I've
found that pulling back the curtain on certain aspects of my graduate
life has created opportunities to connect with my students that I
hadn't anticipated. The semester I was taking my comprehensive
exams, I made the conscious choice to tell my students what would be
occupying my time that semester. I was TAing for the second half of
the U.S. survey, and I found myself talking to my students about what
I was reading when it was relevant. Surprisingly, they were
interested in what I was reading, and what this exam was about, and
why I had to take it. When they came to my office hours the day
after my exam, before they asked questions about their
final exam, they wanted to know how mine had gone and what it had
been like. The past might be a foreign country, but so was grad
school to my students, and they wanted to explore.
Pulling
back the curtain on things like comprehensive exams is one thing, and
perhaps not very controversial, but my thinking about this issue was
actually prompted by a few articles that have been floating around
the internet lately. One, in the New York Times,
discussed the relationship between a student's grades and the amount
of financial support that student was receiving for their education.
Amy Lewis' November 2012 piece on Inside Higher Ed used the recent “Manifest Destiny” Gap t-shirt disaster to make
an argument for the relevance of the humanities to those seeking a
degree in business. “The Adjunct Project,” hosted by the Chronicle of Higher
Education, and other online
forums for tracking the pay and conditions of contingent faculty
around the country have been getting increased attention. The
controversy rages over the “worth” of the humanities, with states
like Florida pondering tiered tuition systems that privilege more
“valuable” majors. What colleges and universities do with their
money, what students are learning, and what they should
be learning are all incessantly debated by people inside and outside
of the academy. I know that my fellow graduate students and I discuss
these articles and issues, and I can only assume the faculty do as
well.
Do our
students know about these things? If they don't, should they? Is it
ever appropriate for us to introduce them to some of these issues?
Our students remain with us as a group of
people, but cycle through as individuals fairly quickly, and perhaps
we assume they don't have a vested interest as a result. But when
we're talking about how our institutions operate, do our students
need (or want) to know how the sausage gets made? Do they need to
know just how much the rest of the country can't stop talking about
undergraduate education? And do we as historians defend the
importance of historical thinking simply by modeling it, or is it
ever appropriate to give our students contemporary examples of
situations where it matters in the “real world?”
I am thinking
about bringing up the “Manifest Destiny” t-shirt issue with my
class when we discuss the concept as part of a larger discussion of
American imperialism. It seems like a good way to get at what the
concept meant to different groups of people. But I don't know
whether I'll give them Lewis' essay. I like a lot of what she says
about the role of the humanities in the education of a business
major, but I don't know whether bringing up those issues is
appropriate, necessary, or desired.
I'd
love to know how my colleagues have dealt with these sorts of
situations and what they think about bringing up these kinds of
issues with our students. - Erin
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