Digital

CHAPTER TWO
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than desirable and less prestigious than tenure-track positions. This is a demoralizing
outcome for humanities graduates who find themselves without
faculty positions and potentially disconnected from their departments and
cohorts and who may carry feelings of being undervalued second-class citizens
of academia if this prevailing mindset does not change.
By offering recommendations and best practices to universities and
departments, professional associations such as the MLA and AHA proactively
acknowledge the need to responsibly prepare graduate students with
a meaningful and applicable education. In a 2012 interview, then MLA
president Michael Bérubé is paraphrased as saying, “curriculums… should
be redesigned to emphasize collaboration, but the question will be how
it’s valued by future employers, and by institutions themselves.” 6 Bérubé is
quoted as saying collaboration “runs up against the barriers of the institutional
reward system,” but also that “‘interdisciplinarity’ will play a crucial
role in reforming graduate education in the humanities, in part because
it will prepare graduates for a greater array of employment, both inside
and outside academe.” 7 Though DH is not explicitly mentioned as one of
those collaborative initiatives, it is definitely understood. In fact, this collaborative,
interdisciplinary approach could be seen as a clear training path
toward equalizing alt-ac careers. According to Vimal Patel, Russell Berman,
who led the MLA task force on higher education said, “Departments
should be more clear with students from the start that tenure-track jobs are
becoming harder to find… and should also explain to students what else
they could do with a language or literature Ph.D. Career options off the
tenure track.” 8 Berman is also quoted as saying, “the subject matter may, in
fact, be far from literature… but the rich professional formation acquired
during the course of doctoral study can be put to good use.” 9 Students won’t
necessarily need to look outside of their field if we or they broaden the
definition of the field itself.
This trend is happening in other humanities-related disciplines where
job offers are falling and attrition is high. In 2011, the president and the
executive director of the AHA made similar pleas for change in graduate
education. They stated that the AHA needs “to examine the training we offer,
and work out how to preserve its best traditional qualities while adding