Assessing the Ineffable

As we prepare for the SACS team’s visit next fall, numerous committees on campus keep fretting the issue of assessment. In order for our teaching to be accountable, it must be assessable, which means that we must define what we expect our students to be learning and devise measuring instruments that will determine whether they are actually learning those things—and then use the results of our assessments to improve our programs.

I am in complete sympathy with this goal. Unlike my colleagues who find the kind of accountability these assessment demands are looking for invasive, an assault on what they think of as their "academic freedom," I agree that we need to think about what we do and why, and find ways of determining how successful they are. I am strongly opposed to the notion that teaching and learning are fundamentally mysterious processes that don't bear close scrutiny: that you just go into class and "teach"--i.e., behave in a way that seems familiar from how you were once taught, decades ago--and hope for the best.

The problem I have with the assessment demands that we face, though, is epistemological. What epistemic relationship can be established between learning and assessment? Or, more specifically, even if we accept the need to define learning outcomes as specifically as possible, how can a quantitative assessment--which is what our administration has systematically demanded from us--tell us anything worthwhile about the extent to which those outcomes are being achieved? And even if we manage to set up an assessment plan that draws on both quantitative and qualitative measurements, is it ever possible to determine whether students are learning what we want them to learn?

For example, our QEP Design Task Force II found a list of student writing learning outcomes somewhere and asked me to tweak them a little. The first one is "students will demonstrate writing as a process that requires brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading." I hate the collocation "demonstrate writing," want to change that to "experience writing," but of course "experience" is harder to quantify than "demonstrate," so if I change that verb, most likely the task force will change it back. The empirical bias of assessment experts forces us to think in terms of externally verifiable (“demonstrable”) products rather than hard-to-verify inward experiences; and then we try to force an inward/experiential thing like "writing as a process" into the outward/verifiable mode, and end up with monstrous phrases like "demonstrate writing as a process."

Of course, maybe what I object to in that phrasing is just the unnecessary wordiness of "demonstrate writing." If we try to figure out what that really means, doesn’t it boil down in the end to just plain "writing"? The only way to "demonstrate writing" is to write, right? So maybe the desired learning outcome would be to "write as a process"? But then writing is always a process; the idea here is to make students aware of the writing process, and to get them to draw effectively on that awareness as they write their papers for class. So it's not just that we want them to "write as a process"; it's that we want them to write with an awareness of the ways in which the writing process requires them to pay attention to certain things as they proceed, and respond in certain ways to what that process draws their attention to. And that suggests that an "outward" and perhaps even verifiable formulation of "demonstrate writing as a process" would be "demonstrate awareness of the writing process," or perhaps, more fully, "demonstrate an ability to write with an awareness of the complexities involved at every stage of the writing process, including brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading."

But is that true? Is that really the desired student learning outcome? Does this mean that a student who writes brilliantly but intuitively, without that awareness, will fail to reach the desired learning outcome? What we want, ultimately, is for our students to write well; getting them to pay attention to the writing process, to undergo the various stages as consciously and conscientiously as possible, is a means to that end, a strategy that five decades of writing-process theory has identified as the best means to that end. The brilliant but intuitive writer may not need that means—may not need to unpack the process consciously—but in the end s/he too will experience writing as a process. But how do we assess that?

Plagiarism Tales

On the WPA-L list lately, people have been rather gleefully telling tales of plagiarism--gleefully, in fact, in the spirit of competition, as in “I can top that story; listen to this one.” The psychology of this glee I think is obvious: catching a student plagiarizing is painful (not only because you have to deal with the student’s denial and/or despair, but because you like your students and want to believe the best of them, and catching one plagiarizing destroys that trust), and telling these tales in the company of like-minded people relieves the pain. But what about the pedagogical value of such story-telling? Robbin Zeff, just below, seems to feel that these stories can serve as useful cautionary tales for students:

Below are synopses of real plagiarism cases at George Washington University (GW) supplied by the Director of Academic Integrity Tim Terpstra. These tales are presented to demonstrate that presenting someone else’s work as your own-—no matter what the reason or situation-—is unacceptable behavior at GW. The stories might also reveal a rather simplistic approach to plagiarism. I think many students "admit" or recognize not "stupidity" but "ignorance" about what constitutes plagiarism, and they are being honest--many don't know how to write without committing what academic integrity committees call plagiarism and many are shocked to discover they've been charged with a violation.

