Latest Forecast: Future of English Profession

I take it that when panels with titles such as “the future of the profession” start being organized, the future has become a focus of some anxiety. As the present appears less stable, the future feels less assured. An event such as this panel suggests a felt need to estimate how various forces and actors are pushing, or trying to push, or may be judged likely to push, the horizon of present circumstance forward amid what the actors themselves perceive as increased velocities of change.

As I hear the question talked about by members of our community now, current concern about the future has at least four aspects:

1. Departmental and institutional staffing practices and their consequences. It is a well known and reasonably well documented fact that English departments staff undergraduate courses by using substantial numbers of non-tenure-track faculty members along with (where there are graduate programs) graduate student teaching assistants (Laurence). It is widely rumored, though poorly documented at least for the immediate past, that such use of adjuncts and TAs has been growing and the size of the tenure-track faculty shrinking.

More sophisticated observers note that the problem has as much to do with proportions as with absolute numbers. As higher education’s student enrollments increase, the need for faculty members to teach upper-division courses for majors may grow, but the need for instructors to staff courses such as required first-year writing grows far more. Given the political economy of staffing required lower-division courses and the revealed preference of members of the tenured faculty to avoid teaching such courses insofar as possible, continued increases in student enrollments unavoidably place an increasing strain on the principle of the scholar-teacher and the whole notion of the faculty and faculty authority derived from that principle.

With regard to the future of the profession, the question arises of when the corps of non-tenure-track instructors hired to teach and only teach bulks so large in the composition of the entire faculty that the scholarly and teaching functions have effectively been severed. What is the “tipping point” where the proportion of the total instructional force holding adjunct appointments has grown so large as to precipitate a qualitative change in the total institutional environment and the character of the faculty as a power in the institution?

2. Employment opportunities for PhDs, especially new PhDs. The too scant supply of tenure-track positions and long-depressed state of the academic job market for PhDs in English have attracted emphatic attention. Here two questions are debated: (1) how large should the enterprise of graduate, and especially doctoral, education be and (2) what exactly should the substance of a doctoral education encompass?

Doctoral education is frequently alleged to slight all employment destinations except a restricted circle of placements in PhD-granting departments. One prominent thread of the recent discussion maintains that the curriculum of doctoral education needs to educate future faculty members more directly for departments where teaching, not publication, stands at the center of what faculty members do, and for faculty work as it exists in baccalaureate and two-year colleges. More, doctoral education is being asked to take heed of the fact that, historically, small but not insignificant numbers of PhDs have made careers in business, government, and not-for-profit organizations.

Ten MLA surveys of PhD placement conducted over a period of twenty years (1976–77 to 1996–97) indicate a higher education system ready to absorb something on the order of 400 new PhD recipients a year to tenure-track academic positions. Every year since 1995, the system’s 140-plus English doctoral programs have granted degrees to more than 1,000 individuals, and in only one of the thirty-two years from 1969 through 2000 did U.S. doctoral programs send out fewer than 700 graduates (Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities). (The year in question was 1987, when the National Research Council reported 669 PhD degree awards in English.)

To me, the real significance of these long-standing numerical imbalances appears when one adds the temporal dimension—that it takes, on average, eight years for someone to complete a PhD program, between one and three or more years to secure a tenure-track position, and then an additional six years to earn tenure. That is, pursuing a career position as a tenured English professor requires fifteen or more years of a college graduate’s life. And, if the findings from Maresi Nerad and Joseph Cerny’s study of career paths to 1995 of 800 1983–85 English PhD recipients provide a reasonably accurate guide, we can take it as given that one-third of those who receive doctoral degrees in our field will not achieve the goal of a tenured position (Nerad and Cerny).

More than anything else, these realities, and the extraordinarily high opportunity costs they signify, persuade me that responsible PhD-granting departments need to exercise some measure of deliberate population control and that responsible institutions need to provide well-supported career development programs for the graduate students they encourage to pursue doctoral study. Such career development should emphasize the full range of employment situations PhDs have in fact taken up, including placement in business, government, not-for-profit organizations, secondary school teaching, and faculty appointments in higher education.

