The Emerging Scholars Blog

Janine Giordano

Read part 1 of the series, “Where Did You Find Your Megaphone?”

I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t be, at the nature of responses to my last post. I expected to hear a variety of answers about where each of us of first found our voice and discovered our efficacy. Was it in your favorite class in college, or in your relationship with a younger sibling? Was it on a Church board, in a Parent-Teacher organization, or on a missions trip? Where did you first feel heard and validated, and see your work invested as time well spent? I was concerned with some kind of defining moment in your path from regular person to learned academic. Ultimately, I wanted to know why you chose the academy—if you chose the academy—as the place for you to pursue your work? I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t be, that the piece I shared of my own quest to find my academic voice was taken instead as a complaint about the glass ceilings for women in ministry. It indeed hurts me deeply to see how much women have been hampered from Christian ministry for generations, but I was trying to stress the positive: many of us have found other ways to compensate for this challenge. How did you, male or female, arrive at your perch of authority? What microphone do you use as you make your way to the megaphone?

Our discussions of the integration of faith and learning these days so often assume that we are already creatures of authority in our academic field. We assume that all of us, by virtue of our association with the academy and our dabbling in even a bit of higher education, are already knowledgeable within a particular terrain of thought or culture, and have some degree of authority within a particular body of knowledge. We are encouraged that we need to be careful how we use our perch of authority, for our stewardship of our gifts has more of an impact on the world than what we might expect. I imagine that many of us found the Emerging Scholars Network because we wanted to further discuss this encouraging message. I certainly did.

However, I wanted to complicate the way we frame this calling, especially with regard to graduate students who are still trying to find our voices within a particular field. What can seem like an exciting challenge to academics who already have perches of authority (read- some kind of teaching or research gig where you feel visible), can be equally discouraging to those of us who are still yearning, searching and struggling to find an audience to hear us. So much of graduate school is about building an audience: an advisor you trust; a cohort of other graduate students and faculty you trust, and ultimately an intellectual community who believe that the final results of your research matter to them and the larger community they fit into. Therefore, even if your research challenges particular assumptions within your field, you are not actually supposed to challenge anyone to the point that they wonder if you fit into their intellectual community. At least not that significantly, or anyone you know, personally. Qualifying exams, preliminary exams and oral defenses, the landmarks in time of your graduate school experience, are all moments specially designed to make sure that you fit into the intellectual community that you are already supposed to be participating in. Your life is not about using a perch of authority wisely; it’s about continually defending how and why you belong. It’s about making others comfortable with you. Like any other hazing experience, it’s about doing what it takes, within reason, to prove that you deserve that perch of membership. Otherwise, you know you will never win that perch of authority.

I have wondered frequently why Christians interested in discussing the “integration of faith and learning” have not spent more time discussing what, and who, is lost this hazing process. Sure, have discussed the loss of our humility, the loss of our identity as a regular person, and sometimes even the loss of our childbearing years. However, many do not see enough wrong with the graduate school hazing process–a process that culminates in the roulette of finding a job–to see a need for it to be redeemed. Many see sets of testable knowledge as virtually objective, and see themselves as authority figures in their own areas of expertise simply by virtue of their successful passing through the hazing process. And perhaps sometimes this is true. However, my own experiences in graduate school have made quite obvious the fact that sets of testable knowledge are really just as subjective as any set of book reviews given by two professors. Preliminary exam questions upon this set of testable knowledge again do nothing but express what the examiners find important. And, as I have learned the hard way, if you don’t tell professors what they want to hear the first time they ask, they will ask you again, expecting that next time your answer will be different.

What do you think is gained and lost in this academic hazing process?

Read part 3 of the series, “Dig Where You Stand.”