Zeff says “these tales ARE PRESENTED to demonstrate, etc.”--presented by whom? and where? By Zeff, on the WPA-L list? Surely that doesn’t need to be demonstrated to other writing-program administrators? Are they “presented” to first-year writing students? Is this “presentation” mandated by the WPA? And if, as Zeff says, many of the stories “reveal a rather simplistic approach to plagiarism”--presumably, the simplistic approach of “Director of Academic Integrity Tim Terpstra”--what purpose is served by replicating the ridicule that feeds off that simplistic approach in this post? Is Zeff encouraging us to laugh at stupid plagiarizers, as his post seems to suggest, or to feel uneasy about our inclination to laugh at stupid plagiarizers, as his post also seems (more subtextually) to suggest?

Here are the stories:

HOW STUDENTS HAVE PLAGIARIZED AT GW

THE TALKING SLEEPWALKER
This case involved two roommates: One was the plagiarist and the other a chronic sleep-walker and sleep-talker. At the Academic Integrity hearing the two roommates were asked how their two papers came to be identical. The plagiarist said that her roommate routinely woke up in the middle of the night and would walk and talk in her sleep. It was during one of these sleep-walking and talking episodes that the roommate alleged she granted her permission to use her paper. This came as news to the roommate, who not only was unaware of being a sleep-walker or a sleep-talker, but was shocked to find out that the roommate claimed she had given her permission to copy her paper.

THE ABUSED ROOMMATE
This type of scenario has been repeated several times at GW: A student steals the paper of a roommate and submits it as his own work without the roommate’s knowledge. In one case, the professor charged both students with plagiarism because the papers were identical and it was unclear who borrowed from whom. When the students were called to speak with the GW Academic Integrity officer, one student finally confessed to stealing the paper of the roommate and to the roommate’s innocence.

THE GREAT FACILITATOR
Sometimes several students are involved in a case of plagiarism.
This tale involved four students who all submitted identical papers.
The paper assignment clearly stated that students could not share or talk about their papers once they had started writing. In this situation, it was determined that one student was actually the sole author of the paper and three others had copied the paper. If it hadn’t been for the great facilitator sharing his paper, which was wrong and a violation of the assignment, there wouldn’t have been three plagiarists.

THE GREEDY PLAGIARIST
A student, unhappy with a grade on a paper, complained to the teacher and asked the teacher to reconsider the grade. The teacher agreed. Upon rereading the paper, the teacher noticed that some of the passages were in a different style and checked them on Google.
The teacher then discovered that the paper was peppered with plagiarized passages. Instead of getting the original grade, the student ended up with an F.

One variation of this case involved three graduate students--two males and one female—who did a group project. The paper was submitted and received an A-. The two males in the group were satisfied with the grade, but the female was not. She thought the paper deserved an A and requested a re-grade. The professor agreed to look at the paper again, and that’s when he detected plagiarism. The two male students accepted the charge, but the female contested. Then there was a hearing. When asked what portion of the paper she was responsible for, she identified the sections of the paper that contained the bulk of the plagiarized material. Consequently, in this case the greedy plagiarist hurt herself by 1) requesting a re-grade rather than being happy with the original grade of an A-, and 2) admitting she wrote the parts of the paper that contained the majority of the plagiarized material.

THE CARELESS, SLOPPY, STUPID, BUT NOT CHEATING PLAGIARIST
This is a very common type of defense students charged with plagiarism use. These students admit to being careless with their research, sloppy with their citations, or stupid in not paying attention when they were being taught how to properly paraphrase or use quotations. However, they claim to not have intentionally plagiarized the material.

THE INADEQUATE PARAPHRASER
This is one of the most common types of plagiarism that occurs at GW. The Inadequate Paraphraser does not seem to understand what constitutes adequate paraphrasing: putting someone else’s ideas into your own words followed by proper attribution. This type of plagiarism is detected when a professor is reading a paper and notices something changed in the writing—a passage seems familiar or the style of writing is different. The professor then Googles a sentence or paragraph and finds the original source, which is almost identical to the passage in the student’s paper.

When speaking to a student charged with inadequate paraphrasing, the Director of Academic Integrity Tim Terpstra asks the student what constitutes adequate paraphrasing. Terpstra does this to determine if the student understands the concept. Terpstra has had students respond with from one word to a set percentage of words.
To demonstrate the inadequacy of merely changing one word, Terpstra recites the first phrase of the Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago today.” He then asks if changing it to “Four score and six years ago today” would be an adequate example of putting the sentiment of the address into one’s own words? He uses this example to drive home the point that paraphrasing is not merely a matter of changing one or two words.

