GESO: Grad Teachers and Researchers at Yale

evan heading

Casualization trend is bad for higher ed

I’ve arrived at the end of the sixth year, and I know the Dean’s Office hopes it is my last. In the Graduate School of the future, “2-4” always equals six. Part of making that happen is the Dissertation Progress Report, requests for which were e-mailed to Ph.D. candidates a few days ago. Like Nietzsche’s dragon with scales that read “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not,” it is replete with commandments of what I will submit, describe, report and confess. Let me try to take stock of what I’ve done and learned, here at what is supposed to be the end of my graduate career. At least it has this going for it: It’s a love story.

When I arrived at Yale in 2001, I was in love with one thing: medieval German epic. Unfortunately, the medievalist in the department was on the verge of retirement and urged me to find a different subfield. There’s no work to be had in medieval, she said. But something marvelous happened next. The department was understaffed, because of retirements and the snail’s pace of Yale’s faculty hiring, so we had a string of visiting professors offering the bulk of the coursework. I took a class on sexual textualities, and the idea for my dissertation was born in one of the most inspiring academic experiences I’ve ever had. And then the teacher went back to his other job. Yale did not hire or tenure any more faculty in the department for a few more years, so I felt isolated, but at least I had my dream and a project I loved.

Then I began to teach, and I immediately fell in love with that. The first two weeks of the term I taught at the Schubert with a dry-erase board I hauled around town because of the strike, but the students stuck with it, and stuck with me. I wrote recommendations for them, since they were mostly freshmen and I was the closest thing to faculty that they knew. I cringed while I did it, knowing recommendations from a nobody, even on Yale stationery, couldn’t help them along as much as I wished it could. At the end of term I told them how proud I would be in 2007 to graduate along with them. So there I was, three years in with two new loves in my life: teaching, and my research. My time at Yale has cultivated two true romances. But those familiar with German romanticism know what comes next: a plunge into the abyss.

The Department of Education reports that more than half the teachers in American higher education are part-timers, a share that rises year after year. Even here at Yale, three-quarters of the instructional staff are off the tenure track, according the AAUP. It’s clear that my life as an academic will look nothing like the lives of the teachers who have inspired me to choose this path. My life will look much more like that of my aunt Mary, who teaches piano at the State University of New York. Her title is “visiting professor,” which, like “lecturer” or “instructor,” is just a nice way of saying she has no shot at advancement or job security. She makes little more than I do, and her contract, renewed on a semester-by-semester basis, tends to arrive during the last week of class, rather than prior to start of term.

Mary works her heart out for her students, partly because she loves them, and loves to teach them piano. Increasingly, she works harder and harder because she has to. In the casualized academy where full-time security is a thing of the past, every second has to be packed with excellence. The casualization of academic labor benefits the bottom line of universities by counting on academics to be willing to work for less, and with less security, because their work is what they love. Education, which is about building hope, realizing dreams and sharing the love of learning, is now an enterprise whose efficiency feeds off teachers’ love for their students and love for their fields. Yale spokesman Tom Conroy told the New Haven Register that “the mix of faculty — tenured, term and non-ladder — provides an outstanding education.” I’m sure it does — because casual faculty’s lives depend on always being outstanding teachers. When your job can be terminated in the blink of an eye, you keep your performance as immaculate as possible. It also means you steer clear of controversy, and you certainly don’t speak up about your working conditions and the growing divide between the lives of a shrinking faculty with security and the burgeoning legions of casual workers with none.

Yale could match its profound commitment to quality teaching and research with an equally profound commitment to making jobs in higher education good ones, universally. In so doing, Yale could pronounce that we as a university value teachers, each and every one, and that we in fact love teachers, and love how they inspire students and prepare them for the future. At least, I hope that’s what Yale does. After six years of graduate school here, I’ve learned to love too much to settle for heartbreak.

This article was originally published in the Yale Daily News on April 26, 2007.

2-4-6-8? When are we to graduate?

Graduate School Dean Jon Butler has called on all departments to conduct reviews of their Ph.D. programs as part of the “2-4 Project.” The review is serious business — so serious, in fact, that last week the dean invited Ph.D. students to spend between 10 and 15 whole minutes on an anonymous electronic survey, as “no one at Yale is better placed … to offer candid and constructive feedback about our academic programs.” The purpose of the review is to yield feedback on how the Graduate School might be run better, with the clear intent of reducing time-to-degree, that classic bugbear and bane of every university administrator’s existence.

Many proposed changes are floating around in the ether of e-mails and conversations between students and directors of graduate study, and they revolve primarily around pushing students to advance to candidacy earlier — reduced foreign language requirements, streamlined qualifying exams, earlier prospectus due dates. At least, those are the changes that have already happened in my program, discussion or no. The idea seems to be that years two through four of graduate school are somehow inefficient. My own recollection of that time is quite the opposite: I progressed through my qualifiers and defended my prospectus while spending more time teaching in the classroom per week than the senior faculty did. But the Graduate School would evidently like to be able to say that it has done everything it can to get candidates working at their dissertations as quickly as possible, and that if they can’t get out by the end of year six, the student is squarely to blame.

This all begs the question of whether time-to-degree is the problem itself, or is rather a symptom of a greater crisis facing the American academy. Six years into my sojourn here, I can assure you, I am eager to leave. There’s a dearth of queer life, and I’m not getting any younger. Am I just so afraid of the challenges to come that I’d rather bide my time in the cradle as long as possible? The most successful graduates from my program in the last few years took between seven and nine years to finish, but the payoff for them were top-notch professorships. Writing a major intervention in my field takes time. That is what I was brought here to do, and it is what I intend to accomplish.

Last April, when Dean Butler announced the “2-4 Project” in an e-mail, he referred to Yale’s participation in the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s “Responsive Ph.D.” initiative. This report does something revolutionary. It confirms what graduate students have known for a very long time: The academic job market is a disaster. Perhaps only two out of 10 graduate students will find a tenure-track job. The logical solution would seem to be to just reduce the size of graduate programs, but the report doesn’t suggest this. Who, pray tell, would be the Teaching Fellows Program Participants for all the introductory language classes?

Instead, the “Responsive Ph.D.” suggests that graduate schools use their resources to point students toward nonacademic careers, and reform the structure of Ph.D. programs to reflect a doctorate that will very likely never be engaged in the kind of teaching and research career for which that degree has long been the ideal preparation. Don’t get me wrong, nonacademic careers are wonderful, and students who want them should be supported in every way. But I imagine where I could go with my dissertation about pornographic aesthetics, and what kind of lame soundtrack and bad lighting it would have — but at least the adult film industry probably provides dental insurance. And then I get to wondering why a graduate school would be so eager to foreclose on the potential of all its students to become the intellectual leaders of their generation, producing ideas that change the world and teaching whole new generations of students how to do the same.

There is much more at stake in the “2-4 Project” than the scheduling of oral exams. It is part of an effort to rethink not just how graduate school works, but what the purpose of the Ph.D. in the world really is. And while there is probably a 10-minute version of that vision that can be shoehorned into Dean Butler’s little survey, my guess is that doctoral candidates — we are a long-winded bunch — will have much more to say on the matter.

Evan Matthew Cobb is a sixth-year graduate student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and an organizer for GESO.

This article was originally published in the Yale Daily News on October 18, 2006 with the title, "Grad schools face bigger troubles than time."