Faculty members who do little or no graduate training thus have an almost parasitic relationship to graduate-student employment: their own salaries and privileges are sustained by exploiting teaching assistants.
We need to recognize these problems that have no easy solutions. Here are a number of preliminary suggestions. Some suggest responses to the pressures of the job market; others offer ways of enhancing the quality - and reclaiming the purpose - of graduate study.
* Many graduate programs should reduce the number of students they admit. Others now should follow suit. It will require institutions to be tougher on graduates of their master's programs. They, marginal programs should be closed. Professional organizations need to become involved in making these tough recommendations, since neither departments nor institutions can be counted on to do so. Although some faculty members would have fewer graduate students to teach, they could certainly teach undergraduates, even in introductory courses.
* Institutions should devise legally sound early-retirement packages for those faculty members who are neither effective teachers nor productive scholars. 10 per cent or more of the faculty would fail both tests in some departments. In an ideal world, retirement offers should include both rewards for acceptance and disincentives for refusal. It is recommended periodic reviews for all faculty members, so that administrators have plausible data to show who is performing responsibly and who is not.
* Professional associations must find better ways of monitoring hiring practices and must investigate deceptive job searches, that is, cases where a national search is conducted even when a department already knows whom it intends to hire. Also, institutions must be discouraged from converting permanent openings to temporary positions.
* To lessen exploitation of graduate students, institutions should increase their wages and benefits. People teaching throughout the academic year should earn enough to have their summers free to devote to their intellectual work. Graduates who teach for six years or more might be given some retirement benefits and unemployment insurance. Universities must propose more extensive child care for all employees, but graduate students with children would benefit particularly.
* Graduate programs should offer serious career counseling, so that students can be advised at a suitably early stage about their prospects for non-academic employment. Since few programs now are equipped for effective career counseling, national professional organizations might well help in gathering, evaluating, and distributing information about alternative careers.
* Universities should refocus graduate education to emphasize both its intellectual rewards and its marketable skills. Specific ideas will vary widely from discipline to discipline, but in the humanities and social sciences, at least, graduate programs need to give advanced graduate students the right to design and teach their own courses. They will be better prepared for teaching jobs at institutions that don't emphasize research, where many of today's jobs exist.
* Faculty members must be required to do their best for students in the current bleak job market. Those carrying out their responsibilities indifferently, for example, who write sexist, lazy, or trivializing letters of recommendations, should be confronted about their behavior by department heads.
Although graduate study is to be an end in itself for some students, and not a means to an end, it needs to be fulfilling in those terms. That is for the most part difficult challenge and we are far from certain what it entails. It at the very least, means being able to leave graduate study with a sense of intellectual work that is coherent and complete.
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