3. The unsettled state of academic life generally in an institutional environment many observers describe as subject to velocities of change greater than any in the past 50 years. There is a widespread sense that established assumptions, values, and practices are being challenged by change and challenged to change.

It seems clear beyond dispute that there has in fact been a consequential change in the way society finances higher education, especially public higher education. Public policy takes a different view of the baccalaureate degree today than it did ten or fifteen years ago. Formerly seen as a general public good, the degree is now viewed as a benefit primarily to the individuals who receive it rather than to the society that confers it. Partly as a consequence of this shift and partly as a cause of it, an increased share of costs formerly socialized through direct state support has been shifted to students and their families in the form of tuition or its proxies, student loans or institutional financial aid.

At the same time, many members of our community join other observers of higher education in noting an increased emphasis on the immediate, demonstrable utility of educational programs, often expressed as skepticism, if not outright hostility, toward the liberal arts and especially toward study in the humanities. Such pressure can come from students and parents, from governmental officials, or from institutional administrators.

Students and parents ask for a clear connection between academic programs and remunerative employment secured quickly after graduation—the more so in an environment of increased costs and ever-higher levels of student loan debt. Governmental officials judge higher education in terms of its responsiveness to state needs and priorities, whether those needs be formulated in economic or in educational terms. And the contributions departments make to an institution’s ability to attract students and the funding it needs to sustain itself financially are among the measures institutional administrators use to judge programs.

Even before the events of September 11, 2001, it seemed reasonable to expect the conjoined pressures of cost and utility to intensify, especially in public higher education, as the economy and state budgetary circumstances weakened following an exceptional period of prosperity and government surpluses. A sudden plunge into recession, deficits, and general social anxiety brings with it budget reductions and, it seems reasonable to expect, an accompanying administrative scrutiny of programs and practices for places to cull out the moneys needed to bring institutional budgets into balance.

I am especially curious to see the effect on the segment of institutions that up to now have been most shielded from these kinds of pressures—the well-endowed private colleges and universities. Even before September 11 and the shocking, violent transition from complacency to our newly fledged epoch for paranoids, the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the end of the decade-long bull market in equities had contracted the endowments of the well-endowed considerably. Now, and for the foreseeable future, every physical asset and piece of economic and social infrastructure stands in the absent shadow of the World Trade Center—as if at risk for attack and sudden, catastrophic destruction.

As the financial markets enter wholly uncharted regions, where risk has become for all practical purposes incalculable, how will those charged with managing the wealth of the wealthy exercise the duty of prudence in making judgments about the anticipated future values of and returns on these institutions’ endowment portfolios? What options will these often high-tuition institutions pursue, now that their budgetary situations too have become more precarious? And what will be the response from current and prospective students, their families, and alumni?

4. The state of the study and teaching of English considered as an array of intellectual and educational activities in the context of higher education. As I listen to members talk about life in their departments, an anecdotal impression emerges of departments experiencing high and increasing degrees of intellectual fragmentation and organizational atomization. (Like all anecdotal impressions about a system as large and diverse as American higher education, this one should be taken with many a grain of salt.)

In a significant number of departments, it seems that discussion of curriculum considered as a collective intellectual and educational project has reached an impasse. The conflicting perspectives and claims of competing interest groups—literary and cultural studies, for example—seem impossible to reconcile. Indeed, the lesson of experience appears to be that attempts to reconcile, mediate, or otherwise deal with disagreements through such stratagems as “teach the conflicts” (Graff) lead to episodes of political nastiness that do more harm than good and that no one cares to repeat if they can possibly avoid it. In the face of this impasse, or in reaction against the unproductiveness of prior efforts at collective engagement, as well as their sheer unpleasantness, faculty members may find themselves inclined to withdraw from departmental life insofar as they can to focus on their individual teaching and writing projects.

But the question then arises whether a collection or mere accumulation of courses developed out of the uncoordinated private elections of individual faculty members can stand as a curriculum, however brilliant in conception and however artfully taught the individual courses may be. Is curriculum created on such a basis equal to, more than, or less than the sum of its parts?

