Category: Uncategorized

What changes at the level of the department, college, university, and profession at large must occur in order for junior faculty members to participate in collaborative projects without jeopardizing their careers?

Are we willing to undertake the potentially time-consuming and contentious work required to revise tenure and promotion guidelines so that collaborative research and publication will really count? (Ede and Lunsford, “Collaboration” 364)

These quotations articulate vital questions about how English studies frames and values collaborative scholarship. Although these questions were originally published in 2001—and Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s work on collaboration dates back to 1983—as a discipline we continue to seek suitable answers even today. Although many forms of collaboration have a long history of creating new knowledge in the humanities, whether blind-review feedback for authors or the teamwork involved in creating a scholarly edition, these efforts are persistently discounted during faculty evaluation. Though compelling arguments have been made to redress this situation, the changes over the past thirty years might be described as unsubstantial at best. As Lunsford, Ede, and Corinne Arraez describe, “despite our research and work like it, despite a protracted and thoroughgoing critique of the author construct and despite the attempts of feminists to articulate an agency not bound by those ideologies, little in the academy has changed” (Lunsford et al. 8–9). The downgrading of collaborative scholarship persists, effectively making it an activity open only to “privileged academic classes, senior faculty” (Entes 57).

One issue with this imbalance is that walling off collaborative work harms professors who must always weigh the benefits of any project against how an evaluation committee may regard that work. Those benefits, we argue, are uniquely important to scholars in a variety of roles for three reasons: contemporary research questions often benefit from many and diverse skill sets beyond those possessed by an individual scholar (Lunsford et al. 9); the opportunity to publish single-authored monographs is shrinking because of the decline of academic presses (Stanton et al. 13); and collaboration with senior scholars provides professors with important professional development in terms of professional networks, research experience, and even access to positions that will advance their careers (Anderson and Lord; Stanton et al. 56). Despite these factors, the prevailing arguments that persist in downgrading collaborative work in English departments focus on a fetishization of individual authors in narrowly defined roles and a concern that inadequate scholars will mask their deficiencies by attaching their names to projects anchored by more talented thinkers or more productive workers (Mullen and Kochan 131). These concerns run counter to both the theoretical dismantling of the solitary author in literary studies (by now a somewhat dated commonplace) and quality issues that adhere to any manner of publication, whether single-authored or not.

Because professors stand to gain so much through equitable evaluation of collaborative work (and we are not just talking tenure), we argue that the rhetoric of collaboration in the humanities can do more to support professors. Although much of the public rhetoric surrounding collaboration and multidisciplinarity extols their virtues, faculty governance documents and, by extension, higher education administrators often do the opposite; they frequently downgrade and discourage the work (Entes 47). Together, these messages may leave professors in limbo (Damrosch 70). They may find themselves saying no to exciting projects that contribute meaningfully to their fields of study and that extend to them the benefits of working with senior scholars or practitioners in other fields. After three decades of calls to reconsider how collaborative scholarship is evaluated, professors find themselves saying, “I still can’t work with you.”

To address this issue, the authors of this article adopted an existing framework for developing a collaborative culture in higher education. This framework breaks the task down into three essential stages—building commitment, commitment, and sustaining—and demonstrates the reality that collaborative cultures are sought across institutions (Kezar). Neither the desire for nor the challenge of producing a collaborative culture is unique to English departments. When mapped onto the work we accomplished to promote collaboration, this framework provides a useful means of organizing and building a rhetoric of collaboration that can support collaborative cultures across a variety of contexts.

Stage 1: Building Commitment

In stage 1—building commitment—Adrianna Kezar identifies four necessary elements: external pressure, values, learning, and networks. In this stage, “the institution uses ideas/information from a variety of sources in order to try to convince the members of the campus of the need to conduct collaborative work” (844–45). Our effort originated in one way with external pressure from the provost’s office “to streamline the review process and make expectations more clear” (Ballentine). Although the Ede and Lunsford quotation at the beginning of this essay casts the arduous task of revising tenure guidelines as a hurdle to be cleared, we found that the inevitable cycles of revising review and tenure guidelines in fact open up fortuitous opportunities for these kinds of conversations. Our provost’s invitation to clarify expectations coincided with a departmental discussion in which faculty members expressed a need for a more capacious definition of scholarly activity that included labors such as professional editing, multimedia work, and collaboration. In other words, the discussion led to an identification of values—another important element of building commitment.

Another often hidden, undervalued, and essential form of academic collaboration is committee work. We realized that our participation on the revision committee could be fruitfully expanded into a collaborative research project that would have a life beyond the narrow scope of our department. We therefore proposed working together as an interdisciplinary collaborative research team to investigate how other disciplines at our institution and other peer institutions evaluated collaboration, in order to establish disciplinary and institutional valuations of collaboration beyond those expressed by our colleagues. At the time, one author was an assistant professor with administrative responsibilities coordinating undergraduate writing courses, and the other author had just been hired as an assistant professor of modern American poetry. Even though we came from different disciplinary backgrounds and had significantly different duties in the university, we had both already experienced the benefits of collaborative work. Our partnership demonstrated that the fair assessment of collaborative scholarship is not and should not be regarded as an issue that adheres to one kind of field or approach; collaboration is not unique to rhetoric and composition, nor is it solely the province of a digital humanist or the scholar with a focus on feminist process. It is a fruitful and arguably vital path to creating new knowledge across multiple fields and methods—a path that can at times be even more arduous than working alone. We also had to recognize and accept that our endeavor was not without risk, especially for two early-career scholars like ourselves. There was no guarantee that our work would produce the changes we sought. And the time spent on this project was time not spent on the single-authored publications that would ensure our continued employment. Nonetheless, we decided to take the chance because we planned from the beginning to write about and share our work so that our effort was not simply or easily relegated to a category of departmental service alone. Moreover, we hoped our efforts might prove useful to others who are trying to advocate for a similar reconsideration of collaborative projects at their home institutions.

Early on, we identified a major gap between the rhetoric of collaboration as articulated by theorists and a kind of institutional rhetoric of collaboration as expressed in the sundry documents pertaining to faculty evaluation and promotion in universities. To explore more broadly the disciplinary grammar of collaboration as it exists in other academic fields and institutions, we first collected information about how other disciplines in our college evaluated collaborative work by examining their publicly available faculty evaluation guidelines. In addition, we contacted English departments at peer institutions to learn about their evaluative language for collaboration.

Institutional Findings

The college of arts and sciences at our university consists of sixteen different departments or divisions, each with its own sets of rules. For example, five departments—math, philosophy, physics, biology, and chemistry—did not explicitly mention collaboration in their guidelines. Four departments—world languages, English, history, and political science—required scholars to assign collaborative work a percentage that best described their contribution, seeming to employ the interpretive frame that suggests partial collaboration, in which “authors divide a writing assignment and each takes responsibility for specific sections” (Austin and Baldwin 24). This approach, while common, also immediately assumes that collaborative scholarship must be valued less than work done wholly individually. Whereas the author of a single-authored article automatically received credit for one hundred percent of the article (despite reviewer or editor feedback, input from colleagues, etc.), coauthors automatically received less than one hundred percent of the credit regardless of scope or impact, setting them up to have to produce even more collaborative or single-authored projects. Only two departments, communication studies and geology and geography, offered full credit for collaborative work.

Among the institutional examples, the geology and geography department’s language created space for more equitable evaluation of collaborative scholarship:

Papers written jointly with other authors are considered to be of equal importance with those written by a single author as long as there is a mix of publications in which the faculty member may be sole, senior, or junior author. A statement of the proportion of contribution the faculty member made to a multi-authored paper should be included in the evaluation file. (Department of Geology 7)

The language still contains many of the conventions found in discourse about collaborative scholarship, including an emphasis on single-authored publications and a statement on the scholar’s contribution to a project. Where this language differs greatly, however, is in the explicit statement that “papers written jointly with other authors are considered to be of equal importance with those written by a single author.” True, there is the condition that scholars should provide a mix of publications, but we found the explicit possibility of equal importance to be noteworthy. In our analysis, we also wondered about the need for the conditional statement. What was its importance? Anne Austin and Roger Baldwin argue that, in a meritocracy like higher education, “the system demands to know who contributed more and who contributed less to the collaborative endeavor” (67). This explains the need for a statement on the proportion of a scholar’s contribution and suggests something about the limits the system places on how much collaboration a scholar might pursue. This language began to shift our perception of evaluating collaborative scholarship from a strictly numbers game (x percent of a project) to a language game of how one builds and describes a scholarly profile. In essence, we began to see how the official language describing how collaborative scholarly work should be evaluated both enabled and constrained how professors might describe the work in their annual reviews or tenure letters.

Our perception of this language game continued to grow as we looked at how collaborative work was evaluated in other departments. For example, the Division of Social Work and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology offered praise for collaborative work while telling assistant professors directly that they should not rely on collaborative projects to see them through the tenure process:

Faculty collaboration is encouraged. Collaboration may be within the field or cross-disciplinary. However, a research portfolio is strengthened when it includes some research work and some research products/publications that show the competence and ability of the individual faculty member and her/his separate contributions as a scholar. While both single- and multiple-authored work can be evaluated for promotion and tenure, it is wise counsel, particularly to assistant professors, that their body of work include single-authored publications. (Policies and Procedures 11)

This language sounds quite similar to the language from the Department of Geology and Geography, but what struck us about this explanation was the move away from the finite counting of effort in terms of articles and percentages. Instead, our analysis suggests a move toward placing a scholarly profile on a continuum of weaker to stronger. In terms of a scholar’s professional ethos, one appears less credible if one has not or is unable to demonstrate one’s individual contributions to the field of study. That is, scholars’ work on collaborative projects may raise red flags for evaluation committees. What is especially interesting to note here is that the reverse is not true. If a scholar were to produce only single-authored publications, he or she would likely be praised for exceptional productivity—despite the recorded benefits of collaboration or the potential stultification from working in isolation. We wondered, Is it possible to redefine a strong scholarly profile as one that demonstrates a balance between the two ends of the scholarly production spectrum, a demonstrated ability to do both individual and collaborative work? The ability to include and reward collaborative projects in one’s scholarly profile would also allow professors to experiment with a variety of different kinds of researching and writing and to diversify the types of scholarly objects they produce. In our experience of crafting single-authored pieces, from articles to monographs, we appreciate the unique benefits of that mode of writing, whether as an opportunity to finely tune one’s own critical voice or to envision and realize a major project on one’s own. At the same time, as collaborators on this and other projects, we know the equal, though distinctive, time, commitment, and creativity required for ventures undertaken with our peers. Our hope is that both kinds of work can flourish and be rewarded side-by-side, instead of elevating single-authored pieces and denigrating collaborative projects as somehow lesser forms of intellectual labor.

National Findings

As our inquiry expanded beyond our institution, our findings grew muddier instead of clearer. Of the twenty peer institutions we contacted, we received responses from ten. We can argue this about the findings: Most of the institutions did count collaboration. However, the ways in which these schools did so were far from formalized and consistent:

• Peer institution 1 reported not having a document for tenure and promotion.
• Peer institution 2 reported that collaborative work could contribute to a junior colleague’s research profile but that the institution would “get nervous” if it was the sole publication.
• Peer institution 3 reported that the single-authored monograph was still the standard for tenure.
• Peer institution 4 reported that collaboration was encouraged, but mainly for teaching.
• Peer institution 5 reported coauthored book-length works were evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
• Peer institutions 6 and 7 reported that in practice the institution offered full credit for coauthoring as long as the scholar showed single-authored publications as well.
• Peer institution 8 reported that collaboration counted minimally because “English is a field that values single-authored publications.” Furthermore, assistant professors were warned to be “judicious about the amount of work [they] coauthor, either with peers or with more senior scholars.”
• Peer institutions 9 and 10 reported that collaboration was counted but that scholars needed to contextualize “the extent of participation and type of contribution.”
• Peer institution 10 explicitly asked for a percentage.

