Graduate Study in English Every year, students ask me for advice about going on for graduate study in English and American literature. Most have enjoyed the English major at Rutgers, have done well in their courses, love literature, and are drawn to the idea of spending their lives as classroom teachers. Two decades ago, I was perfectly happy to encourage such students to go on to a Ph.D program, and was more than willing to write letters of recommendation. Today, given employment prospects in college teaching and the decline in quality even of top graduate programs, I give a simple piece of advice: don't think about going on for the doctorate. Instead, I suggest an alternative route that is, in my opinion, likely to be much more satisfying to anyone who feels vocationally drawn to literary study and wants to teach: the MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) in English. From an interview with Richard Rorty Rorty: The more the English departments make fools of themselves by being politically correct, the easier a target the Republicans are going to have. Interviewer: Is that what you meant by "making asses of themselves"? Rorty: I think that the English departments have made it possible to have a career teaching English without caring much about literature or knowing much about literature but just producing rather trite, formulaic, politicized readings of this or that text. This makes it an easy target. There's a kind of formulaic leftist rhetoric that's been developed in the wake of Foucault, which permits you to exercise a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion on anything from the phonebook to Proust. It's sort of an obviously easy way to write books, articles, and it produces work of very low intellectual quality. And so, this makes this kind of thing an easy target from the outside. It permits people like Roger Kimball and D'Souza to say these people aren't really scholars, which is true.  English Professors Observed A conference of medieval scholars -- or "scholars" -- as reported by Charlotte Allen, herself a doctoral student in Medieval Studies. Her article gives, in WCD's opinion, a very good picture of what it's actually like to be an English professor today. It is not a pretty picture, but it is a true one, and one that should be taken into account by anyone contemplating going on to graduate study in English.   Click here on "A Dark Age for Medievalists"   Why Not the Ph.D? By now, you've probably heard rumors about how bad the job situation is for recent Ph.D's in English and American literature. The rumors aren't exaggerated. In some graduate programs, it is not unusual for 30-40 Ph.D's to be looking for college or university employment and for only 1-2, at most, to get any kind of job offer. The fact that some people do receive offers disguises an even harsher reality. Very often, appointments obtained by new Ph.D's are either temporary or dead-end positions, or are earmarked entirely for teaching Freshman Composition. In non-selective institutions, which amount to well over 90% of U.S. colleges and universities, freshman comp now tend to be what was once called Remedial Writing. "Literature" courses, if they exist, tend to be classes in basic reading comprehension and remedial education. Furthermore, there is now no good Ph.D program in literary studies in the United States. Even top-ranked programs now tend overwhelmingly to be devoted to Cultural Studies, with an emphasis on identity politics and popular culture rather than literature. Even in a program like Harvard's, a graduate course in Shakespeare is today as likely to concentrate on talk-show motifs like "cross dressing" as on Shakespeare's plays as self-contained worlds of motive and action, or on such essential background as Renaissance neo-Platonism, medieval theories of kingship, 16th-century Anglican and Puritan theology, or the conventions of Elizabethan drama. Finally, the level of training even in "top" programs has become quite weak. No program I know about demands competence in three languages (Latin, German, French). All have "hit or miss" examination systems allowing students to pick and choose among the works, genres, and literary periods on which they are to be tested, leaving huge blank areas in the knowledge essential for the Ph.D. And no program demands systematic training either in the earlier periods of English and American literature or in the method of "close reading" that is an indispensable prerequisite for competence in higher-order interpretation. Many programs now routinely award the Ph.D to candidates who are quite literally unable to make sense of a Shakespeare sonnet or a Donne elegy. The bottom line: you should probably not go on to Ph.D study in English because (1) there are no jobs, and (2) even if there were, there is now no program available that provides sound training for anyone interested in a Ph.D in literary studies. The MAT in English Paradoxically, the MAT in English, which prepares you for teaching literature courses in private schools or AP classes in good suburban high schools, leads to a career that is in certain respects "more like college teaching" than most college teaching. Moreover, there are jobs. Here's what the catalog for the Brown MAT program says:  Teaching in the 1990s Now is the time to begin a career in teaching. Opportunities to work with increasingly challenging student populations are growing. Already, in certain parts of the country and in certain teaching fields, teachers are no longer in oversupply. There are, in addition, important reasons for you to consider teaching. Teaching is hard work but the rewards are considerable. It is work that enhances knowledge and human sensitivity. It is work that can subtly but surely make a mark on the world. Teaching is a craft, an historically celebrated calling which, like all great crafts, can deeply enrich those who take it up. Which MAT Program? I have only been recommending the "MAT alternative" to students for two or three years, and I've tended to steer students toward Brown, which is the MAT program with which I'm most familiar. In the next few years, I intend to investigate as many programs as I can. In addition, as more of my students choose various