Second DDGC Town Hall on the Crisis of Labor and Graduate Education in German Studies
Monday, November 16, 2020, 3:30-5:00pm (Pacific)
Event Moderators: Emily Frazier-Rath, Gizem Arslan, Derek Price, Andrea Bryant.
Event Organizers and Notetakers: Patrick Ploschnitzki, Rosemarie Peña, David Gramling, Ervin Malakaj, Beverly Weber, Maria Stehle, Hannah Eldridge.
Contents of this Document
Context, Attendance, Protocol, Purpose, and Next Steps
Paradigm Problems and Conditions we are facing now
General Commitments and Principles shared among attendees
DDGC Action Groups (4–10 colleagues per)
Mutual Aid Action Group
Ethical Hiring Action Group
Graduate Programs Action Group
The Why/Whether German Action Group
External Communications Action Group
Mentoring Up Action Group
Context, Attendance, Protocol, Purpose, and Next Steps
These notes were compiled on unceded Musqueam land. All future DDGC Town Halls and related events will begin with Indigenous Land Acknowledgements. Here are two different potential models:
The purpose and outcome of this 2nd Town Hall was to establish DDGC Action Groups based on needs identified at the 1st Town Hall (Sept 25, 2020). Notes to that meeting are https://diversityingermancurriculum.weebly.com/ddgc-blog/report-ddgc-town-hall-on-job-market-crisis
Attendees: 49 people in North American German Studies and related fields (15 doctoral student colleagues, 4 recent doctoral graduates, 9 contingent or non-tenure track faculty colleagues, 21 tenure track faculty colleagues).
These notes reflect the contributions compiled by the breakout-room notetakers (see above) as well as from the public Zoom chat during the meeting. In an effort to reflect as many people’s contributions as possible, we have often retained their original language rather than paraphrasing. Representing the contributions of 50 participants means that some ideas here will contradict others and, as such, this document represents work in progress. Because we are a Collective, attribution to a particular contributor is not indicated unless requested by that person.
The next step from this document will be to build and join Action Groups (see Section Four) with 4–10 members approximately, to begin working on the actions proposed. We anticipate calling a report-back Town Hall with all of these Action Groups reporting, in April 2021. There is for each Action Group a HUGE list of ideas, as generated at the Town Hall. It falls to the members of the Action Groups to decide collectively how many and which of these ideas they can take up and how. In most cases this will also require communication between the various Action Groups on shared items. Lateral communication and mutual assistance will be key.
To express interest in joining one of these six focused DDGC Action Groups, please use this form by 10 December: https://forms.gle/p8UqgKoXWdN9y5qZ8.
Paradigm Problems & Conditions We Face Now
K-12 Teaching
There is a shortage of German teachers in high schools and few people certified to teach. PhD programs do not offer / require teaching credentialing along the way, so as to train future K-12 education leadership.
How should we be thinking of high school students’ needs and experiences? How can we best acknowledge and support the complex competencies and contributions of K-12 teachers, not only German teachers but those teaching in related social studies and humanities fields? These colleagues’ and learners’ work are essential in their own right, but are also essential to the well-being of university / college programs.
Graduate Programs
Admissions: A stark dissonance persists between ongoing recruitment habits (graduate program admissions announcements etc.) and the labour circumstances that await admitted students. Recruitment materials and job postings do not acknowledge the labour emergency, and professional organizations are struggling to find the words and actions necessary to do so as well.
Mentoring: Support for students-as-students does not translate to support for students as workers and current and future professionals—whether as workers in institutions that are not research-oriented, or in staff positions in academic institutions, or in other career paths that occur outside institutions of higher learning.
Graduate Labour Contractions: When faculty / staff positions are downsized, many invisible tasks tend to trickle down to graduate students, without adequate support or compensation.
Contingent Faculty Experiences
Housing: Some universities are evicting faculty from family / on-campus housing during COVID-19, forcing them into unaffordable rental markets and related (compounded) precarity. Additionally, contingent positions offer the least moving expenses support, creating further invisible debt.
Exhaustion at getting stereotyped as the person who talks about being contingent too often.
Fear of speaking up, repercussions (as contingent faculty); having to “wait until it’s over” before you can speak to problems.
The most traumatized among us at the moment are the ones in most danger of retaliation. How can one communicate experiences of trauma in a way that does not jeopardize a livelihood? How can these experiences be communicated in a way that could enact change without putting those in further danger?
Management Personnel
Chairs / Heads of larger departments (with graduate programs) tend to be those who were very successful under the old paradigms of the 1990s, and their success makes it genuinely difficult for them to apprehend and change priorities and structures.
On the bright side, those who are not themselves qualified to train for other positions outside of academia still have a network of former advisees (who completed BA, MA or PhD) doing work in other fields, whose experiences we can draw on.