As researchers, we found this disparity surprising and intriguing given the length of time that English scholars have been addressing collaborative work in our field’s publications. Ede and Lunsford essentially brought this conversation to the fore in 1981 with their article “Why Write . . . Together?” One of their central claims since then has been that change has to happen at the faculty evaluation level (Lunsford et al. 13). Our limitations for this inquiry prevented us from doing a broader national survey. As a result, we cannot make any generalizations about the state of evaluating collaboration throughout the discipline. This small snapshot of English department faculty evaluations suggests that collaborative scholarship is still a dubious proposition for professors. This snapshot also reaffirmed that what we felt we needed at our institution—holistic and updated language for evaluating collaborative scholarship—might prove useful to other assistant professors in other departments.

Stage 2: Commitment

Our discussion of stage 2, commitment, is brief but important. Kezar identifies the important elements of this stage as a sense of priority, mission, and networks. She writes, “in this stage, senior executives demonstrate support and re-examine the mission of the campus and leadership emerges within the network” (845). In our case, our inquiry into how collaboration is evaluated created an opportunity for us to present our findings at a department meeting. It will come as no surprise that by investigating the subject and being able to present tangible—if limited—information enhanced our credibility on the issue. We emerged as leaders on the subject within our network. While we encountered some skeptical voices and registered that resistance, we received significant support from others interested in opportunities to collaborate. This led to the leadership team drafting the new departmental guidelines and asking us to provide language for evaluating collaboration. The combination of emerging leadership (through learning), a reexamination of the mission, and demonstrated support propelled the endeavor to the third stage: sustaining.

Stage 3: Sustaining

Although there was and remains more work to do within the first stage, the opportunity to present new language advanced our work to the third stage of advancing a culture of collaboration. Sustaining involves “the development of structures, networks and rewards to support the collaborations” (Kezar 845). The structure we had the opportunity to shape was the faculty evaluation guidelines themselves. Therefore, we cocreated language for our English department that offered a more comprehensive and contemporary view of collaborative scholarship. Our goal was to sustain a rigorous approach to research and professional ethos while also fully acknowledging the complexity and necessity of collaboration. Our ideal model is as follows:

The English department values collaborative and interdisciplinary work, recognizing the vital role that it plays in the creation of new perspectives and new knowledge.

Furthermore, the English department encourages tenure-track faculty members to engage in some collaborative projects because of the many recorded benefits of such work, including exposure to new skill sets, rigorous cross-examination of research claims, and the mentorship of senior researchers in one’s discipline.

The English department also recognizes the unique challenge of fairly and equitably assessing collaborative work. Therefore, scholars engaged in collaborative and interdisciplinary work must do the following:

1. Identify the type of collaboration (according to the taxonomy created by Ede and Lunsford)
   • Cocreation: Creators work together at every stage of the process, including inventing, outlining, drafting, revising, and seeing the work through the process of publication.
   • Cowriting: The creators divide the work according to tasks or skill sets. For example, each creator drafts a quantifiable amount of the finished project or one creator completes the research write-up while another completes a statistical analysis.
   • Group writing: This category describes projects with many creators who contribute various components. For example, coauthors may work on pieces of the work over time before one or two members of the group compile those pieces for editing and proofreading.
2. Contextualize the collaborationFor each collaborative project, faculty members should fully describe their work. At times, the faculty member may find it helpful to quantify his or her contribution by using a percentage. Faculty members may also find these questions useful as guides:
   • What role did you play in the collaborative project?
   • Why was collaboration vital to this project?
   • What was the significance of this project?
   • From a professional development perspective, what did you gain by participating in this project?

Our expectation is that, just like our own department, other departments might use this evaluative language as a starting point and first draft for crafting their own language about evaluating collaborative scholarship. Furthermore, we hope that individual faculty members may use this language, whether it’s been implemented in their departments or not, for the purposes of invention. We believe that professors—research, teaching, clinical, or adjunct—can use this language as a first step in advocating for collaboration and convincing their community members of the need to foster collaborative communities. At our institution, we were successful in getting a version of this ideal language included and approved in our updated department-level faculty evaluation guidelines. Although not as comprehensive as the language above, the new language reflects both the taxonomy component and the need to contextualize the work (while minimizing the percentage aspect).

Conclusion

As the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship suggests, “We need to devise a system of evaluation for collaborative work that is appropriate to research in the humanities and that resolves questions of credit in our discipline as in others” (Stanton et al. 57). So far, the prevailing system of evaluating collaborative work—assigning some percentage to it—explicitly values collaborative scholarship less than single-authored publications. In this system, to work with any other person is to handicap one’s own evaluations because of the forced decision to assign a percentage of less than one hundred percent. Therefore, although our collective discourse suggests that “collaboration . . . offers significant opportunities for enterprising, untenured scholars to tackle problems or interdisciplinary topics too formidable in scale or scope for an individual” (Stanton et al. 56), many department evaluation documents either implicitly or explicitly discourage untenured scholars from undertaking collaborative work.

Addressing this issue and repositioning English scholars as important collaborators for research across disciplines in the twenty-first century requires more inclusive and more equitable systems of evaluation, yet achieving this goal requires a profoundly holistic view of the work needed to promote collaborative cultures. English scholars must build commitment through learning and networks. They must seize opportune moments created by external pressure or, in some cases, work to create that pressure. They must establish commitment by clarifying missions and taking on leadership roles, often by repurposing departmental service into opportunities for establishing and expanding the value of collaboration. Finally, they must work to sustain collaborative communities through new structures, rewards, and solidified networks (Kezar 850). To that end, we will add that, although our focus here has been narrowly trained on the tenure, review, and promotion process within universities, much can be done beyond universities to incentivize collaborative work. Professional organizations are well positioned to offer awards for collaborative academic projects or simply to make sure that their award guidelines do not tacitly or explicitly devalue collaborative works. Such organizations might also provide competitive funding for undertaking these kinds of projects, all of which aids in raising the stature of collaboration. This makes it easier for faculty members to use these accolades when rhetorically situating the value of their coauthored pieces for chairs and deans. The key to the overall reframing of collaboration is its vital role in professors’ success. Our hope is that collaborative work in English studies flourishes in the next thirty years so that our future doesn’t mirror our past.

But of course both charts also offer a vision of a way out of this darkness: we can wait. Previous peaks have always come back down to valleys; the valleys have risen back to new peaks. And the number of overall majors in the humanities has been fairly steady since the mid-1970s. So if we can just hold on for a bit, things will work themselves out, as they always have before. There are good reasons, political and social, for shedding the habit of melancholy, for abandoning the chronic age of Minerva’s owl, for letting go of the noble fantasy that we are the remaining survivors of the historic rear guard. Things have been, more or less, fine for about forty years.

Part of the reason they have been fine—and I know that things have not always been fine, that departments and programs have closed, that there is a mechanism whereby forces in this country attempt to financialize the university to destroy its capacity to influence its citizens and the possibility of a common life—is, however, because humanists have fought. Things were not just fine on their own.

That is the good news—that the overall institutional position of the humanities is relatively historically stable and that it is so partly because of the efforts of humanists. The bad news is that today things are actually, I am going to argue, different. I want to persuade you, therefore, to abandon any sense of complacency and to believe that we are facing at this moment—right now—a crisis in the humanities. Without action, we humanists, and the graduate and undergraduate students we care about and serve, stand to lose a great deal. I believe this crisis will define and shape us, as it has already done for our colleagues who struggle with precarious employment and contingent appointments.

What Is Happening to Enrollments?

While the financial factors that caused the decline in the number of jobs advertised since 2007–08 have ameliorated—state funding for higher education is back, in most states, to its pre-2008 levels, and endowments have recovered—other factors are causing a rapid and historically unusual decline in undergraduate enrollments and majors in the humanities.³

This decline is going to be responsible for a highly unusual double shock, in which an already shaken PhD job market not only fails to recover but also worsens, as a result of the decline in enrollments. The results will be, I fear, devastating, for graduate students as well as for departments and programs.

The general decline in undergraduate humanities enrollments does not correspond to a decline in undergraduate enrollments overall or in the liberal arts more generally. It has taken place in a relatively short period of time—not since 2008, but since 2010 or 2011, which is what makes it hard to see, given that much of the data we have for historical enrollments are at this point a year or two (or more) behind the times. At many institutions the decline in humanities majors since 2010 is over 50%, a phrase that I can barely bring myself not to italicize, put in all capital letters, and surround with flashing lights.

David Laurence of the MLA’s office of research has summarized some of what is happening in a 2017 MLA convention presentation about trends in the English major (Laurence et al.). He was moved to present on the topic after discussions in the ADE Executive Committee, which “gained urgency after 2010, as members of the committee brought reports of a new decline—in some departments alarmingly steep—in the number of undergraduates choosing English as a major.”

Laurence provides figure 3, which shows the number of bachelor’s degree completions in English, history, languages other than English, and philosophy and religious studies between 1987 and 2015. This long-term view may mitigate some anxiety—we are, after all, still above 1987. But local stories give a clearer picture of the “alarmingly steep” declines. Where I teach, at Penn State, the number of humanities majors fell dramatically between fall 2010 and fall 2015, by about 40% across all disciplines. Research by Laurence shows shockingly large declines at hundreds of institutions across the country. To speak of English alone, if we compare the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in that field in 2015 with the average number of degrees conferred between 2000 and 2010, we see the following changes:

• Out of 258 doctorate-granting institutions, 189 (nearly 75%) saw declines in the number of bachelor’s degrees granted. Of those, 124 had declines of 20% or more and 53 had declines of 40% or more. At 66 institutions, the number of bachelor’s degrees granted increased. The number of 2015 English graduates across all doctorate-granting institutions is 79% percent of the 2000–10 average.
• Of 438 master’s-degree-granting institutions, 264 (60%) saw declines. Of these, 178 had declines of 20% or more and 95 had declines of 40% or more. At 171 institutions, the number of bachelor’s degrees granted increased. The number of 2015 English graduates across all master’s institutions is 96% of the 2000–10 average.
• Of 258 bachelor’s-degree-granting institutions, 179 (70%) saw declines. Of those, 128 had declines of 20% or more and 63 had declines of 40% or more. At 76 institutions, the number of bachelor’s degrees granted increased. The number of 2015 English graduates across all bachelor’s-degree-granting institutions is 80% of the 2000–10 average.⁴

Figure 3. Number of Bachelor’s Degree Completions in English, History, Languages Other Than English, and Philosophy and Religious Studies, 1987–2015

Let me put it more plainly: at many, many of the schools where we work, the number of humanities degrees awarded has dropped precipitously. In 2015 about 7,400 fewer English majors graduated from universities in the United States than did in an average year from 2000 to 2010. In many places, enrollments in the languages and literatures are not declining as quickly, since departments of language, literature, and history continue to fill seats in general education courses. But at Penn State—and at places where friends of mine teach around the country—upper-level language and literature classes that used to fill are having a hard time making their enrollment minimums, and faculty members are being pushed more and more into the work of teaching for the core curriculum.

In short: things are changing, and they are changing quickly—in the last four or five years. It is the rapidity of this change and the structural causes for it that lead me to believe that we cannot simply wait for things to get better.

Structural Changes in the University System in the United States

At some level the explanation is fairly simple: cuts in state funding for education. Such cuts produce two well-documented consequences. First, they push governments (states in the United States, national governments elsewhere) to increase tuition (Mitchell and Leachman; see also Mitchell et al., “Funding”), which increases student loan debt. Second, they push state universities to increase enrollments of full-price-paying international students to compensate for loss of revenue (Redden).