Any responses to the NY Times piece End the University as We Know It?  Another piece highlighting the concerns of specialization and the slave labor by graduate students in the research universities with diminishing chance of reward after pushing through the system.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

What do people on the inside think about Mark Taylor’s, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, assessment of higher education and his proposal of rigorous regulation and complete restructuring?  Does he shake you from your complacency and open academia to a future you cannot conceive, just speak out without proposing viable next steps, or miss the boat for followers of Christ engaged in higher education? 

Note:  I was particularly interested in the transforming the traditional dissertation, providing opportunity for other formats.

Inside Higher Ed reports on two interesting studies about which students complete a PhD and why. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are completing your PhD, part of the process is completing forms to copyright your dissertation. danah boyd, a researcher who studies online social networks and recent PhD recipient herself, has written an interesting post about licensing her dissertation under Creative Commons, instead of the standard “all rights reserved” copyright. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that provides free licenses for creative works, generally to make it easier to share those works. (I use CC’s search tool frequently to find CC-licensed artwork for the ESN and Faculty Ministry websites.) The post provides a couple of reasons why you might want a CC license (e.g. it will make it easier for someone to use your dissertation as a classroom text), but also potential hurdles you might face from your school administration. It’s an intriguing idea, and I’m now considering following danah’s example with my master’s thesis.

How the University Works

This week, I began reading Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. Bousquet is an academic labor activist, and blogs at both the Chronicle’s Brainstorm and at his own site. (A side note: Bousquet is now a prof at Santa Clara, but he first received tenure at the University of Louisville, my alma mater, at the same time I was a student there. He and I did not cross paths, as far as I can remember, but I witnessed firsthand many of the same things he saw, including UofL’s deal with UPS (PDF) to employ students at UPS’s graveyard shift in exchange for financial aid.)

Bousquet views the current academic economy as systemically corrupt. Here’s his description of graduate education:

Under casualization [of academic labor], it makes very little sense to view the graduate student as potentially a “product” for a “market” in tenure-track jobs. For many graduate employees, the receipt of a Ph.D. signifies the end, and not the beginning, of a long teaching career. Most graduate students are already laboring at the only academic job they’ll ever have – hence, the importance for organized graduate student labor of inscribing the designation “graduate employee” in law and discourse.

From the standpoint of the organized graduate employee, the situation is clear. Increasingly, the holders of a doctoral degree are not so the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its by-products, insofar as that labor system exists primarily to recruit, train, supervise, and legitimate the employment of nondegreed students and contingent faculty. (21)

Do you agree with Bousquet’s assessment? Is the difficulty in finding employment for Ph.D. recipients due to a flooded job market (the standard explanation) or due to an academic system that prefers cheaper, usually non-degreed contingent faculty to degreed tenure-track faculty?

On Friday, I led an International Discussion Forum on Randy’s Last Lecture at U. of Pennsylvania, sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the Penn Graduate Christian Fellowship, and Intercultural Friends.  Note:  Discussion questions posted here in PDF.

Afterward, there was an opportunity for participants to offer suggestions for future topics.  The international students in my discussion group desired an introduction to the practical elements of navigating American culture, one significant area being the management of money while studying in the U.S.

If you have suggestions of web resources/links on this topic or some helpful tips, please post them here.  To get us started below are some pieces from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s International Student Ministry Website:

Read the rest of this entry »

Inside Higher Ed reports on new data from the Council of Graduate Schools’s Ph.D. Completion Project. It finds “significant gaps” in Ph.D. completion rates among different demographic groups. IHE’s summary:

Generally, foreign, male, and white students are more likely to earn their doctorates after 10 years than are their counterparts who are American, female or minority.

The gaps vary greatly across disciplines. For example, in engineering, life sciences, and physical sciences, men are more likely to finish their Ph.D.s within 10 years than women, but in the humanities and social sciences, women are more likely to finish.

International students are also more likely to finish than domestic students. One theory is that international students feel real pressure to finish because of their visas’ expiration dates, though one commenter notes that domestic students typically have greater access to financial resources.

The article is worth reading. Any thoughts about why these gaps exist?