September-October 2005

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Stars, Apprentices, and the Scholar-Teacher Split

Teaching and research don’t have to battle each other for graduate students’ attention.

By Christine Farris

In an essay in Peter C. Herman’s Day Late, Dollar Short: The Next Generation and the New Academy, published in 2000, English professor Sharon O’Dair makes the connection between the current situation of English graduate students and the delusions of young basketball players with “hoop dreams” who commit themselves to the impossible goal of becoming stars in the National Basketball Association. Pressured to publish earlier, English graduate teaching assistants, most of whom want to be professors of literature, are, as former Modern Language Association president Robert Scholes admits in Profession 2004, “generally overworked, undercompensated, and trained for jobs that just aren’t there.” Many are forced to become “freeway flyers,” teaching section upon section of composition on multiple campuses, with no hope of advancement, their “lit dreams” shattered.

Perhaps a more appropriate analogy these days would be to The Apprentice, the television “reality show” hosted by entrepreneur Donald Trump. Signifying a professional in training as opposed to an employee, “apprentice” is the term Yale University president Richard Levin resurrected during the 1995–96 TA strike on his campus to argue that the work of graduate students is actually part of their training as teachers and scholars. Although apprenticeship is a much discredited concept in academia, the twenty-first century version of it is dramatized weekly on Trump’s show in ways not unfamiliar to academics on the job market. Out of twenty or so accomplished final candidates, already sifted from hundreds of thousands of applicants, only one can survive the not-so-beneficent master’s series of arduous tasks to win, finally, what is not the permanent job, but the Apprenticeship, singular.

Beyond the Rhetoric of Support

I understand and support collective bargaining among non-tenure-track faculty and graduate student instructors to establish good employment practices, especially given the growing reliance on contingent labor and the erosion of working conditions. Insisting on collective bargaining and employee, not apprentice, status, “seem[s] far better than silence or passive endurance,” as English professor Stephen Watt wrote in 1997 in Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis, a collection edited by English professor Cary Nelson. We do not have to remain helpless in the face of a changing job market or university, hopelessly bound up in the corporate business of deluding the future professoriate with no solution in sight. Our actions, however, have to be more than just the support that good liberals extend to workers everywhere.

The rhetoric of support for student labor comes not just from members of the contingent labor force but also, to their credit, from members of the senior professoriate. It is typically disconnected, however, from any realistic calls for restructuring English departments, reallocating budgets, or improving undergraduate education. This rhetoric of support can mask not just guilt, but what is finally a conservative view of the profession of English, a perspective that, in the end, supports a “star system” bolstered by cheap teaching labor. It does so particularly in its lamentation over lost opportunities among surplus PhDs for a “life of the mind,” undisturbed by the teaching of undergraduates who would perhaps benefit the most from the expert knowledge of these scholars of English.

I am glad that the apprenticeship metaphor seems to have run its course in the academy. As a writing program director and a former acting and associate department chair, I am aware that the public research university cannot survive without the teaching of graduate TAs. As administrators, we broker with the exchange value of that labor every day with deans on behalf of all our faculty colleagues, not just TAs.

But when we talk about teaching as only labor, we risk what is finally a counterproductive split between our work as teachers and our work as scholars. Such a split alienates the individual from her work as a teacher and distorts public perception of the work university teachers do. Furthermore, it is a split that ultimately plays into a system of academic work in which “the university does not prefer the best or most experienced teachers,” but “the cheapest teachers,” as English professor Marc Bousquet pointed out in College English in 2003. Such bottom-line-driven hiring to staff general education courses, particularly as English majors and graduate programs shrink, will eventually downsize and Wal-mart-ize our expert knowledge in English and erode tenure-track lines for everyone.

Some of my thinking on the split between teaching and scholarship comes from my participation over the last several years in the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, “a multiyear research and action project to support departments’ efforts to more purposely structure their doctoral programs” (see http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/CID/index.htm). My department is among the English departments in the country chosen by the Carnegie Foundation to share the improvements each department team has made in its doctoral program. I play—or work—on the team. If we were contestants on The Apprentice, many of us would be fired by now, as we simply cannot make decisions with Trump-like speed—our decisions, after all, affect more than one part of a department.

Like other teams, our department wants to shorten time to degree and improve our recruitment package for graduate students and their eventual chances on the job market. To recruit PhD applicants who will go the distance, we must compete with peer institutions and what they offer new BAs in English. What is the capital at the disposal of, say, a Big Ten university? Some fellowships, but mostly stipends tied to teaching.

Although teaching experience in a variety of courses may be what will later tip the scales in a candidate’s favor on the job market, after the amount of the stipend and the length of the contract, teaching is the first card dealt in the recruitment pack: when, how much, how much release from it, and which courses—composition or literature? We plan to offer reduced loads (1-1) to those in the first year of teaching and to those making the swiftest progress toward exams and the dissertation, a policy that, if you think about it, is consistent with the ways in which scholarly accomplishments in the profession release “star” faculty from teaching. Reducing our TAs’ teaching load is certainly a reform that has been a long time coming; graduate students teaching only one course a semester can devote more time to their scholarship as well as to each course they teach. Nevertheless, we do not want to turn teaching into a penalty for some or have to resort to hiring adjuncts to staff courses, consequently adding even more levels to the underclass we are presumably working to dissolve.

