Adam Kitzes, Assistant Professor, Department of English
First things first: my apologies for a slow delivery. Part of this has simply been a schedule issue, another expression in the fine art of taking on more tasks than a person can handle at a time. But importunities aside, it is due to the challenging nature of the topic. Concerning the challenges of teaching graduate students today, I have been wondering for some time now just where and how to begin. How does one address such an urgent topic? In my short experience, I have found challenges among my graduate students that my undergraduate courses could never pose. I think some of the problems are quite frankly an issue of professionalism, which stem from a number of students who transition straight from their BA programs into their graduate studies, without fully grasping the significance of their new status at the university. What exactly this status consists of may be a topic of some debate – at Wisconsin, the TA union and the board of regents would dispute whether graduate students were laborers or apprentices – but all the same that transition from student to professional does not run smoothly for absolutely everybody.
But on a deeper level, which I have been trying to put my finger on, is that for every student I have seen make progress as a scholar and professional – in the form of a good essay or conference presentation – I have encountered at least one who has shown little interest in replicating the kind of work I did as a graduate student. This may be traced to a number of factors, but I really do not think complacency is one of them. It forces me to confront the notion that many very talented students who have legitimate interests in a professional career in my discipline – in this particular case, English, with an emphasis on literary studies – nevertheless may not be interested in exactly the critical conversations, research and publications career, or even quite the same academic job search, which has put me in the position to work with them in the first place. So now comes the hard part, namely to get a sense of what my students are after, to find out what they do want to do, and offer instruction and guidance according to those interests, as opposed to beginning with the principle that the goal graduate instruction is, first and foremost, a means to reproduce the model of the four-year institution, which is no longer the dominant model for higher education anyway.
In some ways, this sentiment seems to me, to be replicated by the other posts that have already appeared. I have read concerns from my colleagues that graduate programs at research universities are training for a profession that simply cannot sustain the number of qualified applicants who seek entrance into it. This is a major worry. But I am also aware that student enrollments across the country have never been stronger. More and more people view higher education as a critical step, not only in their professional ambitions, but I think more largely in figuring out their roles in society – and this is something that a good education really does offer an opportunity to think about. Most important, this trend shows no sign of abating, which means that colleges and universities will play an even larger role in the US.
As a professor, but also as an individual who strongly believes that opportunities should be available for everybody, I couldn’t be more excited about this prospect. But I also recognize that this will have major ramifications for the college and university system, which I can’t predict. Changes like this aren’t exactly new. They certainly aren’t an impediment to higher learning, and in some ways they can enhance it. To give one example: I can recall one professor explaining to me that the modern techniques of close-reading in literature courses, which began with the New Criticism of the early twentieth century, grew in part out of a need to teach a new population of students who did not have the background in classical languages and literature that had formerly been the mark of literacy. It was a deliberately provocative remark, but I don’t think he wanted us to deny the tremendous wealth of discoveries about language and culture, which have grown directly out of this learning technique, or the changing conditions to the university system, which helped give rise to it in the first place. Faced with that knowledge, I think it is possible to look forward to an unpredictable future with at least cautious optimism.
The university is changing to meet an entirely different population, with different needs and expectations; but they are people who are going to need quality instruction. That means somebody is going to have to be there for those students. It also means universities will probably have to train more graduate students, rather than fewer. And finally, it means that the challenge to graduate instruction and training is intrinsic to the challenge of figuring out what higher education is going to look like over the next ten to twenty years. This isn’t exactly the type of question that admits of an easy answer – I suppose we’ll all have a better idea in ten to twenty years – but the fact that it is tough does not make it any less important to our profession.
