Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times by Sidonie Smith

Author:Sidonie Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

So, Now for Narratives to Put with the Numbers

Doctoral students pursue graduate education in the humanities because they imagine themselves doing the work of the humanities over the course of a lifetime. They come to graduate school with a long-nurtured passion for a book, an historical epoch, a twist of linguistic usage, a theory of identity, a question of deeply felt urgency. They come motivated by the models of revered Page 119 →professors or by the narratives people tell of themselves, their communities, their struggles, their traumas. They come driven by the desire to launch journeys beckoning from all around, amid the dust or digital affordances of the archive, in lines of poetry, in the logic of an assertion, in the dirt of the dig. They come with a fascination for ethnographic fieldwork, with a keen sense of the unsettling question, with perverse pleasure in thinking big—about society, culture, knowledge, politics, about gender and sexuality, racialization and ethnicity.

They come with diligent scholarly habits, with their trained disposition of mind, and, quite likely, with a reverence for solitude. They come with their brilliance in coining a phrase, tracking an argument, targeting gaps in logic. They come with their pasts, their relationships, their histories of success and disappointment, their politics and their nonacademic interests. They come with entangled forms of online and offline lives. They come driven and dedicated, gifted and versatile.

Some come savvy about trends large and small, in the academy, in the humanities, and in their fields. Some have already worked in academic institutions, some in libraries. Others have worked overseas or in the private sector or in an NGO or in government. Many have already published novels or books of poetry or written newspaper columns. Some have an ongoing blog presence.

They arrive and settle in. Here they begin to ask pressing, often disorienting, questions. What will my scholarly work look like? How will I do that work? How will it be communicated? To whom will it be addressed? How will it be funded? Who will own it? Who will have access to it? How will I teach? What will my students be like? What different roles will I play? How will I respond to the pace of change ahead? How will I make my case for this field of study I love—to peers and mentors, to hiring committees and decision makers, to alumni and the public at large? How will my career in the academy unfold? Everything about the life of an academic humanist, it seems, is shifting around them.

As one year passes into another, this doctoral study turns out to be not only an intellectual journey, but also a trial, a cacophony of unpredictable pleasures, a social network, a long slog, a disenchantment, a psychic landscape, a familial sacrifice, a demanding job, an initiation, a shifting terrain of tradition and change, and a cauldron of anxiety, about adequacy, performance, and future prospects.

For me, the numbers intersect with the stories of this lived experience of graduate training. The inflationary rise in the cost of higher education has led to the rise in debt level of students upon graduation.

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