By Colleen Flaherty. Get to the root of the problem and work upward, argues Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, in his new book out this month, The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press).
“If the problems with graduate school are a tree, a lot of people are fixated on this branch or that branch,” Cassuto said in an interview. “But you can’t fix the branch if the trouble is in the roots of the tree. And in graduate school, there are a lot of common problems that go down to the roots.”
For Cassuto, the fundamental problem for graduate school education in the humanities and humanistic social sciences is one of teaching. Tenure-line professors at research institutions prepare students to become “mini mes,” even though the odds are less than one in two that they’ll get the chance at becoming one, and that is more than a practical failure, he argues -- it’s a moral one.
“There’s an enormous trust that’s being extended here, and that’s something that people who run graduate education programs need to take seriously,” Cassuto said. “If you’re not teaching them to do and value the work they’ll actually be doing, you’re really teaching them to be unhappy.”
He argues in Mess that graduate school professors must “convey their own awareness and approval” of taking teaching-intensive positions outside research institutions, or outside academe entirely. And programs must make readily available placement data for past graduates so students know what they’re getting into, Cassuto says. Next, he argues -- since graduate schools are no longer letting in “armies” of students -- faculty members must begin to better “tailor” students’ experiences to their professional goals. Cassuto's not big on quotas, but he says that a program's ability to provide this kind of attention should drive its admission numbers. Read more...