Each of these factors depresses humanities majors (and hence humanities enrollments more generally). The first causes students to move away from majors less likely to produce immediate income benefits (Sá), leading to decreases in majors in the humanities and the arts. The second brings more students to campus for whom English is a second language and who are therefore less likely to invest in any major that includes intensive reading and writing in English. International students do not in and of themselves contribute to the decline in humanities enrollments. At Penn State, for instance, such students are essentially added on top of existing students, accounting for 98.5% of the total enrollment growth of 4,270 students since 2006 at the main University Park campus. But their appearance contributes to the humanities’ shrinking share of university majors and thus diminishes the power of the departments and colleges that contain such disciplines.

These financial and structural factors outweigh many other recent explanations, which have tended to focus on cultural issues. It’s worth reminding ourselves that most of these explanations don’t hold water. English majors are declining because of too much theory-laden jargon, we’re told (e.g., Klinkenborg), or because students have to read too much literature by black people (e.g., Fund), but enrollments go up during the theory era and during the period when work by African Americans enters the curriculum. People are fleeing the humanities because it’s full of liberal self-satisfaction (Flaherty), but the number of self-identified liberals in the United States is at an all-time high (Saad). Women, liberated from the tyranny of humanistic expectations, are finally free to major in STEM fields (Tworek), but again, look at the charts: the major changes come in the 1970s; since then it’s all ups and downs.

Cuts in state spending and the overall rise in tuition (driven by factors like the growth of administrative staff, the need for universities to provide important student goods like counseling centers, and so on) have led us to a situation in which the state factors that support the study of the humanities—and the freedom of people to study whatever they want without the threat of devastating financial consequences—are at a postwar nadir. The great investments in university education in the post–World War II period that allowed the humanities to become something nearly anyone could have access to have been rolled back. Prospects are unlikely to improve in the current political situation.

Consequences

Consider what has happened to the academic job market in the languages and literatures since 2008. You’ve seen the chart: the number of positions in English and foreign languages advertised in 2016–17 is a historic low (1,659). The job market for humanities PhDs was hit especially hard by the 2008 financial crisis, harder than the job market for the social sciences (Welch and Long), for reasons that are not clear. Thus, the events of 2008 already constituted, for the humanities, an unusual crisis.

In 2014 state funding to higher education institutions was still below its 2008 numbers in most states (Mitchell et al., “States”); since roughly 2011 and 2012, however, those numbers have revived (“Total and Per-Student State and Local Funding”). The stock markets, and hence endowments, are back above 2007 highs.⁵ We might expect, therefore, a return to hiring at more normal levels, an upswing of the market like the one that happened in the mid-1980s or the 2000s—another upward turn of the enrollment and job market graphs, another cycle weathered.

The recent and rapid decline in the number of majors suggests, however, that the humanities may have become disconnected from the general ups and downs of university funding, resulting in a second shock, in which the enrollment drops are extending and concretizing the effects of the 2008–15 period. Having gone from 800 majors to 400, or from 550 to 270, what department head can easily make an argument for increasing the size of the tenure-line faculty? On what grounds can we even argue for hiring replacements for our retiring colleagues? And if departments reduce their hiring, instead of bringing it back to previously normal levels (which were already not enough to employ all the graduating PhDs on the tenure track), what will happen to our graduate students?

To make things worse: in this new situation we will not have the same allies we had before (during the financial crises of 2001, 2008, and so on). Enrollments in the social sciences, in business, and in science are increasing. (At Penn State the department of economics graduated twice as many students in 2015 as it did in 2009.) The humanities are institutionally more alone, more vulnerable, than they have ever been, more at the mercy of a university’s financial decisions or a new dean’s desire to prove his or her toughness by consolidating departments or reducing faculty size.

What Is to Be Done?

It is important to me that these suggestions not be seen as directed primarily at adjunct faculty members or at graduate students. The responsibility for dealing with these problems, which are intimately related to the profession’s complicity with the adjunctification of teaching work, lies with the tenure-line faculty at all levels.

At the Graduate Level

To my colleagues involved in PhD programs, I want to say something simple and hard: unless you are placing most of your students in the professorial jobs for which you are training them, you need to rethink what you are doing. We cannot go on like this—we cannot go on treating people like this, cannot go on allowing ourselves to accept students who believe that they will be the ones to make it, when we see so clearly that the job market is a matter not of individual talent but of structural violence, a matter not of desert or hard work but of pattern and system whose primary ideological function is to absolve the individuals who participate in it from any moral responsibility for its effects. We know how the market works. We know also that the dreams of students, their love of school and of literature, will bring them into our programs regardless of what the market looks like; we know that our own pleasure and happiness in teaching them, our pride in being part of their lives, would be diminished by their disappearance. We know that if we stop admitting students or cut our admissions numbers in half, again, our programs might not survive.

Nonetheless we need to act: the good of the program cannot outweigh the ethical responsibility we have to care for those who wish to earn a PhD. We are not responsible for the situation, but we are the ones who have the responsibility to respond to it.

How to change things? That is a task for the institutional and moral imagination. The good news is that humanists are specialists of the imagination. Among other things, we can begin training PhD students for nonprofessorial jobs. The MLA, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Historical Association are making significant efforts in this direction; if you haven’t looked at the resources available through MLA’s Connected Academics initiative, you should—they’re fantastic. (To be clear: this is not some call for “alt-ac” careers: it is a claim that we need to alter PhD training so that humanities doctorates always prepare students for careers outside the university.) We may also want to double down on certain PhD programs—for instance, those that train the kind of people the professoriat still doesn’t have enough of, people from socially minoritarian groups of all kinds—to assure that this job market crisis does not force us to step backward in our continuing attempt to make the university look more like (or better than) society. We may want to talk honestly and openly to students about the situation and to offer them the chance to refuse the structures of professionalization that govern so much of PhD programs these days, to focus, if they’d like, on learning and writing for purposes other than the academic job market.

In any case, for me the question at this point is, How can we ethically continue to have PhD programs in the face of this new situation? What are the terms under which I feel it acceptable to admit students to a PhD program—how would I insist that they be treated, that they be trained, that they be supported and mentored in professional and intellectual terms? More important, how can those terms be institutionalized, so that every student gets that kind of training and support?

(My terms may not be yours, of course. But that’s OK—the argument can be about what the terms would be. Ideally this rethinking would replace what’s mostly happening now, which is simply a continuation of the status quo that responds to the poor academic job market by ratcheting up pressure on individual students, who are told they need to publish more, graduate faster, teach more, produce more job market documents, and so on, a process that essentially makes them individually responsible for their situation and to blame if they don’t find professorial employment. We all understand that blaming the victims of structural poverty or racism is outrageous; it would be nice to bring the same sense of awareness to our own institutional situations.)

My point here is that doing nothing is not OK. Doing nothing is being complicit with ignorance and violence.

At the Undergraduate Level

The ethics of undergraduate education are far simpler. At one level, it is worth acknowledging that if lifetime income is your only goal in going to college, you should be a petroleum engineer (at least until the oil runs out) or an economist (Carnevale et al., What’s It Worth?; Weissmann). But of course getting a high-paying job is not the only reason most students go to college. And even if it were, there’s plenty of evidence that humanities majors do just fine (in the Hamilton Project rankings [“Career Earnings”], in many cases it’s a matter of a few thousand dollars less a year in mid-career, which is not such a disaster in exchange for having an education that teaches you how to do more than just a job; Carnevale et al. [What’s It Worth?] shows much more extreme differences, however). It’s also the case that many high-paying employers claim to be looking for English and other humanities majors (see Anders; Giang; Linshi; Asay; and Segran). And so it’s clear that we are doing no damage to students who major in our undergraduate fields, that, as they so often tell us, we seem to be doing them a fair amount of good. I feel perfectly calm both about the professional prospects of our students and about the noneconomic value humanistic teaching adds to their lives.

That said, because the current version of our crisis stems from undergraduate enrollments, I want to focus there for the moment. Here, then, are four ideas for ways we might improve undergraduate enrollments, which would lead to improvements in majors and therefore to improvements in the professorial job market.

1. Teach the Humanities, Not the Disciplines

The data suggest that enrollments in the humanities are falling far more slowly than the number of majors, because, I suspect, of the continuing appeal of humanistic questions: What is friendship? What does it mean to have a good life? What is justice? How do feelings work? Does history have meaning? Are we alone in the universe? What does it feel like to be a migrant? Students are less interested—as far as I can tell—in topical courses that promise coverage of a geographic region or historical period, in courses like The Modern Novel or Medieval Europe.

Students also like classes that tell them how to do things—how to eradicate world poverty; how to live a satisfying life; how to create political change. None of these would be strictly history or English or philosophy. I think that’s a feature, not a bug: my guess is that the humanities are going to survive by expanding and extending their general interdisciplinarity, by realizing that the separation of disciplines produces appeals to certain kinds of expertise that at this point may not be enough to retain our traditional audiences. Our market has changed; we probably need to change with it.

Most of our classes in literature already involve philosophy and history (if not also sociology, art history, anthropology, economics, psychology, and the like). We may want to double down on this interdisciplinarity, seeing our courses as training in the humanities (in general), ourselves as humanists (in general), and our work as orienting our students to the big human questions, which are, after all, not constrained by the boundaries of the university’s disciplinary divisions.

I am not saying that disciplines are stupid, or that we were foolish to tie ourselves to them, that disciplinary knowledge is useless or passé or dumb. But in a world where the existing humanities disciplines no longer have the appeal they used to—in which they cannot attract students to make a ten-course commitment to a major—we might market ourselves institutionally to our potential students in more than one way, both as disciplines and as places that ask big questions and teach you how to do things. The problem, that is, is not disciplinarity in general (economics, as I’ve said, is doing fine); the problem is humanistic disciplinarity, in this particular socioeconomic situation.

2. Experiment with Departments, Courses, and Programs

Making the kind of curricular changes I’m proposing is difficult because of institutional inertia. Who would approve the courses? Under what rubrics would they be taught? Here faculty members and administrators need to work together to create experiments in departments and programs. What if, for instance, a dean offered a group of faculty members (let’s say ten to fifteen) who could make a viable proposal the opportunity to create a new humanistic program focused on undergraduate education? What if those faculty members could spend five years, supported with a course release or two and a bit of research money, working to create new courses that would either answer the big questions or introduce students to majors in a broad and appealing way?

Of course such a thing might not work! But what we have now is not working either. It would be really great if we could populate the country (or the world) with experiments like this, knowing that we can all learn from their successes and failures and copy from them what makes a difference.

At the curricular level, I think there’s some promise in what I think of as “super-courses.” Here at Penn State, Sam Richards teaches a sociology course called Race and Ethnic Relations that enrolls 725 students a semester (see “SOC 119”). Richards’s course is supported by a host of undergraduate teaching assistants, students who have taken the course before and now receive additional course credit for facilitating discussion, building bridges among new students, and so on. At Harvard, Michael Puett teaches a 1,000-student class on classical Chinese philosophy; the course, like Richards’s, changes lives, because that’s what the humanities do (Gross-Loh).⁶

I would also be interested in experimenting with very small courses—five or six students. I recognize that the labor costs here loom large (though presumably a department could compensate for this by teaching some large lecture sections). Such courses would allow us to approach what we know of the best of education, which is that it reaches deep into the person, into the individual, and there expands students’ capacities and their relation to the world. The humanities already are the place where students go to feel like their teachers are talking with them, not at them; we should make the most of that reputation and expand it.

3. Don’t Give Up on the Students

The humanities right now simply cannot afford to have faculty members who do not engage or connect with students, no matter how smart or interesting the faculty research is. Does that mean teaching the students at their level? Yes, it does. They are coming to us differently prepared—the Common Core has radically reduced the amount of reading and writing K–12 students in the United States do—and under more financial pressure than any generation before them. There’s no point in blaming them for it. Doctors don’t complain that all their patients are sick people; their job is to heal them. Our job is to increase capacities and reduce ignorance.

