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The author discusses the untenable status of the literature curriculum as of 2024. Topics covered include the academic use of a period coverage model to organize the discipline and the lack of faculty to do so, and the resulting porous character of the literature profession that has never-ending improvisation. Also noted are the growing focus on the utility-based aim with more specificity in research universities, and on skills that will weaken professors' identity as researchers.

Everyone tells tales about advisers. Some of the stories are heartwarming, while others are prurient, even horrifying. Most everyone has such stories on tap because the adviser-student relationship is the most crucial in turning a graduate student into a professional. the ties between graduate students and advisers are both professional and personal, and therefore uniquely strong--and tense. This author's advice is "So don't get too close." Part of what the author means is obvious. Advisers should not make their students into their flunkies, for example. The author has known graduate students who have picked up their advisers' dry cleaning. Of course graduate students should be invited to collaborate on projects that might advance their training or careers, but an adviser has to be careful to offer them graceful ways to say no. Advisers need to treat their graduate students as people without getting overly personal. "Not too close" serves as a professional caution as well as a personal one. Countertransference can transform teachers into nannies who worry more about a student's deadlines than the student does. That can never do. Graduate students are in the final stage of becoming professionals, and they have to figure out their professional identities for themselves. Advisers can also turn into mad scientists who seek to clone themselves. Graduate students know the difference between advisers who want to reproduce themselves and advisers who help students to know their own minds. That difference obtains even in science labs, where the adviser approves and pays for graduate-student experiments, and places his or her name on all student publications that come out of the lab. So do not get too close, but do not stray too far either. How to maintain that delicate equilibrium will vary with each graduate student.

In master's programs, and especially at the doctoral level, graduate students depend on their advisers more than on anyone else in their careers. Students do more work for their adviser's eyes than for anyone else's, and the adviser's approval is the key to the door that leads to the next place, whether full-time employment or more school. For those reasons and many others, graduate students spend a lot of time watching and thinking about their advisers. Adviser-student connection blends the professional and the personal. Treating graduate students as people, not just scholars in training, will make them better professionals.

Frederick Douglass's autobiography, 'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,' develops on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's master-slave dialectic, and is the story of a self-discovery. Through his narrative, the slave asserts his humanity, and reverses the grammar by defining the master as a villain. Douglass's narrative focuses on the slave's work at human self-creation, and dramatizes a variation on Hegel's dialectic. Hegel's work and the African-American literary dialogue can complement each other, as is evident through the literature of Douglass.

Professors revel in reputation--and nowhere does that show more clearly than in their concern about educational pedigree. That concern takes complicated forms. The author wondered what might happen if graduate admissions were reduced to a level that would only replace retiring professors. One possible consequence of such a move would be that less-elite Ph.D. programs might fold for want of students. In this article, the author discusses the influence of low-ranked Ph.D. programs and argues for the value of lesser-ranked doctoral programs on the same ground upon which they are often attacked: academic placement.

Whenever a discussion opens about nonacademic employment for Ph.D.s, it is not long before someone suggests reducing graduate-school admissions. "The market for full-time scholars has fallen off a cliff lately," this argument goes, "so why not just train fewer of them?" The strategy to reduce the number of Ph.D. students recurs in those conversations because it' i sensible. When there is insufficient demand for professors in the marketplace, the simplest response is to decrease supply. But is that the only or best response? Graduate enrollments are indeed dropping. Doctoral programs are admitting fewer students over all, with the most notable declines occurring in the biggest programs, and in the arts and humanities fields. It is too early to track the effects of those cuts, but they will certainly continue as programs seek to "right size." But what exactly is the "right" size? If the goal of graduate programs is to produce only enough Ph.D.s to fill the hiring needs of colleges and universities, then that number is bound to be pretty small. It is going to be so small, in fact, that it will cause drastic changes in the structure of graduate education. But the real bottom line here is not a tiny class of entering doctoral students. If professors decided to confer only enough Ph.D.s to fill vacant professorial positions, the more credible outcome is that lots of doctoral programs would go under. Some observers urge faculty members to take the initiative and start closing Ph.D. programs because of the dismal job market. In this article, the author discusses what would happen if most Ph.D. programs in the United States did close.

