Ethical Decisions at the MLA Job Market

Got to speak at two panels on Saturday at the MLA.  The second talk was a last minute substitution for an absent panelist on something I have been researching for years, the other was a roundtable discussion on the ethical obligations graduate programs have to their students.  The scholarly talk was fun, the round table quickly turned into polemics.  If only people got as angry about Goethe poems as often as they do about blogs.

Scott Jaschik wrote about the panel for Inside Higher Ed.  He really tries to summarize what the speakers said: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/13/speakers-mla-generally-are-skeptical-idea-shrinking-phd-programs

And then Karen at “The Professor is In” just went on her own riff with it.

http://theprofessorisin.com/2014/01/13/who-is-us-thoughts-on-the-mla/

In the spirit of a spirited debate, here’s one speaker’s version of how to insert ethical decision making into the MLA job market.

The panel “Who Benefits? Competing Agendas and Ethics in Graduate Education” had something of a demographic spread: two tenured guys, two guys just starting out, a super competent woman from the MLA with all the data—the other woman on the panel couldn’t make it.

So off the top, one important distinction is between ethics and politics.  There are so many important political actions humanities scholars need to undertake to make sure that cultural learning does not get swept out into a sea of economic necessity.  This means that humanities teachers have obligations to the books and artifacts they teach.  We have an obligation to the past, to hold and preserve it in the memory of the next generation.  We have an obligation to mediate between cultures, to explain why people far away do things differently, why they talk funny and eat strangely, why the kill each other and how they have fun. 

Advocating for public funding for education, re-introducing democracy to top-down administrations, protecting employees from arbitrary decisions, securing a decent income for graduate students and other university faculty are political decisions, requiring organization and publicity.  All too often ethics is used a substitute for political action that has failed.  So many times political activists fall back onto ethical arguments when they can’t change the system politically.

So let’s be clear about when we are acting collectively as a political group and when we are making ethical decisions as individuals.

Closing down humanities programs does not constitute an ethical decision that will help the suffering of students and lecturers.  Eliminating educational opportunities does not equal better lives, more jobs and higher incomes for new PhDs.  It’s one thing for deans and vice presidents to reduce the size of departments for budgetary reasons, but to argue that faculty have an ethical obligation to eliminate their own departments for the sake of future graduate students who might be duped into learning makes no sense.  It smacks of self-effacement and the abandonment of all that is sacred in higher education.

You don’t close the church just because the pews aren’t full.  You don’t shutter the theater just because the audience is home playing with their tablets.  You find new ways to draw an audience.  You rejuvenate, you don’t abandon your life’s calling.

But now to the ethical part:
There is no question that professors can be blithely ignorant of their privilege and thoroughly cavalier about how they treat people below them in the academic class system. And behind every comfy hiring committee stand an array of deans, provosts, and vice presidents for money who set the parameters of the search.  Not that this layering of responsibility should remove responsibility from the faculty hiring committee, but the anger from the recent blog wars and quit lit rarely trickles up to the administrators. 

As many people have argued, we really need do need to change the ethical behavior of hiring committees.  If there is one pasha moment in academia, it is the process of deciding which one of these many super qualified candidates will be invited on campus.  At the MLA interview the decision narrows significantly between 10, no more than 12 candidates being examined by anywhere from two to eight committee members, with ranked distinctions in each group.  It is in these small rooms, where a single phrase can make or break a candidate that ethical obligations are most important. 

Candidates are extremely aware of how much is riding on their every word and they think quickly about all they say, yet in contrast to the candidates circumspection committee members often feel the MLA interview is just the moment to let their own subjectivity hang out.  They try to be fair, yet they speak far more in terms of institutional politics than as intellectuals.  One key undefinable element is the question: Will this person make a good colleague?  Here the ethical bind unfolds, rarely do hiring committees judge candidates in terms of how they will change the department, how will they make us improve what we already do. Only in moments of crisis do committees look for someone different.  Very often, utterly subjective judgments are invoked in order to make sure the hiring committee is not threatened.  Is a candidate too high brow?  Did they speak too softly?  Did they not stop and make eye contact enough?  Did they tell too many jokes? Did they grasp my subtle theoretical allusion?  Will they like my guacamole?  (Ok, not this last one)

All of these objections to a young person’s summary of their research amount to the same issue:  how threatened is the committee by the new and the different. It is at this central moment, that ethical obligation enters.  All it takes is for two members of the hiring committee to agree that someone is “not a good fit” and their candidacy is decided, regardless of what the rest of the committee thinks.  All this subtle power is possible because there are so many good candidates on the market.  No hiring committee needs to argue with itself because there is inevitably always a high-quality consensus candidate available.

The ethical obligation here is to empathize with the candidate.  See things from their perspective.  How do they feel having flown across country for the sake of these 45 minutes?  What can we do to ease the situation?  How might we restructure the hiring process so that the candidate is at their best when they speak about their research?  How can we empower them rather than intimidate them?  If candidates felt that the MLA interview made them feel smarter, if everyone came out of the room having learned something new, then the hiring process would benefit all parties involved.

Out of this ethical moment, politics emerges.  Empathizing with the other people in the room motivates you to fight for them politically as well.  The blog wars, the new rage at supposedly privileged faculty burn that emotional connection and have us fighting amongst ourselves rather than organizing politically.