Dear English Department,

There are so many different things that people have talked about in these letters, and so many things that could and hopefully will be talked about! I’m going to focus on how the department could creatively work on transforming the ways we think about and approach employment and work in academia.

Our PhDs currently lead us to such a complicated employment situation– there are lots of resources offered by the English department and at the GC to help people figure out how they might get jobs in and outside of academia with a PhD, but there’s also this (not department-created! and not unrealistic!) sense of doom and gloom about anyone’s job prospects in academia, and about the state of labor at colleges and universities overall. What I think would be amazing is if, as a department, we can come together creatively to both think through and actualize different models of community and engagement with these issues. Overall, a prevailing narrative is that there are too many of us, a glut of PhDs trying to squeeze through this bottleneck of available jobs. And therefore I feel like a lot of our forward-looking time and energy is spent hoping and attempting to make ourselves individually suited to go through that bottleneck, and fearing that we will be squeezed out, since most of us will. I don’t know exactly what to do about this, but it seems urgent to do something against this exhausting process that really makes us less curious, thoughtful, active, engaged, and willing to take risks in our intellectual lives (and otherwise). I want to find ways treat our numbers and our knowledge and our experiences as creative, collective assets to equip us both as individuals and as groups of scholars to reshape the terms of the academy and the job market that are currently so poisonous. I think many of our classes already feel like good spaces in this way, that do use the things mentioned above as assets– where everyone is working together, where ideas are shared and valued, and individual as well as group projects grow out of these exchanges. I’d like the whole structure of academia–including how jobs work– to be more like that too. And I wonder what we can do as a department to facilitate, begin, poke at, etc. this transformation.

Obviously this whole idea is huge in scope and there would need to be a lot more thought about how to practically foster this kind of creativity and power on a departmental level. But we could start with some kind of direct commitment to helping each other– as students, staff, adjuncts, professors, etc.– re-imagine and re-shape various aspects of the academy, and treating this project with all the seriousness and importance of anything related to the job search, because ultimately this re-imagining is the only way the majority of us can have the kinds of meaningful careers we began this process seeking. Part of this is figuring out in what ways we have flexibility at the departmental level already, to try and shape the kind of academy we’d like to belong to right here, and part is figuring out how to change those things that are important but currently impossible or inflexible at the departmental level, and part is creating a supportive, strong community of people who are working to re-imagine and change things along these lines throughout our careers and lives, not just while we are at CUNY or in the English Department.

I really don’t know what this process would and could look like, but here are a few things that I imagine could be part of it, just to get the wheels turning and the conversation going:

1. Workshops and talks and writing projects sponsored by the department that address how to re-vision the structures of academic governance and employment, with the goal of implementing some of these visions at a departmental level (and, over time, a clear path developed about how this would work).

2. Opportunities to play and work with how we can support each other over the long term both in getting employment and in creating an academy that values and supports the scholars that it trains.These could also be workshops and talks and writing projects, perhaps alongside those that are more directly and practically preparing people for the job market.

3. Departmental meetings of all sorts–including admissions and hiring– being open and transparent, with anyone from the department invited to participate and contribute. (Obviously, this would take work to make wieldy and fair, and there are already ways in which everyone can and does contribute to these processes,  but I think it is worthwhile work to try and make them even more accessible and open.)

4. I also think it’s important to think about this imaginative process in terms of admissions, which is itself a sort of hiring process too. How is it working? What are we inviting people into when they are admitted? Whom are we inviting (and not inviting) and why? Why do people choose this path?

These are by no means exhaustive or even representative of the best ways to begin, necessarily. I’d love to hear replies if people have more ideas– especially if you are someone who is great at turning big thoughts into clear and useful actions!

The letters written so far bring up a lot of other (and related) ideas and issues. I look forward to responding to these letters, reading more, and discussing them as a group. I really appreciate this open letter project, and my time in the English department overall. I have had many experiences of my ideas being validated, encouraged, and supported here, which are part of what encourages me to imagine this kind of support and community as something that we could create and value institutionally, materially, and on a much larger scale.

Thanks for reading and, in advance, for your thoughts.

Becky Fullan