Ethical Conundrums: Institutional Pressure and Graduate Student Needs in the Era of Contingency

With respect to the supply side, the most noticeable fact is that each year graduate programs in English have produced fewer doctorate degrees than the number of jobs listed in the JIL (Report on the Survey). The peaks and valleys are more muted on this side, since the operating principles of graduate programs are too complex to respond quickly to market swings. There was a peak in 1973, with 1,412 doctoral recipients, but the number declined to 669 in 1987 (when there was a peak in job demand). Over the next decade, doctoral recipients in English climbed back to a high of 1,094. Since the late 1990s, the number hovered around 1,000, although in 2009 it dipped below 900 for the first time. The point here is that we already have shrunk PhD programs by more than a third since 1973. The data from the study Educating Scholars, although limited by its focus on ten prestigious universities, document that three years after doctoral graduation dates, about ninety-five percent found some kind of employment, in or out of academia (Ehrenberg, Zukerman, Groen, and Brucker). Moreover, the 2007 MLA study Education in the Balance points to a clear shortage: “[T]here are not enough tenured or tenure-track faculty members to cover upper-division undergraduate courses” (8). These numbers do not paint a simple picture of overproduction.

The real consumer market happens at the front end of the educational process when student applicants are perceived as consumers seeking to purchase the institutional product marketed for educational consumption. When we turn to the data on student enrollment, which ought to be the real indicator of demand, the increases are more dramatic. “The demand for higher education has increased relatively steadily over the past century—from about 238,000 enrolled students in 1900 to 598,000 in 1920, 1.49 million in 1940, 4.1 million in 1960, 12.1 million in 1980, and over 20 million now—so there is a palpable need for college teachers. Just as there is a need for health-care workers” (Williams B8). In short, there’s more work, not less, for our PhD graduates.6 The problem is the poor quality of those jobs, where highly qualified people are competing for outrageously exploitative adjunct positions. In graduate admissions, the number of graduate student applicants (the demand side) has not significantly diminished; at my institution, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and others I know of, it has actually increased. There are no clear data here on the national scale, but I know that many graduate programs in English are still receiving two hundred applicants or more and accepting four to five—that’s the downsized model we’re already working with. Students still seek graduate education in our field, and we should be careful not to patronize them as naive dupes blind to their own future job prospects. It is remarkable that the student population, graduate and undergraduate, grew not just before but also during the period 1975–2005, when public funding for higher education shrank in some states (such as mine, Pennsylvania) by about fifty percent of overall operating budgets.

The increase in faculty positions has come through the hiring of non-tenure-track, contingent faculty members to meet the demand. When you defund public higher education, someone is going to have to pay: our colleagues are forced to accept unethically precarious working conditions both during and after grad school, and students at all levels are now burdened with massive educational debt. These are circumstances we must protest with all the solidarity we can muster. If we do not resist the neoliberal logic, we play right into the hands of those managing the cost-effectiveness ratios.

In the often inflamed discussion about graduate school size, there has been little understanding of why market logic is not an accurate description of how English graduate programs work. If it were a simple case of supply and demand, it would make good sense and be ethical to bring the production of PhDs in line with the lower demand for tenured professors. This equalizing would clearly make it easier for graduates to get tenured jobs. But the system does not work that way, at least not at most public universities (which serve about 80% of all undergraduates). Instead, when you reduce supply by shrinking graduate programs (both MA and PhD), you also end up reducing demand: that one involves the other is the ethical and political conundrum.

When you shrink graduate student enrollments (the supply side), you inevitably also shrink the size of graduate programs and therefore decrease tenured faculty lines (the demand side), because tenured faculty members are the folks teaching in those programs. Most administrators are forced into using the market logic whereby having fewer graduate student cohorts means less need for tenured faculty members. Cost-effectiveness ratios dictate the hiring of cheaper, temporary instructors to teach the undergraduate lower-division classes that were taught before by tenured faculty members. Our devaluation of teaching undergraduates and the reduction of writing to a service function (an odd reduction, when you consider that writing is one of the most complex human activities) ratify this hierarchy. We then serve the wishes of those seeking more power to hire and fire us, and in a system that is gutted of tenure and that has diminished academic freedom, we become more vulnerable, less protected. Under the contraction model, reduced supply reduces demand, and reduced demand further reduces supply, in a vicious cycle. To believe that contracting graduate programs can, in and of itself, improve the situation is a misattribution of cause and effect. We cannot change the global economic system in an overnight revolution, but we can alter our disciplinary values so that they don’t feed so well into the austerity agendas for shrinking human resources.