Let me be a bit clearer about this. People have been talking about improving teaching for years. But, at least at a major Research I university like Penn State, there is almost no premium on being a great instead of an average teacher; the difference exerts almost no pressure on tenure and promotion systems, and so faculty members rationally concentrate on publication. The day we withhold tenure from someone because he or she is a bad teacher or make it clear that a merit raise is lower than it might have been had the teaching been better is the day we can be confident we’re taking this situation seriously. (How do you define bad? How do you compensate for student bias as it applies to women, people of color, and so on? These are real and important questions and should be addressed by faculty members, seriously, as they determine the structures with which they will govern themselves. The premium on teaching needs to come from inside departmental governance structures, not be imposed from on high.)

4. Justify and Explain What We Do

Every single class in the humanities should include some discussion about what the humanities are and why they’re worth something; it might even include information about salaries and employment issues, since our students (and their parents) often care about those a great deal. We need to be teaching students the value of their own education, telling them why what they’re learning matters, and giving them a name (“the humanities”) to attach that learning to. It’s not enough simply to teach the material. All this is part of creating more defenders of humanities in the public sphere. We need to teach as many people as possible, as well as possible, to create the lifelong bonds of affiliation and recognition that will allow the kinds of knowledge we have and the kinds of knowing we do to remain a vibrant part of state-funded education. And we need them to recognize that that’s what’s happening.

My friend Derek Fox, an astronomer with whom I plan to teach a course called Being in the Universe sometime in the next couple years, read this paragraph and told me he wished that people could just say something like, “Take humanities because of how they make you feel. Take humanities because of how much you love to think. Take humanities because when you push yourself, really push yourself, you realize how far you have to grow and how fast you are capable of getting there.” This is exactly the kind of thing we should be saying, in every class. And the job of teaching is then to make these things be true—to make promises to students about what the humanities can do for them (intellectually, emotionally) and then fulfill those promises for as many students as possible.

Taking Despair Seriously. And Yet.

Last thing: a couple years ago I was talking to someone who was chairing a large English department. “I feel so worried about the profession,” she told me, “that sometimes I just think to myself, ‘Oh well, at least I only have five years to retirement, so I won’t have to watch it all fall apart.’”

I completely understand this feeling. Sometimes I feel it too. And I do think that articles like this one too often present a disastrous series of facts as a sort of medically appropriate realism, a cure that also poisons anyone who gets too close to it. Many of us, having invested much of our lives in these fields, look at what’s going on and feel scared or sad. Part of the problem is that the sheer scale of the problem makes it feel impossible to fight against, and so despair leads to a kind of learned helplessness: There’s nothing I can do. At least I’ll be dead before it’s all over.

But it doesn’t have to be over, even if it does, I am arguing, have to change. No one ever said you would get to do the job in the same way for all forty years of your career. No one ever said that large-scale social changes wouldn’t change your working conditions. Well, they have. And now the challenge is to figure out how, in this new environment, to keep the humanities not only alive but also fresh and new, not to retreat like a seed in winter, hoping for the coming spring, but to engage in experiments that will allow us to shift and adapt to new ecosystems—to change and live and to fight to live, however changed, because what we have and what we do is worth fighting for and makes us worthy of the fight.

I.

“Where does it end?” asks Susie Monahan, a registered nurse, near the end of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Wit. She’s discussing the study of literature with Jason Posner, a clinical fellow at University Hospital, by the bedside of the play’s protagonist, Vivian Bearing, a distinguished John Donne scholar, who, presently asleep with a morphine drip, will shortly die of cancer. When Susie wonders aloud what it’s like to study literature, Jason, who took Vivian’s poetry course several years earlier, explains what he took away from the experience: the idea of literature as an intractable puzzle. Susie ostensibly means to ask, “Don’t you get to solve the puzzle?” (60), but her question echoes beyond its immediate sense in this scene, with the two meanings of end (terminus and purpose), rendering Susie’s question a statement of the play’s central concern. In narrating the life and death of a literature professor, Wit asks what literature—particularly the study of literature in college—might offer in life and in death. Susie’s question gestures broadly: What is the end, or purpose, of literature? What significance does literature offer readers’ lives? How might teaching enable or hinder that significance?

For those who teach literature and other humanities, such questions about the ends of our work are as pressing as ever. We hear the humanities are declining, that students are no longer majoring in English and other liberal arts (e.g., Chace; “Bachelor’s Degrees”), that folks aren’t reading anymore (e.g., Reading at Risk; To Read or Not to Read). Whether narratives of decline tell the whole story (see, e.g., Bérubé; Reading on the Rise), we work in their shadow. These narratives—sometimes lamenting the decline, other times endorsing it—pop up in popular culture, op-eds, conversations between college students and their parents about majors (Pearlstein), and political speech, such as when Rick Scott, the Republican governor of Florida, declared having “more anthropologists” not “a vital interest of the state” (qtd. in Anderson) or when Barack Obama insisted that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” While some of these narratives actively vilify the humanities, most (as in Obama’s backpedaling “I love art history”) simply place the humanities on the losing side of a binary between education for a career and education for “love.”

What can we do about these narratives? We can push back (e.g., Zakaria; Jaschik; Weinstein) and offer alternatives, affirming the worth of the humanities broadly (e.g., Hutner and Mohamed; Nussbaum; Bérubé and Ruth) and literature specifically (e.g., Felski; Bruns; Jacobs; Roche). But we also ought to reflect on and learn from them. For instance, even from politicians hostile or indifferent to our work, we may learn to address economic concerns (Fontaine and Mexal). I propose, however, that we begin with our friends—writers of literature who seek not to trip us but to show us where we’ve already stumbled. In What Our Stories Teach Us, Linda K. Shadiow argues that reflecting on stories of teaching can help us improve our teaching. We should extend this insight from the personal narratives she has in mind to literary texts dealing with the teaching of the humanities. Many literary texts—from Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B” to Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons—offer parables of teaching: rich, rough, perceptive accounts of what it means to teach and how to teach more effectively. We might learn a lot from these texts, especially when they offer their own narratives of decline through probing problems in the teaching of the humanities. Wit presents a profoundly unflattering but profoundly sympathetic picture of the teaching of literature. The play invites us to ask ourselves tough questions and change the way we teach.

II.

Why read literature? Whenever we teach, we implicitly perform for students our working answers to this question. Through the characters of Vivian and Jason, Wit dramatizes several competing philosophies and practices of literature. The bulk of the text depicts these characters’ shared intellectualist approach to literature, where detailed literary analysis becomes in and of itself the purpose of reading and studying literature. But in the course of the play, this approach is tried in the furnace of cancer and found wanting—offering Vivian no meaning or solace in suffering, leaving Jason no better as a doctor or person. At the same time, in certain moments, Wit also hints at another answer, a fuller approach to literature that offers more significance for readers’ lives. In this, Wit becomes a morality play about forgetting, then returning to, the purpose of literature.

Early in the play, Vivian provides her own answer to the question of why to study literature. She values studying literature for the exercise it provides for the intellect, epitomized by the act of analyzing the wit of Donne’s poetry. Vivian opines, “To the common reader—that is to say, the undergraduate with a B-plus or better average—wit provides an invaluable exercise for sharpening the mental faculties, for stimulating the flash of comprehension that can only follow hours of exacting and seemingly pointless scrutiny” (18). However dubious it may be to think undergraduates of any grade point average will readily put in hours of seemingly pointless scrutiny of anything, Vivian’s statement reveals her intellectualist priorities for reading literature. When she turns from students to scholars, these priorities amplify: “To the scholar, to the mind comprehensively trained in the subtleties of seventeenth-century vocabulary, versification, and theological, historical, geographical, political, and mythological allusions, Donne is . . . a way to see how good you are” (18; ellipsis in orig.). Here, a disturbing understanding of literature emerges—extreme in method, narrow in purpose. In Vivian’s account, both literature and readers derive worth first and foremost from the sharpness of the intellect.

Cancer, however, shows Vivian the limits of this approach. By noting that her doctors “read me like a book” (32), she implicitly instructs the audience of the play to attend to parallels between medicine and literature, particularly regarding the intellectualist approach and what it misses. In making “[r]ounds,” her doctors are “darting around the main issue . . . which I suppose would be the struggle for life . . . my life . . . with heated discussions of side effects, other complaints, additional treatments” (31; ellipses in orig.). She seems to realize that she likewise has spent a great deal of time darting around the main issue of literature—also the struggle for life—by focusing on secondary concerns, such as vocabulary, versification, and paradox. Indeed, she recalls how, when her students “would flounder” in the face of paradox in Donne’s poetry, she would instruct them to “[t]hink of it as a puzzle” (39). Yes, she would tell them, Donne deals with “the larger aspects of human experience: life, death, and God” (40). But, she would insist, Donne makes of these “an intellectual game” (41). However, when Vivian ponders her own condition (hospitalized and weakened not from cancer but from treatment) as a paradox worthy of a Donne poem, she realizes “it is not” a game after all (39). With the antecedent for the word “it” ambiguous, this statement may cover poetry, paradox, cancer, or all of the above. The point is that Vivian finds her intellectualist approach—darting around matters of life and death—inadequate for living and dying.

Moreover, what’s inadequate for the teacher also proves inadequate for her students. Jason brings her intellectualist approach to literature into his practice of medicine with similarly disastrous consequences. Talking to Susie, Jason explains that Vivian’s literature course “felt more like boot camp than English class. The guy John Donne was incredibly intense. Like your whole brain had to be in knots before you could get it” (59). Jason, however, does not consider this a downside. He continues, “The puzzle takes over. You’re not even trying to solve it anymore. Fascinating, really. Great training for lab research. Looking at things in increasing levels of complexity.” This explanation leads Susie to ask, “Where does it end?” (60). Her question has further resonances about the end, or purpose, of literature. Significantly, Jason’s reply does as well. “Nah,” he says. Like medical research, studying literature is simply about “trying to quantify the complications of the puzzle” (61). Most scholars and teachers of literature would not find this explanation satisfactory. Yes, literature is less about solving difficulties of interpretation than tracing contours of problems, considering the possibilities. At the same time, literature offers more. But, on the basis of Vivian’s teaching, Jason overtly rejects the more: “Listen, if there’s one thing we learned in Seventeenth-Century Poetry, it’s that you can forget about that sentimental stuff. Enzyme Kinetics was more poetic than Bearing’s class. Besides, you can’t think about that meaning-of-life garbage all the time or you’d go nuts” (61). These damning comments carry a poetics. For Jason, the “poetic” has something to do with “sentimental stuff” and “that meaning-of-life garbage.” It involves feeling, meaning, and life. In contrast, the study of poetry has nothing to do with any of that.

Subsequently, neither does medicine. That Jason is not yet dying may explain why he does not see the limitations to this approach. But its limitations end up costing Vivian a good deal of suffering. Jason lacks “[b]edside manner,” his rudeness rooted in a lack of concern about his patients as people (44). While showing awe and curiosity toward cancer itself, he makes no connection between what cancer is and does on the scientific level (cells reproducing and reproducing) and on the human level (those cells devastating and ending human lives) (46). When Vivian wants Jason to “take more interest in personal contact,” she recognizes that—just like herself—he “prefers research to humanity” (48, 47). Indeed, Jason views his work at the hospital— “[t]he part with the human beings”—merely as a precursor to getting his own research lab (46). His intellectualist priorities even spill into medical and ethical violations, first when he resists putting on a gown, mask, and gloves when Vivian goes under quarantine with an “eradicated” immune system (huffing, “I really have not got time for this”) and again when he violates Vivian’s do-not-resuscitate order in an attempt to protect and continue his research (shouting, “She’s Research!”) (39, 39, 64). Jason’s concern for scientific analysis continually trumps any potential concern for human meaning or human beings. Although we cannot say that Jason is this way because of Vivian’s class, Vivian herself notices parallels between her teaching practice and his medical practice, acknowledging having “ruthlessly denied her simpering students the touch of human kindness she now seeks” (48). In one flashback, Vivian reprimands a student (“Sharply”) for not knowing “the principle poetic device” of a particular sonnet (48); in another, Vivian coldly informs a student whose grandmother has died that a paper for the course will remain “due when it is due” (51). While her approach to literature does not necessarily demand this harshness, it doesn’t contradict it. In turn, while her course does not necessarily cause Jason to become an uncaring doctor, it certainly doesn’t push him in a different direction.

