavy teaching loads, low-paid nonfaculty positions (both on and off campus) with no clear path for professional advancement.

In these cases, I can only hope that floundering will be temporary (my advising door remains open), and that at least some of these students will travel the same road as those featured on the alumni directory Web page for Versatile Humanists at Duke (see “Duke Humanities”)—many of them former Gen X grad students who eventually navigated their way into fulfilling nonacademic careers, all without the help of career counselors, academic advisers, or even ImaginePhD.

Mentoring and Advising

None of the foregoing suggests that we don’t need to engage in more graduate education innovation. More and better are great, and extradepartmental resources do enrich the training of many of the doctoral students with whom I work. But the innovation students most need hasn’t yet occurred. A national conversation around reforming doctoral education (not just in the humanities) has also been ongoing since the 1990s, and despite a series of comprehensive reports funded by Carnegie, Mellon, the Council on Graduate Schools, the American Association of University Professors, the MLA, and others, the basic structure, assumptions, and practices of doctoral training remain largely unchanged. Yet everything else has: an increasingly diverse, millennial generation of doctoral students, a rapidly shrinking market for tenure-track faculty positions, more complex institutions of higher education facing unprecedented challenges, new opportunities to partner with scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, and increasingly less linear, predictable, and stable career trajectories outside academia.

The holy grail of graduate education reform (as I hear at every conference I attend on this topic) is moving the needle on PhD program subcultures so that a critical mass of faculty members across disciplines (the gatekeepers of graduate education) will take a hard look at how they train doctoral students, where those students end up, and what changes (especially curricular ones) make sense. We see faculty attitudes changing at Duke, including some exciting new courses that explore public humanities or encourage collaborative research. At present, however, it’s still easier for a faculty member to send a graduate student to me for advising than it is for the faculty member to get departmental buy-in for more far-reaching pedagogical innovations and then usher them through a curriculum committee.

So until the day when doctoral training catches up to the twenty-first century, the first, most critical intervention we can make is through highly individualized and attentive mentoring and advising of students. In and of itself, there’s nothing new about advising and mentoring. It’s a critical part of the traditional graduate education model, but as everyone knows, academics get no formal training in how to do it. Consequently, many doctoral students have phenomenal faculty mentors and advisers, but too many students have experiences that are at best mediocre or at worst abusive and traumatic.

The innovations in advising and mentoring, as we explore them at my institution (and as others do elsewhere), are happening on two fronts: where the advising comes from, and how we go about it.

At the end of the day, the most critical ingredient for graduate students’ success (academically, if not professionally) is the quality of advising and mentoring they receive from their primary faculty advisers. This is not likely to change. But the new landscape of more and better also means more and better advising and mentoring from beyond PhD programs. Faculty members, who wear many hats already, cannot always be expected to know about every extradepartmental resource and opportunity available to their doctoral students. And although there’s been discussion in graduate education reform circles about training faculty to advise students for nonfaculty careers, this is a heavy charge for scholars who may have spent their entire adult lives in research universities. No single complementary PhD adviser (or even corps of advisers) can handle every need, of course. Much of the time, I function as a connector and conduit, sending students to other people and units who might be helpful: faculty members outside their PhD programs, more advanced doctoral students, other professionals working both within and beyond the academy, and career services.

And What about Coaching?

A huge potential for complementary, full-time advising members of staff is the opportunity to work closely with faculty members, and by so doing to promote a culture of skilled advising and mentoring. Even faculty members who are great at advising and mentoring can get better at advising and mentoring. And at some point early in my advising work, I realized (despite consistently positive feedback from my advisees) that I could get better at these things as well. No longer comfortable with getting by on my life experience, career history, and good people skills, I sought out some training on business coaching through an ICF-approved continuing education program.

While I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone who works with grad students must get credentialed as a professional coach, the program has helped me refine skills that are critical (but under-deployed) in graduate student mentoring and advising. These skills include actively listening (I mean, really listening), supporting students in framing multiple possible solutions to a problem, developing greater self-awareness, setting realistic goals, and being accountable for making progress. These last points about goal setting and accountability for progress toward those goals deserves particular emphasis, because they have such a significant impact on success for scholars, whether based within or outside the academy.

Perhaps most critical to note is what coaching is not. Contrary to popular perception, it’s not about talking at someone, or telling people what to do. Coaches often describe their work as “holding open a space” for people to make their own discoveries, solve their own problems, move toward their own goals. Coaching places people at the center of their own professional growth. And that’s what too often does not receive enough attention in traditional academic advising structures. While I don’t envision a future where students direct their own dissertations, there’s a case to be made for creating more space for student agency in this process. And when it comes to career goals, we are long past the point where a one-size-fits-all model of academic success will do. Increasingly, no two careers look alike, even in the academy.

The Bigger Picture

When I sat down to write these reflections, I resolved not to dwell too much on specific best practices. Although advising and mentoring (and coaching) have immediate practical value for students, I’m not suggesting that dedicated supplemental advisers or mentors are the right solution for every institution or set of humanities PhD programs. There are many possible avenues for creating stronger, more impactful cultures of graduate student advising and mentoring. What I do hope readers take away, however, is a larger point about the kinds of more and better for which we should be striving in graduate education reform. An inherent danger of more and better is an assumption that more is always better, and that all interventions hold equal value.

For example, so many well-intentioned interventions—workshops, boot camps, webinars, career panels, online assessments—seem driven by an anxiety to fill deficits with more and better kinds of information. These resources have their place, but they can quickly multiply into cacophony for students. And why do they multiply so quickly? Fill-the-deficit interventions proliferate because they are relatively easy. They involve identifying some lacuna, providing a good deal of content, and allowing students to engage on their own schedule, entirely by themselves, and for a very limited time (perhaps just once, as in the case of a workshop, webinar, or panel). These interventions usually do not require leaders to rethink curricular structures, challenge entrenched organizational cultures, or identify new and creative strategies for funding or sustainability.