The crisis in humanities graduate education is coming to an end. But academic jobs are still few and far between, and graduate education remains on shaky ground both institutionally and socially. Nevertheless, two generations of "crisis thinking" are finally giving way to the idea that graduate education is not in a crisis. Instead, it is confronting a new normal, and it has to adjust accordingly. The most recent sign of collective awakening is a white paper titled "The Future of the Humanities Ph.D. at Stanford." Written by Russell Berman, a professor of German studies and comparative literature (and immediate past president of the Modern Language Association) together with five other Stanford faculty members, the document presents the latest and best proposal for more-flexible doctoral instruction, with different tracks aimed at different career goals. In this article, the author argues that one should take a long look at Stanford's proposal to rethink the humanities doctorate. He discusses one model for alternative paths to the Ph.D. that involves dividing "scholars" from "teachers" by granting them separate versions of the doctorate. Balancing the practical appeal of dual Ph.D. tracks is the model's heavy reliance on binary thinking--the "us" and "them" problem.

Discussion of nonfaculty careers for graduate students so easily disintegrates into dueling anecdotes. The author describes a story about someone who had to drop his Ph.D. from his resume in order to get a job at all. Stories cluster around both of those poles in the comments section whenever the author has written about nonprofessorial career paths. Anecdotes about alternative jobs for Ph.D.'s proliferate because data are in short supply.

The dissertation adviser's task may be to give advice, but his or her approval is required for the thesis to pass and the degree to be awarded. It is the graduate student's dissertation, but the imprimatur belongs to the dissertation adviser, so perhaps the process belongs to both of them. But that equation leaves out some other important actors, namely the other members of the dissertation committee. Usually ranging from two to four members in addition to the adviser, the committee also confers approval of a dissertation, and the group's approval is just as necessary. What is the role of the committee compared with that of the adviser? The answer is not at all clear. While all faculty members have power over students, they also have unequal amounts of power among themselves. And that imbalance can cause problems. The imbalance is highly field-specific. In the laboratory sciences, the adviser owns the means of production of the thesis. Students work in their advisers' labs and are financed by their grants. The student's name goes on any publications that result from the experiments done there, but so does the adviser's. The dissertation, usually a collection of experimental results, goes out under the student's name, but it is thoroughly underwritten by the adviser's money. Given that setup, one might expect the committee's role to be limited--and it usually is. Members of dissertation committees in the sciences offer typically broad oversight to the work that the adviser is managing in detail in the laboratory. For committee members to get closer than that would risk the appearance of meddling in a colleague's financial affairs. The humanities are organized quite differently. Doctoral students are usually financed on the departmental level, either through stipends or compensation for undergraduate teaching. The adviser has no financial stake in the student's dissertation work, and the adviser's name appears nowhere within any publications that result--except maybe in the acknowledgments. Instead, the adviser's investment in the student's research takes the form of time. A good adviser in the nonlaboratory fields will read multiple drafts of a dissertation and meet with the student often. But when a dissertation reaches the end of the line in the nonlab fields, the adviser's stake in the student's work is intellectual and emotional--and it is usually considerable. In nonlab fields, too, the committee does less than the adviser. Advisees may, as a rule of thumb, count on each committee member for one close reading of each chapter. Further readings by committee members will be more cursory, more in the nature of ratification than detailed engagement.

