How to Begin Fixing Workplace Culture for Graduate Students
Doctoral students often suffer the worst consequences of the faculty's inattention to the academic workplace.
By Leonard Cassuto
Professors and doctoral students don't usually think of academe as a workplace. Outside of the obvious exceptions, such as the laboratory sciences, much of our writing and research is solitary. More important, we tend to see that work as centered not within a physical space — like a department or a campus — but in the wider culture of our disciplines.
Yet we do have a professional workplace. And because we pay it so little attention, it often doesn't function well. That hurts all of us, but it's graduate students who suffer the worst consequences. Many of our Ph.D. programs teach students to prize a faculty job and disdain other career paths. Given the limited number of tenure-track jobs actually available, we are, in effect, teaching them to be unhappy. Not surprisingly, many of them are. Their unhappiness — and anger, sometimes spiked with feelings of betrayal — isn't an isolated effect. It needs to be considered in terms of the academic workplace as a whole.
Our collective inattention to the academic workplace — as both an idea and an actual place — arises from our own professional socialization. Back in 1973, a report on faculty careers described a division in academic life between our "disciplinary career" and our "institutional career." (It also cited the "external career" — for example, a psychology professor with a private practice or a business professor who does outside consulting — but such opportunities are unusual in some disciplines, and field specific.)
Here's how the institutional career differs from the disciplinary one:
The institutional career encompasses intramural work — what we do on the campus. If I teach a course on antebellum American literature in my department, that's institutional work.
The disciplinary career is the work we do as members of a national and international discipline. If I give a talk about antebellum American literature at a big annual conference, that's disciplinary work.
Disciplinary work carries the most prestige because it encompasses research. (Whether or not it should is a different issue.) When academics use a phrase like "in my own work," it's invariably a reference to our scholarship. (Though it's worth asking: If my teaching isn't my own work, then whose is it?)
We do research mostly for audiences beyond our home campus. The higher we move up the prestige ladder, toward research universities at the top, the more likely it becomes that we consider our outward-directed research to be our most important work. Our immediate workplace — the space in which we do our teaching and service — matters less, especially at the research-oriented institutions that train graduate students. As a result, we don't think enough about workplace culture.
We could learn something from the people who do. Leaders in the business world spend a lot of time thinking about workplace culture. Most academics pursued a faculty career precisely to avoid corporate culture, but that doesn't mean we should ignore its lessons entirely.
I am not suggesting we adopt for-profit business practices in the name of "efficiency" or "competitive advantage." But as educators, we should aim to learn from people who can help us do our own jobs better. For example, in his 2019 book, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture, the tech CEO and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz writes that leaders should know what their workplace culture is — but that finding out may prove difficult.
That observation took me back to a similar comment I heard during a Zoom conference last February on "Graduate Education at Work in the World. The remark came during a presentation led by Stacy M. Hartman, director of the PublicsLab, a project that is housed at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and aimed at transforming doctoral education.
Speaking to a breakout group, Hartman asked us simply, "What are the values of your graduate program?" Answering that question, she rightly noted, is "harder than it sounds."
Academics live in a culture of evaluation, which means we literally search for values all the time. We evaluate not only our students' work but also one another's — and we do so before and after publication as well as for jobs, tenure, and promotion. However, we rarely evaluate our own work milieu, our own workplace values and processes. Instead, we rely on the old explanation: "We do it this way because we've always done it this way." Consider the comprehensive exam. Most of us consider it indispensable. But it was originally instituted as a bureaucratic solution to the problem of how to assess the progress of ever-growing numbers of doctoral students. We don't have that problem anymore, but the solution persists.
Workplace culture "begins with deciding what you value most," Horowitz writes in What You Do Is Who You Are. Graduate students deserve a workplace culture that responds to their needs — starting from classwork and professional development through their dissertations and employment searches, including searches both inside and outside academe.
"The best way to understand your culture," he says, "is not through what managers tell you, but through how new employees behave. What behaviors do they perceive will help them fit in, survive, and succeed? That's your company's culture."
Graduate students are our version of new employees.
In a famous 1965 debate with William F. Buckley, James Baldwin remarked on the need to expose "assumptions we hold that we're unaware of." Another good example of that, besides the comprehensive exam, is the set of unexamined assumptions that guide graduate-school admissions. Many of those same assumptions grip our workplace culture and pressure graduate-student life from the beginning.
Before we even admit them, we send prospective students the message that the job they should want at the end of a Ph.D. is a faculty position at a research university. Students write a personal statement as part of their graduate-school application and could, in theory, write about anything. But savvy applicants know they need to present themselves as prospective researchers. They know that faculty readers look for particular signals — we especially want them to demonstrate what kinds of scholars and scientists they will be.
What about doctoral students who want to teach more than do research? Or use a doctorate to promote social reform, perhaps within a government agency? What should they say on their graduate-school applications?
The answer is a matter of common sense: To maximize their chances of getting into a Ph.D. program, they should keep quiet about their true ambitions and pretend that their goal is to become a professor at a research university. Thus does the application process turn into a gantlet through which applicants may pass by presenting themselves as embryonic versions of the professors who will read their applications.
"First impressions of a culture are difficult to reverse," writes Horowitz. Maybe your department is one of the few that has reimagined its admissions process. But most doctoral programs continue to tell prospective young colleagues that we expect only one thing — that they value research above all. And in return, they expect the one thing that we increasingly can't supply — a tenure-track job at a research-intensive university.
I mention admissions in this context merely to show how, for graduate students, the academic workplace is vexed from the start, with consequences that ripple throughout their training. If we approached graduate school from the students' point of view, we would ask what they need from us — say, a curriculum that teaches them the skills they'll need after they graduate, and professional development to prepare them for that transition.
Professors may not be accustomed to taking advice from tech CEOs, but when Horowitz suggests that we "make ethics explicit," we could do worse than to heed that call. In his book, he looks for examples of workplace cultures far different from his own, such as Toussaint L'Ouverture's creation of a victorious army of people freed from brutal slavery in the late 18th century.
Likewise we need to be creative and open-minded if we are to improve our workplace for our graduate students and ourselves. In my next couple of columns, I'll describe successful cases of positive, student-centered graduate-school culture, inside and outside the classroom.
Scholarship & ResearchGraduate EducationThe WorkplaceTeaching & Learning
Leonard Cassuto
Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University who writes regularly for The Chronicle about graduate education. His latest book, written with Robert Weisbuch, is The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education, published in January 2021 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. He welcomes comments and suggestions at lcassuto@erols.com. Find him on Twitter @LCassuto.