Graduate Studies in English

The CEA Forum
Winter 2001
Volume 31.1

LITERATURE AND GRADUATE EDUCATION IN ENGLISH
From the CEA President's Forum
National CEA Conference, Charleston, SC
April 7, 2000
Updated for the CEA Forum
By Fred Standley
Daisy Parker Flory Professor of English
Florida State University

Speaker Fred Standley

Oh, so when modern things are thrust
By death below the coffin lid
Our liberal sons will spurn our dust
And wonder what it was we did.
—Tennyson

Introduction:

Given that “colleges without graduate programs outnumber the graduate schools by a ratio of more than twenty to one,” a datum that remains as relevant today as when it was first reported by Don Cameron Allen in The Ph.D. in English and American Literature (1968), the following question can be legitimately posed: “What is the place of graduate programs in the field of English?” However, whether by miscommunication via e-mail or by some other miscue, my topic for this occasion is seemingly more narrowly proscribed as “The Place of Literature in Graduate Programs in English.”
My thesis, nevertheless, has assumptions and implications pertinent to both phrasings and is simply stated in this manner: The place of literature in graduate study in English has evolved in the past century, so that now it might be described more accurately as “centripetal” in English Studies. I apologize only slightly for using that descriptor, obviously borrowed from another discipline, but some of the terms recently used to describe the field of English—terms such as “unified-field theory” and “fusion strategy”—seem to be, as Huck Finn said, “stretchers.” And, thus “centripetal” seems more appropriate, as I shall explain.
My purposes here are threefold: first, to glance historically at the development of graduate studies in English, especially at the place of literature in those studies; second, to show something of where we are now relative to some major concerns about graduate programs; and third, to posit some short-term directions for continuing discussion in the next decade or so.

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At Century's End: The 1890s:

A century ago, the publication of English in American Universities (1895), edited by William Morton Payne, as a “collection of twenty-five position statements by professors from leading universities and colleges,” provided a clear and unequivocal declaration of the centrality and the assumed good of literature, not only in English Studies but also in the more general concept of a liberal education curriculum. Students were expected to read works by the major authors of the Western world and, especially, of Great Britain. Thus, fewer authors were to be covered, with barely a passing nod to the inclusion of women or minorities or other voices. Additionally, an a priori assumption valued works of the eminent dead but not the then-contemporary figures and texts. Consequently, the literature, the student clientele, and the professoriat were presumed to be Anglophone, white, and predominantly male.
Although some pedagogical considerations were included and some attention was given to rhetoric, generally seen as effective public speaking, the fundamental and central concern for literature was dominant. Literature, conceived of in American institutions as primarily British, and philology were indeed central to graduate study, and the latter was thought indispensable for the study of the former, while American literature was hardly recognized as a viable body of curricular pursuit.
Furthermore, the early part of the twentieth century witnessed what has been called “the professionalization of the the Ph.D. as a teaching certificate for higher education” (North 10). This phenomenon resulted from two factors: First, the philanthropic foundations made substantial contributions of money, while stipulating that colleges and universities employ professors who had a doctor’s degree. Second, regional and national accrediting associations applied mounting pressure on the institutions to require that faculty have a Ph.D., to differentiate them from the teachers in prep and secondary schools (Grigg 9–11).

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The Mid-Century Context:

“[T]he most significant event affecting the study of English in
American colleges and universities was World War II. . . .”