While Wit repeatedly holds up the intellectualist approach for critique, Edson doesn’t stop with critique. She also holds up and affirms other, fuller approaches to literature. In one scene, while waiting for an examination, Vivian, ever the astute commentator, begins quoting passages of Donne aloud to herself without commentary (26). Perhaps she hopes hearing the familiar words out loud will offer her some comfort or meaning in her anxiety and pain. While the intellectualist approach does not have any particular use for reciting poems simply for the sake of hearing the words out loud, this more reflective, meditative reading practice may serve a deeper, more sustaining purpose than endless analysis does. Eventually, Vivian addresses the contrast between two such ways of reading. Attending finally to “life and death . . . my life and death,” she tells the audience:

(Quickly.) Now is not the time for verbal swordplay, for unlikely flights of imagination and wildly shifting perspectives, for metaphysical conceits, for wit.

And nothing could be worse than a detailed scholarly analysis. Erudition. Interpretation. Complication.

(Slowly.) Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness. (55)

While she does not quite repudiate her entire life’s work here, she names its limits in no uncertain terms. In the hour of her death, the cornerstones of the intellectualist approach hurt more than help. Other elements—simplicity, kindness—are needed. The play shows next that these are also reading practices.

Vivian’s life does not include many meaningful relationships; she is alone throughout most of the play. She admits that when she dies, rather than grieving, her students and colleagues will feel “relieved” and “scramble madly for my position” (28). As her mind begins its final descent, her speech slowing to just a few words, someone does finally visit her in the hospital—her own college professor. E. M. Ashford had been the very one to teach Vivian to be “uncompromising” in her study, to begin not with “feeling” but with “the text,” and to never use “an edition of the text that is inauthentically punctuated” (15, 13, 13). While E. M. had also taught Vivian how attending to accurate punctuation reveals the meaning of a particular Donne poem—“Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life everlasting” (14)—E. M.’s method overshadows her meaning. In the intervening years, E. M.’s “instruction and example” shape Vivian into a certain kind of scholar (17). Now in old age, however, E. M. finds her way back to what matters. In one of the play’s few moments of true human connection and compassion, in an act of simplicity and kindness, she “slips off her shoes and swings up onto the bed. She puts her arm around Vivian” (62). She offers to recite for Vivian something from Donne. In her last actual word in the play, Vivian turns down Donne with an emphatic “Nooooooo” (62). At this point, it appears Donne remains for Vivian too closely associated with the mental games she has always played with his poems. At the end, the poet she has dedicated her life to offers her no comfort. It is not the poetry but the nature of her relationship to it that has proved so fruitless.

E. M. proceeds to read an entirely different kind of text to which Vivian has an entirely different sort of relationship. Mirroring a flashback where five-year-old Vivian reads Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, experiences the “magic” of language, and realizes “words would be my life’s work” (37, 35), E. M. reads Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny. In this tale, with each threat the child bunny makes to run away, the mother bunny promises to pursue the child. E. M. comments, “Look at that. A little allegory of the soul. No matter where it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian?” (63). This act of reading and interpretation stands in sharp contrast to the readings and interpretations of Donne earlier in the play. The interpretation speaks to Vivian’s life, her years of running from compromise and compassion. More important, the very act of reading itself embodies simplicity and kindness. Vivian’s response likewise contrasts with her earlier response to Donne. No longer able to form words, Vivian simply moans, “Uhhhhhh” (63). Shortly afterward, she falls asleep and dies. Given her clear no moments before, this last moan represents a final affirmation, an embrace of fuller, deeper, more human ways of reading. We may see some small redemption here, a moment of kindness after a lifetime of analysis. But more than that, this final scene of reading in the play represents a return—a return to childhood and innocence, yes, but, more significant, a return to a different way of reading that is open to engaging with life and death, hope and fear, joy and sorrow, meaning and feeling. That this way of reading had been Vivian’s as a child does not mean it is a childish way to read; it means she lost her way far too soon after beginning a literary life. That this way of reading becomes hers again at the end points the audience in the way we should go.

Wit contrasts the intellectualist approach to literature with larger, fuller, deeper reading practices. Intellectualist reading fetishizes the intellect. Larger, fuller, deeper ways of reading make room for intellect and for affect, for complex analysis and for simplicity, kindness, and other human dimensions. The problem Wit takes on, then, is not the intellect, analysis, or wit in and of itself, nor the use of the mind, nor historical, philological, or New Critical methods. The problem is not even merely that Vivian treats her students without compassion. The play takes on the problem of reducing the reading and studying of literature to analyzing for the sake of analyzing without speaking meaningfully to the lives (and deaths) of readers. The play takes on the problem of pedagogical purpose. The central question of the play (Susie’s “Where does it end?”) asks us whether wit or wisdom is our central purpose for reading or teaching literature. We might answer that we mean to develop and deploy wit—or, put in another register, “critical thinking.” Or we might answer that we mean to collect and create wisdom—insight and understanding for living more deeply, fully, compassionately.

III.

Wit offers a narrative of decline for the humanities in that Edson probes how literature may be taught in a way that removes it from any human significance, which, we can easily realize, hastens and justifies its decline. In “On Not Betraying Poetry,” Jerry Farber laments poetry’s “diminished” role in our society, how fewer people read poetry outside school, how students feel “wary and unenthusiastic,” if not “fear and dislike,” toward poetry (215, 214). While acknowledging that cultural factors outside our control contribute to this decline, Farber nonetheless also wonders, “What if the way poetry is taught has actually contributed to this decline?” (215). In particular, what if teaching poetry—or literature—in ways that disconnect the texts from readers’ lives contributes to the decline of the humanities? Too often, Farber proposes, we teach poetry “as a problem to be solved—a sort of brainteaser” or else “to accomplish something else: to teach critical thinking, perhaps, or communication skills, or cultural history—or even merely cultural literacy: recognizing allusions to ‘The Second Coming’ and knowing how to pronounce the poet’s name” (216, 215). Even if these are “laudable” purposes, Farber urges attending more deeply to “the role that poetry will . . . play in [the] lives” of our students as readers (215). And he’s not alone (e.g., Webb; Morgan; Scholes).

A disconnect between literature and lives in literary pedagogy both does and does not parallel what, according to a rhetorical analysis of recent articles in literary journals, happens in literary scholarship. On one hand, Laura Wilder documents that literary scholars widely share the “assumption . . . that literature and life are connected—that literature, regardless of when it was written, speaks to our present condition” (40). If we do not bring this assumption into our teaching, then we are teaching out of alignment with the scholarship of our discipline. On the other hand, Wilder also finds that “the leap from literary text to life is a largely suggestive gesture” in scholarship (41). It is possible, then, that we bring this assumption into our teaching so much that it remains an assumption, taken for granted. In this case, we may suggestively gesture toward the connection between life and literature while leaving students to work out the rest on their own or miss it altogether. As Cristina V. Bruns indicates, it’s easier to pay lip service to broader purposes of literature than to actually teach toward them (87). We might, then, take our teaching a step further than we likely do in our scholarship, attending in a more sustained manner to how literature speaks to readers’ lives. We might teach precisely how Vivian does not.

Edson’s narrative of decline is no more flattering than the narratives of decline we may hear from politicians, parents, or the op-ed pages of the New York Times. In some ways, hers is painfully less flattering in proportion to how it is more intimate. But Edson writes as a friend, as one who loves and believes in good literature and good teaching (McGrath). Moreover, as a literary text, Wit offers a good deal of complexity. In turn, teachers of literature ought not simply rebut Wit, succumbing to the easy deflection, dismissing Vivian as a caricature, protesting that we do not teach like that. If we take that route, we miss an opportunity to learn something from the play. However different from Vivian we may be, we may ask ourselves whether our teaching contributes to or resists those less friendly narratives of decline or to the actual decline that those narratives may or may not accurately describe. We may ask ourselves whether wit or wisdom takes precedence as the purpose of our teaching.

Along with Hughes, Wolfe, and other literary writers depicting problems in the humanities, Edson invites us to think deeply about why we teach literature and why and how students ought to read literature and to work what answers we come to into the content and structure of our teaching. We resist narratives of decline most powerfully not by critiquing the weaknesses of these attacks nor by offering alternative, affirmative visions of the humanities but by changing our teaching. Even as we write letters, talk to parents, pen apologias, we should find more—and more effective—ways to help students encounter the larger, fuller, deeper purposes of reading and studying literature. Though there are many places where we can make the case that literature matters, only in our teaching can we make literature matter to our students. In our teaching, not only can we defend the humanities; we can keep the humanities worth defending.

Reading Petrarch’s Rvf as Hypertext

Since 2003 this project has been connected to the actual teaching of Petrarch’s Rvf; it grew out of specific pedagogical activities, including textual collations, transcriptions, translations, and rewriting. The use of technology in teaching Petrarch and Petrarchism has provided the opportunity to integrate in the digital environment important library resources, removing them from the dust of the shelves and making them available to students and large audiences. Students were credited for their work as contributing authors of the hypertext; they were happy to be instrumental in the democratization of knowledge while they elevated their education. The meaningful activities that led up to the construction of the hypertext galvanized their participation, as well as their linguistic and literary learning.

For Petrarch, the Rvf was an endeavor that took many different forms, both throughout the author’s life and after his death. Petrarch was tinkering with this form even in his last days, when he rearranged the order of poems 336 through 366. This long history of edits and changes means that contemporary readers are confronted with significant variation among the extant manuscript editions. Add to this the profusion of critical and philological commentary, and modern readers may find themselves awash in a sea of confusing information. By digitizing and transcribing key manuscripts, however, the OPOB makes it possible to compare editions and establish a clear sense of this text’s complex evolution.

Early print editions offer similar challenges but also provide a distinct richness of textual experience. For instance, a marvelous edition published in Venice in 1470 by Vindelino da Spira includes extensive illustrations, which serve as elaborate visual glosses of the natural and psychological motifs in the poems. It also contains handwritten marginalia, offering readers insight into the reception of the text one hundred years after the death of its author.

Archiving separate editions together in the OPOB allows scholars and casual readers alike to enrich their encounters with the text by reading it alongside Renaissance and modern commentaries and by comparing the Italian original with translations into Spanish, French, and English and with partial translations in Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and German. Furthermore, readers may decide to experience the text along with artworks and musical renderings. Or, more concisely, they may read the entire Rvf in tweet format.

Beyond opening up the Rvf to new modes of reading and a new generation of readers, the OPOB introduces new hopes and possibilities for digital innovation in the humanities more generally. First and foremost, digital platforms make literary texts like the Rvf available to an audience far larger than the one retrieving books from libraries. These texts also become available through searchable databases, giving readers a new type of access and enabling new, integrated intertextual readings. This opens a path to exciting new research questions on the reception of the text throughout the centuries.

This move to digitization radically alters the experiences of reading a literary text. With the OPOB, readers may explore several different versions of the text side by side for a more immediate comparison. Readers can engage in either a deep, immersive style of reading or a multimodal, discontinuous reading style that can produce new insight into the text and its evolution. Recent technological changes have also radically modified the relation of reading and writing to the point that the reader may now be considered a coauthor. In the new era opened by digital texts, the reader may interact with the text not only by annotating, copying, and indexing but also by recomposing texts in new ways.

