GRADUATE PROGRAMS IN ENGLISH, CRITICALLY AND HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED AN UNINHIBITED GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED Copyright (C) 1991 Hidden Text. Permission to reprint and distribute granted free of charge. The Opinions, Prejudices, and Misinformation Found in this Guide are the Author's; The Guide does not accept Advertising; the Author is already published, has Tenure, is not looking for a new Job, and does not accept Honorary Degrees. TO THE READER: There is no point in going to graduate school in English unless you can get a Ph.D. There is no point in getting a Ph.D. in English unless you can get a job teaching . There is no point in getting a job teaching unless you can get tenure. Unless you don't mind teaching at Bemidji State or the Lurleen B. Wallace State Junior College, there are really only about a dozen departments worth trying to be admitted to; they feed almost all the jobs in the top tier places (i.e. themselves) and most of the jobs in the second and third tier as well. If you check any first or second level department to find out where its faculty got their own degrees, you will see the same places crop up over and over again, with an occasional exception. Earl Miner got his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota and is a professor at Princeton. But if you have your heart set on teaching at Princeton, it isn't likely you'll fulfill your ambition with a degree from Minnesota. It is much, much more likely that you will be able to get a job at Minnesota with a degree from Princeton than the other way around. If you went to a good college, or even a bad one where you had good teachers, you will probably be appalled at the poverty of the courses offered in the best graduate departments. Your teachers are either young and desperate to get tenure or established and desperate to remain powerful within their own department and within the profession. They worry about trends constantly. What are top presses publishing? In what fields are deans willing to let departments hire? They write letters of recommendation for other people and grant proposals for themselves. They read manuscripts for editors at university presses. They go to conferences and are on the road constantly like rock-stars showing themselves off and trying to get job offers from other top departments either because they want to leave their current job or they want to get a big raise or a fancier title. They have no time to lead an intellectual life; they have no time to give interesting courses or give you sensible advice on your dissertation. They are constantly inhibited from saying what they think because it will offend somebody they want something from, such as a letter of support or a favorable report on their next book. No one ever got tenure, or a raise, or a fancy title, or a big reputation by giving interesting courses or giving graduate students good advice. You will find that your courses are boring and that you learn nothing in them. Your teacher can't remember what you wrote in your major paper, perhaps didn't even read it. You are in a rat race to impress someone on the faculty who will be your mentor. If you do learn anything other than how to survive and become one of these driven trend-chassers yourself, it will be through your own reading, or from older graduate students, or from graduates of the program who don't have professional jobs but who like hanging around the local cafs. Many a graduate student in a prestigious department learns more from the manager of the local copy center, who has a Ph.D. but couldn't get a job or couldn't keep one, than from all the star professors put together. Even if you do get into a prestigious department and get a degree, there is no guarantee that you will get a good job or indeed any job. The chances of taking good courses and learning something are higher in second and third level departments where your teachers are out of the chase, have lost interest in trends, are not consulted by editors or invited to conferences, and may actually have developed scholarly interests and a real intellectual life. A degree from a place like that will probably not get you a job at Harvard or Berkeley or even Michigan, but some such departments have a good record at getting their graduates jobs at much more humble places. There are more people making steady livings as secretaries than as rock stars. It's a cruel world, it's ferocious at the top, and you may do better, intellectually and professionally, off the fast track. But if you weren't ambitious, you wouldn't be reading this Guide would you? FOR THE AMBITIOUS These twelve departments are the first circle, although some are at the center and others are beyond the fringe. The guide does not suggest that these are the best departments in the quality of their faculty or in the quality of the education they offer their students, merely that they are the places to go to if you want a job at one of them, for they hire from one another almost exclusively, except for an occasional senior import from Oxbridge, neologue from one of the grandes coles, or confidence man from Antwerp. You can often tell if a department belongs to the best club or only the second or third best by checking to see how many of its own graduates it hires. Yale used to hire Yale; Harvard, Harvard and so on down most of this list almost exclusively. Berkeley is an exception and Duke is too recent a member for this test to apply (although Frank Lentricchia is one of their own). A few of these places may be temporarily or permanently on their way out, but it takes a long time for the embers to die. When one of these galaxies goes kaput, earthlings don't get the news for a million years. They look up at a heap of ash but see yesterday's sparkle and think everything is still all right. All of these places have problems of one sort or another, and only Harvard