On the one hand, such a situation can promote a somewhat solipsistic sense that each course has to do everything, since the sense is absent or much reduced of how course-taking across the curriculum contributes to development of an understanding that is cumulative. On the other hand, to the extent that each separate course tends to the condition of being an area of study in itself, every course can come to seem functionally equivalent to every other. It becomes harder to explain what, educationally speaking, each course contributes to the development of understanding in the area of study represented in the department, why the department needs this many courses (or more pointedly, faculty positions) rather than that, or why this or these courses (and the faculty positions connected with them) might not be dispensed with. I take it I do not need to spell out why, in the current administrative and budgetary context, such a situation is likely to be an anxious one.

I think it worth asking how conditions of intellectual fragmentation and curricular atomization feed back into much-discussed problems of staffing and employment. As candidates for academic employment, PhDs in English are highly non-fungible, non-interchangeable. Academic hiring occurs by subspecialty, and a person who has given eight or ten years to becoming a PhD in Renaissance English literature is not to be remade or repackaged into someone qualified to compete for a position in contemporary mass media.

As intellectual possibilities become more open and less bound within conventional or traditional categories, pressure increases for the curriculum to become similarly open—and also, it must be said, less standardized and predictable. Is one unintended consequence of such developments a heightened unpredictability and anxiety in the relation between the choice of academic specialization graduate students make and their prospects for academic employment? The situation is one of a heightened degree of unpredictability or idiosyncrasy at the level of the individual faculty appointment and degree holder, coupled with heightened contingency as to which idiosyncratic possibility will be preferred in any given year or case.

The personal and social impact of this extraordinary combination of necessity and chance on graduate students and the entire environment of graduate education is worth some discussion. To what degree does removing limitation on intellectual and curricular possibility find an unintended consequence in the sense among newly fledged PhDs that the academic employment search resembles a lottery or dice game?

The example also suggests how hiring implies the point beyond which collective faculty discussion of the larger intellectual shape of the department and the curriculum can no longer be put off. The departmental faculty, fortunately, still holds the power to decide who gets hired, and decisions about who gets hired are effectively decisions about what gets taught and who will teach it. I worry what results ensue from a circumstance where faculty members feel so many incentives to slight or withdraw from collective discussion of lower-stakes matters, precisely because they disagree so strongly—but then must confront the problem of how to work together to make high-stakes decisions. I’d like to think that decently conducted, low-stakes decisions might function as practice at what after all is a far from easy thing to do—and also as occasions for building trust in the department’s ability to function as such, trust that will surely be sorely tested in higher-stakes matters.

However quixotic that thought may be, it seems to me that a difficult question is forming at the troubled interface where the creative turbulence of faculty members’ disciplinary and interdisciplinary intellectual activity meets the temporal and practical limits of curricular possibility: what is the future of the literary chronology, the basic time line that has so clearly and perdurably served as the string on which the beads of curriculum and professorial positions have been strung? Where, how, and to which students will or should study in English offer acquaintance with the literary past and general problems such as periodization that arise in connection with it—in the form of a concept such as Romanticism, for example (including such critical but still dependently related reformations as PFKAR—“the period formerly known as Romanticism”)? Never? Graduate students? Undergraduate English majors? Secondary school students? Certain categories of elite students? Another way to put this is to say that English has its own version of a Y2K problem, and the problem has at least two facets:

1. As of 1 January 2000, all dates beginning with 19-- became objectified in a way they had not been previously. With every passing year, the 20th century and its massive literary archive confront us more and more as the 19th century does, or the 18th. It becomes less and less possible to pretend that the archive is manageable either conceptually or educationally under any imaginable institutional circumstances.

2. The second aspect of our Y2K problem I find hard to talk about, or at least hard to talk about cogently. It has to do with students now—our sense of who they are, what they are ready or unready for, what they need from study with us, all the presuppositions and ever-readjusting anticipations about them that inform the way you or I make up a syllabus, how much reading we assign, how we who in certain narrow respects know more (but in other ways remain completely in the dark) address those who in certain respects bring us nothing so much as their ignorance (but in other respects are perhaps far more knowing than we are). As we advance into the new millennium, the democratization of education and the increasing access, and social demand for access, to higher education place the question of students squarely before us.