The specific aim of the OPOB is to enable the reader to appreciate the importance of the materiality of a work and to witness its complex evolution—its metamorphoses from manuscript to print to digital forms. Our hypertext construction helps make sense of the poems through an intertwined reading of multiple forms and textualities. As Italo Calvino writes, “The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say: ‘I am re-reading . . .’ and never ‘I am reading . . .’” (Why Read the Classics? 14). In the same perspective, he argued that classics are texts that a writer loves to rewrite and provided an extraordinary example by rewriting Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Digital reconfigurations of literary texts and digital tools make rereading and rewriting easier for more readers than ever.

Rewriting Petrarch’s Rvf in the OPOB

The idea of translating Petrarch into “Twitterature” was developed and implemented for the first time during Re-reading Petrarca’s Rvf in the Digital Era, a seminar taught at the University of Oregon in winter 2011. This class created the first Twitter edition of Petrarch’s Rvf in Italian, now available in the OPOB.

The first step was to create a pedagogical apparatus that would facilitate an interpretation of Rvf that would make it amenable to translation into tweets. The six undergraduate and four graduate students in this seminar were motivated to perform this important task for three reasons. First, as advanced students of Italian, they felt that by creating paraphrases, summaries, keywords, and tweets for each poem they were improving their knowledge of the language; second, they sought to develop a comprehensive grasp of the individual poems and of the collection as a whole; finally, by actively engaging with the Rvf, they intended to incarnate the figure of the wreader popularized by George Landow, becoming both active readers and contributors to the creation of the hypertext around Petrarch’s Rvf (Hypertext 4–5; Hyper/Text/Theory 14). I provided a general introduction to the Rvf and presented a narrative account of the sequence of poems assigned. The students then collaborated on summaries and paraphrases of each poem.

It was clear from the start that this combination of philological and writing activities was an exceptional tool for reading and comprehending the text. In many ways, this style of reading recalled the early medieval practice of compilatio, in which people read in order to write and wrote in order to be read. For these readers, as for us, reading was not exclusively aimed at a simple comprehension of the text’s literal meaning. We did not incarnate the role of simple translators but performed as writers as well. Inevitably all rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics; they re-create the original texts to function in a given society in a given way (Lefevere and Bassnett xi). In our class, meaning emerged in stages. First, we moved from the original text to a literal paraphrase. Then we provided summary of the poem’s general meaning, or sensus. Finally, in identifying key words and composing tweets, students were able to capture the sententia, or emotional and philosophical profundity, of the poem. We decided to tweet in the first person to draw out Petrarch’s emphatic style and were careful to avoid ironic or sarcastic renderings of his voice. As an interpretive tool, each tweet had to offer something different from a simple summary or collection of keywords. Each tweet had to contain some quintessential core of the poem and to allow our followers to grasp the text immediately and substantially in only 140 characters.

Throughout our class, we also aimed to reorganize the traditional terms of the classroom. In the computer lab at the University of Oregon’s Yamada Language Center we created a sort of SCALE-UP (student-centered active learning environment with upside-down pedagogies) to facilitate active, collaborative learning in a studio-like setting. In producing these new parts of the hypertext collaboratively, students relied on one another for feedback and help. They assimilated information and built their knowledge not through attending lectures but by participating in consequential activities organized around the OPOB. At the end of the course, the Rvf was reborn as a series of 366 tweets, which students performed publicly.

It was impressive to witness the lively and active reading of the long sequence of tweets that translated one of the masterpieces of Western literature into a language that was familiar to modern-day ears. Elena Cull, a writer and graduate student in the course, said that when she read the first poem aloud, she felt an unusual immediacy and intimacy with the speaker and his longing. She translated Petrarch’s famous opening poem, “Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono,” so that it bore a familiar urgency: “Hey! Remember how it was to be young and in love? Then pity me! I am ashamed for I see the world is but transitory.”

Students agreed, however, that reading a tweet cannot substitute for reading the actual poem. They recommended that readers of the OPOB should explore the tweets after having read the Rvf itself so that the tweets trigger a deep and articulated engagement with the original text. Finally, they pointed out that they contributed to the construction of a creative pedagogical structure available to teachers and students around the world to enhance the comprehension of Petrarch’s poetic masterpiece and its creative receptions in different languages. In this perspective, the OPOB allows for readers to contribute tweets in several languages and submit them to the site, encouraging new, vibrant interaction with the text. In this way, the OPOB is just one example of how digital humanities are providing new and exciting ways to read, write, and engage critically with literature in its many forms.

The goal is to strategically link video game play with concrete pedagogical goals. For example, after learning basic action verbs, we play the first chapter of Rise of the Tomb Raider (Hugues et al.). I provide worksheets so students can review relevant vocabulary and structures, then apply them as we participate in the game’s narrative. Students are asked to discuss and reflect on the gaming narrative in writing and to apply what they’ve learned to their own life experience. I call this process identify, acquire, create (IAC): identifying which vocabulary and structures are familiar and which are not, acquiring this new knowledge through a series of task-based exercises, and creating written texts and spoken discourse.

My experiences with video games in the classroom have been overwhelmingly positive. Even students who are not avid gamers can appreciate the narrative, the clear enunciations, and the authentic speech the games provide. Unpacking the meaning of the various Italian gestures used by characters in the Assassin’s Creed games has become a favorite activity and has sparked many discussions about nonverbal communication.

My experiments with video games as a learning device in the language classroom have led me to explore the option of teaching a language course based entirely on gaming. During the spring 2017 semester, I used a state-of-the-art learning studio to teach Intensive Italian for Gamers, based on the premise that language acquisition is a process that benefits from daily interactions in the language both in and outside the classroom. Although students came from very different backgrounds and skill levels, they all successfully attained competency in the language. By the third week, through continuous involvement in play mechanics, all students in the course could effectively give commands (“Open the door!” “Take the path to the right!” “Talk to the person in the room!”) and express success or disappointment. These types of communication are fundamental to language learning and are normally acquired only toward the end of the first or early in the second semester.

Interestingly, all students autonomously continued to explore gaming in the language outside the classroom by playing their own games in the language or meeting as a group to play in our language lab. As a result, by the end of the semester students were showing a knowledge of the language and culture that included idioms, interjections, and fillers, as well as expressions of joy, excitement, and frustration. These are all markers of the development of fluency.

There are, of course, some limitations. The primary limitation is lip-syncing. Observing lip movements assists in listening comprehension (Kellerman), but anime-like games were created with lip-syncing designed for the English language. Overall, though, these glitches are minor and are far outweighed by the benefits that games offer early language students. In this setting, students who are passionate about gaming can become important classroom leaders. Many are far more fluent in contemporary gaming and technology, and instructors can learn from them, which can enrich the classroom experience for everyone.

I recall when, in the early 1980s, journalists in mainstream media lamented the rise of the video games, labeling it as a troubling fad (see, e.g., Kleinfield). They were wrong, and now video games are a pervasive part of our culture. We have learned that games can offer many advantages to language learners and can turn what is typically viewed as a mindless extracurricular activity into a vibrant learning experience that extends beyond the confines of the classroom. The rise of virtual reality technology promises to advance the frontiers of language education even further. We are not far away from a world where virtually anyone could meet—and interact with—other players from around the planet.

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

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

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

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

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

 ’Tis to create, and in creating live

A being more intense, that we endow

With form our fancy, gaining as we give

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in nature that is ours;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Anonymous University of California, Los Angeles, history PhD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Thoughtfully Involve Graduate Students as Collaborators

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

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

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

3. Think Capaciously about the Audiences and Outcomes of Professionalization

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

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

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

5. Identify New Partners

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

6. Make Spaces for Reflection and Critique

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

7. Analyze Your Work and Share It Widely

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

Changing the Dissertation Will Not Save the Humanities or Some Other Nonsense

Let’s say we get rid of the monograph-style dissertation or that we at least open up the range of possibilities. For a while now, at least since David Damrosch suggested it in We Scholars, the obvious alternative has been a series of linked articles, which together would add up to something like the same amount of work previously required by the dissertation.

The first thing to say is this: no they won’t. The monograph dissertation is a kind of writing for which most PhD students are critically unprepared (see Hayot 36–46). It is several times longer than anything they’ve ever written in their lives. It requires a level of psychological concentration and attention, as well as intellectual management, of a radically different order from the one required for articles. Articles are deeper and more complex, richer than seminar papers; monographs are all these things, and eight times longer. (As always, we are speaking of ideals here.) So we’re not talking about an even trade.

But even if that’s all true, it answers the wrong question. The question is not, “What should we do to make sure people who get a PhD in the future are doing the same amount of work as the people who get one today?” The question is, “What is the right kind of work, done competently, for which we should award someone the PhD?” To answer that question, we need to ask what the PhD is for.

Leave aside for the moment the idea of careers outside the academy, or indeed of careers at all. What the PhD says is that someone can (A) do original, publishable scholarship in their field and (B) teach university-level courses appropriate to their training. (I know that for some folks the second claim is arguable, but I don’t want to argue about it here.)

Now, everything depends on how you frame (A). For instance, if I say, “Do original, book-length scholarship in their field,” then you can’t do without the dissertation. So already, by leaving out “book-length,” I have framed the situation so as to make a collection of articles a possible substitute. But if I put “book-length” in, we have nothing to talk about.¹

So we want people to show that they can (A) do original, publishable scholarship in their field. The monograph dissertation has traditionally been taken to fulfill this part of this formula. We know that it has not done a perfect job; all the work most students have to do to turn their dissertations into books suggests as much (as does all the advice about how to do it). So it’s not as if the system we have right now has a perfect relation to the outcome the PhD is supposed to guarantee; plenty of dissertations never get published. At the same time, we must recognize that the system has produced a great deal of success, including many wonderful first books.

Our goal would then be to find another system that would at least do equally well, that would testify to our desired outcome at the same or better rate than the current one. The point would be not to have to replace the system we have but to have two options, recognizing that even if the outcomes in terms of the profession were identical, the systems might have very different outcomes for students. The monograph is hard for reasons that have as much to do with psychological qualities and personal luck as with intellectual ones; a system that does not put that kind of pressure on its writers would allow people for whom it is difficult to write books, but who are perfectly capable of producing publishable, article-length scholarship, to earn PhDs. The argument then would be that, if our agreed-upon goal is to give PhDs to people who can do original, publishable scholarship, a system that has an article option and a monograph option would make a difference not to our capacity to meet our pedagogical and professional goals but to our capacity to make those goals accessible to a wider variety of people.

All this falls apart if you don’t think that a collection of articles meets whatever threshold for original, publishable scholarship you have. If you have such a threshold, it’s likely to involve something like a sense of length or weight, an idea that someone should make a sustained contribution to a single field, as some tenure language has it. Here I want to urge you to give that up. Why should you care whether someone contributes to one field or to four? There are limits, after all; no one will write twenty articles in a career on totally different subjects. So … what’s the objection? That someone who publishes an article on Shakespeare and another on Matteo Ricci can’t be totally serious about either Ricci or Shakespeare? If the work is publishable and peer-reviewed, presumably it’s serious; or you could read it yourself and decide. But knowing in advance anything about its seriousness seems unlikely.

All this explains how I, who write books and believe in books, have come to think that we need to get away from the requirement of the monograph dissertation while leaving it as an option. Notice what I have not said: I have not said that books are old media, or tired, or only read by a few people; I have not claimed that any new system will have to open itself to the public humanities or be published digitally; I have not argued that we need to do this to save the humanities or to make them relevant again. My only claim is pedagogical and professional: given how hard it is to write a monograph, the current system favors lucky people. It would be better if, minimally, and as long as the new alternative met the fundamental demands measured by a PhD, we allowed for two kinds of luck (for it is lucky, too, to be able to write articles). Better for our students, and better for the profession and for scholarship.