Our system of having elite graduate faculty members surrounded by masses of non-tenure-track contingent teachers mostly fulfilling service functions of teaching lower-level humanities and writing courses fuels the cycle of devolution. Since we do have some control over that system, let us change it. This kind of slow-motion revolution will mitigate our academic hierarchies and internal class stratifications; it will reinvigorate our creative energies and social solidarity and make our profession stronger, more vibrant, and more responsive to graduate student needs.

The 2014 Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature emphasizes that modern language and literature study now engage a “wide range of intellectual paths through which we produce new knowledge” (1). That may be an understatement. Besides the remarkable proliferation of identifiable subdisciplines of literary criticism (see Leitch), everyone knows that we are now multimedia, multimodal, and global. This change poses curricular challenges for any graduate program. There’s nothing new about that: change is a normal part of disciplinary debate and how we constitute ourselves as a profession. But in contemporary circumstances, one key ethical imperative should be widely shared: students in our field should not be trained with their eyes closed to the realities of working conditions in higher education in a global economy. We must not ignore the material conditions of our profession and lead our students to mythical visions of tenured green pastures waiting for all who apply themselves.

We should build into our programs specific course work in the area of “critical university studies.”7 It would inform students about the restructuring of higher education under the pressures of privatization and also about such defining issues as academic freedom, shared governance, the establishment and gutting of the tenure system, and the academic labor movement. But none of this intellectual training will be of much practical use unless it can help us reduce the profession’s class stratification and gain more “cooperative control of the workplace” (Williams B9).

We should increase the emphasis on teaching. This recommendation may seem to hark back to Ernest Boyer’s 1990 Carnegie Foundation study Scholarship Reconsidered, but there’s been a tremendous output of innovative work in the scholarship of pedagogy since then. The Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature advocates that doctoral programs place “greater emphasis on the development of skills in teaching” (6). In this instance, we are responding appropriately to important market factors: demanding more tenure-line jobs and training our students for them. (That most tenure-track jobs in the profession involve more teaching than research has always been true, even though our doctoral programs have often operated as if PhD training were exclusively for R1 jobs.) The huge breadth of pedagogical and scholarly training combined with the depth of analysis we value is our strength, not our liability. We should therefore fortify rather than qualify our primary mission: doctoral education in most humanities fields is primarily for, even if it is not, as the MLA task force report notes, “exclusively for the production of future tenure-track faculty members” (Report 11; emphasis mine). In this fortifying, we must adapt our curricula to serve the huge spectrum of tenure lines in different institutions.8 In this form of market adaptability, what we have to offer and what our profession needs line up.

The ongoing tasks of curricular revision are clearly part of the expansionist project, but expansion should not be carried out in the exploitative sense of asking both students and faculty members to do more work with less resources. When I speak of expansion, I mean increasing tenured faculty lines (and reducing contingency), increasing resources, and lowering class sizes. Wherever and whenever we can, we have to speak out against management mantras to downsize or die.

We are often assailed by the rhetoric of crisis, as if we have reached a tipping point where immediate, draconian cuts are mandatory. This rhetoric mainly serves the neoliberal agenda for contraction and austerity. But we have felt ourselves in crisis for a long time. This rhetoric is a mistake even if you are a market wonk. The National Center for Education Statistics projects a different situation: even though the number of high school graduates will increase only slightly, the center projects that by 2021 there will be nearly 25 million undergraduate students in postsecondary education (currently there are just over 20 million), and graduate enrollments should follow that basic demographic increase (Projections).9 To carry out the expansionist project, we have to make these kinds of revisions and additions to our program while maintaining our highest standards—the ethical hierarchies of values that engage our widest conceptions of social justice. To accomplish both means making some hard choices, but the aim is clear: more secure, tenure-line jobs for faculty members and accessibility to higher education for a broader range of students. An intense engagement in hiring decisions, policy matters, institutional procedures, and curricular revision in our programs, departments, and universities is called for.

The struggle is not just intradepartmental but for the improvement of education in a democratic society. The struggle is difficult. We labor under the constant barrage of funding cuts and austerity agendas mandated by both state and federal legislators. These policies are fueled by the right-wing assessment that the general public clearly knows how useless the humanities really are when their children are trying to get jobs and how literary study doesn’t improve one whit our nation’s effort to maintain global supremacy. Education then gets converted to vocationalism. These wrongheaded but powerful ideologies dominate our congressional halls, so in our weaker moments we might think that most citizens share this template for a diminished future. The reality is that a broad segment of the public is willing to endorse some key features of a more progressive education. Toby Miller sites a 2011 poll indicating “that while Congress favors cutting public expenditure on higher education by 26 percent and the White House seeks to increase it by 9 percent, the general public wants to double it, along with massive cuts to the Pentagon budget” (121). Those figures suggest much more public support than we might otherwise imagine for what I have been describing as the slow-motion revolution.