William Pannapacker wants to destroy higher education in the humanities.

Yesterday, I was reading CAA’s year in review newsletter and was drawn to the title of Pannapacker’s July 27 article, Over Educated, Underemployed: How to fix higher education. Pannapacker received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1999 and is now an Associate Professor at Hope College. Given that he is an academic, I wasn’t sure what to expect upon reading the article. But I can tell you that I wasn’t expecting to be absolutely infuriated. Pannapacker seems to forget that he was, at one time, a graduate student. He singlehandedly manages to insult prospective and current graduate students everywhere.

The article begins by Pannapacker agreeing with journalist and writer Anya Kamenetz “that graduate students are ‘really smart suckers.” Already off to such a pleasant start, Pannapacker continues by stating his view on higher education in the humanities: “higher education in the humanities exists mainly to provide cheap, inexperienced teachers for undergraduates so that a shrinking percentage of tenured faculty members can meet an ever-escalating demand for specialized research.” He proceeds to tell us that he cannot recommend graduate study in the humanities unless prospective students are independently wealthy, have an extensive network, or are considering graduate school to advance up one’s current career ladder. His first suggestion for improving graduate school in the humanities is that there should be an organization that focuses on assisting and preparing graduate students for the working world. His article thus far didn’t provoke me into a rage, but everything after this point did.

Pannapacker’s second helpful hint for improving graduate studies is – and I quote this verbatim because it was shocking – Expose who’s really teaching undergraduates.

“Reliable, up-to-date information should be available about the employment practices of individual universities. Prospective undergraduates and their parents should be able to choose institutions on the basis of who is actually doing the teaching: tenured faculty with a long-term relationship to the institution and the protections of academic freedom (necessary for honest grading), or an army of transient, ill-paid, hired-at-the-last-minute adjuncts and graduate students without terminal degrees who are retained primarily on the basis of high evaluation scores from students (traded for high grades and low expectations). This information should have an impact on institutional rankings and the standing of graduates. Eventually, that might begin to reverse the trend toward gutting undergraduate teaching (now about 80 percent off the tenure track). If parents come to know how their children are being shortchanged—at such great expense—they might support reforms aimed at reallocating resources toward teaching.”

Let’s start with the first ridiculous claim, who is “really” teaching our undergraduates: “an army of transient, ill-paid, hired-at-the-last-minute adjuncts and graduate students without terminal degrees who are retained primarily on the basis of high evaluation scores from students (traded for high grades and low expectations).” Honestly? Dear Mr. Pannapacker, if graduate students aren’t teaching while in graduate school under the guidance of their more experienced professors, how else are they supposed to learn to teach? And in such a specialized manner? What graduate program would even think of letting its students graduate without teaching experience? How can you assume that TAs would happily and shadily give out high grades in exchange for or in hopes of high evaluations, and that they have low expectations? If any of my TAs at UCLA had low expectations for their students, I would not have done half as well in my “actual” (actual being work done for the high and mighty professor) coursework. My TAs would have been doing me, and themselves, a disservice by not having such high expectations. I would be disappointed because I wouldn’t be challenged enough in my education, and TAs would be disappointed because their teaching skills wouldn’t improve by clinging to the training wheels that are low expectations. One of the main reasons students enter graduate study is to learn how to become a teacher of that field and how to balance research with teaching.

The final claim in this paragraph simply made me feel sad after I read it. “If parents come to know how their children are being shortchanged—at such great expense—they might support reforms aimed at reallocating resources toward teaching.” Shortchanged? Why would graduate students be graduate students if they were not extremely knowledgable about their field? The word shortchanged assumes all of the above – that TAs have low expectations of their students and are lazy enough to not bother to try to push their students to excel. Graduate students more than anyone know the value of their field, and they can disseminate that knowledge on a more digestible level than professors often can. Parents should be grateful that their students have an “army” of graduate students whose purpose (aside from research) is to teach, share their knowledge, and along the way, to make their field more relatable and easily understandable to anyone who might be struggling with the coursework or the attending professor’s teaching.

Pannapacker’s next suggestion is to Tell the truth about graduate school. He argues that many faculty members see themselves as heroes who have “‘saved’ a student from entering business.” But faculty members, Pannapacker says, are also academic parents of sorts. They

Pannapacker’s grammar makes it difficult for me to understand if the people who have “little to no experience” in the real world are the faculty or the students (sorry, children) or both – but either way, it’s unfair of Pannapacker to assume this for either party. Professors aren’t ignorant to the goings on of the real world, regardless if they’ve ever worked in corporate America. Students are getting more experience working “outside of higher education” with each year that budgets are slashed and they are forced to enter the working world. I personally have been out of school for a year and a half, and it is not something that I relish. Some days, my brain cells feel as though they’re turning to mush. Pannapacker, this is not what you want for the smart and able graduate students of America! American is already full of enough people outside of higher education and the next generation is getting stupider as K-12 education in America slowly dies. This is not the time to be preaching that students should not become graduate students and should instead abandon academia for the drudgery of the real world, leaving their knowledge to waste in the dark gutters of their minds.