I am not criticizing these kinds of interventions, many of which would have done me a lot of good back in the 1990s. (I’m also complicit in content-driven fixes myself, as anyone who reads the VH@Duke blog can see.) What I am cautioning against in this case, however, is not taking more and better far enough. At worst, harvesting only the low-hanging fruit can lend itself to a we’ve-got-that-covered organizational mentality, shutting down deeper inquiries or conversations about what graduate students really need.

And what do our humanities graduate students really need?

Hand in hand with curricular innovation, the greatest transformations occur through opportunities that provide students space to learn, grow, and explore on their own. This is, after all, how adults learn. Transformation may result from series of powerful coaching conversations, but it can also come about through an off-campus internship, a project management role on a collaborative research team, curricular channels that allow students to tackle new and unfamiliar modes of scholarship, or funding structures that permit students to teach beyond the walls of an elite university.

These interventions are challenging, both for organizations and students. Such interventions often require changes in institutional cultures, structures, and the deployment of resources. What else do internships, project management roles, new courses or scholarly projects, or teaching fellowships have in common? They all require substantial investments in students’ time, and engage students in the work of relationship building. Professional learning and growth best happen over time, and in community and conversation with others: new colleagues in an off-campus organization, other members of an on-campus research team, an entirely new demographic of students at a community college.

There’s probably neuroscience to support this last claim. But to be ruthlessly practical, the proof of the pudding may be in the hiring. What types of experiences and more sustained training do we now see working for humanities doctoral students in both academic and nonacademic job markets? What lines on graduate student CVs and résumés especially stand out and drive the sorts of interview questions that allow individuals to shine?

As I was mulling over the success stories of Mary Caton, Giulia, Stephanie, Ashley, and Scott, I got a farewell visit from Lauren Bunch, a newly hooded Duke PhD in philosophy whose research focuses on medical ethics. Lauren’s CV was relatively versatile; she’d gotten lots of teaching experience, had served on various university committees, and had served as a project manager on a Duke interdisciplinary collaborative research team (see “Transforming Alzheimer’s”).

Lauren initially sought me out last summer, to understand steps for seeking a nonacademic job. Although we ended up meeting semiregularly, we didn’t spend much time on the mechanics of the résumé, or how to network. Lauren most needed space and time to process all of her varied graduate school experiences, and to identify what she most wanted and valued. Just as critically (as Lauren pointed out when we last spoke), she needed a framework from which to understand the value of her many extradepartmental experiences, in an academic culture that tends to devalue such experiences as diversions or distractions from deep focus on dissertation research.

Starting this fall, Lauren will be a postdoctoral fellow in clinical ethics at Albany Medical College, where she will be working directly with medical professionals, and patients and their families. What made her a strong candidate for the position? According to Lauren, her expertise in moral philosophy remained a core expectation, but the sum of her experiences beyond her PhD program allowed her to distinguish herself. The range of her service work and her engagements with different populations on campus convinced the hiring committee that she could work well with people beyond academia, demonstrate empathy, and translate her research expertise in ways that would be impactful.

What would it look like if PhD programs responded to this emerging reality that the most valuable professional development experiences for a substantial percentage of graduates (even those remaining in academia) are increasingly extradepartmental and sometimes extracurricular? How might this recognition transform the intellectual worlds and experiences that PhD programs curate for their own students, and help bring about a truly student-centered culture of doctoral education?

Works Cited

“The Cost of Opportunity? Higher Education in the Baixada Fluminense (2017–2018).” Duke University / Bass Connections, bassconnections.duke.edu/project-teams/cost-opportunity-higher-education-baixada-fluminense-2017-2018.

“Duke Humanities Ph.D. Alumni Directory.” Duke / Versatile Humanists, versatilehumanists.duke.edu/alumni-directory/.

“Study the Humanities: Make the Case.” National Humanities Alliance, www.studythehumanities.org/.

“Transforming Alzheimer’s Disease Care through Integrating Caregivers (2018–2019).” Duke University / Bass Connections, bassconnections.duke.edu/project-teams/transforming-alzheimers-disease-care-through-integrating-caregivers-2018-2019.

Young, Ashley Rose. “Serving Up Food History at the Smithsonian.” Duke University / Versatile Humanists, 5 Sept. 2017, versatilehumanists.duke.edu/2017/09/05/serving-up-food-history-at-the-smithsonian/.

As the numbers of students in humanities departments and liberal arts colleges drop dangerously low, we need to reframe the question of how to increase humanities enrollments to pose a far more important one: What do our students lose by not taking humanities courses?¹ We argue that they lose too much. If we believe the mission statements of most humanities departments, what students lose when they do not take humanities courses includes critical reading and creative thinking skills, clear writing, historical and contextual understanding, and all the necessary skills employers say are key to advancement and that we assume to be crucial for democratic participation in a just society. If we believe all that, then we in the humanities must also take on the deep responsibility of ensuring that our courses do what we say they do. We must prepare our students to be empowered to think and to act critically in the contingent, precarious, overwhelming world we have bequeathed to them.

Now is the time for those of us teaching in the humanities to do more than take a defensive posture in what amounts to a global assault on the humanities. We are not interested in fueling polarizing arguments about the importance of humanities versus STEM. On the contrary: in this essay we argue that humanistic thinking and humanistic skills are indispensable for preparing our students for a technology-dependent world—and, in 2019, there is no other world than a technology-dependent one. The humanities are more crucial than ever in this world, which is dominated by simplistic and even dangerous technological imperialism, and the belief that problems caused by technology will be solved by technology. How do we in the human and social sciences take up this responsibility? How do we train activist, global citizens who feel empowered to demand and create better technologies for a more equitable future? Are the humanities up to the challenge of leading the way?

