Open Letter from Ammiel Alcalay
First off, many thanks to Carrie, Paul, and Justin for getting this initiative off the ground, and thanks to all the contributors so far for many thoughtful and useful comments. For whatever reason, I’ve found a real resistance to offer much in the way of a declarative statement as I think in-person discussion will prove to be more useful but this was meant as a preparation for that.
In such light, I’d like to offer some general thoughts: institutional change tends to be incremental but, like “mission-creep,” it can sneak up on you. With an administration not quite knowing which eggs to put in what basket, a lot of the very actual and perceived “crisis of higher-ed” has spiraled downward to programs, governing structures, calls for change, new attempts at branding etc. As incremental change has accrued, the temperature in the room has finally reached a noticeably different point. So I think we ought, first, to be aware of what we might be responding to (need for “new vision,” “find a focus,” etc.).
As pointed out quite cogently in several of the responses, some of our greatest strengths are most obvious but seldom promoted: size, scope, variety, number of courses offered, number of faculty, number of specializations and broader areas generally available (though with some clearly under duress), and, of course, location, though I’ve thought of myself for quite some time as a civil servant in the late Ottoman Empire, very late.
Given that English tends to dominate the humanities simply through size, function, and the fact that it is the imperial elephant ruling the landscape, there may be some built-in contradictions between the services rendered through the combination of very real training and cheap labor (in the form of teaching fellowships/adjuncting), the desire of the GC to transform itself into something it might not be able to be, and its mission as part of the larger City University of New York structure, a municipal institution originally meant to serve the people of the city.
We are certainly feeling many of those contradictions and it might be helpful for us to think about ourselves in terms of function, structure, and scale on an institutional level within the national context. Once that happens, there is more and more about us that stands out as quite unique, and areas where we might be able to utilize what we have in order to better articulate a programmatic approach to much bigger conceptual and political issues that truly do face higher education (i.e. the absolute incongruity of African American and Latino/a representation, the changing value of degrees, the institutionalization of contingent labor, the growth of administration, the devaluation of general education, the changing face of academic publishing etc. etc.).
Having shepherded job seekers for the past seven years, I have absolutely no doubt that part of our success rate, besides the quality of our students and faculty, is the extra-added factor of each student/job candidate absorbing the sheer complexity of CUNY into their general human/intellectual/academic index of abilities. That, and the fact that our students, no matter their areas or level of specialization, tend to have been exposed to a wide variety of courses, styles, and methodologies simply because of our size. We’re all, I think, aware of this on one level or another, but we might want to think about using this experience and knowledge to our further advantage before trying to reinvent ourselves.
On specifics, I would like to strongly echo some of the thoughts expressed regarding program structures and the Area Groups in particular. While they began as an extremely practical and useful tool for longer-term rational curriculum planning, institutional drift seems to have carried them further from their initial purpose. In a program of our size, we need to remain quite cautious about the over-growth of certain areas as that can easily open the door to the reduction of other areas and a general downsizing of the program as a whole, all under the guise of “promotion,” “focus,” “center for” etc.
While the 5 year fully funded student is, in many ways, a great thing, I think it also needs to be seen in terms of a much larger demand that things be almost absolutely determined, that there be little or no time/space to wander, and that anyone actually coming to a graduate program should already have quite a firm idea of what they want to accomplish. That change exerts pressure throughout all of our decision-making processes, from admissions and curriculum to faculty appointments and the general culture of the program. And it contradicts the actual practice and experience of most of our faculty.
Finally, the program relies on the good will of campus faculty who want to work with graduate students and be involved with the Graduate Center even though this is often perceived at their home campuses as a “luxury,” or time off from the undergrad “trenches.” The English program has done a lot to dispel these ideas institutionally but I think we need to have this discussion very frankly within the program as the administration seems less and less aware of how things actually work at CUNY and our individual and collective practices and ambitions may, at times, contradict each other. We also need to understand the implications of growing the faculty to the point where campus based faculty will no longer be able to teach once a year. As many campus faculty are already on constant overload (given that orals and dissertation committee work is not institutionally recognized), this can drastically change the dynamic of student/mentor relationships and skew relations between central and campus based faculty, something that should be studiously avoided.
