Professionalism: What Graduate Students Need

In what follows, I argue that we need to think more seriously about graduate education as professional training: that is, as training geared towards preparing students to perform the work of professional academics. ¹ Implicit in my argument is, of course, the idea that we don’t do this now. The closest we now come is when we think about preparing our students “for the market.” The sadly appropriate resonances of cattle ranching in this phrase aside, such preparation assumes that our students disappear once they get that magical call from the chair of another department. In this way training solely for the market is complicit with the fact, as John Guillory notes, that getting an academic job has become itself “the culmination of a successful career” (92). More practically, it leaves graduate students largely unprepared for the actual work they’ll do once they land a job. Of course, there are certain things that one can learn only on the ground, but right now we carry this situation to an extreme: the resulting game of catch-up is one of the main reasons why (as everybody knows) “you can’t get any writing done your first year.”

This is a big problem, for which there is no simple fix. In what follows I’ll discuss graduate training in my own field of English, both because its theory and practice are what I know best, and because English exemplifies an academic mindset that sees graduate training as fundamentally different from professional training, rather than a version of such training. My proposal for one course of action is as follows: I think that every PhD student should receive at some point on the way to their degree a one-course teaching release and instead be paid for a semester’s worth of administrative activity in their department. This could take the form of working on a journal, serving on a labor-intensive committee, mentoring other graduate students, or other activities depending on the particular department. If this seems like a foolish (or possibly irrelevant; what does administrative work have to do with professional training?) plan of action, this is because—as I will discuss below—the profession operates under a falsely constrained notion of what constitutes its work. Thus, my suggestion is not aimed at maintaining the status quo; on the contrary, it’s meant to serve the long-term goal of effecting institutional and cultural change within our departments.

Anti-pedagogy

No one can teach you anything, not at the core, at the source of it.

—Henry Cameron

Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead tells the story of architect Howard Roark’s heroic and ultimately triumphant struggle against the forces of professional and social conformity. Near the book’s beginning Roark, who has been expelled from the Architectural School of the Stanton Institute of Technology, is called into the Dean’s office and given a final chance to redeem himself. During this scene we learn that although Roark has excelled in his math and engineering courses, he has repeatedly refused to complete the historical exercises required by his professor of design. “When you were given projects that left the choice of style up to you and you turned in one of your wild stunts,” the Dean tells him,

—well, frankly, your teachers passed you because they did not know what to make of it. But, when you were given an exercise in the historical styles, a Tudor chapel or a French opera house to design—and you turned in something that looked like a lot of boxes piled together without rhyme or reason—would you say it was an answer to an assignment or plain insubordination?

(21)

Roark replies simply, “It was insubordination” (21). Turning down an offer to return to the institution after he has taken a year off “to grow up” (22), he informs his befuddled former dean, “I see no purpose in doing Renaissance villas. Why learn to design them when I’ll never build them?” (22).

As anyone familiar with Rand’s novel (or the 1949 film adaptation starring Gary Cooper...