On Downsizing and Elitism

Stephen Watt On Downsizing and Elitism Near the end of "Access to Grind" in the last issue of the minnesota review (47), Jim Neilson and Gregory Meyerson introduce a paraphrase of a comment I made to Neilson at the 1996 MLA convention to the effect that downsizing graduate programs inevitably results in a less diverse, even "elite," student population. Because they state that such a condition already obtains in the graduate program in English at Indiana University where I teach, I feel compelled to dispel such misconceptions and to comment on downsizing as an appropriate response to an anemic academic job market. That is to say, contrary to Neilson and Meyerson's implication—and to the even more acid denunciations of "the practical" made recently by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh —I am not convinced that such strategies always already serve only the status quo. But more of that in a moment. Here is the passage in question from the Neilson-Meyerson essay: Indeed, according to Stephen Watt, reductions in admissions to the English Ph.D. program at Indiana have already resulted in a graduate student population increasingly drawn from elite private and major public institutions. Essentially, the Bérubé/Nelson proposal [for many graduate programs to reduce thenumberofstudents theyadmit] would solidify the prestige game and increase class inequity" ("Access to Grind" 246). Both sentences—the former ostensibly confirming a fact, the latter offering a prediction—are worthy of attention not because they are inaccurate, which the former certainly is, but because they could be accurate if admissions committees aren't careful about the way they go about evaluating prospective graduate students. One background of this debate is fairly easy to identify: couched in their introduction to Higher Education Under Fire (1995) amid numerous other suggestions, Bérubé and Nelson recommend that the size of some graduate programs in the humanities be reduced. As Neilson and Meyerson astutely observe here and elsewhere, this recommendation is not accompanied by any sustained consideration of the less desirable consequences of downsizing graduate programs. In an earlier, rather feisty review of Bérubé's Public Access in mr 45 &46, they argue that the downsizing of Ph.D. programs will lead to a raising of "standards" for admission: further, if schools are able "to 260 the minnesota review choose prospective graduate students from an ample pool of gifted twenty-somethings, age discrimination too is likely to increase. One probable consequence of the Bérubé/Nelson proposal, therefore, is a younger, whiter, wealthier graduate student population" (270). This forecast is, at best, only partiaUy correct. Moreover, it ignores both the host of factors graduate programs like mine considered when in 1990 we began to reduce admissions and the desirable results of downsizing only beginning to emerge today. To set the record straight, in a brief conversation I expressed to Neilson my fear that at least once in the past several years downsizing had led to the admission of a strikingly homogeneous, highly privileged new class at Indiana. This does not mean that the population of graduate students in the Ph.D. program is, at present, "increasingly drawn from elite private and major public institutions." It is not. Nor does it mean that this population in toto is either younger or whiter; in fact, in some ways just the opposite is the case. In sum, nothing yet has convinced me that downsizing Ph.D. programs at this moment in the history of graduate education was not—and is not—an effective strategy. I want to begin my brief defense of streamlining programs by responding to a faulty analogy Meyerson and NeUson make between undergraduate and doctoral programs. Their informing premise, reasonably enough, is that all capable students ought to be afforded the opportunity to pursue a B.A. or B.S., regardless of what awaits them after graduation. However, they then extend this notion to urge the more open access of doctoral programs to all students, an argument that not only trades in false analogies, but also advocates an unwise policy. For, among other reasons, the mere competence or capability that might earn a student an undergraduate degree will not serve that same student well in graduate school. So...