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Thank you, David. The world you describe is a completely foreign world to me. I am fascinated by this new information and perspective, and I have passed the post along to our graduate director. I am constantly in the position of advising Ph.D. students about how impractical and unrealistic it is to have a tenure-track job as their goal. But they keep coming, and we keep accepting them. So I owe it to them to at least give them some concrete advice about how to re-envision their career and build marketable skills. This is a good first step. Brad. From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of David Lohnes <[log in to unmask]> Reply-To: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wednesday, November 6, 2019 at 8:11 AM To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: [External] Re: Announcement of membership vote for a trial change of venue for the International Spenser Society's annual business meeting and Hugh MacLean Memorial Lecture from MLA to RSA (2021-2023) Having started down this rabbit hole, I’ve been musing on it all afternoon. Some further thoughts below (which turned out to be quite long). It feels a bit of an intrusion for me to post something so long and opinionated in this forum in which I've mostly lurked amongst my betters since 2001. I love Spenser and English Lit; it was just so much easier to get paid doing something else. I still have Nohrnberg's Analogy and Ellrodt's Neoplatonism on my bookshelf, though. Thoughts: 1) Corporate (and especially government) hiring is very much about filling specific holes with specific pegs and checking boxes along the way. Flexibility and fungibility are not marketable assets in that context. When you’re on the job market, you don’t want to be the adaptable, quick-learning jack-of-all-trades. You want to be the master of one trade—whatever’s asked for in the job description you’re applying for. Obviously communication skills and adaptable intelligence are desirable, but they're hard to put on a resume and hard to hire against. 2) Related to the above is the fact that hiring processes have to be structured and auditable because of the money involved. Budgeting for hires is the same everywhere—certain seats come out of certain budgets, and there’s a chain of request and approval that justifies the expenditure. A key purpose of the “peg in hole” hiring process is ensuring that the money is spent equitably and to purpose. This is especially true in government hiring where all appearance of conflict of interest and sweetheart deals must be assiduously avoided. Good communication skills and adaptable intelligence can themselves never be the difference maker in a hire that is not otherwise equally or better qualified because they're the exact thing you would use to cover a conflict of interest. "Oh, I know my cousin is on paper less qualified. But he has excellent soft skills." Yeah, nope. You must have equal or better domain-specific skills and experience before your soft skills come into the conversation. 3) Academic hiring is just as rigorous and "peg-in-hole-ish", and for many of the same reasons. If the University of Somewhere is hiring on Early Modernist, that gap year I did in Physics or Thoreau isn't really an asset unless I'm a demonstrably excellent early modernist as well--and even then the benefit may be quite marginal. That same principle applies when trying to take a graduate humanities degree to a business or tech role. 4) Peg-in-Hole hiring is one of the reasons professional and post-secondary certifications are becoming increasingly popular. They can demonstrate focus for a particular role in a way that a generic degree--even with a specific major--cannot. Language like this in the requirements on a job description is completely common (I lifted this from a random job description on LinkedIn): • Experience with a standards based risk management framework (i.e. NIST SP-800, ISO, COBIT, HEISC, etc.) • Experience implementing and maintaining compliance requirements (i.e. HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc.) • Professional certifications such as CISSP, CISA, GSNA, CCNP, CCDP or other information security and networking certifications are highly desired. In that context, a CISSP or HIPAA certification would be a really great thing to put on my resume. I myself just took a new consulting role. I got a DAMA CDMP certification this summer and put it on my resume. The interviewer brought it up early in the conversation, and I know it helped me land both the interview and the job. Pound for pound, professional certifications like this punch waaaayyy above a graduate humanities degree. The training for many of them is a mere week long (but costs $1-4k per student. It's a decent profit model). 5) I think graduate humanities programs need more clear focus on skills--and particularly the roles--that society actually wants and needs. What are the jobs we're preparing students for, and what are the skills required? In my experience of post-graduate English study, the "job" being prepared for was "writer of books and articles that almost no one will read except when writing their own book or article that likewise almost no one will read." Publications were touted as the number one qualifier for the job market (far beyond teaching ability). Except it was even worse than that, it was publications in an extremely narrow niche (from the perspective of someone to whom "English Lit" is already a narrow niche--which is most humans). The job being prepared for was "writer of books and articles about Edmund Spenser's poetry" Is that the marketable role of a post-graduate English degree? Does society want or need such people? Will it pay for them? It seems not. If there is a way forward for graduate humanities, it begins with a focus on what society will pay for. 6) I would frame a marketable roles and concomitant skills conversation this way: a) What useful thing can I do that no one else can do? b) What do I know that no one else knows that enables me to do it? I would posit that for English graduate students, the heart of the answer should lie in Teaching English and in Preserving Memory. And therein lies--to me--the heart of where graduate English has gone wrong. Teaching English and Preserving Memory are outward focused to the masses. They're about making the language and its authors *more* accessible, not less. It's about amplifying the approachable, human aspects of the language (which is the heritage of every one of its speakers) and its art (which should be enjoyable by all). Why is it that interest in poetry has been dying in the exact same decades that interest in rap has been soaring? They're fundamentally the same thing! It has been in part because the keepers of the poetry, rather than humanizing it and making it accessible, have sought to protect their own position by wrapping it in the penumbra of jargon and theory that only the initiated can penetrate. When I taught freshman Lit as a graduate assistant, the curriculum handed to us called for us to teach our students how to write a series of literary critical essays over course of the semester. College Freshmen in first-year English had to produce a formalist reading, a feminist reading, a politicized reading, etc. What a wasted opportunity that was to shine light on the joy and power of the English language and its art. 7) IMO, the graduate English curriculum