Don’t Panic
About the Future of Classics and Humanistic Higher Ed
This is the first of a two-part transcript of a conversation with Joy Connolly and Joseph Howley. Check out Part II for professional advice and resources for classics grad students.
On April 23, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, Joseph Howley, Associate Professor of Classics at Columbia University, convened a special Zoom session of the Graduate Research Colloquium featuring Joy Connolly, President of the American Council of Learned Societies. I was honored to join them in discussing the pandemic’s implications for higher ed, the humanities, and classics as a profession — from undergraduate teaching and outreach to graduate training, job prospects, and tenure requirements. Our discussion was scaffolded around questions Columbia grad students had submitted in advance, and follows below in two parts, edited for length and clarity. The second part includes institutional advice and alt-ac resources from Joy. I’m grateful to all who participated, and above all to Joy and Joseph for their wisdom, pragmatic advice, and humor in these trying times. Many thanks for sharing with a wider classics community a conversation that concerns us all.
Joseph: So today we’re joined by two guests to talk about the intersection between the COVID crisis and the ongoing crisis in the academic humanities. I’m going to try to moderate but not talk too much. And I think we’ll just go into two questions on what I would call the big picture. One is, how might this crisis be a way for us to re-envision what the university and higher education looks like? How might we collectively — grad students, contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty — enact positive change in support of the humanities? And the other question: how can we best advocate for the importance of the humanities at this critical moment?
Joy: There are so many things to say and a million ways to come at this. So I’ll start [with] the economics of higher education and the fundamental core mission of what all of us are here to do: we are all committed to discovering and circulating knowledge. …
For those of you who don’t know my trajectory, I’m a little bit like Han Solo in Star Wars when he says to Luke Skywalker, “I’ve flown across the galaxy, I’ve seen a lot of strange things.” … I’ve been a dean and a provost and acting president of a college, and now I’m at ACLS. So when I look over the whole landscape, the one absolutely immovable factor that we all have to think about is the fact that universities run on undergraduate tuition. … If we lose sight (as I think frankly we have) of undergraduates — large numbers of undergraduates being taught really well and being really engaged — then a whole cascade of problems … becomes much harder to solve because we don’t have the ground of undergraduate interests and frankly, tuition dollars.
I could go on and on but I just want to open up that question, and for doctoral students, [ask] your thoughts on where undergraduate teaching sits in your consciousness. I’ll be frank: when I was a grad student, it didn’t at all really. I got very little preparation, and it wasn’t presented to me as the heart and soul of what I was supposed to be doing with my life.
Nandini: It’s important to think about the complex ecosystems that we’re all part of. And I think that this crisis is making clear that arts and humanities and communication are incredibly important. I mean, science means nothing unless we’re able to communicate it to people. [Our forced migration out of brick-and-mortar classrooms] also makes clear how scalable we [humanists] are and how cheap and high-value we are and easy to translate online compared to many lab classes. So I wonder if we play our cards right and refocus on that teaching mission — if we have the vision to break down some borders and [prioritize] reaching out to those undergrads and to a larger population — [whether this crisis presents] a golden opportunity. …
It’s also forcing us to confront some structural problems. So, for instance, the same people who produce knowledge are not always the best ones at communicating it, are not always the best ones at uploading it and handling the technological side, are not always the best ones to check in for 5–10 minutes with every individual student [as we should be doing even when we migrate large lecture classes online]. All of these jobs are not really doable by one person with equal skill. And this ecosystem leaves a lot of room for graduate teachers.
Joseph: I’m thinking about our graduate students, all of whom are deeply committed to teaching and have organized pedagogy seminars and programming that everyone in the department benefits from. But who also know that they need to finish a dissertation and they need to go on the job market with their CV looking a certain way. That’s just a kind of collision of incentives that I can see emerging. [How should grad students be apportioning their time?]
