The CEA Forum
Winter/Spring 2005: 34.1
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"ONLY CONNECT!": DEPARTMENTAL COMMUNITY AND
THE ALUMNI NETWORK
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As the theme of the 2004 CEA Convention made clear, these are times to think about what we are doing as teachers of English language and literature. Of course, we always do this, every time we make a lesson plan or shape a syllabus, every time we read a student paper or listen to a colleague's work; and increasingly, in these days of “accountability” and financial duress, the pressure for pseudo-empirical measures of the value of what we do, the pressure to define the hard work of English in utilitarian ways, intensifies. From a different perspective, with a war being fought, sometimes by our own students, we might need to ask about the purpose and meaning of the study of the humanities. It is entirely natural, and entirely fair, that students who yearn toward the study of English have a good answer from us when they ask, “What can I do with my English degree?” In asking, we should not think that they are repudiating the value of English; rather, this question bespeaks that they want to be able to be who they are in the world.
First, a bit about my particular circumstances: I teach at a small liberal arts college, where the English major remains one of the largest two or three programs of study, (jockeying with Biology, Political Science, Psychology, and History, typically) as it has for the last 50 years. In the past twelve years, we have averaged 66 graduates a year, 13.4% of graduating classes, and the swings up and down from year to year have not shown any particular trends—with the possible exceptions that the weaker graduating classes (as measured by cumulative GPA, smaller size, and reputation among the faculty) have had fewer English majors, and the stronger classes, disproportionately more. Even though we don't have to recruit majors, I don't conclude from this that the major "sells itself”: more likely the strong teaching faculty, who have won more than our share of the teaching prizes, the coherent and rigorous curriculum, our close ties with study abroad programs in Britain and Cameroon, and the “buzz” of committed students, create a potent attraction for incoming students. Nevertheless, during my three years as department Chair, I was often asked about career options after graduation. As some of you may know from my article in the ADE Bulletin, I chose not to answer the question in the abstract –“English majors can do just about anything!”—but by researching the history of our past results. I asked, “What have Dickinson English majors gone on to do?” (Moffat).
The ADE article concerns a range of approaches I undertook to build a sense of community within the major, of which the research on alumni career outcomes and the programmatic applications that sprang from it are only a part. Here, I'd like to describe the specific work of researching the alumni database, and how our department decided to use this information to the benefit of both our current students and our alumni. When Dean Baldwin kindly asked me to share this research at the 2004 conference, I revisited the data that I gathered in 1999, and updated my conclusions longitudinally. I looked at information from 2,694 people, the entire cohort of English alumni since 1958. This represents a slight shift from the scope of my earlier inquiry: since my interest is in career paths, I framed the inquiry where it was most likely to contain information about alumni who were still in the workforce, or had only recently retired. As one might expect, the work histories of these more recent classes (our alumni go all the way back to the class of 1918!) reflect larger social trends: fewer women now than then list their sole occupation as “Homemaker,” and the range of career choices for all alumni manifests developments—especially in the area of technology—which were unimaginable even a decade ago.
Since I began this inquiry four years ago, our development and alumni relations office has become much more sophisticated about capturing information from alumni, and as a result, we have fields of inquiry for this current cohort of alumni which were not available to me in my earlier, cruder, search. Moreover, communication with the alumni records office is much smoother and less laborious than it was in those pioneering days when my question—“What are the job titles of English alumni”—was viewed as a bit impertinent for a professor to ask. In our discipline, we know that discourse is shaped by operative assumptions, and I'm happy to report that the current job descriptions are more supple, more various, and more likely to be a result of an alumna's self-description than an occasion for a computer or a data-entry person trying to shoehorn an answer into a pre-designated box. (This is how we came up with “rock musician” as a job category, albeit a small one.)
First, the cumulative data. [ http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/engl/alumnijobs ] As you might expect, most of our graduates are word workers, who use the powers of persuasion, of empathy, and of analytical thinking in their work lives, as an extension of the skills they practiced and honed in the major at Dickinson. The single largest job category remains the law; varieties of lawyer and judge comprise 16% of our alumni. If you add up the teaching professions, from primary school through college teaching, in an astonishing range of disciplines from Waldorf School to Professor of Geology or Internal Medicine, 18% of our graduates are teachers. This is true despite the fact that we do not offer an education major, and our certification program in English is for secondary school only. Very few students—this year five of our 72 majors—complete this certification during their four years, so these job categories reflect the pursuit of graduate degrees on the part of our alumni. 5% of our graduates are in finance and accounting; another 4% in marketing or sales; 4% in advertising or public relations. 10% identify themselves as working in publishing or journalism, or as professional writers; a few years ago, one such alumna, Jennifer Holm, won the Newberry medal for her juvenile novel, Our Only May Amelia. Obviously, these job categories are fluid— for example, whether our recent alumnus, Phil Goroupulos, who directs an AIDS assistance support organization in Harrisburg, PA, might have called himself a worker in the “not for profit” category, or a “health care administrator,” a consultant, in communications, social work or “other occupation.” Indeed, he is categorized as not for profit, and two other categories simultaneously. Phil's good work is all of these, and more.
