Metaprofessional Milk and Cookies: Minutes

On Tuesday, April 29, 2008, we met for the last time this semester to discuss graduate-student professionalization. We used John Guillory's "Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want" and Walter Broughton and William Conlogue's "What Search Committees Want." Jeff Glover made an initial comment on the Guillory, and a spirited and contentious discussion of the readings and of professionalism more generally followed. Andrew Goldstone took minutes and requests corrections and additions from participants. All are welcome to comment. For the full minutes, follow the link to the complete blog entry.

Update: May 12, 2008. Many thanks to those who have written in with additions and corrections to my minutes, including Jeff Glover, Gabriele Hayden, Paul Grimstad, and Anon. I've changed the minutes accordingly (see the full blog entry). More contributions always welcome!


Present: Emily Coit, David Currell, Molly Farrell, Colin Gillis, Jeffrey Glover, Andrew Goldstone, David Gorin, Paul Grimstad, Gabriele Hayden, Andy Heisel, Susannah Hollister, Michael Komorowski, Laura Miles, John Muse, Patrick Redding, William Weber, Jordan Zweck, and about 15 participants who requested anonymity.

AG's note: For this discussion of a sensitive topic, we gave everyone the options of participating as normal, participating anonymously, or participating with comments omitted from the minutes. Many people requested anonymity. I believe that the desire for anonymity is an entirely reasonable response to an extremely fraught situation; but it is also a symptom of a profound institutional problem, for, clearly, the way people feel about the job market situation--and the way the English department, Yale, and the profession have responded to it--prevents them from enjoying the basic academic freedom of speaking freely and publicly on a very relevant subject. In particular I am distressed not to be able to transcribe my notes on an important and extensive discussion of the impact of casualization.

I have not indicated below where comments have been omitted at the request of the participant.

Introductory comment. Jeff Glover: In thinking about the job market, it's important to think not only about your own location but also about the location of others, since where you are in the hierarchy determines what you see, or at least how you feel about what you see. Guillory is writing this piece at a particular moment in the mid-90s when the downturn in the job market seemed to coincide with a shift from literary scholarship to a concern with race, class, and gender.

Discussion. John Muse: Does "What Search Committees Want" revise our view of the market by reminding us how our own location affects our point of view?

Colin Gillis: I have something positive to say about Guillory. He comes at a specific moment, and the essay serves the purpose of disenchantment---he's using the jarring quality of the word "preprofessionalism" against the idea of grad school as some kind of utopian library setting without deadlines or obligations other than contemplation and intellectual development. On the contrary, graduate school is not the opposite of going to business school.

Andrew Goldstone: Another use of Guillory is the way he contextualizes theory within the institution. Guillory taught me to ask: how do developments in the structures of the profession affect research methods and interests?

JM: And a related question: does preprofessionalism skew grad-student work? Whether we think so or not, it's a question worth debating.

Gabriele Hayden: Those questions are important, but I wish that Guillory had addressed money questions. Graduate programs grew because grad students were cheap teaching labor.

AG: Guillory discusses that in his later essay "The System of Graduate Education" [JSTOR], PMLA 115, no. 5 (October 2000): 1154-63.

Anon: JM's question is good. Guillory himself was not under professional pressures: he did his PhD in four years, and converted it right into a book. That's why he has a nostalgic tone.

Jeff Glover: Guillory's comment that much scholarship is "only product" is offensive--its suggestion is that Guillory should write books, and people like me should only be allowed to teach.

Anon: Yet Guillory's right--we all have to slog through crap when we read literary criticism.

Anon: Guillory's comment about professionalization seems to me parallel to discussions about professionalization in the nineteenth century. The shift from Romantic to Victorian eras saw a move from an ideal of artistic inspiration to the man of letters, a professionalization of the author. I am myself neutral on which of the two models is the better one. But setting aside the question of the value to other readers of an article, doesn't it have value for the writer in working out ideas?

Anon: Okay, so couldn't we mark that somehow on the publication?

Laura Miles: Right, that's what grad student journals do. And everyone knows we don't have to read them.

Anon: Then there are aspects of professionalization that pressure people to do work that's actually a waste of time. I see first-year students at conferences giving papers on topics they have no commitment to--that they're not going to write dissertations on.

CG: It's not a question of professionalization or not. Only a question of which strategy of professionalization: either the attempt to ignore everything, produce a dissertation, and get a job with it, or going to conferences, building up a CV, and getting a job with that.

Paul Grimstad: I agree with JG's observation about Guillory's nostalgia, but Guillory's larger point is nevertheless acute. He's saying that there is a positive correlation between the marginalization of literary criticism and its politicization. It's an innovative and falsifiable sociological approach.