Joy: At ACLS, we’re trying to move fast to get funding for a post-doc program to help preserve those emerging PhDs inside and outside the academy. [But] we can’t be in the business right now, in my view, of encouraging people to stay on the hamster wheel, of producing a few articles in peer-reviewed journals, when that’s not going to sustain the enterprise for the next generation. And I say that as somebody who deeply values highly specialized research. I think it actually represents an act of love for humanity. … But if that’s going to be the measure of the next generation coming up and getting jobs, we are sunk. Because those kinds of skills and expertise and time are not going to get the students in the classroom. And if we don’t have the students in the classroom, we won’t have posts, not just twenty years out, but five years out at this point.
So, [that’s] a long answer to a question about how we spend our time and how we need collectively as a field — grad students, faculty at all ranks, contingent faculty — to make some really tough decisions about the work that we love to do. We only have limited time. How are we going to divide the pie?
Joseph: I want to ask something prompted by what you just said, Joy, about what the situation looks like from where you sit. … Are we looking at a new crisis in the profession, or are we looking at an exacerbation of an existing crisis?
Joy: I would say definitely an exacerbation of an existing crisis. And one angle of it that I haven’t seen talked about a lot, because I think it makes people so uncomfortable, is the fact that we live in academia in a state of competitive fragmentation. … Unfortunately, one thing I’ve seen in my move from NYU to CUNY and then to ACLS, is that while the cuts hit everybody — and I’m not disrespecting the challenges and pain that are going to be felt at Ivy League schools — the impact on less well-funded universities is going to be hugely intense. And when we’re talking about the need for systemic change, it can be very hard to deal with that reality because the Ivies can set the standards intellectually for the rest of the system. … The fact that people at much less well-resourced schools are being asked to meet standards that are set at much richer places, that’s going to start more visibly falling apart. And I think that’s going to cause a lot of pain and difficulty in coordinating change. It’s going to add a lot more friction into the system. I have total optimism that we’re going to be able to overcome it. But it’s so difficult even to talk about that I think we need to recognize it as its own separate challenge.
Joseph: Nandini, you’re no stranger to a state school system under fire.
Nandini: It’s great to hear Joy’s perspective. I’m honestly worried more about survival-level things. I’m worried about finding jobs for [students] who are graduating, who are very unlikely to get hired. … I’m trying to figure out how we can [best use] the increasingly constrained resources we have. We don’t yet know how fall enrollment is going to look, for instance. So we might not even be able to justify our usual number of TAships. How we can use what we’ve got to figure out ways to keep people on health care, pay their rent and pay their groceries, is a big priority for me. …
Every institution is feeling this very differently. But — and here I could use Joy’s expertise in how to create institutional change on a large level — I really wish that we could, for instance, share teaching and TAships and collaborate across institutions, and thereby create a kind of internship program. Not everyone [earning a PhD this year] is going to be able to get a post-doc. But [if departments hired one another’s grad students on a short-term basis] we could give them some networking [opportunities and] experience teaching elsewhere. The good thing about this crisis is we’re very mobile and we can be present in multiple places on the same day, right? So I wonder if there’s a way to use that and to take advantage of that huge desire that I’m sensing in my colleagues to do something [helpful]. Many of us are going to be furloughed, anyway, but I’d be happy to donate a percentage of my salary if it would help retain a TA when we don’t [otherwise] have the need or budget for that.
Joy: Obviously this is a kairos and I think it is one to seize. … Chris Newfield, the incoming president of the MLA, has written a couple of books about the “just university” and how to pay for it. … I think one good tactic is to educate yourselves as much as you can about where costs are going in the university and try to think yourself into the administrators’ shoes and think what would be required that could do this in a just way, now that this behemoth has been created of a university that has a million offices and a million projects that are not what I think are the core mission.
Nandini: [My husband, a financial administrator, has made me aware of] how small a part tuition is of the whole complex economy of [our big public university]. The places where we’re really bleeding money right now at Madison are housing, athletics and other campus services … that used to help subsidize a lot of our teaching mission. Our tuition is actually artificially low because our state government is able to force that. [But] there’s something very equalizing and flattening about this [crisis]. Because now that all universities are online, you’re taking away the fancy dorms, the gym facilities, all the bells and whistles. And we’re seeing the emperor of education without its clothes. We’re seeing the extent to which certain institutions are really selling a whole packaged experience, the chance to build connections with movers and shakers of the future amidst beautiful buildings. But [now that] everyone is losing all of those physical aspects of education, it’s getting stripped down to this really essential undergraduate mission that Joy is thinking about. And there’s something very radical in that.
