The Generational Compact: Graduate Students and Germanics

The Generational Compact: Graduate Students and Germanics Sara Friedrichsmeyer and Patricia Herminghouse Perhaps the major component of our professional lives is the preparation of those who will come after us. Hardly a controversial statement. The controversy begins, however, when the discussion becomes more specific: just exactly how is it that we can best fulfill this portion of our role? The ensuing debate takes place not just within departments and universities, but within the professional organizations that support our discipline as well. It is tempting to say that academic life used to be simpler. When Women in German was founded two decades ago, many of us who now find ourselves with titles and tenure were living our lives as graduate students or junior faculty. In general, we were taught by academics who defined their job—if indeed it were thought to warrant definition—as providing us with a body of knowledge that they in turn had absorbed from teachers before them. In retrospect, that tacit agreement between generations seemed to revolve around the maintenance of continuity. Given everything that has happened at universities within the past few decades, including the much-discussed "graying" of the professoriate and the more recently remarked upon "feminization" of the profession (Nollendorfs), it is not surprising that this pattern too has changed. Responsible professionals today see their roles not just as imparting knowledge. They also find themselves engaged in preparing students to teach language and literature and film and culture, to prepare materials for publication, to manage the stresses of conferences, and, perhaps most importantly, to interview. In short, how to get a job and keep it. The generational compact of the 1990s then is more complex than its predecessors. And as with most compacts, this one is not being shaped by easy consensus. One of the touchiest issues to emerge recently revolves around graduate student participation at conferences and their submissions to professional journals. Increased student participation, it is argued—and the argument is based on there being a finite number of annual journal articles and conference sessions—limits the opportunities for professorial participation. In addition, so goes this line of reasoning, the prestige value of conferences and journals when graduate students share space Women in German Yearbook 11 (1995) 224The Generational Compact with faculty is diminished. Strangely, this discussion, as far as we can tell, is not one preoccupying colleagues in other disciplines. Perhaps there are more major conferences and possibilities for publication in other disciplines, perhaps job openings are especially tight in Germanics, or perhaps the expectations of those doing the hiring in other fields do not include conference presentations and/or publications. Disciplinary differences certainly exist. We, however, are less interested in the reasons for those contrasts than in how we deal with this potentially damaging issue within our own discipline—in our departments, at our conferences, within our organizations, and in our professional journals and yearbooks. There are those who view the graduate years as best devoted to the kind of acquisition of knowledge that students will presumably need in their own academic careers, which, they point out, will quite naturally include publishing and conference presentations, but all in due time. They have a point, especially when one considers the almost exponential expansion of what today can be included as a topic of study within a German department. Writers are being discovered and rediscovered, the emergence of theory and theoretical debates presents on-going challenges to old paradigms, film studies and culture studies are being added to the curriculum, and bibliographies grow longer every year. The counter to this position comes from those who believe that the best possible training is the "hands-on" kind; according to this logic, graduate students should be learning by doing, ergo, they should be publishing and presenting papers. This too is hard to refute, as long as student participation offers exposure and training and is not understood as a proving grounds. Both these positions then have obvious merit; they can also be carried by theoretical arguments untainted by the vagaries of Germanics or the mission of the academy in the USA; advocates of both can base their arguments on the shibboleth of "quality education." But...