John Guillory, referring to Alain Touraine’s The Academic System in American Society, has analyzed the basic dynamic as one whereby democratization produces “massification”—that is, the transformation of secondary and now of postsecondary education from elite to mass education systems. Massification, in its turn, produces increasing stratification—the arrangement of institutions in a hierarchy according to the type of education they offer, the populations they serve, and the status ascribed to these (1155).

One wants to say of students what one wants to say of the society they live in: that it is to a considerable degree severed from history—marooned in a temporally undifferentiated contemporaneity—and inclined to see literature not in educational or intellectual terms but as one of the several modes of mass entertainment. The question is, what happens when such students encounter an educational apparatus of literary study that has so many tacit dependencies on historical narratives and events keyed to such dates as 1660, 1789, or 1914?

Of course, one item students apparently continue to bring with them—or perhaps that continues to bring them to us—is a residual belief in culturally prestigious names. But this motive is one some members of the community may feel least inclined to credit and toward which a few may even be ready to express a condescension that in its tenor and effect may seem a little hard to distinguish from the old social snobbery they might at other moments affect to despise. But let us not be too quickly unsympathetic to our colleagues, or too quick to imagine that they are not in fact ourselves. For truly, the situation of those who know more is never an easy one in relation to those still lost in ignorance (I am being partly ironic, but only partly).

The difficulty may appear most visibly if we consider the situation of the teacher in the secondary school in comparison to that of the professor in the context of advanced study. Listening to secondary school teachers talk about their classrooms, I am struck by how overwhelming for them is the problem of student engagement or disengagement. The reality of students and what students do when presented with a piece of literature perpetually pulls instruction to its first point: how do I get them interested? How do I get them to begin reading, to begin to want to read? The brilliance and appeal of these teachers flow from the intelligence of their engagement with a pedagogical situation where reading cannot be taken for granted. But the limitation of this situation should not be overlooked: it is hard to see how learning is not arrested at its first point such that a series of encounters with books never leads to something cumulative and progressive.

It is perhaps possible to see a reciprocal manifestation of the same problem in advanced study. Advanced study always presumes capacities for articulate reading, interpretation, and understanding that it is itself reluctant to teach—or perhaps humbly excuses itself as incompetent to teach or more meanly holds itself above teaching. Of course, it is anyone’s privilege to adopt the position that the intellectually, historically, and aesthetically informed sort of “messing around with literature” that’s been the stock in trade of English departments for the greater part of their 100-year history should not be taught because it perpetuates a social practice and set of mystifications that stand in the way of self- or social understanding and hence of anything deserving of the name of education.

Either way—whether the subject or the students are unworthy to be taught—the result is the same: the erosion of conviction about the educational formation called literary studies and the institutional formation called the English department. How members in the field respond to the quandaries posed by the literary archive in relation to the educational apparatus and the questions posed by students for that same apparatus will in my estimation primarily decide the value of English futures.

What is wanted—at least, what I hear a good many MLA members ask for—is an account of “what English departments do” that is institutionally persuasive in the sense that it will convey to administrators who are charged with ensuring the future well-being of institutions and their educational programs, and also to parents, students, and the public, that we in English departments know what we are doing and why it is worth doing. Of course, for those of us who count ourselves members of the community, there is a double bind connected with any attempt to make headway on this problem. An account of “what English departments do” can emerge only from statements of individuals; but no account that is merely an individual’s can possibly stand as such an account.

I do think that our community can work out some minimal criteria for such accounts of what our departments do. I’d like to propose three for discussion here.

1. Such accounts need to maintain conscious and self-critical distinctness from self-justification and self-congratulation. I will even assert that self-congratulation or self-justification is precisely what is not wanted, and that a confused lapse into either is bound to be fatal to our credibility. In stance, tone, and substance, what is wanted and needed are qualities much closer to self-awareness or self-knowledge than to either self-congratulation or self-justification. In my estimation, knowing the difference and knowing how to enact the difference are crucial conditions for success.

