Josh Wilner’s Open Letter

Open letter about the future direction of the program – Josh Wilner

Mario has asked members of the Executive Committee to make a particular effort to contribute to the discussion, so I’m doing so.

First, I have felt for a long time, and feel even more strongly today, that we should have a very strong offering in Rhetoric and Composition and be working to attract strong candidates in this area. CUNY is an unparalleled laboratory for the work that needs to be done. Not just for reasons of “profile,” but as a matter of addressing our mission and potential as a doctoral program, this should be four-square and center for us.

Once I get past that affirmation – which, were I do take the time I could find plenty of ways to complicate/elaborate – I find myself encountering very quickly fundamental questions about our raison d’être as a program, questions which are not so much specific to us as reflective of the state of the “discipline,” if it can even be called that any more, and the job market. All of the terms that defined the study of English Literature as a field are today deeply, and rightly, contested. The relationship of “literature” to textuality more broadly conceived is an open question in ways it was not even in the relatively recent past, though the pendulum continues to swing. As for what “literary history” is, or should be – specifically the extent to which it ought to be thought in some degree of distinction to e.g. social or political history – forget it. As for “English,” a) English departments tend to act as though all of literature is their domain and b) the global spread of “World Englishes” increasingly disarticulates the alignment of linguistic and geographical boundaries. There was a time – in the by no means distant past – when the study of English Literature took as its object literature written in England – not Scotland, not America, variably Ireland, maybe Wales. Even more fundamentally, the geographic and demographic spread of literature written in English since, let us say, World War II, makes the older history of literature written in English an increasingly narrow corpus, looked at merely in quantitative terms.

As for the job market, I will only cite City College’s experience at the moment, when we are searching for one Global Modernist and two specialists in Rhetoric and Composition. In the former case there are an enormous number of highly qualified candidates competing for very few positions nationally. In the latter cases there are, by comparison, a large number of positions in search of a comparatively small pool of highly qualified candidates; my impression is that most, perhaps all, of the people we’ve targeted in the Rhet/Comp search are actually or potentially looking at multiple offers.

I say none of the above in a spirit of complaint, but simply to register my sense that we find ourselves in the midst of a transition that is both prolonged and wrenching; bound whither is anybody’s guess. Justifications in terms of our particular area of expertise, i.e. the particular role we occupy within the academic division of labor, to me feel academic indeed in such a context.

Having said that, I would nonetheless insist that concern with the problem of language should be central to our efforts at self-definition. This may sound anodyne, but as a matter of scholarly and pedagogic practice, what I am somewhat evasively calling “the problem of language” is regular subordinated to various kinds of thematic concerns, be they political, cultural, historical, psychological what have you. I am hardly advocating an “apolitical,” “ahistorical” orientation in favor of a more abstractly theoretical or technical one. On the contrary I believe, and I’m sure many would in principle agree with me, that the political and the historical and psychological manifest themselves most deeply and acutely and dialectically – as shaping and shaped – in language – not in language alone, to be sure, but nor is this one area of human being-in-the world among other. To find one’s way to the places where all the pressure and complexities of those interactions can be felt to be occurring is not easy – which is one reason why we sometimes retreat to the security of more stable thematic orientations.

Little of the above points to positive recommendations about the “future of the program,” but I thought it might be useful for me to share some of my thoughts about all of the “disciplinary” assumptions which I find myself unable to take for granted as I seek to address that question.

Carrie Hintz’s Open Letter

I value the eclecticism of our current faculty and curriculum.  There seems to be a strong will in the program to have a variety of periods, approaches, and geographical regions represented in our curriculum, events, and hiring/ appointment priorities.  I don’t see a need for us to converge around a single area of curricular, geographical, or theoretical strength because this would exclude many people doing great work of all kinds.  At the same time, I feel the urgency for us to converge on some trans-temporal areas of mutual interest, dialogue, and cross-fertilization and to build common program culture beyond our area groups.  Here are a few areas of inquiry that might bring us together in a collective conversation (obviously these are just starting points):

Genre and Form:  In keeping with the “new formalisms” and renewed interest in aesthetic questions in our discipline,  “genre and form” would encompass not only fresh approaches to traditional literary genres, but also popular culture, life writing and emergent genres like the graphic novel or ARGs.

Archive/ Recovery:  There is already huge energy in the program around the study of non-canonical texts, and an upsurge of editing and recovery practice.  We should build on this, and nurture it more.

