If any sector of higher education professionals can be described as multihyphenates, it’s humanities scholars. It was out of the humanities that some of the most important contributions in area studies and interdisciplinary studies were birthed. I raise this giftedness not out of some sense of hubris but to highlight the unique position of scholars who work in languages, literatures, and cultures. The work we do as scholars is the work of creating worlds where humans and the earth can flourish. And we want this flourishing across all communities, for our writers, our students, our thinkers, our families, our campuses, and our worlds.
Amid a presidential election season and a season of wars, it is admittedly challenging to (re)direct our attention squarely on the things we do well as humanities scholars and have some control over professionally. We train students to think about the relation of the ideological and political to the personal and professional. This is the work languages and literatures do well, and we would do well to act strategically so that our interventions have the greatest sustainable impact. As the higher education landscape and its relation to democracy as an ideal evolve, graduate education in the humanities emerges as one such place we might look to channel our energies to create meaningful, systemic change. Graduate education is both the present and the future. The ways we are attentive to it today affect higher education tomorrow.
Supporting graduate students is at the heart of the association’s mission. When the MLA advocated for moving interviews out of the convention, it opened the door to making the annual meeting a different kind of professional development event for graduate students. You see this in the offerings at the reimagined Professional Development Hub, in the Public Humanities Incubator program, and in the opportunities for graduate students to connect with one another through preconvention meet and greets and at the graduate student lounge.
But there’s still work to be done. Ten years since its publication, the Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature remains a valuable road map. It makes the point that while the value of doctoral study as an intellectual path for the creation of new knowledge is not in question, the design of doctoral study in language and literature fields leaves much to be desired. Three of its recommendations—strengthening teacher preparation, using the whole university community, and rethinking admissions practices—seem particularly relevant for this moment when academic freedom is under assault by certain lawmakers and when national and international polarizations and discord have reached dangerous proportions.
Now more than ever, graduate students need support in teaching preparation. Liberal arts classrooms are among the most fraught spaces precisely because of the work we aim to do—to encourage critical thinking, to promote diverse perspectives and develop leadership that values these perspectives, and to communicate complex ideas with clarity. Doing this work is hard; doing it without intentional training is harder. Relatedly, English and language departments are not the only places where this kind of training can take place. Encouraging our students to see themselves as a part of the larger university ecosystem can provide safe spaces for them to be in communities with others and can provide entrée for them to expand liberal arts thinking beyond humanities classrooms. And we need more diversity among students doing this work: geographic and regional diversity, diversity in identity and ideological politics, racial diversity, and diversity of interests.
For many years, we’ve been cautious about making a career in academia synonymous with the ultimate achievement of graduate education. There’s no disputing that the market was oversaturated with PhDs determined to land one of too few coveted jobs (even as we did what we could to discourage the hierarchies that attended). But my long-standing reservation about this caution was and remains tied to the ways that efforts to decenter the academic career as a pivotal path for systemic transformation adversely affect underrepresented students’ opportunities to be agents of change in the classroom. In an odd turn of events, the advocacy for caution feeds homogeneity at a time when we need diversities in greater volume.
What can we do—since we all agree that we must do something? Start by taking a look at the 2014 doctoral study report recommendations (MLA Task Force). Encourage your colleagues to consider how any of the recommendations need to be updated, and then act on those most applicable for your department. Read the 2024 issue of the ADE Bulletin (www.maps.mla.org/bulletin/issue/ade.161./), which addresses the diversity of PhD programs in English and shares the curriculum of the MLA Institutes for Reading and Writing Pedagogy—programs that prepare graduate students to teach at access-oriented institutions and that support current community college instructors. Submit to the “In Practice” section of Profession to share models of innovative graduate programs or of departmental efforts to strengthen teacher preparation, engage the whole university community, and adopt admissions practices that increase diversity among graduate students (see profession.mla.org/about-profession).
There is no shortage of things that rightly demand our attention as language, literature, and culture scholars. One place we can effect change most readily is in graduate education. So much depends on it. The future of high-quality and transformative liberal arts education and the future of humanities expertise will be shaped by our graduate students, and the stakes for that, for the formation of a genuinely informed citizenry, could not be higher.
Work Cited
MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. Modern Language Association, May 2014, www.mla.org/doctoral-study-2014. PDF download.