STEM alone cannot save us. Nor can STEM training alone help our students succeed. Anyone who still believes that simply learning how to code will train students for more than menial, contingent, and underpaid employment hasn’t been paying attention—or prefers not to look (see Gray and Suri; Semuels). Anyone who believes entry-level employees are promoted to executive positions—even in tech companies like Google—primarily on the basis of STEM skills hasn’t read the vast number of workplace studies that emphasize the role of so-called soft skills in advancement.² We are all aware of the disaster of contingent, exploitive labor in academe; we need to be equally sensitive to the adjunctification of the many other professions that our students (undergraduate and graduate) will be attempting to enter. Our students can no longer count on stable, rewarding careers. Even obtaining an entry-level full-time job requires evidence of skills beyond a college diploma. In any number of surveys, employers insist they want beginning employees who possess the full array of written and verbal communication, project management, and collaboration skills across different skill levels, cultural backgrounds, and languages. That, again, is the territory of the humanities—or we say it is in our mission statements.

Numerous studies, including surveys of educators and experts in executive training and professional development, insist that college graduates lack the essential skills we as humanists have the unique opportunity to teach: people skills, communication skills, critical and interpretive skills, collaboration and project management skills.³ Other essential skills the humanities teach include working effectively in groups to solve problems together; reading and interpreting complicated data, events, and texts; undertaking original research; and understanding and making sense of ambiguity (the gray areas). Engaging in the humanities, too, fosters self-awareness, ethics, decision-making skills, good judgment, clarification of values, and the ability to know when and how to appropriately apply newly acquired skills beyond the classroom.

In this essay, we argue that if our humanities courses cannot deliver in these areas, something is seriously wrong. Humanists who care about the fate of our students—and, in fact, the fate of the world—should be taking our mission seriously and delivering on our promises. We need to ask ourselves (not in a general way, but as individuals in this profession) if we are really doing what we say we do in our humanities classrooms.

Below, we offer several relatively simple techniques and exercises that make it easy to create and sustain a student-centered classroom. We are hardly the first people to advocate progressive, engaged education.⁴ What we want to underscore is the relevance of active learning to our particular historical moment. We argue that preparation begins in the humanities classroom—all of our classrooms: small and large, at elite private institutions or large public ones, in discussion and lecture classes, and in any setting, including developmental classes at community colleges, general education courses, introductory literature courses, composition and creative writing courses, and graduate-level courses, even the most specialized doctoral courses when students are on the way to writing a dissertation.

Essential skills may be foundational humanities skills, but rarely do we consider them foundational in our reward systems. That is, we are not typically encouraged to value these skills or to teach them deliberately. Essential skills are also, paradoxically, both easy to teach and, at the same time, not transparent. Most of us who were trained mainly by emulating our own professors find it difficult (at first) to reshape our lectures and discussion methods to include students in the building and leading of our classrooms—active learning situations that offer students an opportunity to master essential skills. It is often equally difficult for students to realize when and how they are mastering these skills. Rarely do we describe for students what and why they are learning. Yet reflection or metacognition (the structured, intentional consideration of what one has mastered and how one has mastered it) is one of the most important cognitive tools we can pass on to our students.

For the traditional humanities course to truly help students master essential skills, students need to be included in the learning process. In other words, simply mastering what someone else tells them to master is the opposite of gaining critical, creative, constructive abilities students can apply beyond the final exam, the course, and the diploma. To truly help students master essential skills, we need to lift the curtain and show them the string. Who decided this material was important to learn and why and how did they select this curriculum instead of many possible other ones? What criteria did they establish and use to make such decisions (and, in any situation, how does one establish and then implement such decisions)? What skills will this lesson build on and what skills will it build toward? Where will these skills be applicable in students’ everyday lives? Why are we covering this material at this particular moment in history/herstory? These are deep and powerful questions that change how students participate in the course and what they take away from it into the rest of their lives.

We cannot just do lip service to the rich, deep, critical, and creative thinking provided by the humanities, as described in our mission statements and our op-eds. We need to deliver the goods. We need to rethink our curricula, of course.⁵ That is crucial. At present, almost all departments (including those outside the humanities) are based implicitly on a model of self-replication: we teach so that our students will become college professors like us. That’s a false goal. It always has been, but it is now more irrelevant than ever. We need to do the very hard work in the humanities of taking the lead at our institutions to redesign our programs in ways that are relevant, urgent, meaningful, and indispensable to students’ lives, including work lives that do not resemble those of their instructors.

This is an arduous process; it requires thoughtfulness and generosity and a willingness to be equal parts tough-minded and willing to give up one’s own turf for the greater good of preparing students who have little chance of replicating the profession of the professor. But even as we work toward the larger goal, we can begin to change the humanities through the way we teach and the way we talk about learning. We can do this, as individual instructors, in our own courses, literally tomorrow.

At even the most restrictive college or university, even those where learning has been reduced to outcomes and deliverables and requirements, any professor can begin to transform the humanities classroom into a site where students not only learn the content but also understand why the skills, tools, and methods of a course will be important to them beyond the grade and the final and how they can exercise these new muscles in other subjects and in the world beyond school.

The ideas we offer are not just for tenured, secure, full professors. Nor are they only for those with a lot of time to experiment. Investing the time in rethinking how one teaches does not require giving up one’s own research agenda. That, too, is a binary we find senseless and antithetical to the revised forms of thinking required to transform the humanities from something dismissed (wrongly) as peripheral to the absolutely essential.

Here are six ways to transform the humanities classroom to help students develop the essential skills that they need to meet the challenges of the world they have inherited.

