Learning to cope

Part 3

by James Surowiecki

At Harvard and BU, the academic job crisis seems at once bigger and smaller than the universities themselves. Bigger, because the decline in the number of jobs in the humanities is a systemic problem -- too widespread, arguably, to be challenged by a single school. And smaller, because hiring at these institutions, as in most of academia, is handled by the departments themselves -- and one of the few things the available statistics do make clear is that job prospects vary significantly by field and even by subfield. That's a vagary that the university as a whole is probably too big to manage.

"Talking about the job market in globalized terms is deceptive," says Harvard dean Margot Gill. "It really does depend on what discipline or subdiscipline you're in." And J. Scott Whitaker, an associate dean at BU, suggests that it's at the departmental level that one can best get a sense of what's being done -- or not done -- for graduate students. "For each department, we want a sense of how well the curriculum is matched to students' needs, and how well it prepares them for the job market," Scott Whitaker says. "That's an ongoing process, but last year we initiated a series of program reviews on a rolling basis to look at the curriculum, to look at the research and scholarly opportunities, and to try to figure out how well we're preparing our students and what kind of world we're sending them out into."

What remains unclear, though, is how much difference departmental reviews of that kind can make. As Gill points out, the job market in each specialty changes significantly from year to year. If you were a scholar of Francophone literature, for instance, this would have been a good year to be on the market, whereas if you specialized in 18th-century English satire, you might have found interviews hard to come by. Next year, the situation could be reversed. Can departments really hope to keep up with these fluctuations, recalibrating their curricula according to every shift in academic fashion? In a changing market, such a policy might not be worth the effort.

And although there are any number of universities embarking on radical restructuring programs at the departmental level -- many designed to eliminate weaker departments entirely -- no plans of that kind have been announced at Boston-area universities. For their part, university administrators here don't seem to believe that they have a real role to play in shaping the way departments respond to the new realities of the market. The deans' emphasis on the importance of individual departments may simply be an admission that, as administrators, they have limited power to improve conditions for their graduate students.

There are other departmental strategies at BU and Harvard for dealing with the job shortage, but these are generally narrow in scope. Humanities departments at both universities have, like the schools' administrations, instituted programs designed to help graduate students find jobs, including workshops in how to write an application letter and prepare a curriculum vitae, and mock interviews conducted by members of the faculty. And there are certain departments that seem to be informally emphasizing to their students the importance of publishing articles before they actually go on the market (though there seems to be no consensus on whether this is useful advice). But larger questions about the purpose of graduate education, and what changes a continued overproduction of PhDs will bring -- which are the questions that might be most likely to lead to broader change -- seem not to be topics of real discussion. Though these questions may be of abstract interest to department members, they pale next to the responsibilities of teaching, department meetings, advising, and scholarly work. To understand and even change a system that results in 400 candidates applying for a single job, it will be necessary to ask questions that reach to the heart of academia's future.

"I actually think that the purpose of graduate education is something we should be talking about," says Schor. "The instruction that we give is very much geared to what it already has been -- that is to say, reproducing people like ourselves. It's a kind of cloning, you might say. Unfortunately, there is no market out there that can give jobs to people like us. There are jobs, of course, but they're very few and far between. And we have not only to make our students aware of this fact, which they are already, but we should be constantly rethinking what we are training them for."

Schor points to the psychological, as well as professional, importance of graduate students to their professors: the self-reproduction she's talking about helps define the world of an academic. If, as Schor puts it, "universities get to the point where we have one graduate student a year," the university will still exist, but university professors, at least in the way that we have traditionally understood them, will not.

Part 4

James Surowiecki has written for Lingua Franca and the Village Voice, and is a regular contributor to PLS.