Many tenured colleagues are ready to get to work on actions that protect contingent faculty and graduate student colleagues, and to mentor up to upper-level administrators, etc. They often don’t yet have the training and information necessary to do so. (See Action Group F “Mentoring Up”, below.)
Big vs. Small Programs
Lack of communication and mutual support persists between large university departments with graduate programs and small college programs, as does communication between K-12 colleagues and university researchers. Colleagues in large departments still aren’t engaged enough in recognizing the different priorities / circumstances of programs at smaller institutions. There’s no good reason for this lack of cooperation / mutual regard. When larger programs set the disciplinary, curricular, and professional agendas, smaller programs’ circumstances and priorities will not be well served.
How much strategic neoliberal rhetoric is defensible?
How much should programs orient themselves to neoliberal discourses for short-term gain / stop-gap strategic ends? When should we, for instance, try to represent ourselves and our labour as “cheap” in contrast to other programs, like chemistry? How much should we align ourselves with “strategic plans” in order to secure lines? What is an ethical and effective engagement with marketing for us? If we want to succeed in such strategies, how well do we have to command these idioms?
How should we be thinking about our relationships with local German-run businesses, and what do we know about their interest in our students? Is the market for German-speaking workers really what we think it is? How honest are we being about the relationship between businesses and the humanities?
How do we ensure that our strategies and outcomes align with our ethics and guiding principles?
The “Why/Whether German?” question:
We have no clear, persuasive, ethical answers to this question, nor consensus on whether and why it needs answering. Some of us have had to learn marketing in order to save our programs, others have determined that “Why German?” is the wrong prompt entirely. We need clear principles about how and whether to argue “for” German, and what that means when and if we do so. What is the relationship between “Why German?”, “Why Humanities?”, “Why Multilingualism?” etc. (See Action Group D “Why / Whether German” below)
General Commitments and Principles shared among attendees
Academic and intellectual activity is work; faculty and graduate students are workers, when they are teaching but also when they are researching, building community, and doing service commitments.
Graduate student colleagues and contingent faculty need a living wage, as equitably defined according to local calculations, including equitable leave for illness and family needs (related or unrelated to COVID-19).
Making invisiblized labor visible is crucial at all levels, though there is a culture of resistance to doing so.
Hiring and living-wage compensation standards need a rigorous review that our professional organizations will endorse and defend, so that chairs / heads can do so too. At very least, job ads for precarious positions need to be written with less pride and impunity.
We need to pursue agreements about departmental level decision-making: i.e., not to routinely make short-term hires and semester-long hires. We can help determine what constitutes an emergency personnel need (disability, illness, etc.) and a non-emergency stop-gap compromise.
Colleagues at larger programs need to speak up for and connect with smaller, more immediately endangered programs so as to strengthen everyone involved.
Prominent R1 faculty members with powerful connections should be expected to use that symbolic power to defend precaritized workers and secure better outcomes for everyone.
Local / translocal collectives and informal underground networks / undercommons (Harney and Moten 2013) can sustain us where professional organizations have not. Changes in our professional organizations are promising, but it’s easy for them to fall back.
Action Groups
Mutual Aid Action Group
A network for sharing and requesting different kinds of mutual aid (social, financial, emotional, material, etc.). We would need to design a system which accepts requests for and offers of mutual aid (ex: Google Form), allows us to collect, organize, approve, and deliver aid that people need.
Promote new longer-term sensibility: that our jobs have long prohibited meeting urgent needs that shift throughout our and our colleagues’ lives (times of illness, disability, as well as the financial issues facing graduate students and contingent faculty). Short-term funding, organizing of meal trains, working to collect resources for the person who needs them and connect them?
People need a range of things - someone to talk to, someone to help find housing, someone to give feedback on a project. Allow people to both offer and request; small group of people that coordinate, match offers and needs.
Accessing wealth, fund-raising campaigns, accessing rich people’s money & German-affiliated companies for our mutual aid purposes.
Think about the network itself as sustainable for the long term.
Networks / Contacts who can help or be a model:
The Sportula: Microgrants for Classics Students: https://classicssocialjustice.wordpress.com/2018/09/15/the-sportula-microgrants-for-classics-students/#:~:text=The%20Sportula%20is%20a%20collective,economically%20marginalized%20undergraduates%20in%20Classics.
Black Trowel Collective Microgrants: https://blacktrowelcollective.wordpress.com
DDGC folks with mutual aid experience
Info-sharing among WiG, MLA, ACLS. Perhaps a meeting of DDGC folks who attended the MLA summit on doctoral education.