I. Share the Floor

How It Works

Instead of lecturing first and polling the room for questions later, begin by sharing the floor: give students time to share their ideas about the topic for the day. Opt for a low-stakes-but-intensive activity such as the classic Think-Pair-Share (TPS) in which you ask a question and each student has time to write down a quick, individual response. Ninety seconds is plenty. Students then work with a partner and take turns sharing their responses and discussing them (another ninety seconds). Finally, they share what they discussed with the entire class either verbally—if you ask for volunteers to share—or by posting to the class wiki or blog or by handing in their writing (we use index cards; see fig. 1) for you to read and reflect on. You might even summarize salient points for the class later.⁶

Why It Works

Rather than selective methods (where only two or three students raise hands in answer to questions), which tend to single out students who are most likely to replicate their professors, inventory methods are structured for what the American Psychological Association calls total participation (see fig. 2). Every student contributes something, and every student speaks and is heard by at least one other student and by the instructor. Inventory methods like TPS highlight the value of essential skills such as actively engaging and participating, taking a moment to collect one’s thoughts and then share them, and learning how to hear all available ideas in a group (not just those of the two or three people who tend to dominate classrooms—and business meetings, too). Inventory methods help students feel there is purpose in their education, not just in the education of the voluble few. These methods also show students that they are not passive receivers of information; they are thinkers and keepers of ideas, insights, and knowledge. Total participation helps students gain the confidence they need to apply knowledge, to develop independent problem-solving and research skills, and, when working in pairs or small groups, develop essential collaborative skills as well—especially (and this is key) if you, the instructor, reflect on this process as it unfolds and underscore what and how students are learning. (We have each followed a TPS strategy, for example, with a reflection in which we ask students where such a method might prove useful, and students have offered examples of everything from the workplace to the community center to the family dinner table.)

Fig. 1. Typical index card question for one of our Think-Pair-Share activities at the beginning of the semester. We try to do one quick, low-stakes “inventory” exercise every class period.

Fig. 2. Undergraduate students in a CUNY Peer Leaders and Mentors Program respond to their own student-generated poll. “Undergraduate Leaders 2016.” Flickr, uploaded by Futures Initiative, 28 July 2016, flickr.com/photos/132429829@N05/28873856176/in/datetaken/.

II. Welcome Students into the Learning Process

How It Works

Make your syllabus into a warm welcome, not a rule book. Anne Balsamo, the inaugural dean of the new School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas, Dallas, does this in her two-hundred-student introductory Technoculture lecture course, an offering in the core curriculum of this STEM university. She makes her syllabus a readable, inviting booklet (see fig. 3) that not only outlines course content but also explains why and how skills such as researching, analyzing, and synthesizing are important both in and outside the class. Balsamo also, on facing pages of the syllabus booklet, includes the official university policies on, for example, academic honesty (a page detailing the “disciplinary action” the university prescribes) and protecting “your intellectual credibility.” The former explains what happens to a student who messes up. The latter honors students for their credibility and offers three “basic tips” for protecting one’s integrity: learning to love citations, giving credit where it is due, and reading Wikipedia critically.

Why It Works

By treating students not as kids or potential miscreants but as intelligent and honorable human beings, an inviting syllabus welcomes students into the methods and processes that we academics esteem. It also underscores why we value such things as intellectual integrity and citation and helps students develop the skills necessary to credit ideas they gain from other sources. It invites students to practice and apply methods and newly acquired skills while knowing that they are doing so. Treating a largely STEM student audience this way introduces the practices and values key to our discipline—and, we hope, to the world. In addition, students are encouraged to take pride in applying the principles well. These are essential skills and practices that will serve them in every area of life beyond the classroom.

Fig. 3. Front matter of the syllabus booklet for Balsamo’s Technoculture course.

III. Prioritize Student Goal Setting

How It Works

On the first day of class, create an activity that has students develop their own goals and learning outcomes for the course. You could start with a TPS activity, asking students to write down their goals for the year (see fig. 1, for example). You might also invite them into a shared Google Docs document where they can suggest changes to the learning outcomes on the syllabus. Or you could put students into groups of three or four and have each group come up with two or three aspirations for what they will accomplish together in this course. The responses can be shared on a whiteboard or some kind of collaborative tool (e.g., in Google Docs), and, with editing, these student goals can go onto an evolving syllabus as the learning outcomes for the course. Ideally, you and the students will refer back to these goals throughout the course to see how many are being achieved. (We are continually surprised and even inspired at the creativity and idealism of our students when we encourage them to aim high.)

Why It Works

Today’s college students have been subjected to a lifetime of outputs, outcomes, and seemingly mechanical (and meaningless) standardized goals. Many of us, as instructors, churn out learning outcomes as if they were meaningless, too. Something magical happens when we turn a seemingly quotidian task into an invitation for students to voice their dreams for their education. The students may need coaxing. They definitely need to know that you believe in them. But if they trust you and the situation, they will take the opportunity and they will shine. Students need to unlearn years of being taught that they aren’t experts or innovators. Activities like this one guide them in taking ownership over their own education and taking themselves seriously as colearners. Balancing ambitious goal setting with practical expectations takes practice in the essential skill of project management. This is a perfect opportunity to guide students in translating their loftiest aspirations to practical, attainable goals. Moreover, this class-wide activity teaches students the essential skills of valuing both individual and community goals and of linking personal achievements to community success.

IV. Follow Major Lessons with Reflection Activities

How It Works

In addition to lifting the curtain before an activity, set aside time for student participation after a lesson, either for an independent reflection, TPS, or an exit survey. At the end of a lecture, Jonathan Sterne, who lectures to as many as six hundred students at McGill University, often asks a question and gives students a few minutes to jot down a response. ⁷ He has students sign and hand in the cards, and so they also serve as an efficient way of taking roll. His teaching assistants use the cards from their sections to guide small-group activities, and he uses patterns he finds in the answers to shape future lectures. We both, too, use exit tickets in most of our classes, large and small.⁸ Our favorite question: What did we discuss today that you will still be thinking about tonight? If there’s nothing, then what should we have discussed?

Whether you use a formal or informal method for reflection, the point is to have students recall something important that resonated with them from the class, something they would like to take with them into the world beyond the classroom. And if they can’t think of anything, ask them to write down a burning question, one that will keep them up at night. This alternative question prompts students to develop independent research skills. One reflection activity per class is ideal. And it is especially meaningful on the final day of class.

