What are some of the challenges facing graduate students entering PhD programs and the faculty members charged with mentoring students in the second decade of the twenty-first century?
Challenges for faculty mentors: Faculty find themselves enervated by the intensity of their multiple obligations. I observe that many find it difficult to take on a new kind of course, or introduce new kinds of course requirements, or explore alternatives to the monograph dissertation with their students. But some do. And some chairs or heads find ways to work with or around obstacles. A more challenging situation obtains when faculty are asked or expected to advise and mentor students on alternative academic positions and alternative careers outside the academy. I know I’m not qualified to successfully provide such mentoring. But there are networks that can be put together—networks of graduates who have gone on to careers outside the academy; networks of people in the university who have humanities doctorates, especially in the library. Mentoring can play out across a distributed network. The same difficulty pertains when programs seek ways to train doctoral students in new skills required for digitally environed scholarship. Humanities faculty, except for those identifying as digital humanists, rarely have the expertise to teach such things as concept design, coding, visualization. Nonetheless, there are often professionals across the campus to enlist in alternative modes of training; graduate students who come in with considerable skills; and tech-savvy undergraduates who can be collaborators in the classroom. Many faculty have limited knowledge of the new business models with which academic presses are experimenting and the complexity of the new ecology of scholarly publishing in the humanities; or about the new opportunities of open access publishing; or about the need to pursue Creative Commons licensing as they communicate their work. But then again, there are ways to gain the knowledge so that they can incorporate that knowledge into coursework and into discussions with advisees.
Let me also address this question of the challenges for students in a slightly different way.
Graduate students enter programs with their ideals, their diligent scholarly habits, their trained disposition of mind, and, quite likely, with a reverence for solitude. They come with their brilliance in coining a phrase, tracking an argument, targeting gaps in logic. They come with their pasts, their relationships, their histories of success and disappointment, their politics and their nonacademic interests. They come with entangled forms of online and offline lives. They come driven and dedicated. They arrive and settle in. As one year passes into another, this doctoral study turns out to be not only an intellectual journey, but also a trial, a cacophony of unpredictable pleasures, a social network, a long slog, a disenchantment, a psychic landscape, a familial sacrifice, a demanding job, an initiation, a shifting terrain of tradition and change, and a cauldron of anxiety, about adequacy, performance, and future prospects. So much life is happening. So much struggle, so much euphoria, and so much despondency. And ahead, so much that is unpredictable.
The challenge confronting doctoral students in this environment is how to claim a space of agency when everything seems so intense, when pressures don’t abate, when reserve energy flags, when stress wracks the body. But there are ways for students to become agents of their own pathway rather than cautious reproducers of the way it’s been done. Yes, graduate students are constrained by the requirements of their programs and the interests and energy and commitment of the faculty with whom they work. But they can and many do take charge of their own learning, stewarding their intellectual passions, gaining knowledge, and preparing themselves, with whatever help and guidance they can find, for the possible futures ahead. They can come to recognize, gain, and hone a range of skills or capacities increasingly necessary to doing scholarly work and teaching in the humanities. They can seek to know about the state of scholarly publishing, the shifts in scholarly practices, the new kinds of relationships scholars will have toward their work, and the opportunities and challenges of an open-access ethos. Those who increasingly use and create digital archives can pursue opportunities on their own campuses and at others to gain expertise in coding or visualization or project management or archive design or big data analytics. Because future faculty in humanities disciplines will require flexible and improvisational habits of mind and collaborative skills to bring their scholarship to fruition, they can seek opportunities to mobilize scholarly networks, networks that include not only mentors but other graduate students and undergraduate students.
Students can hone their teaching skills and become adept at engaging classes of various sizes, of diverse student literacies, and diverse demographics; and familiar with and innovative in digital teaching environments. They can grab knowledge of new modes and methods of organizing classroom dynamics, activities, and relationships. They can practice at articulating an elegant story of the relationship between their teaching and their scholarship.
As they go through their programs, they can name the capacities they already have. A person speaks three languages fluently. Discovers interesting archives. Organizes a conference or symposium. Works collaboratively to start an online journal. Teaches an innovative, hybrid course. Experiments with new platforms for scholarly communication. Runs a listserv. Takes advantage of seminars on how students learn now. They can determine where to gain knowledge and additional capacities. Perhaps the target is the basic information of how university life is organized and how it works. Perhaps knowledge of the current and projected shifts in institutions and institutional practices in higher education nationally and globally. Perhaps in reading and preparing budgets. Perhaps in coding. Perhaps in project management. Perhaps in social media outreach. Perhaps in advocacy for the humanities. Perhaps in an internship. Or in a public fellows program. They can find institutional resources to support their goals – summer workshops, research initiatives, internships, institutes, fellowships.
The intellectual and affective life of doctoral students and academic humanists will be enhanced by programs that bend to and with the receiver toward an as-yet-discovered ensemble of achievements. This is especially critical as programs attract and successfully mentor more diverse cohorts. I had a conversation some time ago with students about the question of pressing back. They stressed how critical the sense of flexible openness to a heterogeneous cohort of students can be to doctoral students from underserved and marginalized communities. They spoke eloquently of how some students work hard to gain admission to graduate programs, only to discover that many on campus don’t believe they belong, only to experience the microaggressions of daily encounters. They commented that there are students who don’t want the academy to alienate them from their families and communities, and the humanities to alienate them from certain community values and local knowledges. Savvy in the ways in which higher education is part of “the system” through which inequities are reproduced, they know that doctoral study doesn’t just have to do with the kind of job one might get in the future but also with being disciplined into normative values.
If programs respond to the challenges of a 21st century doctoral education, then students will have been prepared for careers that unfold through diverse trajectories. Those who go on to the professoriate will be prepared to pressure colleagues and administrators to adopt more expansive criteria for earning tenure and promotion, and will themselves contribute heterogeneous portfolios for advancement. They will think more capaciously about the venues of humanistic inquiry, and extend scholarly tracks to public footprints and public partnerships. They will recognize that their formidable skills have prepared them for leadership positions of all kinds in the university. They will recognize themselves as part of a larger network of humanists, those in alternative academic careers and doctorally trained professionals outside the academy. They will be prepared to contribute to the long project of changing higher education through critique, innovative initiative, advocacy, and activism, including activism directed at making the climate more inclusive, intervening in the economics of contingency, and diversifying the demographics of the professoriate. And those who go on to exciting careers outside the academy will be motivated to become advocates for and mentors of humanities doctoral students. Furthermore, those who advance to alternative positions in the academy and careers outside the academy become unavailable for recruitment into low-wage positions in higher education.