Why Probably No One Will Do Anything

I say that a collection of articles can prove that someone can do original, publishable scholarship as well as a dissertation. But of course I don’t know, and neither do you. No one will know until someone tries it. And right now the main thing keeping people from trying it is that no one wants to be first.

No one wants to be first because they are afraid that it will seem as if they have relaxed standards. In this way the monograph dissertation threatens to become a Veblenian good, the kind of thing that certain institutions retain because they can afford it and because affording it allows them to display their wealth.

That is not what leadership is, or what courage is. Having convictions means having them even if it hurts. My guess, honestly, is that making this kind of change would not hurt that much anyway, that it could enhance an institution’s reputation as much as damage it. But even if not: what does it hurt? Your reputation, because your reputation is a proxy of your university’s? Your department’s inflow of graduate students? I suppose it might, though I could see things going the other way. What about their professional outcomes? Well … yes. That might happen. Because the major disadvantage of writing a collection of articles for the PhD will be that it makes it difficult for the student to get a job at a place that requires a book for tenure.

So it may all come down to a collective willingness to change tenure requirements, which would require, in turn, our recognizing the fact that tenure requirements are not, as some seem to imagine, either historically immutable or out of faculty control. In an era in which so little feels like it is in our control, and in which it feels so hard to imagine how to open up the corridors of social power to a wider variety of people than before, the really fantastic news is that these are changes that departments and faculty members can make, this very year, if we are interested in improving things, and brave enough to do it.

The History of Tracking PhDs and Why We Need to Do More of It

Tracking projects seem to be everywhere and nowhere. In the University of California system, the Office of the President surveys PhDs one year out from their degree through the UC Doctoral Placement Survey.² Add to this the efforts of the federally sponsored Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) and the many campus-based graduate divisions that administer an exit survey to PhDs upon graduation, the purpose of which is to identify employment plans as volunteered by recent graduates.³ Across the UC system, several graduate divisions and humanities centers have begun to track PhDs who pursue varied careers after receiving their degree. Among them is the UC Davis Humanities Institute. Molly McCarthy, associate director of the institute, has led a cross-college team to collect data about humanities graduates. She notes that “much of [the team’s] success collecting this data is due to graduate students taking the lead” and negotiating with their departments to pursue the information, although “no one has yet figured out what to do with the data.” To date, no comprehensive analysis of the UC Davis data has been performed, and this outcome is not unusual; collected employment data often languish in databases, not readily available even to those centers and departments who collected the data. This scenario is surprising, considering the extraordinary labor required by tracking projects and the value of these data for current graduate students and their university-based support systems. In some cases, tracking projects have either stopped entirely or exist in a bureaucratic limbo, collected but invisible to current graduate students, faculty members, and administrators. Of course, when legal departments get involved, the individual data collected by departments cannot be shared on Web sites and in other public forums without the consent of each student mentioned by name, for reasons of privacy.

Notable among recent large-scale tracking initiatives are projects of the Humanities Indicators, the Scholarly Communication Institute, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association; the Ph.D. Placement Project; and the TRaCE Project.⁴ The AHA and the Humanities Indicators, for example, compile national data and offer a broad perspective on the state of the profession. This data collection is an important first step toward a culture change in the academy, since it begins to make visible the range of work environments of PhDs in non-tenure-track teaching positions. But is this identification enough? Those of us who have already engaged in this data-collection process think not. A standardized approach to data collection must begin with the intent to analyze the data and continue with the goal of discovering the nuanced stories behind the numbers. We need to begin by asking ourselves what we want to know about these graduates and their careers. Questions would include the following: What kind of longitudinal information might be helpful to track as programs advise graduate students on future career paths? What challenges do graduates face as they transition to life after graduation, and how can programs better support them? What level of career satisfaction do our graduates report one year, five years, and ten years after having received the doctorate? How do graduates pursue a variety of scholarly activities after leaving the university? What kind of resistance do they face, if any, upon entering the work world outside the academy? The analytic foci will vary from university to university and from discipline to discipline, but they should always involve input from current graduate students.

At Humanists@Work, we have begun a process to track humanities PhDs across the UC system through our Humwork initiative, a project organized by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).⁵ Humwork includes current and recent graduate students in developing programming that makes a variety of career paths and training opportunities accessible to humanities MAs and PhDs. Humanists@Work hosts an online publishing and resources platform (humwork.uchri.org), runs biannual statewide workshops, and offers paid summer internships and advisory committee positions to support the professionalization of humanities PhDs and include them as primary collaborators in the process of developing professionalization activities and conversations. We also are beginning a collaboration with language and literature departments across the UC system to track the employment placement of graduated PhDs. Yet, throughout our Humwork programming, we have had little luck discovering where our graduates are working and how they are using their advanced degrees outside the academy. How can we program professionalization seminars and all-day workshops, much less create entirely new graduate programs, without information about how and where our PhD alumni are at work in the world?

To gain the understanding required for good professionalization training of our humanities PhDs, we developed the project Humanists@Work: Where Are the Humanities PhDs? Over the past two summers, three humanities PhDs have worked as interns to develop and update a database of humanities PhDs at work. These initial forays into tracking served as the basis for the MLA’s Connected Academics tracking project we are pursuing for the next two years. By partnering with two language and literature departments at eight of the ten UC campuses to track PhDs, we will collect data that reach back to at least 2011 and continue to track students after they graduate.⁶ We hope that in partnership with these departments we can begin to change the culture as it pertains to the acceptance of, and support for, careers outside and alongside the academy. To support our students as they transition to careers after graduate school, we must at the very least acknowledge the history of PhDs at work.

Why Track? Why Now?

Our efforts are just the beginning of a process that tracks PhDs, even those who leave the program with ABD status (“all but dissertation”), to enable universities to tell an accurate story about the diverse impact and importance of graduate programs. Placement information of former students allows organizers of professionalization initiatives and departmental programs to analyze for what careers graduate education has prepared students.⁷ Program directors can use the information gained from tracking graduates to actively engage with the career journeys of current students, even before students take their first graduate seminar and throughout the rest of their studies, and also collaborate with students to articulate the relevance of graduate education for a variety of work spheres. Program organizers might also use placement information to reflect on how graduate pedagogies can better support students as they transition to different professional positions—and in so doing adopt a proactive response to the current reality of life after graduate school. Ultimately, an institutional drive to track PhDs will empower students to make choices that align with their financial, social, and geographic needs and desires by providing them with access to a network of PhDs at work in the world and communicating to them that diverse outcomes are an acceptable, and sometimes celebrated, result.

By tracking students, directors will be in a better position to answer questions about the impact of their graduate programs: What are the trends or notable details regarding where students go to work postdegree? What role, if any, do we (as a department? as faculty members? as graduate students with diverse interests and work histories?) have to play in tracking placement information? How has the program, either purposely or inadvertently, trained PhDs to work in a variety of careers? How might we rethink our graduate curriculum to address the emerging needs for specific skills, expertise, and experiences for potential careers as identified by graduate students and as reported by graduates? To be useful to students and program organizers, answers to these questions must take into account the long and diverse history of humanities PhD career pathways and acknowledge an academic job market that has not and cannot supply all PhDs with tenure-track teaching positions.⁸ As departments are asked to create learning outcomes and objectives for undergraduate and graduate students, tracking PhDs speaks to an institutional accountability for the graduate student population in particular. This accountability, however, must extend beyond our supporting students to land tenure-track teaching positions at the highest-level research (R1) universities to encompass the vast spectrum of professional trajectories. Doing so requires us to confront the issue of how departmental and university prestige has been measured historically and to propose new models for evaluating institutional and individual success.

Tracking all graduate students is an institutional responsibility for which programs and universities must hold themselves accountable. Departments tend to reliably collect data from graduates who have gone on to obtain tenure-track teaching positions, and this information is celebrated on the placement page on departmental Web sites. But what of those graduates who never intended to pursue teaching positions or who decided to forego the precarious journey toward an increasingly improbable tenure-track position?⁹ Where are these PhDs now, and in what kind of work are they engaged? What kind of salary, and retirement, are they earning? Information about these graduates is rarely included on departmental Web sites, and departments and universities provide professionalization activities without significant knowledge of their former students’ professional trajectories. In part, this situation has something to do with an antiquated notion of placing students in jobs.¹⁰ All too often, the PhDs who find employment beyond the academy did so by way of their personal networks, with little help from faculty advisers and mentors.¹¹ But the missing stories of many PhDs also speaks to very real, if outdated, notions of professional success and failure in the academy and of what we are training graduate students to do. Even if fifty percent of PhDs find tenure-track employment upon graduation (and many argue that this number does not reflect current conditions), the other half will go on to secure other kinds of positions. In truth, we don’t know what we are training the other fifty percent of students to do. And although there are both real and perceived repercussions for certain kinds of placements, there are also a variety of intellectual, social, and institutional benefits for engaging in the difficult work of tracking and reflecting on the information we receive about our PhDs at work.

Tracking will yield data that can counterproductively influence rating a department’s record of success, should that notion of success follow a paradigm that privileges R1 tenure-track teaching over other forms of teaching and teaching in any form over other kinds of work. But for those programs and departments that value the influence of advanced humanistic education in arenas beyond the academy, these data will reveal the range of career outcomes that have resulted from the programs’ or departments’ graduate education and perhaps will reflect on their role in preparing students for nonacademic careers.¹² David Laurence suggests that a program’s view of placement information

comes down to a question of the attitude or affect that accompanies the recognition of the fact that doctoral program graduates make careers beyond the postsecondary classroom and teaching. Does the fact inspire a celebratory sense of success, both for the individual graduate and on the part of the doctoral program and its faculty? Or is it met with mournful resignation and a reflexive sense that, rightly judged, placements and careers other than the career in scholarship and teaching as a tenured faculty member can only be evaluated as failure—a failure on the part of the individual graduate, of the program and the members of its faculty, and also of the wider profession? And what are the underlying suppositions and convictions that produce one or another affective connection to the placement facts?¹³

Laurence identifies the range of potential responses to the “fact[s]” made real through tracking data. One wonders, however, how often such a reflexive conversation about reactions to placement data is taking place anywhere in the university. Would data collection prompt such reflection, and, if so, how might quantitative and qualitative data affect the range of affective responses? Ultimately, we must move the conversation about career diversity beyond the theoretical and put faces, names, and careers to those missing PhDs who do not grace departmental Web sites, and collecting comprehensive data is an important first step.

What Tracking Contributes to the University

Knowing how PhDs are at work in the world allows us to begin to understand the relevance of our existing graduate education programs. We can start by acknowledging the places of employment and job titles of our former students; although this information isn’t enough to help us understand how graduate training prepared them for these careers, it does open the door to new voices. This acknowledgment is a symbolic opening of the doors of the university, for sure, but it could expand to take into account the graduate school and post-graduate-school experiences of these former students, as a way to identify how graduate programs may develop to better support their current students. What will we find when we collect, compile, and analyze employment trends for a particular department? And at this point it is critical to acknowledge that tracking our students and inviting their narratives back into the university asks us to examine our institutions and our roles in them as much as it asks us to acknowledge our former students. Our histories are intertwined.

We are beginning this process of analysis at Humwork. Figure 1 shows the distribution of career fields and highlights a few professional titles from a representative sample of the more than two hundred UC humanities and humanistic social science PhDs at work in nonteaching positions. The size of each circle corresponds to the number of individuals working in a career field; not surprisingly, most humanities PhDs who do not obtain tenure-track teaching positions pursue other education-related career fields or work in the nonprofit sector. Though interesting, especially in terms of the smaller circles, the graphic and the data behind it suffer from incompleteness and incomparability. The graphic is incomplete in that it only includes data for those who we’ve been able to identify as former UC humanities graduate students and are findable through online searches (primarily through Google and LinkedIn). It also suffers from combining outcomes in a way that doesn’t attend to difference, placing students from more than thirty departments across ten large universities side by side, without attention to differences between, say, an art history PhD from UC Santa Barbara and a literature PhD from UC Santa Cruz, or between those who graduated over a decade ago and those who graduated last June. The graphic also does not include the very large group of PhDs serving in adjunct positions in the academy.¹⁴ This graphic is one example of how a national or statewide tracking project may be instructive but in partnership with campus-based tracking could articulate a more nuanced, and less abstract, reality.