Why It Works

Following an activity or lesson with a metareflection creates a space where some of the most important and long-lasting lessons are committed to memory (see fig. 4). Even if students forget the content or activity itself, they are likely to remember their reflections about what they learned and about how to apply that knowledge in other settings. There is perhaps no more essential a skill than taking specific content learned in one context and applying it in another. Isn’t that one of the great, compelling reasons for reading literature? In a novel or a play, we learn how someone else navigates a particular situation; that lesson has particular meaning if we can relate to the situation and think about how we might or might not respond in the same way. In poetry, we see how a particularly creative and dexterous mind recombines words and images in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful. Reflecting on the importance of the literary—and the uniquely essential role of the writer in society, throughout time—is something that can slip through the cracks when racing through content. Storytelling is an essential skill in every aspect of life—workplace, family, democracy. If a humanities class cannot teach that essential skill, then why bother?

Fig. 4. Poster from the Undergraduate Leadership Institute introducing the concept of metareflection or thinking about the skills we master through reflecting on our own and fellow students’ thought processes. “Meta-Cognition.” Flickr, uploaded by Futures Initiative, 19 Aug. 2015, flickr.com/photos/132429829@N05/20586409980/in/datetaken/.

V. Give Students a Say in the Curriculum

How It Works

The simplest way to do this is to ask students to vote on one event, piece of art or music, problem, text, topic, or unit to spend time on. There are myriad ways to involve students in the creation of the course. For example, you could ask for one-paragraph proposals in advance, written individually or in small groups, and then set aside time for class-wide presentations and discussion, followed by a poll or vote by ballot. This works best if students have had some time to get more familiar with the course content. We don’t recommend doing it on the first day. Whichever way you decide to structure the vote, you will need to make time for discussion, time to build the process into your syllabus, and time to include comments about how the process itself is part of the learning. We find that small group discussions that lead to class-wide discussion work best. We also find that every aspect of a course is enlivened and enriched when students choose even one small unit together. (After you feel comfortable having students choose a small part of the curriculum, you might even try something truly radical, such as having students create a whole unit or the last half of the course—or even the entire course. That takes a good deal of preparation, or scaffolding, but it can be done responsibly and with stunning impact.)⁹

Why It Works

Now that we have lifted the curtain by explaining research methods and best practices, by explaining how and why activities and lessons work outside the classroom, and by letting students in on cocreating learning outcomes, having students take a hand in actually designing the course and the syllabus is the ultimate exercise. Cocreation teaches essential leadership and entrepreneurial skills through both critical and creative thinking. It helps students master the essential skill of coming up with a realistic solution to a problem (e.g., choosing only one text that everyone can read in a week from the dozen or so that are proposed and then finding a responsible rationale for why they have made that choice and not a different one). Making room for students to set the direction for their community and then to work together and agree by consensus allows them to practice all the essential skills they will need down the road for effective professional teamwork.

VI. Provide a Public Platform

How It Works

Whether writing to classmates on Blackboard or another tool like Slack or on an open platform (anything from WordPress to Twitter), students write differently when they write only for their professors than they do when writing for a wider audience, including an audience of peers. The research of Andrea Lunsford, professor emerita at Stanford, suggests that students are better writers in these peer contexts (see, e.g., Lunsford et al., “College Writing”; Lunsford et al., Everyone’s an Author; Ede and Lunsford). We especially advocate having students write for a community that is relevant to them. A good one is HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, the world’s first and oldest academic social network. Founded in 2001 (before Facebook or MySpace), HASTAC includes seventeen thousand network members dedicated to “changing the way we teach and learn” and has hosted 1,430 student HASTAC scholars over the years. Anyone who registers for the network—and it is free to do so—can post or comment. Any professor can create a class group on the Web site (e.g., see fig. 5), and students can post their own work either for other group members or open to the world, using their own name or a pseudonym.¹⁰

Fig. 5. Landing page on HASTAC for “Teaching Race and Gender Theory—A Toolkit.”

Why It Works

As soon as students write for an audience beyond the professor and the classroom and use some kind of technology to publish their work, they are mastering a range of essential skills. If they read the terms of service agreement carefully, they learn ethical and unethical uses of data—surely a survival skill today. They learn about security and privacy and also about publicity in a serious, academic, respectable context that can serve their future career and personal goals and can help them build a portfolio of public, online work that supersedes possibly traces of recreational online activity (such as an Instagram account). Public writing helps students understand how to write in a public voice, with an appreciation for audience and the essential skill of communicating what one knows to someone who, unlike one’s instructor, may not share their expertise. In addition, this assignment affords students a constructive opportunity to develop their professional public presence while learning how to protect their digital identities from unwanted surveillance.¹¹ Understanding how to secure personal information online, and having the option to create and use a dummy account for additional protection, is critical to everyone’s future.

These are only a handful of techniques that honor the importance of the humanities in teaching essential skills (power skills, critical skills—not “frills”). The techniques help any instructor transform a humanities course (at any level, at any institution, including the most traditional) into an active learning environment, in ways both small and large. While we are undertaking the typically arduous, painstaking, and lengthy process of redesigning outdated departmental majors and minors, university-wide general education requirements, and interdisciplinary relations between the human and social sciences and the STEM departments on our campuses, we can walk into our humanities classrooms tomorrow and help our students understand and master skills that will change their lives. Will they learn art, classics, history, linguistics, literature, music, philosophy, and more? Will they learn how to read, to write, to perform? Of course they will. They will also learn why learning how to think and to do these things critically and creatively are constructive, essential components of their education and survival skills in a challenging world.

Notes

1. For the ADE report on the decline of undergraduates declaring English as a major, see Cartwright et al.

2. See the outcomes from Google’s Project Aristotle in re:Work (“Guides”) and outcomes from Google’s Project Oxygen in Impraise (“Project Oxygen”); for a narrativized perspective, see Duhigg; for outcomes from similar studies, see Woolley et al.; Rainie and Anderson.

