Members Member News Member News Archive
|
By Charlotte M. Canning
We had an engaging talk here at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) in spring 2010 by University of California-Berkeley political scientist Wendy Brown, “Privatizing the Public and the Future of the Humanities.” In it she took up the “perilous situation” of the humanities in the neo-liberal order of things. The humanities involve what she termed “non-marketable knowledge” and therefore are not easily situated within an economy that devalues that which has general worth, but no easily quantified value. At the end she called for a renewed purpose in speaking to a broader public with passion, and resisting the reduction of higher education to capitalism’s latest modality. As she went on to state in The California Journal of Politics and Policy, “Without quality public education in our future, we face a populace taught only the skills needed for work, ill-equipped to understand or participate in civic and political life. This is corporate oligarchy, not democracy.”
What I have been thinking as these issues have been playing out on our campuses, in our state houses, and in the media is: "thank goodness I am in the arts!" Yes, as a historian I have plenty of ties to/affinity with the humanities. Additionally, many theatre/dance/performance departments or divisions are situated within the humanities (at UT the Department of Theatre and Dance is in the College of Fine Arts), but our ties to the arts mean we have been wrestling with these questions far longer. We also have an enormous commercial and non-profit arena where we see our ideas play out and our students move into leadership positions.
Now, since 2009 and for the first time on our field, we also have a way to think about the how doctoral programs participate in these debates, the ways in which we prepare our students for the field, and what lies in the future. Esther Kim Lee, with her colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, sponsored a conference which has since inaugurated the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Theatre and Performance Studies. Her original invitation read:
This invitation has since served as an informal charter for the group that grew out of the meeting. Unanimously, all of us there decided these discussions were too important not to continue on a regular basis.
That decision came because the time we all spent at the University of Illinois turned out to be remarkably productive. We realized that while we mostly knew each other and had been seeing each other at conferences for years, we had never formally discussed how our doctoral programs worked—from nuts and bolts like required curriculum, qualifying/candidacy exams, or language requirements to the larger, more philosophical issues with which we wrestle on a daily basis. We had interacted formally as scholars, but not as leaders of programs. Not that those conversations hadn’t been happening—of course they had—but not with all of us in the same room at the same time and brought together by a planned agenda.
Two months later at ASTR, Esther and I (with input from Emily Roxworthy) met to discuss how to translate the brainstorming in Illinois into something sustainable. We were looking for a structure that would not be overly demanding on any one person or even a small group, but would allow us to continue the thinking and planning that began last fall. We thought that if we created groups composed of 3-4 members that focused on the topics/areas/questions that emerged from our meeting in Illinois the workload would be manageable for each of us. The groups we identified were:
1. Strategies for Survival (budgetary issues, hiring, and advocacy) 2. Curriculum and Evaluation (courses, requirements, exams, and dissertations) 3. Employment (market trends, preparation in programs and through professional organizations) 4. Quantitative Study (program statistics and related matters)
In Illinois we had agreed that regular meetings were important but, in interests of fiscal probity and general sanity that we would meet as a discrete group every two years and at ASTR on the other years.
In 2010 we met as a full consortium at ASTR in Seattle. Immediate Past President Tracy Davis had suggested we use ASTR as a home base, which current President Rhonda Blair was happy to approve. There we decided to shift the groupings slightly, refocusing on institutional advocacy, faculty development, and graduate training and placement. Also on the table were more administrative questions of program directories, website, and membership fees. The Graduate Student Caucus of ASTR has raised thoughtful questions about what role graduate students might play in the consortium’s work. The answers may be different for different topics, but graduate student involvement will be enormously important, and help us foster leadership for the field.
During the time we have been developing the Consortium, I have agreed to take a leadership role so that Esther may hand off the responsibilities she has shouldered alone, but I do not see this role as anything more than coordinator. The group is not mine alone, it must work cooperatively so that it continues to serve doctoral programs as a whole. We are also all looking forward to collaborating with ASTR’s committee “New Paradigms on Doctoral Education.” Under the leadership of Heather Nathans (and with Esther on the committee) the findings of the committee should be invaluable to program heads as we look ahead to the future of the field. The 2011-12 academic year will be a busy one for the group: we will have our first independent meeting since our inaugural meeting in Illinois. Plans are underway to host it at the University of Texas. The discussions here will no doubt be as lively as the ones two years ago. We’ll have a lot to debate, and debate is one of the things scholars do well. As heads of doctoral programs we are not just guiding students toward their degrees so that they may join the ranks of the professorate. Brown concludes in her Politics and Policy piece, “the fundament of democracy [is] an educated citizenry capable of thoughtful analysis and informed judgment.” Through our doctoral programs we are sustaining a commitment to our students, ourselves, and the larger public to develop as citizens, not just of the US, but of the world. The more we know about how to do that, the more likely we are to be a part of bringing about the world in which we all want to teach, research, and live. About the Author
|
There is no doubt that this is a challenging time to be in higher education. Budgets are being cut, hostile public voices are questioning the value of a university degree, “research” is being demonized as a distraction from teaching, and the professorate is finding itself characterized as lazy and greedy. Those of us at state institutions may feel more imperiled than our colleagues at private ones, but we all send recently defended PhDs out into the same job market. That market has been a rough experience for many of our former students, some having jobs offered and then rescinded, others going through on-campus interviews only to have searches cancelled, and many just not getting interviews, despite the quality of their CVs.
Charlotte M. Canning is professor of theatre history in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin where she heads the Performance as Public Practice MA/MFA/PhD programs. Her most recent book is the anthology, Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, co-edited with Tom Postlewait, and she is currently finishing On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism for Palgrave Macmillan.