Marc Aronson, a lecturer in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University at New Brunswick and a historian who writes books for young adults, recently suggested that all Ph.D. candidates be required to take a course he calls "Communications." The goal would be to teach Ph.D.'s--both would-be academics and those who will pursue other work--how to talk about what they do to a variety of public audiences. The author suggests that a Ph.D. communications course might bring together students from across a university. Together, they would explore disciplinary and interdisciplinary literacy in their different fields. Learning how to successfully reach multiple audiences is not only a skill--it is also a way of looking at the world that enables individuals to see alternatives to specialization. It is a habit of thinking that provides a necessary counterweight to the default tendency of losing oneself in a narrow field of knowledge.

The practical goal of graduate education is placement of graduates. But what does "placement" mean? Academics use the word without thinking much about it. "Placement" is a great keyword for the graduate-school enterprise. For one thing, its meaning certainly gives a purpose to graduate education. Furthermore, the word is a portal into the way of thinking about the success or failure of what one does. So who determines the definition of placement that directs--and also constrains--the work of graduate deans? None other than their fellow deans and administrators. The problem is embedded in the foundation of the edifice itself. Reform therefore depends upon a more self-conscious definition of the word "placement." It should mean the jobs that graduate students want--not just the academic kind. A broader definition would overturn the common assumption that a Ph.D. is a pipeline leading to an evaporating pool of academic jobs. How do advisers know what kinds of jobs their graduate students want? By asking them, and then by periodically asking them again, to see if the answer changes over time. That's part of good graduate advising. Successful placement of graduate students has never been harder these days, and not just because the academic job market is a mostly dry well. As recent graduates know, the nonacademic market isn't exactly overflowing, either.

What should graduate teaching look like when it aims to prepare students for a range of careers? That's a welcome question, but it is not an easy one. The author takes up the problem in two parts, this month from the individual faculty member's perspective, and next month on the curricular level (that is, from the point of view of departments and programs). In history (and other disciplines), the idea that graduate students should perforce become professors arose relatively recently, during the postwar expansion of higher education. Thomas Bender, a history professor at New York University and author of the 2004 report of the AHA Committee on Graduate Instruction, wrote to the author in an e-mail that "the most immediate issue is to remove the stigma" that graduate students feel if they do not become professors. This must begin with a concerted "refashioning" of what it means to be a professional historian. But graduate students are not the only ones in need of refashioning. To move students away from thinking about their possible futures in purely professorial terms, Leora Auslander, a history professor at the University of Chicago, suggests that graduate-seminar leaders "teach from unconventional stuff." Edward Balleisen, an associate professor of history at Duke University, suggests that graduate-seminar leaders "imagine interdisciplinary seminars around a given theme," in which history graduate students would work "with grad students from other disciplines, as well as professional students." The very nature of that idea points to its applicability to other disciplines. Its value goes beyond cool-looking seminars to the cultivation of a wider professional ethos. Such courses would allow graduate students to imagine their work outside of the contexts of their own specialties. In fact, the central virtue of the whole approach lies in its endorsement of a move away from the sort of niche specialization that creates scholars whose work is far deeper than it is wide. The work in such seminars challenges the idea of solitary authorship that prevails in the humanities and some of the social sciences. Balleisen further suggests that departments create the option of pursuing an outside field that would orient graduate students toward nonacademic careers.

The author used to teach a core course at Fordham University called "Language and Knowing." It was during an evening meeting of that class early in 1991 that he first heard that "Operation Desert Storm" had begun-by which he means that the United States and its allies started dropping bombs on Iraq and occupied Kuwait in preparation for a troop invasion of the area. The fighting part of the Gulf War began that night, and the author and his student spent most of that evening's class meeting talking about it. Many were adults of about the same age of the author at the time (thirty) or a bit younger, which made them old enough to recall the Vietnam War in vague terms, but without a full sense of having lived through the turmoil. They discussed how it felt to be at war, and what it meant. The students were agitated, but not unmoored--which was a fair description of how the author felt himself. In this article, the author discusses how he changed the syllabus that term and added war stories, along with George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" to relate to what was going on in the world and open discussions for the class.