Ethical Hiring Action Group
Encourage departments to open up new opportunities (even in a time of financial constraint) that could help recent PhDs – perhaps a post-doc opportunity or something similar that the department has never considered before.
Advocate for postdocs at home university, remove stigma thereof, push for TT faculty to be more involved/aware of current job market, make clear that the end goal of a PhD doesn't have to be a TT job, but also not a precarious livelihood.
Living wage, benefits, lecturer positions/post docs for recent grads, change requirements for applications, secure benefits for contingent faculty, stimulus checks / (universal?) basic income to help supplement those in more precarious job markets like ours.
Appealing to the DAAD/GSA/MLA for a Dissertation Pandemic Writing Fellowship.
Bringing change to the job application process: no need to submit 5 documents for a first round with hundreds of applicants.
Do any other disciplines have better hiring practices?
Collect questions that were asked in job interviews; what (inappropriate) language is being used; a space where this can be shared comfortably, anonymously, and safely is needed —> Google Forms.
Do a survey of contingent faculty, graduate students, and TT faculty at departments, asking about issues like hiring plans the next X years, CF pay, budget cuts, # of post-docs, etc.
Writing a sample job ad (draft) to share as a DDGC model for departments to adopt. There may be good examples out there! Keep it streamlined (in terms of documents you’re asking for); Add “dos and don’ts.”
Create guidelines for hiring procedures; need for (clear) language to be presented from various levels. Find examples of institutions that are doing a great job.
Create guiding principles / talking points for the discipline that departments can reference. If our institutional organizations back these guidelines, all the better; a document of talking points that can be adjusted depending on institution.
Long-term strategies: a national/international ethical hiring pact (along the lines of the Council of Graduate Studies April 15th resolution) in which signatories commit to: not listing ANY positions lasting less than one year, paying under a living wage, or withholding benefits; requiring providing moving expenses for all positions; offering robust mentoring for TT and NTT faculty.
Look for other inter-university solidarity structures as models; consult campus unions for further demands/commitments to list; see if international universities or other disciplines have anything along these lines.
Graduate Programs Action Group
Ethical PhD program recruitment suggestions/guidelines. Reducing application fees for graduate programs.
Stigma-busting about non- and alt-ac jobs. Begin helping the disciplines imaginine nonacademic careers as equally valid.
Updating (some) senior faculty on current grad student experiences through survey in our group, then we can take anonymous stories and use modern comms methods maybe to highlight stories.
Rather than ending grad programs, how about changing the focus of grad programs to include more skills that are useful in a broad range of post-doctoral positions. Scholarship is just one aspect, but an important one.
Graduate study should integrate community-engaged work (understand broadly): reaching out to local high school teachers, connecting with local organizations.
It is crucial to start building systems of support for graduate students who are adjuncting elsewhere while still enrolled in our own programs—this has already been a reality of the final years and will be an even greater reality in the coming years. This is a reality we have to acknowledge. Possible areas where we can create supportive structures: reducing workloads if they are TAing in our own programs, recognizing their adjuncting as professional development where possible, making sure they have continuity of insurance, childcare, etc.
Invite graduate students as guest lecturers, speaking about their research and teaching.
Begin developing practica as part of graduate curricula. Often they can lead to jobs.
Help colleagues creatively ask about possibilities, do not fall to language of “there is nothing we can do” or “that isn’t how we do this.”
Model how to start making contacts to community organizations where graduate students could intern/work. It shouldn’t be left up to graduate students to make those contacts to community organizations.
People at PhD granting institutions aren’t necessarily qualified to train people for these other positions or even know how to point them in the right direction. Counterpoint: but they can invite people who have experience applying for and getting other jobs. Rely on others for expertise that you don’t have—academics do that all the time.
Help articulate what the dissertation process trains you to do that other things don’t: long term project organization, living in contradiction, processing and communicating enormous volumes of complex information, knowing there isn’t one right answer.
Model how to encourage roundtables from alumni who aren’t in instructional academic positions: publishing, advising, k-12.
Research other job markets for German PhDs are out there (aside from 'transferable skills' workshops)? Begin learning about how to navigate other job markets, collecting evidence about what other majors/grad students have done—successfully.
Change expectations for graduate students entering the job market that supports their mental health and doesn’t require overextending themselves with publications, conferences, service, etc.
Preparing graduate students for the non-academic job market.
Show (great) flexibility towards usual formats of assessments (across the board)—simply allow for new formats, even if they are not going to stick around, just to test things out.
The Why/Whether German Action group
Identify how / why this topic is so difficult for us to be clear / honest about. What evidence and presumptions drive the way we pose or do not pose the “Why / Whether German” question?
Develop clear and honest arguments about how exactly German is useful beyond the humanities, i.e., Science, Business, and Healthcare.