During the first half of the twentieth century, the most significant event affecting the study of English in American colleges and universities was World War II (1941–45), for that near-global conflict resulted in the virtual breakup of Eurocentric colonialism—replaced by the simultaneous developing competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for political influence—and the further complications arising from the emergence of the so-called third world. Importantly, English thus became the undisputed language of diplomacy, and the rise of American political, economic, and military authority generated the conditions for a large measure of American cultural hegemony, elicited by a global awareness of and desire for knowledge of things American, especially in the areas of popular culture and literature.
During the war, the government had established cadet training programs and bases on college and university campuses, private and public. Then, with the post-war G. I. Bill of Rights, enacted on behalf of the millions of men and women returning from the armed forces, and the consequent paying of their educational costs, thousands of new students enrolled on college and university campuses, creating a larger demand for graduate programs in English, as well as in other disciplines, to educate and train the faculty required for staffing educational programs.
Thus, the influence of World War II—followed by reverberations from the so-called Sputnik era in the late fifties, with its open competition between Russia and the United States not only for space flight domination but simultaneously for international status—resulted in the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which allocated millions of dollars for enhancing American education, with special emphasis on the productivity of graduate degrees, particularly Ph.D.s. Graduate programs in English grew, and the total number of graduate degrees earned from public universities quickly outstripped the numbers earned at private universities, an effect that remains true today.
During the World War II years, the annual production of doctorates in English had been fewer than 100; by 1950, in the aftermath of the war, the number had increased to nearly 200 and kept climbing. For example, in 1958 there were 333, and by 1960 there were 387. Another striking indicator of the times was that the number of departments offering the Ph.D. increased from 60 in 1958 to 124 by 1972 (North 42–47).
Associated with the above developments, euphoria of expectation for what seemed unlimited employment of Ph.D.’s was omnipresent in the field. And those doctorates were overwhelmingly in “Language, Literature, and Philology,” with the former and the latter viewed as ancillary to the focus on Literature, still predominantly British in emphasis, but with a growing activity in American Literature.

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The Allerton Park Conference, 1962:

“The most important action at that meeting was the
general consensus to define, for the first time, the field
of English as 'Writing, Literature, and Language.'”

A multiplicity of factors, including those spawned by the cold war competition, and specifically the new emphasis on basic education in K–12 that had sparked a national interest in what were called “Basic Issues” in numerous disciplines, combined to cause the Modern Language Association, in conjunction with the University of Illinois, to convene in 1962 the Allerton Park Conference. At this conference, representatives from Ph.D.-granting departments of English conferred about the conditions, problems, and status of the doctorate in English. The most important action at that meeting was the general consensus to define, for the first time, the field of English as “Writing, Literature, and Language.” Prior to that point, no such formal definition had been agreed upon, though there had been tacit accord that the study of Literature was central and that the study of Language (i.e., philology) was a concomitant pursuit, with perhaps an occasional nod in the direction of Written Exposition as indeed necessary for at least first-year students.
Allen’s book records this definition and the conference proceedings, including some forty-four suggestions to improve graduate study and the teaching of English. Two of those proposals are in retrospect quite noteworthy: the need for formal pedagogical training for graduate students in English; and the need for a new professional organization for all English programs, what we now know as the Association of Departments of English. The long-range consequences of the Allerton Park Conference have proven more significant than the participants might have expected—most especially that definition of English as “Writing, Literature, and Language.”
Once the Pandora’s box of assumed “coherence” was opened, however, the resulting questions, debates, disagreements, and decisions were to become legion, as they are even now and will undoubtedly remain. New developments across intellectual disciplines—e.g., philosophy, psychology, economics, linguistics, et al.—were to stimulate significantly differing modes of conceiving English Studies. Stephen M. North concludes in Refiguring the Ph.D. in English Studies (2000) that Allen’s book
on the one hand . . . commemorates the commissioning of the study that produced it and thus marks a special moment in the discipline’s corporate history: the moment at which English doctoral education can be said to have officially entered the educational big time—or, to put it a bit more pointedly, to have officially tried to (re)claim corporate control and/or responsibility over an enterprise that had gotten out of hand. (46)
In spite of this applause, however, North goes on to indicate a basic flaw that underlay the conference and that would ultimately prove problematical, even to now—namely, the discipline’s “official endorsement” of and “corporate misjudgment” about the “shortage of fully trained teachers of English,” based on “the assumption that there were far too few Ph.D.’s in English. . . . The field’s primary imperative, therefore, was to streamline the process of doctoral education . . . into a serviceable and uniformly administered procedure sensibly adjusted in all its requirements to the public obligations of the profession in this century” (47).

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Transition:

“Alas, the euphoria previously mentioned inevitably
had to confront a phalanx of harsh factors. . . .”