Embodiment/ bodies and politics: Many people in our program do cutting-edge work on gender and sexuality, critical race theory, social class, disability and cognitive approaches—and this strand would allow us to work across periods on embodied “selfhood,” and embodied difference.

“Outward-facing” scholarship:  I see this strand as about nurturing scholarship that “radiates out” into the world outside the academy.  It obviously includes the Digital Humanities, and has at its core the idea of the “scholar-teacher”— and also scholar-activists, scholar-novelists, scholar-performers, scholar-poets and scholar-artists.

Cross-temporal strands like these could inspire student and faculty reading groups, colloquia, Friday Forum series, works in progress groups and conferences.  And I could see these strands as a great way to represent ourselves in the wider scholarly world and to prospective students.

So…what should we do about the current area group organization?  I am getting a sense that the area groups are not working as well as they should.  At minimum the area groups should be examined to make sure that they respond to our contemporary sense of the profession (I definitely see this concern in the open letters thus far).  It’s a little bit tricky, because the profession itself still defines applicants by chronological field–in the job market and in terms of applications to grad school.  And I worry about getting rid of chronologically-based fields altogether, because I am sensitive to the fact that such a move can often mean “doing away” with earlier periods in the curriculum (I see this concern in the open letters to date as well).  Some of the area groups are doing amazingly well and are functioning seamlessly and productively together…I would not want to ruin their magic.  Yet several of the applicants to our program in recent years, as well as many current students,  have indeed defined themselves in ways that challenge chronological periodization, and I continue to think of the GC as a good place for these students.

In terms of hiring and appointments, I think we should strive for a system where we alternate between hiring/ appointing in chronological fields and hiring and appointing scholars whose work does not “fit” into a conventional field or area.

I am, like many contributors here, concerned about the extreme overwork of college-based faculty and the lack of compensation for serving on dissertation committees, program committees etc.  And I hope we can maintain the consortial system and have college-based faculty teach regularly in our program…to allow for college faculty to serve as effective mentors for our students.  College faculty carry a very significant burden of service to the program, and if the consortial system is eroded I cannot imagine that the level of dedication that college faculty offer to program committees and dissertation committees will be sustainable at the level it is now.

Finally…I am struck (and not in a happy way) by how people use the noun phrase “the program.”  People frequently say: “the program should do x, y or z,” or “the problem with the program is [fill in the blanks].”  Could people be a bit more specific here?  Who is actually “the program”?  By  “the program,” are you referring to program administrators?  The faculty?  Not to downplay the leadership responsibilities of program administrators and program faculty–those are profound and without limit–but at the end of the day, aren’t we all “the program?”

I really like it when people talk about “the program” to refer to our collective work and community–everything we are doing and have yet to do.

 

 

 

 

 

Open Letter from Alicia Andrzejewski

Dear Mario, Carrie, et. All,

Every moment I’ve spent at the GC has been precious. I echo the sentiments in Stephen’s letter that size of the program is a strength, and I’ve felt nothing but supported by this large community since I’ve arrived. Of course, I can only speak from my own experience.

Rather than continue to echo any of the sentiments articulated thus far, I’d like to draw attention to a disconnect that’s my very specific to my experience, and that is how we might bridge the gap between earlier and later fields of study in our program. In the later theoretical courses I’ve been graciously welcomed into, as well as the early courses in my chosen “field” of study (early modern literature), I’d like to see more overlap in student enrollment. This also extends to Friday Forums, on-site conferences, and the area / writing groups. My recent work is indebted to taking courses outside of my comfort zone, so to speak, in the different points of entry this course work has inspired, and the different perspectives I now have when working with the seemingly impenetrable body of work on Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
I think this overlap / exchange of ideas in the early course-work stage of the degree can be facilitated by continuing to make sure the ESA conference topics are broad enough to allow for a wide range of papers (I remember how astonishing and important it was to hear the connections among my Minding the Body paper’s focus on abortive imagery in Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence and the other papers on the panel discussing seemingly disparate texts and contexts). I also wonder if more Friday Forums could be devoted to our own faculty’s work (in a way that does not increase their workload without compensation), with interdisciplinary / broader topic panels that allow students to get to know the work of faculty outside of the classroom, and bring together diverse audiences. For example, a panel on queer bodies / desire could easily include Steven Kruger, Will Fisher, Mario DiGangi, Robert Reid Pharr, etc. Rich McCoy’s recent work has been put into conversation with work done by faculty working in Romanticism, but might also work with a panel performance theory / religion. Many of our faculty write about comp rhet / and teaching from their own diverse perspectives, and I would love to attend a panel on this topic.