O’Dair admits in her essay—citing English professor Michael Bérubé—that the “collapse in the job market” in English is actually “a certain kind of collapse, not just in full-time tenure-track jobs, but most especially in full-time, tenure-track jobs to teach upper-division and graduate-level courses in literature, and in some cases, cultural studies.” The fact is that while the number of traditional literature jobs shrinks, there are more positions in or including composition and rhetoric than ever before. The fall 2004 MLA Newsletter reported that over the previous four years, roughly 30 percent of all English job advertisements in the MLA’s job information list had “composition and rhetoric” as the primary term, or at least one of the index terms, selected for job seekers to search the ad—as many as or more than all the ads indexed as “British literature” (all periods), the second highest category. The majority of these composition and rhetoric listings were for full-time tenure-track positions. Nevertheless, rather than lose graduate students in literature, most PhD programs, alarmed about the job crisis, buy into the star system and continue urging doctoral students to pursue the tenure-track job in literature at any cost.

Unproductive Split

I find the conflation of the literature-composition and scholarship- teaching binaries in analyses of the job crisis oversimplified and unproductive. Ultimately, it is not in the best long-term interests of graduate students to represent teaching simply as part of an attractive stipend or signing bonus, as only that which slows down dissertations, or as merely a desirable c.v. item.

When one hears a graduate student say that the curriculum in the introductory composition course he is assigned to teach needs to better address his career goals, it becomes clear that he is getting a rather foreshortened view of the profession.

Working with the needs of undergraduate students is a part of professional development and, indeed, part of the career graduate students are working toward. It is our responsibility to improve the working conditions of teachers, but we are not in the business only of “managing an employment service for graduate programs in English studies,” as Joseph Harris, director of writing at Duke University, put it in 2000 in College Composition and Communication. Our professionalization of graduate students needs to offer a larger, more generous picture of a profession than labor talks alone generally make possible. We are also at the university for and because of the undergraduates.

Graduate students’ understanding of themselves as teachers and teaching as intellectual work is shaped largely by their awareness of whose capital is tied to which courses in a department. As Kathleen McCormick, professor of literature and pedagogy at the State University of New York College at Purchase, wrote in Profession 2003, their professional identity is shaped by the attitudes faculty project about teaching first-year and lower-division courses. Harris reminds us that if “we have abandoned a key part of our curriculum . . . we have said, in effect, that almost anybody who enrolls in a graduate program in English can teach—at reduced salary—the courses that make up the bulk of our undergraduate enrollments.” Graduate students seldom see tenure-track faculty in the first-year writing or even literature classroom. There is the assumption that one simply progresses from teaching composition to teaching literature, borne out in many departments with an orientation in the teaching of composition but nothing in the teaching of a literature course.

About seven years ago, we decided that our PhD program needed to forge stronger connections between scholarly work and the work of teaching and, at the same time, between literature and composition. For such bridge building to be meaningful, however, we knew it would have to involve a greater number of department faculty members in teacher preparation and the teaching of first-year courses.

As part of our participation in the Preparing Future Faculty program, an initiative of the Council of Graduate Schools and the Association of American Colleges and Universities, we designed a second pedagogy seminar in the teaching of literature and culture to follow and build on the composition pedagogy seminar. Faculty teaching the seminar collaborate with experienced TAs in the conception, design, and teaching of a first-year English course that integrates literature, culture, and composition. If taken over two semesters, the course also fulfills the first-year writing requirement. These collaborations are now part of our ongoing efforts to redistribute labor and to unify the teaching of reading and writing in ways that need not be disconnected from or threatening to instructors’ scholarly interests. So far, about a dozen different versions of this seminar have been offered, coordinated with topics for the first-year course, including representations of violence, disaster, war, and monstrosity; literature and animal rights; the literature of passing; literature and medicine; language, metaphor, and thought; and contemporary concepts of genre.

In our further efforts to adequately prepare all degree candidates to teach writing, literature, and culture in ways that improve both the graduate and the undergraduate curricula, we have discussed a possible third type of pedagogy seminar, coordinated with what are now survey and upper-division courses separated by historical period and continent; graduate students and faculty across areas of specialization might collaboratively redesign and teach what would become entirely new courses. If graduate students move into more upper-division teaching opportunities, however, who will teach the vacant regular composition sections? Not-so-cheap tenure-line faculty? Part-time labor from other internal and external PhD programs? These are important questions if we are to expand this combined scholarship-teaching arrangement. For now, at least, this collaboration returns more tenure-line faculty to the first-year classroom and enables them to mentor graduate student instructors. Back in the day, perhaps they would have called this an apprenticeship.

Until a radical transformation of the American higher education system is at hand (and there is no evidence that it is even on the horizon), we can work locally at something like this redistribution of work. A curriculum that better represents and enacts the relationship between teaching and scholarship in the profession; that attempts to unify rather than separate our scholarly and pedagogical responsibilities; that takes professional development, including our work as teachers, seriously should not only help us recruit quality graduate students. It should also better enable us to insist on reduced loads and higher pay for this expertise, both in the university granting the PhD and in the marketplace that efforts such as the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate hope to transform.

Christine Farris is professor of English at Indiana University. Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction: First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars, a volume she co-edited with Judith H. Anderson, is forthcoming from the Modern Language Association.