The GC has a dynamic intellectual life, with exciting cross-currents from other area institutions, frequent speakers and events. We have world-renowned faculty and brilliant, self-reliant students. As a place for intellectual growth it is unparalleled, and I am very grateful to be able to be here.
However, like other institutions in NYC, we are providing an incredibly rich resource with very little money, space, or time. We all have too much work. I’ve read the various reports Carrie posted, and I agree with the external review that college faculty are particularly victimized, teaching essentially an extra load at the GC (with extra students, office hours, and committees) on top of their already sizable loads at their home colleges. Both the external report and the response to it imagined a way to compensate college faculty for work on committees and exams other than directing the committee, perhaps a 1/10 credit, and I strongly endorse that.
I also very much like the idea that Carrie came up last year, capitalizing on our location in New York. It is, after all, a major reason why students come here, and if it can become a guiding principle that the Grad Center should enthusiastically take advantage of resources here and make itself a microcosm of the city’s rich, diverse culture , it can only benefit us. A New-York-centric identity (which we already have but have not fully articulated) will give us a better identity nationwide and provide a guiding sense of self as we make future decisions.
But I thought I’d use this opportunity to mention one aspect of life at the GC has come to loom bigger and bigger in my sense of the institution in recent years, and it’s one that I don’t see mentioned in any of the documents. I refer to its governance structure, which, it seems to me, could usefully be streamlined and standardized in order to keep pace with the growth of the institution. I’d be very interested to hear others’ ideas about the following issues:
1. Can we think creatively about another way of running the department, other than by a loose confederation of area groups? I understand that this works better than nothing, and that in an essentially egalitarian department, it is hard to come up with other structures. But I would love us to try to think of more imaginative ways. What has happened, in effect, is that professional fields have taken the place of governing structures, which stretches them in ways that are not necessarily viable.
The area group organization means that we are divided into little fiefdoms by period and region. Such an organization is out of sync with an increasingly interdisciplinary, global, and fluid way of understanding literary studies. It makes us look old-fashioned. It also means that we have built-in lobbying groups pushing for particular kinds of hiring and admissions, so that people are added to the program based on whether they suit the needs of a particular subfield, which risks losing people who are doing new fields or interesting interdisciplinary work, because they have no built-in group to advocate for them. It is true that we do have interdisciplinary or affinity groups, but I think my experience is typical in that I am active in my primary group (Victorian) and have little energy left for another bunch of meetings or activities for feminist studies, queer studies, etc.
I don’t really have another idea, but I’d suggest we talk to people in other departments at the GC and see what they do. Right now the membership groups push for hiring, set up Friday Forum speakers, and organize teaching rotations. Maybe we should move those functions to committees instead. Ie, the membership committee could poll the department for our needs and present plans for future hiring; a teaching committee could set up a teaching rotation for everyone.
Another idea: why not have faculty meetings? I know that many people wouldn’t show up, but it would be healthy to have monthly check-ins for those who could come. It would allow department members to be well-informed and track ongoing issues. There’s a reason most departments hold these things.
2. Can we streamline the appointment process? By this I mean: can we create a single universally-followed structure for appointing people, and also, bring college and central line appointments more into sync with each other? Problems with appointments have been a consistent source of dissension in the department over the past two years and this would be a great opportunity to fix the process.
Right now, college appointments take about three years and sometimes even longer (one year for the need to be identified and the ad to be posted; one year or longer for trial teaching; the following year for the actual visit). This takes far too long, especially when you consider that the people serving this lengthy apprenticeship are already our colleagues, whom we have known intimately, served with on committees, observed teaching, etc. The multi-year process makes it impossible to respond nimbly to departmental needs, and it means that by the time someone actually comes up for a vote, a whole new crop of faculty might be available who were not yet tenured when the original call went out. So, even when it works, it’s problematically sluggish. However, in the last few years, two or three college high-profile college faculty have undergone this process only to be rejected after the job talk, a highly humiliating result. So sometimes it’s sluggish and disastrous as well.
Not only is the college appointment process unwieldy, but it is also totally out of sync with the procedure for appointing central faculty, which is currently based on recruitment (based on murky personal ties) and on a single day’s visit (whose format may vary wildly).
We have not been allowed to recruit central line faculty with a national job ad, which would have created a level playing field. Without that, the door is open to all sorts of favoritism, rumor-mongering, old-boy networking, and back-room deals. (Even if those things are not actually happening, members of the department perceive them to be happening, which is toxic in itself.) What’s more, central faculty appointments don’t follow a recognized procedure and tend to get made up as we go along each time, creating hard feelings. We need a democratic, transparent hiring system with accountability at every step.
In my opinion both college and central line appointments should work the same way, and that way is not a mystery: send out an ad, bring the most promising candidates to campus, have them do a visit, have lunch and dinner with department members. Have the candidate teach a seminar (sit in on someone’s course, or set up the seminar as a specific teaching opportunity and thus something exclusively attended by graduate students). Then do the job talk. If the candidate does not seem viable, we need to make a strong effort to figure that out before the campus visit. The whole thing should be done, from ad to hiring, within a year. There is a structure for appointments that departments use nationwide; why do we need to reinvent it every time, or create our own idiosyncratic version of it?
I know many people like the trial teaching semester, and I do understand that it gives grad students a real sense of faculty that nothing else could give. I like that too. But my problem with it is that, if college faculty are good teachers, we should be appointing them already, and if they are bad teachers, we should not be forcing our students to spend an entire semester with them. Would we ask job candidates to teach for us for a whole semester normally before deciding whether or not to hire them? No, and the same reasons should apply for college faculty.
3. We absolutely need to continue pushing for diverse appointments and diverse admissions; monocultures are inherently unhealthy. But that also means we cannot turn into a monoculture of one field or one period. Part of diversity is historical and international (Anglophone) appointments. Anyone who works in feminism, queer theory, etc, is continually experiencing the situation of advocates and scholars who know very little about pre-20th century formulations of these issues, which means that such scholars lack an understanding of how and why contemporary formulations of race, culture, gender, and desire originally formed, and also lack a sense of what historical alternatives might once have existed to constructs we now take for granted. Having a historically diverse faculty also means a better student body, as we attract a richer variety of applicants who can then, as students, help inform each other’s research with their own expertise. Having strong faculty in British and other Anglophone fields prevents Americentrism. A field where everyone reinforces each other’s sense of what’s important is an unhealthily closed field. I don’t want us to end up there.
We are renowned for our strength in queer theory, and I would like to make sure that continues. We have major feminist scholars here (Jane Marcus, Nancy K. Miller) and I would like to ensure that we continue strong hires in contemporary feminist theory. But we desperately need more appointments in 17th and 18th century, since those fields are currently carried by David Richter and Carrie Hintz, both of whom have robust alternative fields that they often want to teach, as well as major administrative responsibilities. We need a Latino/a specialist. We might also talk about fields other than fiction – how is our representation in poetry, drama, graphic novels, film, etc? Can students who increasingly work in interdisciplinary genres find enough people to work with there?
Sorry for the length of this letter, but I have tried to give it serious consideration. I do think that what we need above all is a) a vision of ourselves as expressing the best of New York, and b) better governance structures: more communication, standardized hiring procedures, and a set of departmental hiring goals.
Talia Schaffer