These are just a few examples off of the top of my head, grounded in my own experience. This is, admittedly, not an urgent matter compared to some. However, I do think that these more local, small-scale endeavors might help with Becky’s questions re: fostering a more inclusive, supportive, joyful sense of community within our own department.

Thank you all for your part in the strengths of this program.
Alicia

 

Open Letter from Rich McCoy

Dear Mario — and Joan,

I’m sorry to be so slow in responding to Joan’s thoughtful email re the future of the program; the first week of class was pretty frantic.  Like Joan, I will be interested to learn what the trends are in grad school applications. She suggested doing research on that question at the last Executive Committee meeting, but I don’t know whether anyone has done that. At that same meeting, I added that building on strengths can become a circular process, and whether that cycle is virtuous or not depends on which circle you belong to. I know I share the concerns of other early modernists that with the departure of so many central lines in premodern — starting with Martin Stevens in my time and many others before him through Joe and David Greetham more recently — that these fields are getting marginalized.

At our meeting with Bill Kelly a year ago fall, he said very clearly that “coverage” was an obsolete objective, and Carrie has added that building on strengths is the mantra with Chase and Louise as well. Certainly under Bill’s leadership and more recently Chase’s, the Graduate Center has done brilliantly at recruiting extraordinary appointments in targeted areas, and Bill made it very clear that he wanted English, his own program, to take advantage of similar opportunities. Eric Lott is one such opportunity and Cathy Davidson was presented as another. I hope that Feisal Mohamed will be our next — because we have a diverse student body even with a smaller but still relatively large class compared to other programs. One of the things I loved about Berkeley, like us part of a large public system, was the huge talent pool of faculty members in all fields. I came prepared to do American literature — in part because of market trends and to work with Fred Crews and Larzer Ziff, but my interests evolved and took me elsewhere. At recruitment day last year one of the most eloquent testimonials came from a matriculated student with a comparable experience who ended up in romantics.

So I would like to see us continue to offer diversity even while building on strengths in place. And of course there are vast strengths in a variety of fields on the campuses where junior hires have increased dramatically.  I think this combination better serves our students while allowing for unanticipated developments in both market and more intellectual trends for institutions and individuals.

Thanks, Joan, for getting me to think about this and Mario for giving me a bit more time to respond.

Best,

Rich

Open Letter from Joan Richardson

Dear Mario,

Rich and I found ourselves together yesterday evening and we addressed the issue of the future direction of the Program. After considerable consideration, we agreed that it is quite difficult for any one of us to suggest a future direction without having at hand the information about the various larger trends in graduate school applications, for instance–in terms of the percentage of those applying in some aspect of American literature and/or studies versus applications in other areas. We also need to take into full account, at the same time, how we can maximize our strengths within the frame of the Center’s relation to the various campuses and underscore our existing strength as a Program in certain areas–in Gender Theory and Studies, for example, as well as in American Studies. Balancing/arranging of all these concerns is, of course, like a very complex juggling act. It is/will be impossible to satisfy the desires of all constituencies, but necessary to take all of these aspects into account along the way of determining what makes best sense for the present, given the larger national frame and what will make for optimizing success in what we are attempting/continuing to attempt as educators/participants in the ongoing project of what Emerson so beautifully described as “this new yet unapproachable America.”

Ever,
Joan

Open Letter from Ammiel Alcalay

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.

Open Letter from Simone White

An Open Letter on the Future of the Program 

I work between American Studies, poetics, and the history of the idea of blackness (some people say that my field is Africana Studies, but that’s not how I see it), crossing back and forth between these in everything I write or think about. I want to try to identify some of the challenges of doing this work under the program’s current configuration and outline some wishes for a student-of-the-future with similar or related interests.

When I came to the Graduate Center in Fall 2007, identifying as a person interested in black persons and poetry, I cobbled together a course of study that leaned heavily on the course offerings of Wayne Koestenbaum, Ammiel Alcalay, Jerry Watts, Robert Reid-Pharr and Joan Richardson. From them, I learned that I was an Americanist, that poetics was a field, that my interest in theory was stronger than I had imagined. I also learned that scholarship organized around a period of time inside a single discipline (English literature) would frustrate both my conceptual instincts and my writing goals.

I wrote a prospectus and the first section of my dissertation without accepting that I could work or think successfully (uncramped and uncompromised) under the rubric of American Studies. I credit my experience at Futures of American Studies in the seminar of Donald Pease (an experience made possible by Duncan Faherty) with teaching me that there was a place for me in American Studies. And, I credit the guidance of my dissertation supervisor, Jerry Watts, who supports me and my work in ways that I will never be able to thank him for, but mostly by accepting that my scholarship is, as he says, “fundamentally unorthodox” – but it is scholarship, anyway – whose aims relate to the fact that I am a writer who works, in addition to other genres, in the genre of literary criticism, which sometimes requires some methodological invention.

I’m not suggesting that my particular combination of choices and capacity/incapacity can guide the department. I am suggesting that the department actively invites the fundamentally unorthodox applicant and enjoys a reputation based in part on its ability to support “nontraditional” graduate students like me: people who come to graduate study after another career (law, in my case), “older” students (I was 35 when I started the program), and the most weirdo of all, people who are poets. It looks to me like all of these creatures are going to become endangered in the future, and I think that should not happen.

I am not speaking here to the pressing economic questions that will face students who advance beyond year five of the Program under the current funding model. I continue to be shocked by what is essentially the withdrawal of support for these students and the burden that withdrawal places on individual students and EOs to treat their funding as exceptions and favors. Some of these issues include the availability of affordable health insurance, protections for students who choose to become parents while in graduate school, and the specific economic pressures on nontraditional students.

1) American Studies, Poetics as Interdiscipline and Gauge

At no point during my time here have American Studies priorities within the department been clearly articulated (at least not to me), nor do I know of any interdepartmental initiative to think through the professional impact of non-period specific, interdisciplinary work for Americanists or others, with respect to the job market. I don’t know what professionalization could mean if it does not mean being prepared to look different from other candidates. I am saying that I work in an interdiscipline not because I want to act perverse but because I am perverse. I continue to believe, not against all evidence but against some, that the fact that I publish poems actively and think and write about poetics outside the official channels of professional English Studies, signals something about the future of the profession. Which is that the fact that I am here likely means that more like me will be coming (I’m just not that special). The department can and should be prepared to meet poet-scholar people halfway by making some effort to acknowledge the field (inside American Studies in my case, but some will be elsewhere), the kinds of work we produce, and speak to the professional demands of our market with intelligence and foresight. I think this preparation and initiative will serve lots of students who do truly interdisciplinary work, not just poets, but definitely poets.

2) American Studies and Diversity

I am thankful for the leadership of Revolutionizing American Studies, led by Duncan Faherty and Kandice Chuh. The Black Atlantic at 20 conference, especially the brilliant, inspired remarks of Robert Reid-Pharr, and related events were intellectual highlights of my time at the Graduate Center.

I don’t think it’s controversial to note that efforts to articulate a vision for American Studies as a potent attractive force in the department, going forward, and as a voice of reason with respect to the need to end the Program’s somewhat technocratic “hands are tied” approach with respect to its recalcitrant whiteness have been met with resistance, at best. It is not for me to answer the question of how and why American Studies faculty haven’t coalesced within the department in these matters, or why the very idea that the Program should become stronger in American Lit and American Studies, harnessing the energy of faculty and students working in an expanding, politically engaged area should be undesirable. How could it harm this department to have more students and faculty committed to a vision of racial and economic justice in the contemporary world?

I’d like to see American Studies continue to lead in efforts to increase the department’s many possible diversities by continuing, whenever possible, to strengthen its course offerings relating to race and class-based critique in any and all periods, to pursuing appointments of faculty who demonstrate commitment to teaching and mentoring students of color, who are capable of connecting historical study of literature to the contemporary in meaningful, rich ways, whose scholarship impressively ranges across disciplines and fields to make new territory.

Open Letter from Matt Gold

It’s great to see our community engage in some reflective thinking about the nature, structure, and priorities of the English program. It will surprise no one that I’d love to see the program engage the digital humanities more directly, in ways that would build upon the GC’s growing strengths in this area (see the websites for GC Digital Initiatives https://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ and the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative https://cunydhi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ for sample projects and recent talks)

Among the questions I’d ask members of the program to consider are:
* How can we open up opportunities for students and faculty to engage digital tools and methods in their work?

* What changes do networked reading and communication devices/platforms portend for the way we understand digital textuality and encounter texts of various kinds?

 * How can graduate students teaching in the CUNY system learn more about digital pedagogy and use digital tools and platforms to engage undergraduate students in their classes?
 
* Are we willing to consider digital projects, perhaps accompanied by a white paper, as meeting the dissertation requirement for the program? 
 
* To what extent might we be willing to consider collaborative work at the dissertation stage?

Aside from questions specific to DH, I wonder whether we might also situate this discussion within larger trends in academe. Here are some starting questions:
* To what extent should the structure of the program be responsive to the academic job market?
* Given the increasing corporatization of the academy and what many see as the gradual erosion of the tenure-track system, how can we best prepare our students for a range of careers?

* To what extent does our program require/encourage/foster the kinds of skills that are valued across a range of careers?

As we think through these issues, I’d encourage members of the department to read through Katina Rogers’s Mellon-funded report, _Humanities Unbound: Supporting Careers and Scholarship Beyond the Tenure Track_ http://libra.virginia.edu/catalog/libra-oa:3480 , which reports on an investigation into perceptions about career preparation provided by humanities graduate programs.

For those short on time, here is a direct link to the Executive Summary: http://katinarogers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Rogers_SCI_Survey_Executive-summary_09AUG13.pdf . I would particularly encourage a collective program discussion of the recommended actions for graduate departments:

* Evaluate and modify required aspects of graduate-level curricula in favor of including courses that help students to prepare for the wide-ranging career paths that they may pursue upon completion.


* Rethink standard methods courses to structure them around a collaborative project in which students must apply a range of skills toward an end goal centered on methodological understanding.
* Create one-credit courses that center on ecosystems crucial to the academic landscape, such as academic administration and scholarly publishing.
* Form more deliberate partnerships with inter- and para-departmental structures—either within or outside their home institution—that are already engaging in this kind of work. Humanities centers are an excellent example.

* Cultivate partnerships with the public sphere, both to provide graduate students with valuable experience and exposure, and to make a clearer case for the public value of humanities education.

* Encourage (and provide funding for) students to become members in relevant professional associations, even if the students do not intend to pursue careers as faculty.

* Work to expand the understanding of what constitutes scholarship. Encourage faculty to develop collaborative project assignments that allow students to work together in a variety of roles and to communicate their findings to an array of audiences.

* Critically examine the kinds of careers that are implicitly and explicitly promoted to students, and consider ways to increase the visibility of the varied paths that scholars pursue.

* Make a much stronger effort to track former students (including those who may not have completed a degree), and to encourage current and prospective students to connect with former students.

I look forward to the “Open Letters” discussion process and thank the program for creating this space for conversation.

Open Letter from Becky Fullan

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

Stephen Spencer’s Open Letter

Hello Carrie,

I write in response to the call for open letters about the future of the program. Though I’ve only been a part of the Graduate Center English community for one semester, I feel as if I can respond directly to one of the questions posed in the original call: what are we (or should we) be “know for” nationally as a program?

First, let me start by offering what I feel the program is presently “known for.” In sum, the GC is a realistic opportunity for potential scholars and intellectuals of all sorts. I certainly don’t need to tell you how competitive the graduate school application process is, especially considering that many prestigious programs only accept a cohort of about 8-10 students. Since the GC accepts around 20, students simply face better mathematical odds in applying. But, I don’t bring this up to suggest that we should necessarily advertise those kinds of statistics, or, to transparently advertise them simply to communicate a better possibility of admittance (especially considering that the new fellowships will likely raise the number of applicants in the coming years).

Nevertheless, I do feel that the GC should be know as a bigger program. I can imagine someone throwing that argument back by suggesting we are more invested in quantity and not quality of students. But in my experience, the bigger cohort has enriched and enlivened my experience. Simply put, my cohort is full of wonderful, bright, and dedicated people, who I already feel fortunate to know, learn from, and hang out with. I suppose what I’m suggesting is that being known as a larger program could be seen as advantageous in a number of ways: better chance of admittance; more student interactions/networking/collaboration opportunities; a diverse spectrum of perspectives, etc. This isn’t even to mention the quality of the program itself, and how much that quality can be attributed to quantity (professors, number of classes offered, extracurricular events both at the GC and in NYC).

I hope you find this helpful as you imagine the future direction of the program. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to have our voices heard, and I look forward to four-and-a-half more years of enjoying this great, big, wonderful program!

Best wishes,

Stephen Spencer