By Emma Lipton
Long before the pandemic, graduate students in the humanities have struggled. Because the pandemic has made it impossible to dismiss their difficulties with platitudes, Emma Lipton considers several ways, all grounded in the realities of our students' lives, we can engage them with heart-felt and tangible compassion.
Some things I learned in my role as Director of Graduate Studies about our students in English at the University of Missouri when the pandemic hit: that their appointments are only for 20 hours, which makes them ineligible for public assistance (which requires a 25 hour appointment); that some of them were supporting multiple family members on their modest stipend (in some cases as many as three people and sometimes providing unpaid care to aging parents); that many of their friends and family have COVID and major health concerns; that student counseling services limit their number of sessions and some cannot afford the copay for private practice; that they rely on summer jobs (many of which were cancelled due to COVID) to pay rent in summer; that the effects of many disabilities are exacerbated under stress. This was, of course, on top of realities I already knew about, including the precipitous drop in academic jobs even before the pandemic and its effect on the morale of current students.
It is common knowledge that the effects of the pandemic are falling unevenly in our country, hitting people of color and low-income earners especially hard. The virus certainly affected our graduate student population unevenly. But it also called attention to the fact that graduate students as a whole are low-income workers and are thus more affected by the pandemic than others. In academia, as well as outside of it, the pandemic has brought increased and urgent attention to long-standing inequities.
As academics, we are better trained to talk about Chaucer than to address the practical issues that routinely confront our students, now more than ever. Our graduate students report being told by some faculty that they “should just focus on their work” and not worry about other issues so that they can complete their degrees in a timely manner. However, I believe it’s imperative to see a fuller picture of the realities of our graduate students lives so that we can better advise and support them and cultivate a culture of compassion.
Our graduate students often reported to me that they did not feel “seen” by their professors, both their advisors and the faculty members who teach graduate classes. In response, last spring I worked with our English Graduate Student Organization to arrange a listening session in a faculty meeting in which a select number of graduate students shared details of their lives. Faculty members were not allowed to ask questions, because the graduate students wanted them to just listen; they wanted to control the terms of the conversation. The graduate students chose—both individually and collectively—what they wanted to share. They talked about a range of concerns, including the challenges of doing graduate work with disabilities, the necessity of taking jobs to supplement their income from teaching assistantships, the burden of student fees not covered by tuition waivers, and the pressures of student loans accumulating since their undergraduate days. Faculty members were moved and distressed to learn the extent of the precarity of our students’ lives; some were in tears. Recognizing the value of this experience, we collectively decided to make a listening session in a faculty meeting an annual event.
This decision was a recognition of listening as a value unto itself. It was a clear rejection of the impulse to avoid asking students to talk about problems we believe we cannot fix. At the same time, the listening session did lead to some changes that had not previously seemed possible. Word of our faculty meeting session helped galvanize some administrators to make a final push for a bureaucratically difficult but long-desired option for graduate students to be paid over 12 months instead of 9. Shortly after the faculty meeting, I organized a one-time emergency fund from faculty donations for graduate students experiencing immediate fiscal emergencies. Knowing some students were having trouble paying rent for the summer, I found the original endowment papers for departmental funds allocated to graduate students, which are typically awarded by application to support conference and research travel or used as supplemental recruitment funds. In a few cases, the use of funds was broadly described (such as “to support graduate studies in English”). I reframed those awards by asking applicants to make a case for how the award could help them complete a specific task, such as studying for comprehensive exams, readying an essay for publication, or preparing to teach a new class. To these awards, I added a statement that preference would be given to graduate students who are parents, caregivers, and/or have been especially challenged by the current COVID-19 situation.
Practically speaking, these efforts were very modest, but graduate students reported that they had a larger effect of helping to cultivate a culture of compassion in our department in which students felt more seen and more supported. I believe a positive thing that could come out of the pandemic is a more overt embrace of this culture of compassion in response to our graduate students—who themselves are often deeply caring towards their own undergraduate students— and within our departments more broadly, as the pandemic has perhaps helped us to practice compassion towards students, colleagues, and ourselves.
Can compassion offer any insight on the important question of how to respond to the decline in academic jobs for our graduate students? Compassion was a clear factor in our department’s decision to halt admissions to our PhD program for this coming academic year. Not accepting new PhDs, we reasoned, would make us more able to support our current students who might need a sixth year of funding because their studies were slowed down by COVID-related factors such as library closings, cancelled research trips, the difficulties of taking classes online, and the increased demands on them as teachers as they pivoted abruptly to online or hybrid classes and supported their own students in crisis. Is it compassionate to further limit the number of graduate students we admit in future incoming classes?
Another approach is to work on developing professionalization opportunities for our students to better prepare them for a full range of careers outside as well as within the academy. I am leading my department’s team on an Association of American Universities (AAU) project to make diverse careers for PhD students “visible, valued and viable.” We have added a “Career Exploration Workshop” for graduate students to our existing “Academic Job Workshop.” As Director of Graduate Studies, I’ve attended talks by experts who advise telling incoming students in their first semester about the difficulties of the academic job market and the need to look for employment outside of academia. However, in my view, we must recognize that, while our students do gain transferable skills in graduate school, our graduate programs are primarily designed as academic study, not preparation for other fields; our incoming graduate students generally are aware of the difficulties of the market.
There are no easy answers to these questions, but it is my belief that cultivating a culture of compassion will help us address them in meaningful ways.