OOPS, I SENT THE WRONG FILE, TWICE!
This situation is the electronic version of “Oops, my dog ate the paper.” A student submits a paper electronically to a professor.
The professor confronts the student with suspicions of plagiarism.
The student responds by claiming that the paper submitted was actually the rough draft that still contained cut and paste material and not the corrected and final version. The student then requests permission to resubmit the real final draft. When the professor grants the request, sometimes the new version doe not appear for several days.

In one case, this happened twice. The student submitted the paper electronically. When the professor questioned some of the text, the student claimed he had accidentally sent the rough draft instead of the final version because both drafts had the same file name. The professor accepted the explanation and pointed out that there were some questionable passages and that the student needed to cite his sources better. A few days later the student emailed another version that had more questionable passages. The professor brought this to the student’s attention. The student replied: Oops, I sent the wrong file twice!”

YOU MADE ME DO IT- IT'S NOT MY FAULT, IT’S YOUR FAULT
This is the classic case of shifting responsibility: the student blames the professor for the plagiarism. In this scenario, if a professor reviews a rough draft and makes constructive comments and criticism without detecting plagiarism and returns the paper, the student takes this as a green light. If the professor catches the plagiarism in the final version, the student claims that if the professor had only pointed it out in the draft, the student would have fixed the questionable passage. The student insinuates that the only reason plagiarism occurred in the final draft was the professor’s inattentiveness.

Another twist on this is when a professor requires a number of short papers. The professor detects plagiarism in the first assignment and the second and the third. The sequencing of the papers is such that it may be several weeks before all the papers are returned. The student does not accept responsibility for his actions; rather the student blames the professor for not returning the first plagiarized paper earlier. The bottom line is that the responsibility is the student's. Professors don’t enter into grading assuming and looking for plagiarism.


THE WIKIPEDIA CONUNDRUM
Sometimes a student misunderstands a professor's instructions to not use Wikipedia as a source. The student uses Wikipedia in his initial research anyway, but fails to cite it as a source because of the professor's prohibition. And where an even larger problem occurs is when a student uses text directly from Wikipedia without proper attribution thinking that this is a workaround to the professor's baring use of Wikipedia.

Read the whole post.

Kim Ballard responds by expanding on the uneasiness Zeff seems to hint at above:

Okay, I haven't been following this thread, but I find the stories below [now above], often, include evidence of student ignorance not of their ethical slips [which in fact Zeff did say]. The story of the "greedy" plagiarist, for example, has as much evidence of someone not understanding what constituted plagiarism as it has of someone doing something wrong or being "greedy."

I'm not comfortable with many stories (though not all) that seem to belittle students' views of a complex ability (how to write about researched insights or even read materials without plagiarizing), an act that happens to differ in various settings. How about some stories that show how professors have borrowed each others' syllabi, or changed only a few words of a standard syllabus, without attribution, how professors have taken Purdue OWL handouts and not referenced them, or how professors have borrowed wording for their review files without attribution. These practices are fairly common, and do not always occur with the original writers' permission, but I wonder if such tales have been collected and posted on a web site ... although a company that seems to make money by also simplifying plagiarism, Turnitin, has suggested all writing at universities should be scanned for plagiarism.

And maybe that's my rub, in addition to sounding very similar to "Stupid Criminal" stories in the Reader's Digest, these stories concern me most because they do seem to find plagiarism and not doing it such a simple matter and obviously ethical choice. How about the value of patchwriting?

Read the whole post.

Christina Fisanik, the WPA at Xavier University, added a story in support of Kim’s uneasiness:

One of my friends was plagiarized by her prof in grad school. Her prof took an entire section (verbatim!) out of my friend's thesis and presented it at a conference. My friend might never have known if one of her buddies from undergrad (and thesis proofreader) hadn't been in the audience! When she brought the matter to the attention of the chair of the dept, he told my friend to drop it. Sad.

Read the whole post.

Do we condone academic dishonesty more easily (or uneasily) in our colleagues than in our students? Are we hypocritical enough to plagiarize ourselves and still come down hard on students who plagiarize?