Alas, the euphoria previously mentioned inevitably had to confront a phalanx of harsh factors—from the newer developments in intellectual discourses and disciplines, to the new combination of social, political, economic, and demographic problems in the domestic body politic. Thus, the 10,000 Ph.D.s trained principally in literature and produced over the decade of the 1970s found themselves, upon completion of their degrees, facing several negative dimensions affecting academe: new innovative and restrictive forms of fiscal funding for higher education, different standards of accountability for student credit hours in the institutions, increasing enrollments without an increase in faculty ratio, a decline in the number of English majors, downsizing of faculties within departments, and many others with which we are now familiar.
Instead of hiring the new Ph.D.’s seeking tenure-earning positions within the profession, institutions turned to non-tenure track personnel, greater numbers of adjuncts, part-time faculty, and teaching assistants. The resulting decline in graduate students seeking admission began to show in the decrease of Ph.D.s graduating: to 1214 in 1975–76; 952 in 1979–80; 733 in 1983–84; and 668 in 1986–87. Hence, the Great Expansion became the Great Contraction, as North has noted (48–51).

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The Eighties and the Nineties:

“The decades of the eighties and nineties
witnessed a feverish ferment of reviewing,
rethinking, revising, and restructuring. . . .”

The decades of the eighties and nineties witnessed a feverish ferment of reviewing, rethinking, revising, and restructuring, as well as innovation and experimentation, amid a plethora of contentious claims, conflicting allegiances, and heterogeneous theoretical debates; and now I invite your attention to three formal endeavors from this period.

First, the publication of The Future of Doctoral Studies in English, edited by Andrea Lunsford and others, in 1989 deserves comment. These twenty essays emanated from the work of the MLA-created Commission on the Future of the Profession and the Commission on Writing and Literature as well as a conference in 1987 for representatives from eighty Ph.D.-granting departments. From this combination of labors came two agreed-upon and clearly enunciated principles that proved quite surprising even to the participants.
Both principles related to the study of literature. The first rejected the historical coverage of literary periods and the concept of canonical coherence as the irreducible points of reference that had been assumed as inviolably valid in the past. The second recognized the impossibility of a single unifying principle for the heterogeneity endemic to English Studies.
Participants then turned to the possibility of envisioning new principles for thinking about disciplinary coherence, with special attention to rhetoric, literary theory, and the reality of pluralism/diversity. Ultimately, affording deference to the desire “that reading and writing be integrated at all levels of theory and practice,” they had to take cognizance of and accept the reality enunciated in the same year by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature (1987): “what academic literary studies have had to work with is not a coherent cultural tradition, but a series of conflicts that have remained unresolved, unacknowledged, and assumed to be outside the proper sphere of literary education” (15).
A second noteworthy and large-scale effort meriting attention consists of the book series sponsored by NCTE that began in 1994 and that continues under the rubric “Refiguring English Studies.” The stated goal of the series is to provide “a forum for scholarship on English Studies as a discipline, a profession, and a vocation” (North i). The first seven books in that series assert presuppositions and implications relevant to graduate study, but it is the latest volume that I recommend for your scrutiny: Refiguring the Ph.D. in English Studies: Writing, Doctoral Education, and the Fusion-based Curriculum (2000), by Stephen North. North presents both a narrative and an analysis of the doctoral program in English at the State University of New York at Albany—a program that has evolved from its original inception in 1990 under the umbrella phrase “Writing, Teaching, and Criticism” and that “now marks a substantial departure in English doctoral education” (1).
The curriculum therein is structured by “seven interrelated branches of study”: Writing in History; Writing Theory and Practice; Rhetoric and Composition; Critical Theory and Practice; Teaching Theory and Practice; Language and Language Theory; and Literary History. Emphasis in the program is on the interrelatedness among the branches, and only two courses are required of all candidates: Writing in History; and The History of English Studies, 1880–Present.
All courses “are intended to invoke the central elements of the program—writing, teaching, and criticism. That is, they are intended to be pedagogically and critically self-reflective and to place the art of writing at the center of inquiry” (North 91–92). The bottom line even in this program remains, however, “textuality,” that is the recognition of the “curriculum constant[,] . . . the central disciplining activity” as “the business of teaching graduate students to situate themselves properly with respect to whatever are imagined to be, in a given time and place, the discipline’s key texts” (110).

“[I]n the five years between 1990 and 1995, when
4,727 graduate students earned Ph.D.s in English, only
2,175 (46%) found full-time tenure-track positions
in the year the degree was earned. . . .”

