[Margaret Hanzimanolis]

The following letter, based upon a close analysis of the MLA Taskforce Report on Graduate Study (2013) in the Humanities, written by Margaret Hanzimanolis, Dick Ohmann and others, and based upon discussion on the radical caucus list serve.

*********************************************************************************
Dear Professor Ferguson:

The Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association hereby registers significant objections to the 2014 Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature, as well as objections to how the Task Force was constituted and did its work. We urge that its analysis not become MLA doctrine, that its recommendations not become MLA policy. and that the report not be further circulated or promoted to graduate programs in our fields.

The report fails to address the central crisis in higher education: the deprofessionalizing of our work and, in particular, the decline in pay, status, and dignity of at least 40% of people in our field with newly earned doctorates. Nor does this figure reflect the actual extent of un- and under-employment, because it ignores the cumulative effect of a ten-year decline in tenure-track hiring, on top of the slower decline since our job market peaked, in 1968. It does not link the impoverishment and career disappointments of thousands of our present and former colleagues to broad changes in the economic and political context, such as the defunding of public goods (including higher education) and the casualization of labor throughout U.S. and other societies. It does not explore the corporate, political, and philanthropic forces that have increasingly privatized the work of the university, and subordinated the public parts that remain to corporate needs and market imperatives. By thus trivializing its subject, the Report inevitably arrives at piecemeal recommendations that address symptoms rather than causes.

We also object to the makeup and procedures of the Task Force, which included no part-time or other contingent members and no graduate students; which was selected by an undemocratic and opaque method; and which issued its report without review by affected constituencies. Nor, so far as we know, did the Executive Council consult these constituencies before accepting the Report.

In addition, we note that some key recommendations conflict with one another. For instance, the emphasis on preparation for alternate careers conflicts with recommendations to strengthen preparation for teaching and to shorten time-to-degree. Those two recommendations also conflict with each other. And the recommendations to vary dissertation forms, elaborate permissible topics and modes of delivery, and add training in technology to the standard curriculum conflict with the aim of shortening the time it takes most students to earn their Ph.D.s.

We see no benefits and many drawbacks in having fields colonize one another. To imagine that doctoral level education in the languages is so insubstantial that it might be a perfectly fine training for work in some other field is the most troubling assumption that underpins the Task Force recommendations.
Thus, we reject the Report’s implicit injunction to maintain the size of the Ph.D. cohort but expand career paths, such that the “English or Language doctorate” might be a perfectly fine qualification for a Museum Director. Doctoral students or Doctorate holders who jump track should not be seen as failures. But to alter doctorate level education deliberately to accommodate quasi-random and sometimes desperate career changes is a mistake.

Finally, the Task Force does not address how traditional, status-based patterns of hiring and career advancement would change in response to the proposed changes in graduate education. Hiring patterns and the career advancement ladder thus would likely remain unchanged under these reforms of graduate education. Nor does the Task Force consider the extent to which these hiring and advancement patterns have contributed to the widening income and wealth gaps between the precariat and the professors, or how changes in graduate education such as those proposed would in any way begin to reverse the ready acceptance or enabling narratives that have hardened into a two-tiered academic system.

We believe that, taken together, the Task Force’s recommendations would have the effect of weakening doctoral education, not strengthening it. And they would certainly disperse and obscure the profession’s foundational body of knowledge.

The Task Force report does not unpack the historical and economic forces that have produced the two-tiered state of academic labor and does not build on the experience and wisdom of those most harmed. The Modern Language Association should abandon this report.

Sincerely,

Barbara Foley
for the MLA Radical Caucus

• This topic was modified 10 years, 10 months ago by Margaret Hanzimanolis.
• This topic was modified 10 years, 10 months ago by Margaret Hanzimanolis.
• This topic was modified 10 years, 10 months ago by Margaret Hanzimanolis.

[Author]

Posts