If we’re all going to be teaching in the fall anyway, which I think is fairly likely, wouldn’t that be an amazing moment to play with the idea of universal education and make online auditing free and thereby share the intellectual wealth that we usually charge so much for [when it also entails] the privilege of going and living in a dorm room? If we tried to detach the content and the conversations from the physical plant, I think we would still have plenty of students who’d want to come interact with each other. And I think that sharing the wealth that we generate more widely would actually help our status going forward.
Because if students are sitting in their homes in the fall without anything to do, I think they would rather take a myth class [online] than organic chemistry. So I actually see a chance for people to vote with their feet and for us to build our future audience and to get out of our defensive crouch against STEM — which is a false one — and show that we’re actually quite complementary. In this time when death is so close by, there’s a real memento mori in the air … If you have limited time on this Earth, why not learn to live a more beautiful and more thoughtful life?
Joy: Can I just pick up on the flattening, because that’s so crucial? I mean, we could do it department by department. Call a high-school teacher and say, you know what, let’s just blend our classes. Because I haven’t been in a high school class in a long time, but they are the ones feeding us the students. And I can’t tell you how many teachers have told me over the last ten years: “Joy, we send you students from high school and they can’t wait to take classics or history or English. And then they come back to us in two years and they’re majoring in econ or bio. What are you guys doing?” And part of the problem is that there’s no connection, right? High school teachers and college faculty never talk.
So we have a chance to do that now. I think Nandini’s absolutely right, whether it’s high schools or community colleges or connecting with people who are isolated in senior centers. We can do whatever we want in this moment and nobody can stop us. And imagine the dean or the provost who’s confronted with this cool department that’s gone out and done these innovative things and thereby hit all these birds with one stone, if I can use an overly violent and anti-animal metaphor. Who has reached new audiences and has opened up and shared knowledge — shared the wealth as Nandini said? It’s going to be a lot harder for that dean to cut that department.
Joseph: You know, I’ve taught Lit Hum every year since I came to Columbia. And every year I have some version of a conversation that goes: “well, Professor Howley, I love reading literature. I think I’d really like to major in English or classics, but my mom, my dad want me to major in something that will get me a job.” And why parents think an econ or poli sci major is going to get them a job is a different problem: some of those programs have clearly run a more effective scam than we have! But if I’m hearing you right, Nandini, part of what you’re saying is essentially … that pressure students feel to major in something practical rests on a certain kind of futurity, a certain understanding of how things are. And I’ve always been sympathetic to these students because the job market sucks. You know, I graduated from college in 2006 and went straight to grad school. And so I watched the financial crisis hit in ’08. And I understand if you feel like there are fewer and fewer jobs, you’re more and more worried about your children doing something that will definitely get them a job. Nandini, what you said is kind of scary, [because it’s] like, who knows what the future holds? So why not major in classics? I don’t know how we package that, but it’s interesting.
Nandini: Yes, you’re articulating exactly what I was thinking. … [We have to stop thinking of college as a conveyor belt toward secure employment, because that’s long been a myth for most majors, and many rewarding jobs aren’t at the end of some predefined pipeline.] And we are going to have to think a lot more creatively about what it is that we love, what we’re good at, what the world needs right now. We need to recenter [our individual career goals] based on how we can contribute … [and] start discerning in ourselves: okay, I’m really happy when I’m reading, or writing, or solving puzzles. And that skill set can go into classics or it can go into contact tracing or whatever jobs will be in the future. We’ve always had a lot of uncertainty in classics grad school about the future. But that uncertainty is a way of life right now, and I think that could actually be very healthy for a discipline that tends to be so conservative and inertial.
Please join us for the second part of the conversation, where we address grad students’ questions about the job market and how to effect positive change in this time of crisis.
As of Wednesday, Nandini Pandey lives, writes, and teaches classics in the only state “without a single protective measure in place to combat the coronavirus.”