Still, the categories represented in my graph demonstrate useful ways of understanding our strengths as a major. From looking at the dozens of descriptive categories simplified into the thematic areas in this chart, it is possible to argue that there is NOTHING one cannot do with a Dickinson English major. Some current students take comfort in the fact that extremely unlikely, or unpredictable, career paths have been pursued by alumni. We can see that while very few alumni—only 2%—become poets and novelists, and arguably only about 15% teach literature, being an English student embodies useful skills. One alumnus, John Balitis, who recently returned to campus, summarized this elegantly in a lecture entitled “English Studies Before Law: How an Attorney Learned to Think, Tell Stories, and Empathize.” John spoke of his work as a litigator as a form of theater, and his most important insights into people having been shaped by the study of character in novels and plays, and the displacement of his own position as a reader as it was challenged by unsympathetic and unfamiliar points of view in literature.
John's lecture was the most recent in the now four-year-old program we established as a department to apply the research on our alumni into concrete action. [http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/engl/cogan.html ] The Cogan Fellowships, named in honor of one of my favorite students, Eleanor Cogan, bring two alumni back to campus each year for a two-day residency. They give lectures open to the whole community, the department hosts a big dinner for all faculty and current students and some invited guests, and we sponsor a literary dessert contest, whose prize is a Shorter OED. This is a seriously contested event. The standard of judgment (pace William Wimsatt) is that a literary dessert is “like a poem or a machine. One demands that it WORK.” In other words, it must be both literary and edible. (For more on these aspects of the residency, see http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/engl/cogan.html ). Eleanor Cogan, who just turned 95, has taken 52 courses at Dickinson as a continuing education student—most of them in the English department. This year at commencement we will award her an honorary degree, in light of her extraordinary embodiment of engagement in the world, and her devotion to learning—both fundamental qualities we hope to foster in all our students. The total cost of the program is about $3,000 each year, and though it was named in honor of Eleanor's work, and not because she was a donor, after its inception, she presented the department with an annuity that will more than cover its expenses well into the future.
Cogan Fellows are selected by our student committee of majors from all four years, in consultation with the faculty. We have chosen alumni with “interesting jobs” rather than those whose career paths might be viewed as “success stories,” which is not to say that Cogan Fellows don't make money, or have impressive titles. Rather, they have usually not been subject to the interest of the development office because they are not potential major donors, often because they work in not-for-profit arenas, or because they are too young to have reached the pinnacle of their ability and desire to give money to the College. They give us more than money.
The very disengagement of these people from the typical “big-wig” alumnus profile is of interest to us. One Cogan Fellow managed the Boston Globe foundation, a charitable trust which gives more than $2 million to progressive, mainly children-oriented organizations in the Boston area; another is the curator of literary manuscripts at the Morgan Library in New York; a third is an NPR correspondent and anchor of Morning Edition in Chapel Hill; a fourth, a vice president in marketing at Houghton Mifflin, whose job was to coordinate the publicity for the Lord of the Rings before the first film was released; a fifth “retired” from a long career in intelligence gathering and computer work to run the Whitaker Center, a new combined arts and science center with Imax screen, concert hall, and science museum in Harrisburg. Many of our Cogan Fellows had not been back to campus in a long time; none of the pairs knew each other; each was surprised to have been invited to campus, and spoke movingly of the relationship between them and the faculty, of their nascent discovery of who they would become as it occurred in their undergraduate years. So, the reentry into the Dickinson that is now has been salutary for the fellows themselves. All have been impressed with our students' interest in them, and capability to present themselves well.
In turn, the students have learned some very interesting lessons: that even the most rarified and successful career path is an organic trajectory, full of surprises and mishaps. This year's Cogan Fellow Dr. Laura Seeff, who runs the colorectal cancer education division of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, has taught at Emory Medical school, and is pregnant with her third child, foregrounded the struggle to be the kind of doctor she wants to be, to balance work and family and to be ambitious in both. She told a story laced with episodes that could be construed as outright failures: of withdrawing from not one but two prestigious residencies when it became clear that continuing in them would mean saving face but losing her compass. Clearly, she is manifestly successful, and has kept her bearings. That the Cogan Fellows hold on to the humane values we associate with literary study, and that they see those values as central to their work and its meaning, is perhaps the most compelling aspect for me of this campus residency.