Avoid reifying stereotypes and perpetuating attitudes that suggest the “West against the rest.”
Think intersectionally: center concerns of Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ folks, immigrants, disabled folks, and other marginalized people.
Is there a winning argument for German? What are we attempting to win? What is a very good losing argument for German, one which we might defend nonetheless, based on DDGCs Guiding Principles and other sources?
German is not just German. German is also Queer Theory, Holocaust Studies, Memory Studies, Psychoanalysis, space to talk antiracism, decolonization, memory, LGBTQIA history, and so on and so on.
Draw on student experience, what they value, to incorporate in advocacy language.
Decide how to use / distribute the results of these discussions
External Communications Action Group
We need a toolbox of excellent, ethical arguments that comport with our guiding principles and with decolonization (liaise with other Action Groups on this?).
Pursue potentially a (trans)national pact of universities who sign on that they won’t hire at a non-living wage (like the no grad school decisions before May 1 pact), which can be used to pressure admin (“peer institutions” is the magic word) (liaise with Ethical Hiring Action Group above).
Bringing together best practices documents, from AAUP, MLA, etc. and then send them back to these organizations, with our critical modifications. Publish our own critical modifications on the DDGC website. Is this adequate, for instance? MLA guidelines: https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/Career-Resources/Guidelines-for-Search-Committees-and-Job-Seekers-on-Entry-Level-Faculty-Recruitment-and-Hiring-as-well-as-Postdoctoral-Applications.
Flood journalistic outlets (local, regional, student-run) with op-eds https://www.theopedproject.org.
Change the face of humanities and academia, fighting anti-intellectualism. Break down walls dividing those inside the academy from those on the outside.
Liaise with attendees to MLA Virtual Summit for the Future of Doctoral Education.
Find out from the DDGC network what other social movements and groups on campuses are doing similar work, who we could make connections with, who might offer services to help connect network members to. E.g., BIPOC groups, unionization efforts who might have data on contingency and precarity.
Mentoring Up Action Group
We also need language to help chairs / heads / tenured accomplices advocate to admin.
From the experience of a tenured faculty member in attendance, we are constantly trying to advocate up but have little training. There is a disconnect and a lack of honest communication that is a result of the power structures in place.
What are institutional-specific considerations that inform how program advocacy and asking for positions operate? Do faculty know when and how to advocate for their programs? Do they know how to navigate department administrations hostile to ideas?
Privileged faculty have no training in pushing up vs. down when it comes to advocacy.
How much mentorship do faculty in administration get in advocacy for their program?
Who “speaks language of administration” and how can that language be acquired?
What background do faculty admins in language education have in this?
Not everyone is a good writer of reference letters. One attendee has been horrified to see some of the things that people have written in letters, of course without the knowledge of the people they’re supposedly recommending.
We also need to mentor people on writing letters, writing reviews of articles, a whole range of things that faculty are assumed to know how to do.
Updating (some) senior faculty on current grad student experiences is very important (Liaise with Graduate Programs Action Group above).
Teach chairs / heads how to uplift the work of precaritized colleagues (liaise with Ethical Hiring Action Group above).
Insist on comprehensive plan to help new or visiting faculty transition to/into the academic community and, I believe, transition forward, if it is just a visiting position.
Rethink the k-12 pipeline, with the GSA, MLA, AATG. Find out about excitement among high school students, marketing, placement tests, not the content.
Encourage colleagues at different kinds of institutions (large / small, PhD-granting / undergraduate-centered, university / K-12) to pair up and dialogue about their work conditions, experiences, and priorities.
Find out what is actually happening in the administration: where are the cuts, what hiring decisions and priorities are being made. Tenured faculty can find this out—go to the meetings (one university has a talk to the provost coffee hour and things like this, also faculty senate).
Guidance and mentorship in speaking with upper administration (adjustable for different kinds of institutions).
Short-Term: Try to find out about budget priorities for next hiring season.
T-T people: raise awareness of struggles faced by contingent faculty and grad students among administrators/ higher administration.
Networks/Contacts who can help: NEH/State Humanities Councils, GSA, MLA, AATG, ACTFL, AAAL.
What are the priorities for this institutional advocacy? Is it maintaining German programs as German programs? Maintaining Graduate student funding? Long-term advocating for more tenure lines? What do we ask for?
We also to have to learn who to advocate to—where is the power, how does the money flow, etc.? Even though these processes are institutionally specific, what general questions should we be asking to figure this out? Are we adequately guarding the interests of faculty and students of Colour?
Academic intersectionality: Generate possible partial appointments, i.e., with computational science and digital humanities.
Consider endowed chairs and funded positions.
Develop relationships with potential donors.
Advocating in conversations with colleagues on our campuses.
Support on-campus unions.
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