can live by Alfred E. Newman's motto, "What Me Worry?" Harvard is envied or detested by all the others because no matter how bad it gets, everybody who knows nothing about universities thinks of it as the best and naturally this includes a lot of graduate school applicants and a surprisingly large number of deans and provosts who hire them after they get their degrees. So Harvard has a kind of built in thermostat. Long before things reach the point of disaster, there is a new crop of bright young graduate students, another bunch of newly acquired faculty picked off from the departments that nourished them in obscurity just when they are starting to make a reputation, and always, always job offers for its graduates, no matter how dumb they are. Harvard's department is like the Mona Lisa or Shakespeare. Ask anybody who knows nothing about painting to name the "greatest painting in the world," ask anybody in the English speaking world who has never read a book published before 1950 to name the "greatest writer who ever lived," ask anybody who has never crossed the threshold of any university to name the greatest university in creation I. Do you believe in magic? YALE Since 1929 or thereabouts all truly loony and disruptive stuff has come from Yale, which has been, as a result, generally the most important and successful department in the country. It and its close allies in comparative literature and French have given us New Criticism (Cleanth Brooks, and Brooks in collaboration with Robert Penn Warren); half-baked ideological histories of criticism both short (Brooks and William K. Wimsatt) and interminable (Ren Wellek), confusion's masterpiece, Deconstruction (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller) and the work of assorted nut-cases such as Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman. A few sane ones are normally on board (currently Claude Rawson and G. K. Hunter, both British imports). Until recently Yale maintained a strong old fart connection as well: people like John Butt and Frederick Pottle, as well as a number of competent types such as Talbot Donaldson. Yale has been an exceptionally influential department through its graduates who always seem to get a lot of whatever jobs are available: Stanley Fish is from Yale, and/but so are Hugh Kenner, Charles Muscatine, Stephen Greenblatt, Michael Murrin, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Jerome McGann, David Quint, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Not as rich as Harvard or Stanford, Yale is in a depressing area of a cheerless city and faces huge expenses in reclaiming its physical plant, which seems to have undergone a decontruction of its own lately. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY Berkeley is huge and rich. It can and does just smother its (frequent) mistakes. Inefficient, but it has size on its side. It always seems to have a mix of trend setters like Greenblatt and loonies like Fish, balanced with solid types like Philip Damon, Henry Nash Smith, and Bertrand Bronson in addition to the odd recovered trendy such as Frederick Crews. This department, through amazing luck or clever policy, has tended to get the benefits of publicity from the publicity-prone, and then watch other places lure them away at huge salaries just when they begin to be old-hat. It is considered by many to be the best department in the country now, but it has not been especially good to its own graduates, too many of whom seem to end up collecting sea shells or working at organic vegetable stands. The campusQan eclectic horrorQis surrounded by unkempt cafs and pretty good bookstores. The area is famous for its pleasant climate. The setting beggars description physically and socially, but it is not known as Berserkley for nothing. HARVARD Very rich, sets no trends (although it produced both de Man and Miller) turns out lots of smart-dumb graduates and an occasional gem such as M. H. Abrams, has a policy of buying one of everything that becomes prominent and will out-bid anyone if necessary (as it did recently for Skip Gates). In the past it has had very big presences in major fields, people like Perry Miller and Walter Jackson Bate. Their influence is nowhere to be seen in Harvard Yard today. Solid types such as Larry Benson do not appear to have successors. Its graduates seem to get jobs, though, and, over the years, this program has had a lot of success at exporting its disasters and acquiring other programs' successes. This department admits more than it means to graduate; the first year is a dog fight. Respectable circus atmosphere: Berkeley hedonism as filtered through the New England mind. PRINCETON Small and dull-but-solid in the past, veering towards glitz more recently. Like Yale, and unlike Berkeley, it has tried to keep down the number of its graduate students with an eye toward taking care of all of them. On the whole, the Princeton products have been better-behaved and therefore have attracted less attention. (Compare Frederick Crews [Princeton] with Stanley Fish [Yale]). It has its crazies, but until now they have not been allowed to take over the controls. It is still, however, sorting through the debris of a recent collision, and things may change. Like other major departments, it has modified its requirements to reduce the importance of literature before the nineteenth century and regards writing literate English and prefering argument to ritual assertion as outdated fads. Usually the most anglophile and upper-class trend- prone of the major departments, it has two spigots, one of which drips elegance, the other radical-chic. Attractive, expensive, and isolated setting. CHICAGO Chicago has suffered a big decline since let us say 1930-31 when it was the best in the country. Now a small, poor, slum-dweller, it made disastrous mistakes in hiring and promotion in the recent pastQgoodbye Aristotle, hello engendering professionalism. It