3. For an overview of several recent studies that repeat this finding, see Wood.

4. Among the vast array of books and articles on progressive pedagogy, for further reading, see Davidson, New Education; hooks; Lang; Morris and Stommel; Shor.

5. See the PMLA forum on The New Education in the May 2018 issue (pp. 667–707), and Davidson, “New Education and the Old”; see also Warner.

6. For more on TPS, see Katopodis, “Dialogic Methods.”

7. See Dolan and Sterne on the importance of peer-to-peer conversation and the value of collaborative tools.

8. For more on exit tickets, see Katopodis, “Entry and Exit Tickets.”

9. For an example of more radical cocreation with students, see Katopodis, “Lesson Plan.”

10. For examples of course Web sites on HASTAC, see Davidson, “Black Listed”; Katopodis, “Mediating Race”; Savonick.

11. See Glass on protecting oneself from surveillance.

Works Cited

Cartwright, Kent, et al. A Changing Major: The Report of the 2016–17 ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major. Association of Departments of English, July 2018, ade.mla.org/Resources/Reports-and-Other-Resources/A-Changing-Major-The-Report-of-the-2016-17-ADE-Ad-Hoc-Committee-on-the-English-Major.

Davidson, Cathy N. “Black Listed: African American Writers and the Cold War Politics of Integration, Surveillance, Censorship, and Publication.” HASTAC, 11 Sept. 2017, hastac.org/groups/black-listed-african-american-writers-and-cold-war-politics-integration-surveillance-1. 

———. The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. Basic Books, 2017.

———. “The New Education and the Old.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 3, May 2018, pp. 707–14.

Dolan, Emily, and Jonathan Sterne. “Two Campuses, Two Countries, One Seminar.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 Oct. 2017, chronicle.com/article/2-Campuses-2-Countries-1/241542.

Duhigg, Charles. “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team.” The New York Times, 25 Feb. 2016, nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html.

Ede, Lisa S., and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed / Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook, edited by Edward P. J. Corbett, et al., Oxford UP, 1994, pp. 243–57.

Glass, Erin Rose. “Ten Weird Tricks for Resisting Surveillance Capitalism in and through the Classroom . . . Next Term!” HASTAC, 27 Dec. 2018, hastac.org/blogs/erin-glass/2018/12/27/ten-weird-tricks-resisting-surveillance-capitalism-and-through-classroom.

Gray, Mary L., and Siddharth Suri. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. Houghton Mifflin, 2019.

 “Guides.” re:Work, rework.withgoogle.com/guides/. Accessed 3 June 2019.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Katopodis, Christina. “Dialogic Methods in the Classroom.” HASTAC, 18 Feb. 2019, hastac.org/blogs/ckatopodis/2019/02/18/dialogic-methods-classroom.

———. “Entry and Exit Tickets: A Way to Share in the Intellectual Growth of Students.” HASTAC, 4 Mar. 2019, hastac.org/blogs/ckatopodis/2019/03/04/entry-exit-tickets-way-share-intellectual-growth-students.

———. “A Lesson Plan for Democratic Co-creation: Forging a Syllabus by Students, for Students.” Christina Katopodis, 12 Nov. 2018, christinakatopodis.net/2018/11/12/a-lesson-plan-for-democratic-co-creation-forging-a-syllabus-by-students-for-students/.

———. “Mediating Race: Technology, Performance, Politics, and Aesthetics in Popular Culture.” HASTAC, 16 Aug. 2018, hastac.org/groups/mediating-race-technology-performance-politics-and-aesthetics-popular-culture.

Lang, James M. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. Jossey-Bass, 2016.

Lunsford, Andrea, et al. “College Writing, Identification, and the Production of Intellectual Property: Voices from the Stanford Study of Writing.” College English, vol. 75, no. 5, 2013, pp. 470–92.

Lunsford, Andrea, et al. Everyone’s an Author. W. W. Norton, 2012.

Morris, Sean Michael, and Jesse Stommel. An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Hybrid Pedagogy, 2018.

“Project Oxygen: Eight Ways Google Resuscitated Management.” Impraise, 5 June 2019, blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/project-oxygen-8-ways-google-resuscitated-management.

Rainie, Lee, and Janna Anderson. “The Future of Jobs and Job Training.” Pew Research Center, 3 May 2017, pewinternet.org/2017/05/03/the-future-of-jobs-and-jobs-training/.

Savonick, Danica. “Teaching Race and Gender Theory—A Toolkit.” HASTAC, 13 June 2017, hastac.org/collections/teaching-race-and-gender-theory-toolkit.

Semuels, Alana. “The Online Gig Economy’s ‘Race to the Bottom.’” The Atlantic, 31 Aug. 2018, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/08/fiverr-online-gig-economy/569083/.

Shor, Ira, editor. Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Boynton/Cook, 1987.

Warner, John. Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019.

Wood, Sarah. “Recent Graduates Lack Soft Skills, New Study Reports.” Diverse, 3 Aug. 2018, diverseeducation.com/article/121784/.

Woolley, Anita Williams, et al. “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.” Science, vol. 330, 2010, pp. 686–88.

As a graduate student in English in the 1990s, I remember exactly one conversation about community colleges as a place to consider working. The conversation was with a friend in an MFA program who interviewed for a full-time teaching gig at a suburban community college. It was a group interview. I don’t know if that was the norm at this institution, but it’s not a practice I’ve heard of since. My friend wasn’t taking the interview very seriously until her interviewers mentioned the salary. Then she sat right up, aced the interview, and got the job. She described the job later (and often) as “teaching art to lunkheads.” Sigh.

