While speaking to humanities faculty and graduate students at Washington University in 2017, I was asked the following question: “In the introduction to your book, you talk about the community surrounding graduate students—not just colleagues and professors/mentors, but also family members, partners, and employers. It’s so fantastic to see you emphasize this aspect, since we often focus on how isolating graduate school can be rather than on its possibilities for collaboration and network. What led you to stress this aligning, empathetic component and how do you think it needs to function in order for graduate education to make a difference?”
Writing Manifesto for the Humanities, I came to grasp how insufficient it is to think only of the dyad of the graduate student and the advisor as the sustaining and consequential relationship in doctoral education. For one, academic humanists are increasingly part of a broader ensemble and network of people and things. The locus of thinking, for the technologically extended scholar joined along the currents of multiple networks is an ensemble affair. It involves the scholar, the device, the algorithm, the code. It involves the design architecture of platform and tool, the experiential architecture of networks, and the economy of energy. It involves the cloud, the crowd, and the “rooms,” bricks and mortar and virtual, in which scholarly thinking moves forward. Ultimately, thinking is a collaborative affair of multiple actors, human and nonhuman, virtual and material, elegantly orderly and unruly. Networked scholars are not only connected to knowledge communities close at hand—in the room, so to speak—but also connected across the globe in an interlinked ecology of scholarly practices and knowledge economies.
Second, the lives of our doctoral students have to be thought of holistically in order to support them as they make their way to their passions and their expertise. They are embedded in multiple sets of relationships, with families, with lovers, some with children, often with bosses and employees of the places where they work. These relationships can be sustaining and distracting, fraught and pleasurable, all at once. I thought particularly of the importance of this recognition in our goals of attracting greater demographic diversity in our cohorts. Over the years, I have worked with graduate students committed to returning to their communities, motivated by the goal of giving back to parents, neighbors, and friends hard-earned expertise and pedagogical practice.
Third, doctoral students are members of a far larger community of humanists than the faculty and peers in their programs. As teachers, they are part of a humanities workforce, as people dedicated to the work of the humanities in the world they are part of a larger community of allies, people outside the academy whose work, whose everyday pleasures and lasting legacies, translate the value of the humanities in the world. Allies include doctorally-trained humanists employed throughout the academy in positions outside departments; they are professional humanists in non-academic careers; they are self-tutored humanists in love with reading or music or museums or archives and archeological sites; they are former students in humanities disciplines.
Instead of thinking of humanities education as an education for independence of thought, I find it more empowering to think of it as an education in the interdependency of thought. I’ve had so many individuals in and out of the academy, so many networks across the academy, that have helped think with me, that have supported my work, that have made my career what it has become. Thinking capaciously about multiple, dispersed communities and networks of enablement helps conceptualize an ecology of doctoral education that draws a larger network of people into a mentoring ensemble.