Upon entering graduate school, students become part of a new family. The first-year student is the youngest of the department, receiving guidance from advisers, friendship from fellow students and a semester allowance from the family’s financial resources.
I entered graduate school in the Program of Comparative Literature, a cohort of professors from many departments who adhere to the teaching and thinking of literatures and texts from a comparative perspective. As a program, we are poor in financial resources but rich in communal ties and support. The program is part of a huge extended family, with close relatives in the language and literature departments and further community links across the humanities and social sciences — where students in the program take courses — seek advisers and get paid as assistant instructors and teaching assistants.
Like any type of family, when it comes to money, we also fight.
The current financial crisis has caused shocking reverberations throughout the University, especially among graduate student workers. We depend completely upon our teaching positions for reduced tuition payments and a small stipend.
Without these positions, few of us would be able to continue our studies. As teaching assistant and assistant-instructor positions become scarcer due to budget reductions, which cause some departments to be cut by 30 percent or more, palpable fear runs through the graduate student population and questions linger. What will we teach next year? Will our already meager pay be cut even further? And who, next semester or next year, will not have a job at all?
Within a program, as opposed to a department, these fears are amplified. The Program of Comparative Literature has virtually no teaching budget of its own and must rely on the generosity of departments allocating their own money to graduate teaching positions for their students and for us. These departments now face the prospect of cutting the positions of their home graduate students and those of out-of-department students who lean on their structures for financial support.
Fortunately, although the immediate family of the Program of Comparative Literature is small, extended community ties are strong. By nurturing close relationships with other departments, we are treated just like family. Indeed, many professors of national literature and social science departments teach as core and affiliated comparative literature faculty, and graduate students of the program constitute a substantial presence in their offered courses.
We have been assured that, as family, we should not be left desolate on the streets of Austin, with no jobs and no prospects of continuing our studies. If our assistant instructor and teaching assistant positions remain, it is thanks to the contributing departments’ generosity and their realization that comparative literature plays a productive role in their departments, as well.
Beyond the financial crisis, this type of community at the University points to a larger issue and one that has become a buzzword of late. Interdisciplinarity — the ability to work in and eventually teach in multiple disciplines, perhaps in multiple departments or programs — can only be achieved if a University-wide community exists that crosses the boundaries of departments, schools and programs. As a graduate student of comparative literature, I feel lucky not only to know that my teaching position is secure, but to have advisers from multiple disciplines, to have taken a range of liberal arts courses but also to be being trained as a scholar capable of fulfilling a role that I hope the 21st century university demands: one within a larger extended community of scholars, students and thinkers.
Marin is a graduate student in the Program of Comparative Literature.
Fiscal crisis and graduate community
Published: Thursday, November 12, 2009
Updated: Thursday, November 12, 2009
1 comments
Aniele
Beautifully written! I look forward to discussing this issue with you in person!