needs much more: a) Practice in the production and consumption of English meters. A learned master of English Lit should be able to produce a proper hexameter or dactyl on demand and teach others the joy of hearing and producing such. b) Practice in the production and consumption of English drama. A learned master of English Lit should be able to quote ably and at length from great English plays and even direct one in a pinch (at a high school or small community theater, for example). c) Latin. Many more learned masters of English lit should be able to read Latin well. If the English Lit memory-keeping discipline has forgotten Latin, it is failing as a memory keeping discipline. d) Paleography. Memory keepers who cannot read the book and manuscripts on which the memories are found are failing in their role as memory keepers. e) Philology and Grammar: Memory keepers again. History of the English Language. Comparative Linguistics. Grammar Etc. This should be a substantial shared knowledge base that every English PhD has. If an English PhD cannot diagram the first sentence in Paradise Lost, what does it mean to be a learned master of English Lit? I'm being completely serious. f) Composition and Style: A PhD in English lit should be able to write clear, graceful English prose in well-structured compositions and know how (at least at a basic level) to teach others to do the same. The English PhD, then, becomes one of two things: A Master Teacher: the Dumbledores and McGonagalls of English Lit, the approachable, well-loved masters of English word art who make it live for the next generation. Society needs (and craves) those kinds of figures, and if this discipline can provide them it is not unlikely it will continue to pay for some of them (although that brings in the wider conversation of the total disarray in teacher salaries, adjuncting, etc.). A Master Memory Keeper: The Master Namers of English Lit (a reference to LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea) who keep the lists of old words, and seek out the meaning of the words that have been lost. These inhabit not the classroom but the library and the archive. Relatively fewer of these are needed, and they need a strong grounding in digital preservation and in library science in addition to paleography and philology. 8) I have propounded two roles as alternatives to "writer of books and articles that almost no one reads." They may be the wrong roles. But regardless, the crisis in graduate English (IMO) cannot be resolved until there's universal clarity on what roles it's preparing students to fill and a curriculum structured accordingly. On Nov 5, 2019, at 9:55 PM, Susanne Woods <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: David Lohnes’s comments are consistent with what I was seeing from senior academic administration positions.and well put. Susanne Sent from my iPhone On Nov 5, 2019, at 7:39 PM, David Lohnes <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: Happy to have you circulate with attribution. On Nov 5, 2019, at 7:37 PM, Peter Herman <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: Would David Lohnes mind if I posted his comment on the "Remaking the University" page on Facebook? You make some very important comments, and I'd like to see them get wider distribution. I would not include your name (unless you want me to). Thanks in advance, pch On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 2:31 PM David Lohnes <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: “As I understand it, the greatest drop in humanities jobs --in English and History esp-- has happened since the 2008 crisis although the decline was gradual before that. How to get back?” As someone who’s Ph.D. (ABD) with a sadly unfinished Spenser dissertation and a now almost decade career in technology, I’ll speak to this. A BA in humanities is sellable in business and tech fields in my experience provided there’s additional certifications or experience that demonstrate competency in the target field. But graduate degrees offer little additional competitive value in those fields, especially the doctoral degree. Specialist fields like medicine, law, and the sciences of course require their own education path. So from an investment point of view, there’s very little return on investment for graduate studies in the humanities outside of a higher ed career. That is to say, the money I spend on the degree and the years of income and resume-building job experience I lose while pursuing the graduate humanities degree are not going to make me more competitive or get me higher pay—in virtually any field at all outside a higher ed career. In fact, they may make me less competitive. So we have a situation where graduate studies in the humanities are only useful for training future teachers of graduate students in the humanities. The snake consumes its own tail in an echo chamber with no meaningful integration with the wider market or community. In such a situation, demand for graduate studies in the humanities will inevitably fall. This is *doubly* so when such studies divorce themselves from the useful preservative functions of philology, archiving (of books and manuscripts), and paleography. Society only needs so many theorists, especially antiquarian theorists. It needs a few specialist memory keepers, and it needs communicators and humanists in all domains. Graduate studies in the humanities need to position themselves to fill those voids. More of the art and music and the physical, historical materials themselves. Less politicization and fewer theoretical byways. ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the SIDNEY-SPENSER list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=SIDNEY-SPENSER&A=1 -- Peter C. Herman Professor of English Literature San Diego State University Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 https://www.routledge.com/Unspeakable-Literature-and-Terrorism-from-the-Gunpowder-Plot-to-9-11/Herman/p/book/9780367249007 Editor, Critical Concepts: Terrorism and Literature https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/terrorism-and-literature/B276DBD28A55D10FA05ED356716C74B2#<https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/terrorism-and-literature/B276DBD28A55D10FA05ED356716C74B2> Editor, with Elizabeth Sauer, The New Milton Criticism https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/new-milton-criticism/082A6DAA78B170EA428DFCD098BF60E1#<https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/new-milton-criticism/082A6DAA78B170EA428DFCD098BF60E1> Destabilizing Milton: "Paradise Lost" and the Poetics of Incertitude (Palgrave) https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781403967619 ________________________________ To unsubscribe from the SIDNEY-SPENSER list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=SIDNEY-SPENSER&A=1 ________________________________ To unsubscribe from the SIDNEY-SPENSER list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=SIDNEY-SPENSER&A=1 ________________________________ To unsubscribe from the SIDNEY-SPENSER list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=SIDNEY-SPENSER&A=1 ________________________________ To unsubscribe from the SIDNEY-SPENSER list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=SIDNEY-SPENSER&A=1 ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the SIDNEY-SPENSER list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=SIDNEY-SPENSER&A=1