There are more resources now for people who are interested in careers at two-year colleges. The MLA’s Connected Academics site has a section on preparing for a career at a community college. Chronicle Vitae has a series of columns by Rob Jenkins on how to apply and interview for jobs at community colleges and what to expect once you land one. Although not particularly aimed at job searchers, the “Confessions of a Community College Dean” column by Matt Reed for Inside Higher Ed is prime reading for anyone who is in or considering applying for such a position.

What you may not learn from these sources, however, is that new faculty members at community colleges—surprisingly, to some—have access to professional development resources for teaching and research. Much of what I discuss herein is based on my experience working as an administrator at three community colleges (Lake Superior College, in Duluth, Minnesota; College of the Desert, in Palm Desert, California; and the Borough of Manhattan Community College, in New York, New York), but these colleges are not atypical.

Keeping Mum about Community Colleges

Higher education’s stigma against community colleges is strong, particularly since graduate programs and advisers don’t intentionally prepare their students for community college careers. Community college students are seen as, yes, lunkheads who couldn’t get into real colleges. However, community colleges have enrolled as many as forty-nine percent of all undergraduates in the country and currently enroll somewhere in the mid-thirty-percent range, according to the Community College Research Center (“Community College FAQs”). Heads up: community colleges are #realcollege. And jobs at community colleges are #realjobs. So for the rest of this article, I will be using the word college by itself or with a different modifier when it seems warranted.

I recently attended a career fair for those interested in two-year-college jobs and a speed mentoring event sponsored by the MLA. Both of these were in New York City. I also was a virtual guest in a pedagogy seminar for graduate students in the humanities at a highly selective university on the West Coast. Over one hundred master’s and doctoral degree holders attended the career fair to talk to faculty members from various colleges and disciplines about what it was like to work at this type of college. Since these people attended an event explicitly promoting community college jobs, they by and large got what they came for. And they were prepared to talk to current faculty members, department chairs, and human resources professionals about those jobs.

The graduate students at the MLA’s speed mentoring event, through no fault of theirs or the MLA’s, were less prepared. Coming from PhD-granting institutions in the NYC area, some quite exclusive, the students were not particularly interested in talking to a dean about opportunities at two-year colleges. I think one of the seven people I talked to had some community college experience, but all were looking for positions at research-oriented institutions. They didn’t know what to say to me. This is not to disparage those students, and the MLA is to be commended for their inclusion of access-oriented institutions in spaces that were previously the domain of selectivity. It’s simply to say that graduate programs across the country need to start talking to their students about positions across the spectrum of higher education.

Even when graduate students have experience with community colleges, they are often hesitant to share it. I don’t know how many candidates I’ve interviewed who have left their associate degrees off their résumés. It comes out during interviews when I ask candidates how familiar they are with two-year institutions: “I got my AA at Normandale.” Even, “I was a student here.” (This happens.) When I videoconferenced in to a colleague’s seminar at a West Coast university, the students seemed unsure why they should be talking to me. Their questions felt forced. Finally, one student piped up that she had attended a community college and hoped to work there. She had an interview coming up, in fact. What kind of pressure did she face in her program (not from my colleague, of course) to land a position at a large, private research institution like the one she was attending?

Misconceptions

The job of a professor at a two-year college is primarily to teach, as you would expect. Vicki Rosser and Barbara Townsend put it this way in 2006: at two-year colleges “faculty members are not expected to conduct research, although participation in outreach/service activities and institutional governance is expected. The primary aspect of community college faculty’s worklife is teaching, with the related components of advising and curriculum development” (127). Around the country, the teaching assignment at community colleges is usually between thirteen and seventeen hours per week, according to Arthur M. Cohen and his colleagues (89); that translates into four to six courses per semester (Jenkins). Definitive figures are hard to come by, but the teaching load doesn’t vary much across states, although some nonunion institutions are on the high end. Two-year-college faculty members are highly unionized, with anywhere between 60% and 78% represented by a union (Rosser and Townsend; Cohen et al.).¹ One significant union victory recently was the result of negotiations between the Professional Staff Congress and the City University of New York (CUNY), which lowered the contractual teaching assignment by three hours across the university. Community college faculty members in the CUNY system now teach twelve credits per semester—twenty-four for the year, rather than the previous twenty-seven (“Agreement”).

Collective bargaining agreements often define the supports for faculty members at unionized institutions. According to an analysis of collective bargaining agreements done by Sue Kater and John Levin, 48% of faculty contracts mention sabbaticals and 30% mention professional development (10). Frequently, contracts designate a monetary amount for professional development, either as a per-person entitlement or as an amount to be pooled for distribution annually. The Minnesota State College Faculty (MSCF) has negotiated $250 per year “per each full-time equivalent faculty position at the college during the preceding academic year. The MSCF Chapter shall determine an equitable procedure for the distribution of faculty development funds.” The contract states:

These funds are to be used to support the professional development of the faculty, the development needs of the academic departments or areas, and the planned instructional priorities of the college. Funds provided by this section shall be used for financing expenses for faculty members only to attend conferences, workshops, take college courses and other activities off-campus, or for the provision of on-campus activities for staff development of the faculty. These funds may be used to reimburse the cost of travel, housing, meals, and registration associated with participation in professional conferences, workshops, and similar meetings or memberships” (Master Agreement 68).

This is a pretty broad statement of what the funds may be used for. Similar agreements exist in many other places. In California, where there is no statewide contract, funds at College of the Desert are also distributed by a committee. At BMCC in New York, however, the funds are not pooled, leaving just $450 per year per person. To the extent that the funds are used at the individual’s discretion, many faculty members choose to focus their professional development on their disciplines, attending conferences of their disciplinary associations rather than focusing on broader teaching issues. So ubiquitous is the focus on going out of town for disciplinary conferences, in fact, that at all three of the institutions I have served, professional development funds are generally referred to as travel funds.