programs, I'll ask for feedback about the quality of the training they received. I'll update this booklet frequently, until, eventually, I hope it will beocme a useful guide to the MAT alternative for any of my students wishing to choose that route. In the meantime, I'm going to recommend only two programs -- Brown and SUNY Stony Brook -- while explaining the reasoning that led me to choose these two. Here's the reasoning. If you're going to teach literature at the secondary level, you want to attend an MAT program that (1) has an English faculty distinguished enough to give you sound literary training at the graduate level, and (2) lets you take advantage of this faculty while taking your MAT courses. Point (2) is more complicated than it sounds. For instance, the English department at the University of Virginia is very strong, and Virginia has a well-established MAT program in secondary education. So at first glance you might well include Virginia high on your list of MAT programs. The problem is that Virginia's MAT program is run entirely by the Education department. You don't take graduate courses in English, so the strength of the Virginia English department is irrelevant to your training as an MAT candidate. For your purposes, then, you want not only an MAT program at a school with a strong English department, but one that allows you to take the maximum number of courses in the English graduate program. It's also essential that your MAT courses be the same courses taken by students in that school's Ph.D program. This is the case at both Brown and SUNY Stony Brook. Ph.D and MAT students are in the same classes, have the same workloads, and are asked to meet the same expectations. As a consequence, the level of training can be very good. There's a further consideration. A good MAT program must be set up so that you will be able to get genuine literary training rather than being compelled by program requirements to take irrelevant courses in such subjects as popular culture, queer theory, feminist ideology, gender studies, etc. The programs at Brown and SUNY Stony Brook illustrate the point perfectly. Both universities have English departments that are highly "politicized," meaning that most teachers are going to be interested more in ideological issues than in literary studies. (At Brown, the English department has in effect divided in tow, with many former English faculty now professing such subjects as "media studies" rather than literature.) But -- the essential point -- both programs have MAT requirements flexible enough that you can "steer around" politicized faculty and courses, concentrating on the teachers and the courses that will give you the literary training you will need to teach intelligent and highly-motivated students at the secondary level. Should I Go to Brown? Brown has one of the most well-established MAT programs in the country. I became aware of it when my wife was getting her Ph.D at Brown in the 1960s. She had MAT students in all her graduate seminars, and was favorably impressed with their intelligence and level of preparation. Admission to the program is competitive, and MAT students tend to be very good. The MAT program at Brown takes 12 months (summer plus one academic year). It consists of four Education courses -- History, Philosophy, or Sociology of Education -- credits for which include a summer practicum (with team-teaching laboratory in Brown Summer High School) and academic-year student teaching, plus four English courses at the graduate level. These are normally taken in the second semester of the MAT year. The program awards the MAT degree plus (when the National Teachers Exam competency test has been passed) secondary creitifcation from the Rhode Island Department of Education. The Brown MAT then has Interstate Certtification Compact (ICC) approval, meaning that graduates are automatically certified in the 35 ICC member states. The Brown MAT is thus as close to a "national teaching certificate" as is presently available in the U.S. That's the good news. The bad news is that the Brown MAT program is quite expensive: $22,592 for the eight semester course credits required for the degree. There is some financial aid available in the form of scholarships, loans, and proctorships, but you must weigh the cost of the program -- plus, of course, moving to Providence and paying living costs during your period of residency there -- against what you might reasonably hope to earn teaching secondary school. What about SUNY Stony Brook? After as thorough an investigation of existing MAT programs as I could manage over the phone and the Internet, I've chosen Stony Brook as the highest-quality "affordable" alternative to Brown. The good news first: the MAT at Stony Brook costs about $4000 a semster for out-of-state students, or about $12,000 for the three-semester program. Stony Brook's MAT is offered through the School of Professional Development. The structure is similar to Brown's, with 18 credits of graduate study in English, 12 credits in Education, and 6 credits of supervised student teaching. The degree leads to New York State certification for teaching grades 7-12. Like Brown, Stony Brook has a very highly "politicized" English department and, like Brown, it also has a number of well-regarded faculty devoted to literary study as such. I spoke at some length to Dr. Elisa Emenheiser, who is the English department liaison for MAT training, and got the impression that there is a good deal of flexibility in course choice for MAT students -- that is, students interested in the "literary study of literature," and in then going on to teach literature-as-such at the secondary level, ought to have no problem finding professors and courses that both meet program requirements and suit their own interests. How Do I Apply? Both Brown and SUNY Stony Brook have complete application information available on their Web sites. Rather than needlessly duplicate a lot of that material here, let me just send you to their sites (click on the links in the preceding sentence). Read what they have to say, send for application materials if you're interested, and then come in and see me during office hours with any particular questions you'd like to discuss.   10 November 1998