combines the worst features of places like Princeton and places like Berkeley inasmuch as it admits relatively few students but means to dump most of them anyway. Chicago has done a poor job of placing its graduates for the past twenty years or so. They were found at almost all the top places (its bte noire, Yale, was the main exception) from the 1920s to the 1960s: Louis Landa at Princeton, George Sherburn and Perry Miller at Harvard, Kemp Malone at Hopkins, William Rea Keast at Cornell. Where are they now? Places like the University of Toledo and Ohio State, at best. Wayne Booth, who got his degree in 1951, is the last graduate of the program to have had much national visibility; very few in recent years have established themselves in good departments. Larzar Ziff is currently chair at Hopkins, but he got his degree in 1955, and Hopkins is practically a ghost town today anyway. UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA This department was once a specialty boutique for textual criticism run by Fredson Bowers; in the sixties he began a policy of picking up people who failed to get tenure at better places. Now it is a major department where others can scavenge if they want to. It got a lot better in the past thirty years despite jerks like Hirsch, dopes like Ralph Cohen, and flasher-kids like McGann. Big department. Not great at placing its graduates, some of whom have perhaps absorbed too much of Richard Rorty's gospel and can neither offer an argument nor write intelligible EnglishQbut this is a problem everywhere. Some place it second to Berkeley, but the Commonwealth of Virginia has severe budget problems right now, the program has lost most of its money for graduate student support, and morale is low. Located in a small city in the middle of Virginia, a two-hour drive to anywhere, and maintained as a shrine to its founder, whom the locals refer to with oily self-consciousness as "Mr. Jefferson." CORNELL Cornell was solid if second-level (except in High Romantic Argument where it was a specialty boutique) when its powers were M. H. Abrams and William Rea Keast; the program produced Lawrence Lipking; Harold Bloom and Paul de Man passed through, then it acquired Jonathan Culler, drum beater for/retailer of trends and atheism's answer to Billy Graham. It began to out-Yale Yale after Derrida and Miller went to Irvine for sun, surf, and money. Its graduates seem to be getting jobs lately. Cornell is in an attractive area of central New York State and has all the isolation and small-town mindsets that go with rural charm. Chilly scene in winter. COLUMBIA Loonies abound on this faculty but are occasionally restrained by a few solid types. Some of its students get good jobs. For years the program was large and inefficient at placing its graduates; now it is smaller, apparently with an eye to doing better at getting its students jobs. Of course, those who can survive the Upper West Side of Manhattan are not likely to be traumatized by reading through the MLA job list or even by the great flesh market at the convention, and are often capable of taking care of themselves. Many members of this faculty are too busy solving the world's problems or too deeply engrossed in their own to be able to spare much energy for teaching. If you have a great idea for a dissertation and really don't want to be bothered while you're writing it, have a large private income and like the excitment of living in the Occident's answer to Calcutta, this may be the place for you. JOHNS HOPKINS Hopkins was small and a little eccentric, but solid in the days of Arthur Lovejoy's epigones like Don Cameron Allen and Earl Wasserman. Then it got Miller (who left for Yale), and later McGann (who left for Cal Tech and then went to Virginia) and, much worse, Fish (who left for Duke). It spent big, bought big, went bust. Now unstable and deeply compromised. Full of gender-ideologues and crazies like Jonathan Goldberg and Frances Ferguson, but still clinging to a few distinguished types such as Hugh Kenner, now retired, and Larzar Ziff, near retirement. Bordering on, but not in, a Baltimore slum. DUKE The ultimate loony bin. A kind of sophist's paradise. Pushing the envelope ever since the arrival of the King Fish. It is a test case for seeing if glitz, glitter, and conclusions driven by ideology can entirely override old-fogey notions like argument, evidence, reading what's on the page and writing jargonless English. It has its own flying squads of thought police to enforce its favorite dogmas and postures. Its self-conscious effort to join the first circle is too recent for anyone to judge how well its graduates will do when they leave the zoo and try to make it in the jungle. Pleasant location in former tobacco town now plastered with no smoking signs. STANFORD Very rich, more p.c. than Duke but not as trendy. This is a small program, more like Princeton's than like Berkeley's, and has done relatively well at placing its graduates. Stanford is already the most influential university of the decade. The federal government discovered that its overhead charges on research contracts included various forms of gracious living for its administrative officers; as a result, every major university in the countryQmost of whom cheated on a much more modest scaleQ has an unexpected budget crisis. Stanford's greed will cause job freezes and tenure promotions denied from Manhattan's island to the Pacific coast. Taco stand architecture recently improved by a major earthquake. Expensive and isolated location. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA There is nothing new about English professors who don't have much interest in lyric poetry, epic, romance, drama and other categories of traditional literature. But this department is right on the cutting edge; it has professors who are absolutely hostile to such things and are doing their best to dissolve them in comic books and critical jargon. Too earnest to be truly trendy but yearns, oh how it yearns. p.c. Located in a Philadelphia slum. FOR THE AMBIGUOUS This section is necessarily less complete than the previous one. It includes a selection of formerly first circle departments and recent pretenders whose graduates occasionally get jobs in the best departments but more often get jobs at local colleges within the university's geographic region. If you're not sure you have the necessary ambition and energy, stomach and stamina for the the big-time but you don't want to disqualify yourself altogether by getting a degree from the kind of university that regards the English department as an unfortunate and unnecessary obstacle to fielding a winning football team, or seeks to establish itself by importing illiterate basketball players with criminal proclivities that help them fit in well with the coaching staff, you may want to consider one of these places. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES Got better recently because it has lotsa money, and English has been a buyer's market for the past twenty years. Local real estate is so expensive that this department has had trouble attracting faculty who aren't already millionaires. UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINAQCHAPEL HILL Sane neighbor of Duke. Never at the very top but good. This department is something like a southern version of what Princeton used to be. Dull but solid. It has resolutely stayed clear of high salaried snake- oil salesmen. Respectable and untrendy. Attractive setting. UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Big department, in the past something like North Carolina in the mid-west without the benefits of having a loony bin next doorQinstead it has Detroit. Now lurching towards glitz and becoming increasingly p.c. Ann Arbor is a clich college town with all the usual advantages and disadvantages. UNIVERSITY OF INDIANAQBLOOMINGTON Lost in the mists of semiotica. Once did a boutique business in Victorian studies. Ralph Rader, a former chair at Berkeley, has a degree from this department. UNIVERSITY OF WISONSINQMADISON Went to hell in a cloud of (marijuana) smoke some time ago. UNIVERSITY OF IOWAQIOWA CITY Does a small boutique business for people who want to teach "creative writing." Iowa is a literate state as things go nowadaysQit is, of course, doing its best to catch up with the others in illiteracy, but old habits die hardQand like some other midwestern states, it is home to a large number of small and more-or-less obscure liberal arts colleges, many of whose faculty members come from the local university. If you don't mind the absence of city lights, street crime, noise, filth, and major research libraries, there is much to be said for studying in a department like this one with an eye to a quiet and uneventful teaching career at the kind of place where no one will look down on you if you don't publish in Glyph and admit that you get a headache when you try to read Derrida. All such places, including this one, however are anxiously p.c. and want desperately to prove they are just as sophisticated as Duke or Cornell, so they tend to risk their best qualities by hiring class-two hawkers of yesterday's trends. THE SCENIC ROUTE This guide disdains the sort of department that causes deans and provosts at top places suddenly to remember that there is a budget crisis which obliges them to leave a position unfilled if one of its graduates is proposed for a job. But it includes a very small selection of places that, while not absolutely impossible, rarely place their degree- holders at a first tier or even second tier department. Remember, we live in interesting times; things have a way of changing. The departments listed below may be regarded as types. To sample too many of them might ruin the author's palate. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT IRVINE This is the sort of place that lures elderly eminences whose productive careers were spent in cold climates and who now want to retire at full (indeed overflowing) salaries in a warm place. Jacques Derrida and Hillis Miller are currently in (official) residenceQnaturally this sort of eminence travels a lot and teaches very little. Irvine is a haven for trends which have probably run their course, but who knows, they may still have a little pop in them. If anyone wants to hire a deconstructo or a specialist in slasher videos, however, they'll take one from Yale or Cornell or Duke long before they'll take one from Irvine, so if you decide to study in this department, don't get your hopes up. The real advantage of a place like this is that every time it gets an eminence to come, it is forced to hire two or three junior assistants to do the work that the eminences are too eminent to do. After all, if they wanted to teach courses and direct dissertations, they would have stayed where they were. Some of the junior assistants may actually be all right. Hideous campus with concrete buildings done in California- Stalinist style. NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY There are some good people here in fields that don't get a lot of attention nowadays, such as late medieval and early renaissance literature. It is a good setting for such scholars, who generally like to do their work slowly and in a quiet atmosphere. There aren't many students here pestering them with chapters of dissertations and requests for letters of recommendation, and the Newberry Library, with its late medieval and renaissance collections, is nearby. There is also Lawrence Lipking, who left Princeton some years ago to come here. Apparently New Jersey didn't agree with Mrs. Lipking, but both Lipkings seem to have found an agreeable niche in suburban Chicago. Of all the departments that have one and only one BIG NAME, this is the most intriguing (much more so than Texas Tech, which now has Hamlin Hill, or South Carolina, which had Morse Peckham