The third and most recent activity was the Conference on the Future of Doctoral Education in English held at the University of Wisconsin under the auspices of the Modern Language Association and its Committee on Professional Employment. Numerous sessions and workshops centered on practical and professional matters, the intellectual facets of restructuring doctoral program requirements and experiences, and issues involving writing, cultural studies, critical theory, interdisciplinarity, multiculturalism, et al. (MLA).
The Committee on Professional Employment set forth its final report in December 1997. (The report is now available online; follow the Reports and Documents links at the MLA website. Conference proceedings also appeared in the October 2000 PMLA). MLA data released for the conference indicated that in the five years between 1990 and 1995, when 4,727 graduate students earned Ph.D.s in English, only 2,175 (46%) found full-time tenure-track positions in the year the degree was earned, i.e., found the type of employment for which they had been educated and trained. And, the subsequent prognostication for the years 1996–2000 showed no probable improvement .¹
This discrepancy between hope and reality results from several factors, one of which, in my opinion, is surely the identity perspective of the typical Ph.D. department, which refuses to accept that “over 90 % of English programs are located outside doctorate-granting research institutions.” Many of the faculty in such departments continue to believe that their basic task as graduate faculty is to replicate themselves in the students under their supervision. The conference focused considerable attention on the need for departments to offer courses in pedagogy, as well as experiences that would familiarize students with the complex system of post-secondary and secondary education plus opportunities for careers outside academe.

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Conclusion:
A quick summary must necessarily conclude that literature has long been regarded as the essential good of English Studies from the earliest period of departmental and program development and that it continues today as the centripetal force within the field. I have avoided attempting to define literature, though I acknowledge the imperative to do so as one of the burning issues of our time, and I have assumed that such defining is an integral part of scholarship and teaching within the discipline. To that end, two points now demand enunciation.
First, the definition of literature—like many other intellectual concepts—is always under negotiation and is an arduous task that never satisfactorily achieves completeness, precisely because literature is a phenomenon of human activity within the context of the world at large. It is instructive to remind ourselves of Graff’s interpretation of this phenomenon:
In the final analysis, what academic literary studies have had to work with is not a coherent cultural tradition, but a series of conflicts that have remained unresolved, unacknowledged, and assumed to be outside the proper sphere of literary education. To bring these conflicts inside that sphere will mean thinking of literary education as part of a larger cultural history that includes the other humanities as well as the sciences even while acknowledging that terms like “humanities,” “sciences,” “culture,” and “history” are contested. (15)
Finally, let us remember, too, that literature is grappling with textuality in its myriad modes and forms. We are concerned about textuality because the text is the record of a transaction between a writer and the language in which the text is composed. Thus, the centripetal place of literature and the good of literature are its textuality: Literature is writing is language. Robert Scholes has succinctly questioned: “Who cares about the text? We all do.” And then he has reminded us that “we care about texts for many reasons, not the least of which is that they bring us news that alters our way of interpreting things. If this were not the case, the Gospels and the teachings of Karl Marx would have fallen upon deaf ears. Textual power is ultimately power to change the world” (165).
Note

¹The Spring 2000 MLA Newsletter, in its analysis of positions in English advertised in the October 1999 Job Information List, shows unmistakably that the majority of positions in English are still related to Literature, with British, American, Multicultural and World emphases accounting for 45% of the available vacant positions and with several of the other categories having a substantial component of literature at their core (Lawrence and Welles 6–7).
Works Cited and Consulted

Allen, Don Cameron. The Ph.D. in English and American Literature. New York: Holt, 1968.

Applebee, Arthur N. Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History. Urbana: NCTE, 1974.

Commission on the Humanities. The Humanities in American Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Grigg, Charles M. Graduate Education. New York: Center for Applied Research in Education, 1965.

Lawrence, David, and Elizabeth B. Welles. “Job Market Remains Competitive.” MLA Newsletter 32.1 (Spring 2000): 6–7.

Lunsford, Andrea, et al., eds. The Future of Doctoral Studies in English. New York: MLA, 1989.

Modern Language Association. “Conference on the Future of Doctoral Education.” Program Brochure. New York: MLA, 1997.

Modern Language Association, Committee on Professional Employment. “Proceedings of the Conference on the Future of Doctoral Education.” PMLA 115 (October 2000): 1136–76.

North, Stephen M. Refiguring the Ph.D. in English Studies: Writing, Doctoral Education, and the Fusion-based Curriculum. Urbana: NCTE, 2000.

Ohman, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.

Payne, William Morton. English in American Universities. Boston: Heath, 1895.

Scholes, Robert. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
———. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.
Shugrue, Michael. English in a Decade of Change. New York: Pegasus, 1968.

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