Molly Farrell: I want to address this idea of intellectual maturation and the supposed alternatives of preprofessionalization or intellectual development. We're caught in a "justify your existence" model--why didn't you go to law school? This model advocates for the purity of intellectual experience at the same time as it creates disenchantment about literary criticism. But I'm tired of self-justification; can't we just recognize that what we do works in the world, that's it's balanced between the two alternatives?

GH: Is the problem of self-justification specific to our discipline or to the humanities? Non-humanities have higher sellout potential; how would you sell out a PhD on Milton? Our skills aren't convertible into extra-academic jobs in the way other fields' are. This is reflected in the cheapness and increasing casualization of the composition job.

AG: If you look at the MLA Report on the Professionalization of PhD's you'll see that their recommendation is that departments start promoting "BGN" (Business, Government, Non-profit) careers outside the academy.

LM: Isn't there some kind of correlation between the deformations of preprofessionalization and the crisis of the job market? Aren't preprofessionalization and casualization two sides of the same coin?

Emily Coit: There are some huge elephants in the room here. The discussion of being a "sellout"--and the skittishness about the term "job market"--raise a controversial question: To what extent are we--is the University--in this to make a living, and to what extent to do we have a non-profit motive? We should talk explicitly about this.

Anon: This relates to the issue of the devaluation of our work. Measurement is a universal problem for teachers. The tenure track can't compete with casualized labor because the product--student grades--is the same.

AG: And how about measuring research? How's that supposed to happen?

GH: And don't research and teaching interact in a valuable way? How's that assessed?

JM: Right, it's significant that Professionalization Day is synonymous with Publication Day. In fact Professionalization Day ought--as Broughton and Conlogue suggest--to show us that there are many tracks, and more than one model candidate.

Anon: It's not just publications. Teaching a lot--as grad students at other universities do-- brings intellectual maturity, too.

LM: Right, the important point in Broughton and Conlogue is the widespread agreement that the "model candidate is a good teacher."

Anon: And how do you measure teaching competence? It's incredibly hard to bottle that.

JM: Especially since student teaching evaluations mostly measure popularity.

Anon: Are Yale students at a disadvantage not teaching more classes? Do we need to change the priorities of our program?

GH: How do graduate students make the decision whether to teach more or to take a research fellowship? It's hard to get time off to do research once you're a professor, whereas teaching experience you miss in grad school can be recuperated later. Yet the profession is about teaching. And if we want to maintain student interest in literary study it is important that introductory writing classes be taught by ladder faculty committed to literature. At a professional level we're sandwiched between those who think we don't do enough Milton and those who think we should be doing cultural studies in a way that leaves literature behind altogether. Either way, the prestige leads away from teaching. [GH adds: I was thinking in this comment of Marjorie Perloff’s exchange with James Sullivan in PMLA 123.1 (2008), in which Perloff writes that Sullivan “is right to remind us that, even now—not just in some hypothetical future—in most large state universities, ‘English departments are composition departments, and foreign language departments are ‘language learning’ departments’” (255).] [The Perloff-Sullivan exchange is in the "Forum" section, available online here (requires subscription)--ed.]

Anon: There's a problem with the idea of "good jobs" and "bad jobs." People are happiest when teaching--probably. Isn't it grad students who produce the pressure to casualize by wanting to teach the intro and writing courses?

Jeff Glover: Aren't departments the main source of casualizing pressure?

Anon: It's complicated. A few generations ago, senior faculty taught 4/4 loads at Yale; those loads have declined over time in order to give more research time--though I'm not really sure that increased research productivity. And does "casualization" mean the use of part-time teachers, or all non-tenure-track teachers?

JG: Guillory passes the buck on casualization by attributing it to changes in American society as a whole. Deans and departments bear responsibility; couldn't they have had a conversation about the use of casualized labor?

GH: This brings to my mind the recent MLA Newsletter Comment piece by Gerald Graff. [You can download the whole newsletter issue, including Graff's comment, here--ed.] He discusses how, a few generations ago, senior professors taught composition.

Paul Grimstad: It's telling that we should be suspicious of the desire to quantify teaching ability. It shows that the ubiquity of the market has made research in the humanities more and more irrelevant--i.e., you need to go to teaching stats for the raw numbers you could never get from assessing the value of this or that angle of research. This is then another version of Guillory's basic point about how market logic and a certain kind of political engagement go together.

EC: Actually there is a very accurate way to assess the value of what we do using the terminology of the market, a very accurate measure of our exchange value. We may not like it, but it's there. It's demand. Demand for the product we as a discipline offer is going down.

AG: And in fact number of students really does affect funding at the departmental level--but not for individuals.

PG: Guillory is calling for a shift in what we consider appropriate knowledge production in our field--that is, for more relevance. He thinks we should be doing sociological analyses (maybe like the ones he does).

[Much informal discussion followed our hour.]

Click here for the full blog entry.