Figure 1

Through tracking our PhDs we might also discover different models for how the humanities matter—beyond the university. Of course the humanities do matter, though we increasingly find ourselves in the position of defending their relevance to a variety of publics. Ironically, this defense occurs alongside a very public celebration by tech firms of the value of advanced study in the humanities (see, e.g., Wadhwa; Reisz; Horowitz). And yet I’m not sure that many departments can identify how their most highly educated humanistic thinkers—besides the ones engaged in university teaching positions—do contribute to working worlds beyond the university. Again, discovering where our former students employ their advanced humanistic training, and the publics they serve, is a good start. If we take our tracking initiatives even further and spend time evaluating how these individuals have or are currently shaping their organizations, the stories of current PhDs at work will provide compelling cases for why and how the humanities matter. Furthermore, this kind of engagement with PhDs outside the academy will make space for these stories to return to the university, simultaneously paving a variety of career paths for current graduate students and allowing for the existence of more capacious institutional messages regarding the importance of the humanities. It’s critical that as we engage in tracking we balance numbers with narratives.

This kind of work is under way across the UC system. We are pursuing both broad-based initiatives that track humanities PhDs globally and localized, campus-specific projects that focus on individual graduate students and programs. Our LinkedIn group, PhDs in the Humanities, for example, is an opportunity for humanities PhDs anywhere in the world to connect with one another, learn about different professional trajectories, share experiences, and network. From a data-collection standpoint, we see great potential in LinkedIn as a venue to evaluate how PhDs are at work and to learn more about how they pursue particular professional development as they move throughout their careers. We also see the benefit of LinkedIn for current graduate students, who have asked for help imagining potential career fields. We are currently offering programming that demonstrates how LinkedIn can be used to search for jobs and how students can build profiles that effectively represent doctoral-level education in the humanities.

At Humwork, we’ve also engaged in a series of narrative-based projects to highlight individual PhDs. Though we recognize the importance of thinking about the many, including broad surveys of PhDs, we emphasize individual stories when discussing and representing career diversity. Our Stories from the Field interview series was created, in part, to break the silence around pursuing nonacademic or alternative (“alt-ac”) careers. In many ways, this series is the inverse of the big national data projects. Through this series we ask recent UC humanities PhDs employed in careers outside or alongside the academy to talk about their current positions and reflect on their paths from the doctorate to employment. Although we believe that tracking these individuals is critical, we want to know more than just where they went and what they’re doing postgraduation. We want to hear about how they made the transition from the academy to government or a nonprofit organization, including the culture change that comes with entering a new profession. What served them well in graduate school? What would they do differently? How, for example, have they meaningfully contributed to struggles for social justice or educational reform?¹⁵ Stories from the Field also seeks to introduce current and future students of humanities doctoral programs to the range of careers pursued by peers who have similar education and training. Through this series we’re beginning to plot, drawing lines around experiences and through various career paths in the hopes of discovering what the field of humanists at work looks like.

Plotting this field is partly a numbers game and as such is prone to easy display in charts and graphs, which capture the number of PhDs, the number employed in various sectors, and the year in which they graduated. But a comprehensive tracking project can be so much more than a list of such entries. As part of our history, the PhDs who have pursued careers beyond the academy represent an enlargement of our plot, and in a way that enlargement invites diversity into the humanities more generally. To understand the trajectory of higher education as it influences organizations outside and alongside the academy, we must begin by tracking the data and attending to the numbers by asking questions that further our interests. As individuals who are already generating complex questions that open up the data in promising ways and prompting action on behalf of their programs to collect and work with the data, graduate students may be ideal partners for this project. We can’t, however, ask our graduate students to do this work on their own. Tracking must be a partnership that transcends hierarchical divisions of labor in the academy, reaches across campus departments and units, and ultimately connects with professional organizations. There are so many reasons we should track humanities graduates: to diversify the stories we tell about the impact of our graduate education, to add to our public case for why and how the humanities matter, to honor our PhDs as individuals with interests and capacities that extend beyond the university, and to make space for faculty and staff members to reflect on our responsibilities to doctoral students. Tracking can bridge the gulf that awaits PhDs when they leave the academy and pursue other kinds of careers, but it must be done with these purposes in mind and with the commitment to work with and share the data and stories as widely as possible.

Of course, the haphazard approach to course work of our graduate school experience arose from the technology of the era. We were pre-Internet in the late eighties and early nineties, and computers had barely made their way into graduate education in the humanities. And while the Internet did indeed enable better communication, it was mostly through e-mail. For all its convenience, e-mail constitutes a clumsy flow of communication, subject to all manner of error and lag when it comes to working with mentors and students, especially in the time-sensitive world of graduate academic progress. Yet here we are, twenty-five years later, and e-mail is still the dominant mode for the sharing of time lines, the exchange of drafts and comments, and the communication between mentor and student that results in career opportunities. Even as personal digital repositories, managed work flows, and aggregating tools were being developed for use in industry or other areas of the university, they were too slow, only marginally relevant, or beyond the capabilities of the student for them to be serviceable. In essence, students were—and still are—subject to the inefficiencies of the back office: filing cabinets, the attention of an office staff, and the stability of administrative leadership.

The landscape has changed in profound ways since the early age of the Internet, both in higher education generally and in humanities doctoral programs specifically. Because many PhDs in English are competing for ever fewer jobs, there is new and increasing pressure on programs to make sense of the time and effort they require of doctoral students. Why spend nine years on a degree that doesn’t lead to the kind of job we went to graduate school to try to attain? Many of the curricular reforms in the humanities proceed from the perspective that we should streamline programs: reducing the number of required courses, making exams measure what happens inside rather than outside the classroom, reformulating the dissertation so that it directly demonstrates the skills we want the holders of PhDs to have even if it is not an original contribution to scholarship.

We want to suggest an additional approach. If we empower students and their faculty advisers to pull together and demonstrate to the world a strong independent program of study, then we have in effect created a personalized curriculum that’s akin to the personalized medicine that will shape health care over the next twenty years. We propose using technology to empower students and their faculty—in particular, digital portfolios.

In our positions as dean of humanities and associate dean for graduate initiatives at Arizona State University, we’ve used that rare alignment of administrative wherewithal, friendship, and shared history to attempt to rethink graduate progress. We are developing these ideas with the help of Connected Academics, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation–funded MLA initiative to help doctoral students in languages and literatures better understand career options, inside and outside the academy. We designed ASU’s part of Connected Academics without the digital portfolio system—that came later. But we knew we wanted to think through how curriculum might be reshaped to serve students’ real needs. We didn’t want to impinge on the authority of the faculty to set the requirements for the PhD, and we certainly did not want to be in the business of approving courses to ensure that they built on one another or of telling faculty members what to teach. Instead, we thought about a tool that would allow the curriculum to develop more or less organically, from the students’ point of view. The goal is to see if we can help students be metacognitive in their approach to their growth, to see their own decisions (both deliberate and improvisational) as part of a whole.

A series of questions drove our project: Can we help students understand connections between graduate courses? Can we invent a tool that could help reshape pathways through the degree, and beyond, to make better sense and provide more opportunities? How does the curriculum work with the student to produce a network of possible successes? A networked curriculum would, conceivably, involve both better design on the part of the faculty and more conscious empowerment of the students in our doctoral programs.

We have avoided altering the core curricula of our programs in the English department and the School of International Letters and Cultures. Instead, we are developing curricular add-ons (which will likely become part of the core) and other processes that help students network their knowledge in newly useful ways. Emphasizing core skills and competencies might be anathema to a humanities community that rightly resists the instrumentalization of higher education. Over the years, however, we’ve yet to observe a doctoral curriculum in danger of succumbing to a sense of the PhD as a commodity. Our goal is to use skills and competencies to transform standard parts of most curricula, including course requirements and comprehensive exams. We want the curriculum to help humanities scholars serve students and our communities outside the academy.

And we envision digital portfolios, flexible in what they can provide in both internal organization and external communications to the world, as helping students accomplish the key goals of design and empowerment. The implications of our efforts will, we believe, be far-reaching and transformative.

At their most basic level, digital portfolios are structured spaces that can bring together student work as it develops over time, serving as both repository and representation of the academic products of graduate training. Digital portfolios offer the ability to achieve three objectives for students in our Connected Academics PhD programs: the construction and continuous adjusting of a coherent curriculum, the provision of a space for student-faculty communication and collaboration, and the fostering of flexible options for presenting a student’s abilities and accomplishments to the university’s publics and their communities.

ASU is working with the industry leader Digication so that students will have control over the look and feel of their portfolios. Students will create a portfolio for internal use by mentors and advisers, bringing together their electronic program of study, a time line of their progress, and their set of work completed for courses and examinations. Using the Digication platform layered above ASU’s PeopleSoft-based tracking and documentation system, students and their advisers construct a curriculum that is personalized to their needs and interests and then share it with the other faculty members. The Digication system tracks a student’s progress in ways that are too granular and program-specific for PeopleSoft tracking. And because the portfolio allows a set of the student’s documents to be curated over time, the external-facing element presents the student’s progress as scholar. Mentors will not only be able to see and understand the scholarly progress of their students but also, through a process created by our project and the university’s technology office, be able to enter into a scene of social reading, by commenting on work in progress shared through Google Docs for Education.

Students will be able to construct outward-facing portfolios for various purposes, customizing the content and appearance of the portfolios they provide to potential employers and other audiences. By sending a link along with a letter of inquiry or job application, students will be able to control (while at ASU and for endless years after) what they share about themselves with particular audiences. There is no limit on the number of portfolios that can be created.

The use of digital portfolios will marry the capacity of new forms of scholarly communication as a mode of social reading and composition with the prudent need for administrative tracking at various stages of the process. Indeed, the simultaneous visualization of tasks, progress on ongoing projects (e.g., dissertation chapters), and public-facing documents (e.g., vitae) enabled by digital portfolio is what is so simple and so powerful about it. Digital portfolios provide easy access to a time line of milestones and put the space of composition and revision within easy reach.

We are most excited, though, about the impact digital portfolios will have on the student’s course of study. It will certainly be possible for students and their mentors to continue with the atomized noncurriculum we describe above. But we believe that digital portfolios will transform how most students understand their progress through a program. Instead of being shoved in a drawer or revised and sent out for publication as a discreet product, a seminar paper will become part of a continually revised narrative of intellectual development registered in the portfolio. As our PhD programs come to understand the power of these digital portfolios, we believe that faculty members will choose to assess student progress through analysis of accumulated student work rather than through the typical milestone examinations. Whether that work consists of seminar papers or other forms of scholarly communication, it will be contained in this one place as an accessible record of a student’s life of scholarship.

Faculty members control the PhD curriculum, and that control is essential not only to their teaching careers but to their intellectual legacy within their fields. The way we educate our doctoral students will be our greatest legacy in scholarship. The fields we research and teach as humanities scholars will change a great deal over the next few decades as demographics and technology provide new ways of seeing and new media for sharing our knowledge. No one faculty member—no one department—will be able to create the change we need. Through the Connected Academics project generally, we hope to be pushed to make the right major changes in all aspects of our doctoral programs. Through assessing where our students are and where they are going, we will be able to shape the courses we offer, the research assignments we require, and the ways in which we communicate what we know.