and funny finances; and now that Peckham is retired, just has funny finances). Its graduates don't often get good jobs; quite a lot don't seem to get any jobs, but you won't have to survive a dog-fight in the first year, there are some good people on the faculty and they aren't exactly drowning in good students, so if you're any good, you might actually get some of their attention. You should be warned, however, that this faculty has a much better record at getting themselves good jobs than at placing its students. The university shares its name with a railroad station; recently travelers have departed for Michigan, Chicago, and Harvard. UNIVERSITY OF MARYLANDQCOLLEGE PARK This could be a sleeper department. It has solid programs in rhetoric and in renaissance literatureQ the Folger Shakespeare Library is only about ten miles away and the D. C. Metro will soon make access quick, cheap and easy. The state of Maryland has made a major committment to improve this, its flagship, campus. The department is in the unusual position of having a large faculty turnover in a very favorable hiring market. About twenty-five years ago, Morse Peckham was fond of saying that there was nothing wrong with his departmentQhe was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania thenQthat a selective outbreak of boubonic plague wouldn't fix. A large number of retirements occurring within a few years is less dramatic than the black death, but just as effective, especially if there is money to replace the retirees. An ambitious faculty many of whose members are in their thirties and forties and want to make reputations can turn a department with a few good areas into a good department with national visibility. This department, obscure as it is nationally, is probably better right now than its Baltimore neighbor, Johns Hopkins, and is a better bet for the future. Good placement record in recent years at local area colleges, especially for its rhetoric students. UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICOQ ALBUQUERQUE A lot of people like New Mexico, but it will always be a little isolated. Hamlin Hill missed this place so much after he left to succeed his dissertation adviser, Walter Blair, at Chicago that he came back after a few years at a huge salary increase, once he had given up completely on Berkeley and Stanford. There are some good people in this department in the history of criticism and in American studies too. Unlike a lot of big shot professors of American literature at famous places, there are people here who have heard of A. J. Liebling and even teach courses in which his works are read. M. H. Abrams is a greater presence here than Derrida. Sounds good doesn't it? UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON AT SEATTLE This is a big department most of whose faculty think they ought to be teaching at a better places. One of these days they may decide this is the better place they had in mind. California is in for a rough ride in the near term and many of those who can are leaving for Washington. If the state is willing to spend the money and if the university's administration is capable of making the right decisions, this could become a much better department in the near future. Less isolated than New Mexico, and generally better managed than Arizona or (shudder) Nevada. It's in the right place and this is the right time for an ambitious university to make a move. A few closing remarks on Job Hunting as we go to press in these final days of 1991. The top tier universities continue to hire only their own, but many of them are not hiring anyone at all. Very few graduates of these departments are getting jobs at peer departments. Even some of those who do (and publish at major presses) don't get tenure. Graduates of places like Princeton and Chicago are teaching at state universities in places like Mississippi (not necessarily at the "flagship" universities in those places either). For this, you might have saved yourself all those stupid seminars in pornography in medieval saints' lives taught by ignorant ideologues, and New Historicist courses in Shakespeare where you discovered that King Lear is about inheritance laws in renaissance England, not to mention having to replace terms like allusion (which imply human purpose) with terms like "intertextuality" (which jibe with the new robot poetics). You could have gone to Chapel Hill or New Mexico and actually read some books and perhaps learned how to write English. The right pose to strike for new Ph.D.'s on the job market requires some serious reflection. It helps if you don't appear to be too bright. Most jobs are at places whose faculty did not go to top graduate schools and who are more likely to have published at Fairleigh-Dickinson than at Princeton. These people usually think really bright people "don't fit in." They prefer medium bright people from lesser top places, often in the same geographic area. Many mid-western state colleges will forgive you a Ph.D. from Chicago if you look like the kind of person who feels lucky to have got a degree at all and utterly at a loss to explain the ideology of the heroic couplet. You might be allowed to teach Freshman composition to bored adolescents from the suburbs at shamefully low wages. If you're obviously terrific, you run great risks. The dumbo state colleges won't touch you. You might get a job at Yale, and you might get that cracker-jack dissertation published, and you might get dumped after five or six years because True Blue Hall needs to have its plumbing replaced. And, of course, you might get a job at Mississippi State. If you average Yale and Mississippi State you come up with the kind of place that hires graduates of New Mexico or Maryland. They don't get jobs at Yale (and don't get dumped by places like Yale either) and more of them get jobs in the first place. You can even say allusion, if you like, and forget intertextuality.