Supports for Teaching

The veteran college leaders Gail Mellow and Cynthia Heelan write: “The single most important variable in the academic success of community college students is faculty expertise in teaching and learning. When this is coupled, as it so often is among community college faculty, with a sincere enthusiasm for making a difference in students’ lives, the transformative capability of education is realized” (220). So although associate-degree-granting colleges are often underfunded, particularly in comparison with four-year colleges, many college leaders will invest in professional development for faculty members, often through a center for teaching.

The models for such centers vary: some are staffed by full-time professionals, others by faculty members on full or partial reassignment. Still others are staffed by faculty members as service to the college, sometimes as part of their membership on a faculty development committee. Teaching centers often provide confidential consultations on teaching and learning, an orientation for new faculty members, and workshops on pedagogy, writing across the curriculum, and understanding contemporary students. Teaching centers are also often called on to provide professional development for specific college priorities. I have been involved in initiatives related to active learning, online teaching, and the most current issue facing two-year colleges: improving student success.

Many teaching centers focus on finding solutions to meet immediate faculty needs, such as the one-off workshop. Others have developed semester-long or yearlong professional learning communities: groups of faculty members that meet seminar-style to focus on a specific aspect of teaching, such as instituting culturally responsive pedagogy, developing student learning communities, and integrating global competencies into the curriculum. At BMCC, we have developed a teaching academy for faculty members who are new to teaching or new to community colleges. This two-semester program links a small cohort of new faculty members (teaching fellows) to a mentor teacher. The cohorts visit one another’s classes and provide nonjudgmental feedback. The program allows new teachers to reflect on their practice with colleagues who will not be evaluating their job performance. The new faculty members also explore ideas about the scholarship of teaching and learning, and, after the teaching academy, faculty members may elect to join a two-semester program aimed at exploring and developing a project in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Supports for Research

In keeping with the idea that faculty members at associate-degree-granting institutions are hired primarily to teach, I find that these faculty members are not often rewarded for research. The most common form of support for research seems to be the sabbatical. Several faculty members I have worked with have produced books while on sabbatical, especially creative writers.

While it is true that faculty members at most two-year colleges are not expected to publish, it is not true everywhere. At the seven community colleges in CUNY—including BMCC, where I am associate dean of faculty—research is expected, recognized, and rewarded. It is also supported in systematic and tangible ways. Tenure-track faculty members receive twenty-four hours of reassigned time in their first five years “in order to engage in scholarly and/or creative activities related to their academic disciplines” (“Faculty Handbook”). That is up to eight courses from which pretenure faculty members are released so that they may devote time to their research or creative work.

Additional supports negotiated by faculty members in New York City include research grants for early-career faculty members and support for adjunct faculty members. Research grants from $3,500 to $12,000 are available for full-time faculty members through a competition administered by a faculty committee. These awards are offered annually. Support for adjuncts is available in the amount of $3,000 for “research, courses, conferences, field studies and other activities that will enhance . . . professional development” (“Adjunct-CET Professional Development”).

In addition to this research support, which is specific to CUNY, several outside organizations offer support to community college faculty members who are active scholars or artists. These include the American Council of Learned Societies, which instituted a fellowship program for community college faculty members in 2018 with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In its first year, the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships program awarded $40,000 stipends to twenty-six individuals.

Several of my colleagues from New York and Minnesota have participated in international professional development thanks to the Fulbright Program. Faculty members have studied in Finland, Vietnam, and Taiwan. An English instructor who spent half a year in Belarus explored her experience on her blog.

For strong professional development at a two-year college, faculty members are well served by collective bargaining agreements that guarantee a certain number of sabbaticals per year, a designated fund that they can apply to, and a central organization that can snag big money. Equally important is a strong vision by a provost or president who recognizes that investments in the faculty lead to better student outcomes.

I teach a course on community colleges for the Higher and Postsecondary Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. I share with my students the many rewards and challenges of careers at community colleges, including knowing that you’re teaching students for whom higher education is far from an entitlement and for whom your course might just be life-changing. Newly minted PhDs may not feel prepared by their graduate programs to take on a community college position, but they should know that community colleges want their students to succeed, and so they want their faculty members to succeed. We have our financial constraints, but we welcome new faculty members, and we will do our best to support you.

Note

1. These figures may change in the light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME.

Works Cited

“Adjunct-CET Professional Development Fund.” PSC-CUNY, 5 Sept. 2019, psc-cuny.org/benefits/adjunct-cet-professional-development-fund.

“Agreement between the City University of New York and the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY: October 20, 2010–November 30, 2017.” PSC-CUNY, psc-cuny.org/sites/default/files/2010-2017_PSC-CUNY_Collective_Bargaining_Agreement_upload.pdf. Accessed 9 Sept. 2019.

Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College. 6th ed., Jossey-Bass, 2014.

Cohen, Arthur M., and Florence B. Brawer. The American Community College. 4th ed., Jossey-Bass, 2003.

“Community College FAQs.” Community College Research Center, ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Community-College-FAQs.html.

“Faculty Handbook.” Borough of Manhattan Community College, www.bmcc.cuny.edu/academics/faculty-affairs/faculty-handbook/full-time-faculty/responsibilities/. Accessed 9 Sept. 2019.

Jenkins, Rob. “Community College FAQ: You Teach How Many Classes?” Chronicle Vitae, 25 Oct. 2016, chroniclevitae.com/news/1590-community-college-faq-you-teach-how-many-classes.

Kater, Sue, and John S. Levin. “Shared Governance in the Community College.” Community College Journal of Research and Practice, vol. 29, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–23.

Master Agreement between the Minnesota State Board of Trustees and the Minnesota State College Faculty 2017–2019. Minnesota State College Faculty, 20 Mar. 2018, www.mscfmn.org/mscf-contracts.

Mellow, Gail O., and Cynthia M. Heelan. Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College. 2nd ed., Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.

Rosser, Vicki J., and Barbara K. Townsend. “Determining Public 2-Year College Faculty’s Intent to Leave: An Empirical Model.” The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 77, no. 1, 2006, pp. 124–47.