And how about the nice pat on the back for those graduate students who are lucky to be such. Pannapacker doesn’t think getting accepted into a graduate program is something to be proud of – but don’t worry, your professors do! And they’re wrong to do so. Faculty foolishly ”regard a graduate-school placement as an accomplishment…” It doesn’t matter that you’ve slaved away on your senior or Master’s thesis and produced the foundations of what likely signifies you as a promising scholar. It doesn’t matter that you paid hundreds of dollars in application fees and spent weeks hunting down, researching, and talking to prospective advisors. You wasted your money visiting schools. And when your acceptance letter came, with whatever degree of funding offered to you, you should’ve shrugged it off. Got into Harvard? Full ride? No big deal. They’re just letting “inexperienced” and “really smart suckers” in, and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on them. (Yes, I’m using Harvard because it’s Pannapacker’s alma mater.) Bah humbug, I say! If you got into graduate school, no matter if you attend an Ivy League or a small state school, congratulations! And to those of you hoping for a nice crisp envelope filled with good wishes in your mailbox in the next couple months, I hope you get it.

Pannapacker argues repeatedly for free information, and I have nothing against making information, especially statistics about job placement, readily available to prospective and current students. This brings us to Pannapacker’s fourth and fifths points: Disrupt the graduate-school labor scheme and Train students for real careers. The fourth point of this article doesn’t appear to represent any real threat to morale in the same way the previous sections have. However, it is erroneous. I have spoken to professors from Ivy Leagues, small schools, and public but privately funded schools across the nation over the past year and a half, and not one of them let me off the phone without telling me about their department’s success or difficulties with job placement, whether I asked or not.

Pannapacker’s fifth point is more problematic. In one of the longest run-on sentences ever, he writes:

“Graduate programs must stop stigmatizing everything besides tenure-track positions at research universities that almost no one will get. They should cultivate an “alternative academic” sensibility by redesigning graduate school as professional training, including internships and networking opportunities, and working with other departments and programs, including partnerships with other institutions, granting agencies, government, and business to cultivate humanists who are prepared for hybrid careers in technology (“the digital humanities”), research, consulting, fundraising, publishing, and ethical leadership. … The largest challenge [facing these reforms] is the misguided investment of most tenured faculty members in the current system combined with the passivity of most graduate students and adjuncts, aggravated by the fear of unemployment that is now a permanent characteristic of academic life.”

In the four years of research I’ve done about graduate school and various programs,  I’ve never had the sense that graduate school as a whole was just going to train me for a life in academia. I realized that in a way, graduate school is what you make of it. It was obvious to me that if I wanted to gear my studies more toward curating, I knew I’d need to have internships in museums or galleries and coursework in conservation and museum studies before I’d be truly prepared for a curatorial position. If I wanted to simply be a professor, graduate school was already going to prepare me for that through teaching assistantships. It’s difficult for me to think of a single person I’ve talked to considering graduate school in the humanities who wants to use their humanities degree in the corporate world. This isn’t because they aren’t aware of their options. It is because an advanced degree in the humanities signifies something deeper than just wanting to build a career in the corporate world. It means that the person getting the degree has decided to devote a significant portion of their life to the detailed study of whatever field they’re in, and that they hope to continue that curiosity once they obtain their degree. Certainly there is nothing wrong with using one’s degree in any of the areas Pannapacker mentioned; I just think there is a disconnect between his idea that current graduate programs stigmatize “alternative” career options.

I’ve spoken to a lot of professors over the years, and I had one professor tell me that one of his active goals is to check his graduate students’ C.V.s after each semester. They discuss how professor and student could work together to make the C.V. as attractive as possible, be it through publication of a recent paper or co-authoring an article together. He also told me he actively seeks out internships and other opportunities for his students and has had incredible success placing them in jobs after they graduate because of the personal attention he gives his students. He’s assisted in placing his students happily in traditional teaching positions, conservation, curatorial work, non-profit work, and even, if memory serves me, government work.What a teacher! After that conversation, this professor became one of my academic heroes. He represents a unique case in the professors I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to – but only because he went so in depth with me about his concerns and efforts. Another professor was candid with me and told me that their department had tough luck placing students in recent years, and that I should take that into consideration. In my experience, professors do absolutely care about the placement of their students, wish for their success, and strive to assist their students in discovering what the best career option is for them.

Finally, we arrive at Pannapacker’s sixth point, which is equally disturbing as the second: Just walk away.

Pannapacker’s article ignited such debate in the comments section on Slate that Slate published a followup article with responses from current graduate students. What do you think of Pannapacker’s ideas to improve graduate school in the humanities?

Tags: Academia, Essay, Grad school, Higher Education, Humanities, News, Opinion