The tangible benefit to current students is expressed in the network of e-mails and phone calls, blooming into internships and career choices, which have evolved from the personal contact with Cogan Fellows. Not one Cogan Fellow has been in a position to offer a current student a job, but many students tell me they have been taught, directly and indirectly, by the presence of these inspiring graduates. The central lesson of the Cogan Fellowships for these students has been that the path to finding one's way in work is a human one: there are no rails laid in the ground; there is no secret path. Cogan Fellows have spoken of shaping their work and helping their world with conviction, sometimes passion. Mara Nicastro described founding a small school with a dozen colleagues, to teach students who have been abandoned by other schools, and how this impetus came from the violent deaths of some of the students she first taught in crowded inner-city schools in Washington DC. She noted pointedly that it took months of searching, hundreds of applications, to get her first job, in a school which closed due to budget cuts the year thereafter.
These stories of struggle and engagement compel our current students to use the human connections inside and outside the classroom to help them find their way in the world. My colleague Bob Ness was stunned to hear himself described as a seminal influence on this year's Cogan Fellows' life and career. John Balitis told a story of writing a paper in an English grammar class on the story of “Jeannie,” the young girl, isolated and abused by her parents, who had not acquired speech when she was rescued as an older child. John's paper treated the example of Jeannie as a test of Chomsky and others' theories of language acquisition. Ten years later, he received a postcard from Prof. Ness, which he held up and read at the lecture to the astonishment of its author. It read: “Still interested in Jeannie? Look at this week's New Yorker magazine. Best, Bob Ness.” Bob is a teacher: of course he remembered John's paper from a decade before. But he didn't remember writing the postcard; and it's extraordinary that John, not knowing he was a latent Cogan Fellow, not only remembered, but filed and kept it. (This is why he is a good lawyer.) Wordsworth reminds us that “Little, unremember'd acts of kindness and of love” beget other such acts. The kind of teaching we do at Dickinson offers a lot of opportunities for this sort of human exchange.
My title today comes from the famous passage in E.M. Forster's great novel Howards End. In it, he advocates for the great human power to reach out to others, and to try to understand what we don't know understand about their thinking. He asks us to “only connect the prose and the passion” in our daily lives, even if this means risking discomfiture. (In the novel, arguably, reaching out too far begets disaster as well as profound rejuvenative change.) The program I describe is not expensive, and its results cannot be measured empirically in dollars earned. Yet it has the tenor of human value. We do know that more than 400 alumni have responded to English department mailings, and more than 250 request to stay current on its twice-yearly newsletter. Our alumni's hunger for connection and meaning in their past, and are interested in the present state of the college. Our current students are nourished by the example of the Cogan Fellows. Through the program they meet people whom they imagine to be worlds ahead of them in experience and power, yet who humbly describe their own lives as a continuing engagement with their undergraduate work as English majors. Lest we think this is just about the experience of the liberal arts, let me offer you a telling moment: a student who intends to go to law school asked John Balitis whether he had taken any political science courses, which she had heard were invaluable in preparing her for future study. He answered, yes: “I was a double major in English and Poli. Sci. . But Political Science taught me nothing about the things I needed to succeed in law school and thereafter.” (I admit to a certain Schadenfreude at the expense of my colleagues in Political Science when I heard this.) Lastly, through this program, the department's faculty is invited into a continuous program of meaningful self-study, and measurement of the effectiveness and power of what we do. We watch with pleasure as our former students go on to be life teachers for us and our students; we stay in touch with them, and are enriched by the connective experience of their lives and ours.
Works Cited
Forster, E. M. Howards End. 1910. New York: Random House, 1921.
Holm, Jennifer. Our Only May Amelia. New York: Harper Trophy, 2001.
Moffat, Wendy. "Marketing the English Major: or, Tending the Garden, Organically.” ADE Bulletin 128 (2001): 25-31.
Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy." The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954.
Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey… ." Wordsworth : Poetical Work s. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt. New York: Oxford U P, 1988.
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Wendy Moffat is associate professor of English at Dickinson College and past president of the Association of Departments of English. She has published on issues facing the profession of English studies, as well as in the area of modernist British literature. She is currently working on a gay cultural biography of E. M. Forster.
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