2. Such accounts should take care to describe the educational goods derived from studies undertaken in our departments in such a way as to make evident how these goods are unmistakably specific to us—to our departments and our subject area. That is, the accounts we formulate should not be pitched at so high a level of generality that they make what we do more or less identical to humanistic study or the liberal arts at large. This is one weakness I see in accounts that stake their appeals on terms such as “critical thinking” or “reading, writing, and literacy.”

The problem is not that these terms want truth as descriptions of what we do—far from it. The problem is that it is hard to sustain an argument that, as descriptions, they are true of us only or uniquely. In that respect, such formulations unwittingly encourage administrators, students, and members of the public to regard our departments as more or less identical with any or all other units or faculties that can plausibly lay claim to providing these same educational goods.

To the extent that departments and faculties come to be seen as more or less identical in their educational purposes and functions, they likewise arguably become (at least potentially) interchangeable with and substitutable for one another—since the departments are all doing essentially the same thing (we ourselves seemed to say so and authorize the conclusion). There is risk when students (or their parents) assume that what’s to be gained from study in English is pretty much the same as what’s to be gained from study in any number of other departments.

There would be more than risk, perhaps, something more like threat, were institutional administrators to proceed from a similar assumption. I hasten to add that I am describing a purely hypothetical progression, not a practical possibility I see being actively considered as a basis for institutional reorganization. However, I confess, in my more paranoid moments I have caught myself wondering whether certain modes of interdisciplinarity might not qualify. I do think that the logic of such rhetorical identities is most worth our attention before the administrator community entertains the same conclusion and proceeds to make it a basis for practical action. (As a historical analogue, consider Classics and the educational claim some teachers of Latin and Greek made for the study of classical languages as productive of “mental discipline.”)

3. Such accounts will meet with more success the more they take a neutrally descriptive rather than judgmentally prescriptive stance. Rather than picking and choosing favorites from among the activities and approaches currently active in our programs and teaching—essentially, getting the scene up into a melodrama of good guys and bad guys—we do better when we attempt simply to understand and describe what it is our departments actually have done and are doing. This is harder than it sounds, since all of us have our favorites and frame what we think is happening, or more likely what we think isn’t happening but ought to, in terms that (whatever we may think our intentions are) tend to begrudge the institutional space one or another of our colleagues occupies. The effect is best judged when, as happens, we find ourselves on the receiving end of this dynamic.

Now comes the part where I really get myself into trouble—or even more trouble than I am in already. Do I dare to stake out some possible positive points for an account of what English departments do? Actually, I am going to try out not one phrasing but two.

The first comes from the experience of working with dozens of departments and hundreds of individual faculty members over the course of fifteen years as an MLA staff member. Especially important were the twenty-nine departments that in the early 1990s took part in a curriculum review project that the MLA’s Office of English Programs administered with support from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. After listening to faculty members disagree with one another and find fault with every, any, and all the curricular ideas that any one or any department brought forward, I was surprised to find the experience had led me to the paradoxical conclusion that our community does indeed hold some intellectual values in common that we believe our teaching ought to transmit.

One lesson I think I learned is that accounts of “what our departments do” need to be disentangled in our own thinking from descriptions of curricula. We won’t ever, and ought never, agree as a scholarly community on “the one best curriculum for English,” and we ought never, and need never, trap ourselves into thinking that lack of such agreement is our chief problem. What we’re looking for, I have come to believe, isn’t “the ideal curriculum” but a level of description and discourse pitched between description of curriculum and the terms commonly used for describing the liberal arts in general.

I ask you, then, to consider the four points that follow as an experimental example of what such a middle discourse for describing “what we do” looks and sounds like. Perhaps it is better put as a question: Is this what such a middle discourse looks and sounds like? And do you recognize such a discourse as potentially useful—as something that might do good work for us in our institutions, with members of the public, and in our own community? So, the four points: