AnalysisI haven't much to add to what I said to the departmental review committee, in a letter I wrote in the spring of 1998. What I wrote to them is still true, and still seems to me to be a fair statement of the situation. Something I noticed upon rereading all this is the constant refrain of fear. Fear seems to have been the dominant emotion caused by my graduate school experience. When I first started, I was terribly afraid my Spanish skills were insufficient. Later, I dropped the Modern Peninsular Literature survey class because of fear. The MA exam was an exercise in utter terror. The Quichua contretemps was just as bad. I remember feeling a little more comfortable once MA exams were passed and past, and I had a new adviser, but the fear returned with a vengeance in preparation for prelims. On the few occasions when I did not show or experience fear, as for example in the letter I wrote the departmental review committee, what I seem to have felt is a tired, cynical acceptance of past and future ill-will. I don't think I am a terribly timorous person. Certainly, fear never characterized any of my previous academic experience, aside from the ordinary minor jitters associated with exams and major projects. I'm not completely sure why I spent so much of four years being afraid, but I do know that I'm unwilling to blame myself wholly. Another matter that has occurred to me since I left: the extent to which this department's workings are directed by its insatiable need for teaching assistants. I do not exaggerate when I say that teaching assistants teach far more undergraduate course sections in this department than professors and lecturers put together, even when one includes those lecturers who are actually dissertators rather than formally hired academic staff. The work teaching assistants do in this department is highly visible, and utterly necessary -- the professors available in this department simply could not, under any conceivable circumstances, teach the huge number of beginning Spanish courses the department regularly offers. So the department must attract and admit enough graduate students to teach, and it must make teaching a reasonable endeavor, the more so because not all TAs come from inside the department. This it does, as I have explained. Leaving that aside, however, the department has no motivation at all to help students earn degrees or to keep students qua students. This may sound odd; it took me a long time to realize. But it's so. To see why, think for a moment about department ranking and reputation. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison enjoys a top ranking among similar departments in the country on such well-known surveys as that published by the National Research Council. This ranking is based on such criteria as publication records of professors and professional placement and accomplishment of degree holders. Notice what doesn't figure in? Graduate student attrition. Doesn't matter. In fact, a 1996 NRC publication concludes that no one is quite sure even how to measure attrition. So as long as a very few graduate students in this department survive to earn Ph.Ds -- and such individuals, of hard necessity, will be amazingly talented and motivated, likely to do well professionally -- the department has carte blanche to burn out everyone else without its departmental rankings suffering in the slightest. It can afford to burn out people who might, in a more supportive graduate environment, have done just fine in academia! Ah, but where will new graduate students come from, if this is so? Haven't I already said that the department needs teachers? Sure. But a lot of prospective graduate students will be attracted merely by the department's strong rankings, which earn it good word-of-mouth all over the country, largely (I suspect) from people who have never been here and don't know what it's like -- and have no idea what the attrition rate is, since the department has no reason (and for obvious reasons, no desire) to make that public. Moreover, the mere fact of having plenty of teaching positions available attracts many students -- even graduate students have to eat, not to mention pay tuition. Ex-graduate-students rarely talk about their experiences, largely from shame, and if they do talk most people rush to blame them for leaving or failing. So the department can afford to admit a horde of graduate students every fall to staff its undergraduate classrooms, knowing full well that only half (I'm guessing; I can't know the numbers, because the department doesn't publish them) will earn MAs and perhaps one in five to ten (if that many) will earn Ph.Ds. And it can afford to ignore these students, prepare them badly for MA exams and Ph.D prelims, treat them poorly, and believe it's their fault when they don't earn degrees. There will always be more new students next year to shove in front of classrooms. I don't think these sorts of numbers -- or the reality behind them -- are what students expect when they join the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I think it's abhorrently deceptive that they are not told. I think it's absurd that attrition rates are not considered in the NRC's ratings of graduate departments. I suspect, however, that these problems are a fair bit larger than my department; as it is, academia cannot find jobs for the humanities Ph.Ds it produces, so it not only can afford to treat students badly, it almost has to in order to prevent an even worse glut of doctorates than currently exists. (Of course, this problem is self-perpetuating; if people with doctorates taught the courses that graduate students currently teach, there would be enough jobs and to spare for Ph.D holders!) Any graduate department will suffer some attrition. That's normal, and I don't want to imply otherwise. People come to graduate school who aren't academically prepared for it. People come who aren't really suited to academia. (Neither of these, by the way, was in my opinion true of me.) That's not graduate school's fault. I strongly believe, however, that the attrition situation in my department is far worse than what would normally be expected, and that this is due at least in part to a view of graduate students as what I once called "cannon fodder for 101 classrooms" and little else. And it's not necessary. It honestly isn't. Nothing insuperable prevents this department from being a better place to study than it is now. There are other graduate departments in the university (I have particularly noticed the Department of Linguistics, in which I did my Ph.D minor coursework) that strike me as quite well-run, and very attentive to possibilities of improvement. (Is it coincidence that Linguistics has very few TAships to offer?) I find that I don't know what to do to make a department run better. I find that I don't know how to make one listen when it is determined not to. I wish I did. I wish even more that I'd listened to my undergraduate mentor when he told me I wouldn't like this place. I don't know how he knew (and I can't ask him, because he has died), but he told me so, and he was right. I can't know for certain what would have happened to me if I'd gone elsewhere for graduate study -- and, given my writing of this, it's unlikely in the extreme that I will ever find out -- but I can't imagine a situation turning out much worse than this one. I don't believe I'm alone in what I have experienced. I do believe that these experiences aren't necessary and could be done away with, if more people like me took the chance of speaking up about them. |