Authentic Labor

My previous post mentioned a recent WPA-L thread on “time in grad school.” There was an interesting spin-off of that thread that ended up revolving around “authentic labor.” It began when a Ph.D. student named M. Deanya Lattimore wrote: “After many years of hiring and firing people, I would never discount someone for a position based merely on the time it took her to receive certification for it. Instead, I would look for some explanatory reasons in her cover letter or supporting documents. Here's some of what you may find:”--and she lists several kinds of narrative that job applicants may provide as explanations for the time spent obtaining qualifications for the job they’re applying for, such as “narratives of retooling,” “narratives of poverty,” “narratives of family illness,” “factors of age and of being sole supporter,” and so on. She added: “I certainly hope that, when I finally finish in spring semester, there will be at least one or two departments to which I apply who will consider hiring someone who overcame the odds against her because she was dedicated, hard-working, and tenacious enough to learn how to balance all of these factors with a 4/4 adjunct teaching load.”

Read the whole post.

Then Onur Azeri, an ABD working outside academia in Corrales, New Mexico, who said he had “happily left academia” but was still plugging away at his dissertation, just to give himself the satisfaction of finishing it, reacted strongly against Deanya’s use of the term “narrative”: “Hell, this isn't a narrative or a story, this is real, true blooded life that we live everyday, day in and day out, as we do many other different things beyond just writing a dissertation.” He then contrasted academic or intellectual work with “authentic labor” done outside the academy: “This thread has constantly brought up conversations I had with Steve Witte back in the day--he always reminded me that people work really hard for a living (and I'm not talking about a 3-3 load, or grading papers, or lecturing, or sitting on committees--I'm talking authentic labor) and that I should never discount a hard day's work toiling at some constructive task...this was coming from someone who pretty much did everything while he worked on his PhD beyond teaching and scholarship to get through it and to support his family.”

Read the whole post.

I jumped in here to correct Onur’s reading of Deanya’s use of the term “narrative,” saying that “Deanya's reference to ‘narratives’ that you reacted negatively to was about how to RETELL the story of your life in job applications in order to improve your chances of getting the job you're applying for. It wasn't an attempt to reduce lives to theoretical constructs.” I added: “Ask any of the people you have worked with whether they ever tell stories. Ask them whether they ever take something that happened at work and retell it to friends or family after work. Ask them whether they consider it an important part of maintaining any relationship--family, work, friendship—to narrate life experiences as story. Ask them whether they would be willing to retell their most unpleasant work experiences in positive terms in order to obtain a better job. I would highly doubt that any of them would be as negative about this sort of narrative as you.”

Read the whole post.

Bill Thelin came back to Onur’s point about “authentic labor,” defending Onur by critiquing academia: “But what about our other duties and our teaching of upper-level and graduate courses? Much of it is self-perpetuating. We're not really producing anything. Our labor is, essentially, trying to preserve white culture, maintain an aesthetic sensibility, assure middle- and upper-class privilege, and secure future positions for people who look and talk like us. While this is "authentic" work, I guess, it sure is not work that does much for the good of the community or the environment or the oppressed or even the individual soul. Perhaps I've grown a tad cynical after being a beacon of light, joy, and good will over the years , but we need some serious self-examination. We need perspective about what work is, and what this artificial environment we have created is. Somehow, this discussion of time spent in grad school is bringing some of these tensions to the surface.”

Read the whole post.

I responded to Bill: “What I'm hearing behind the class war of ‘authentic’ (physical) labor vs. ‘inauthentic’ (intellectual) labor is not only lower-class farmers and laborers vs. middle-class tutors and monks but masculinity vs. femininity. Real men work with their bodies; women and children hardly work at all, because they don't get sweaty. Real work makes things (manufacturing and farming jobs); fake work buys, uses, and at most embellishes what has been made. (Even when I write a book, I don't actually MAKE the book; I fill a file with ones and zeroes and send it to the publisher, who hires someone else to make the book.) Real work gets done in public, in fields and factories; fake work gets done in private spaces, in homes, scriptoria, offices, and classrooms. Men who do fake work are fake men, in fact honorary women, subservient to power: teachers, nurses, secretaries. Real men have hard bodies, bodies that are increasingly fetishized in visual culture (the "feminist" wolf-whistling at construction workers laboring naked to the waist, sweaty and muscular); fake men are flabby and inconsequential. (And who really cares how smart we are? After all, we don't MAKE anything.)”

I added: “And I forget now who it was that said authenticity is in the eye of the beholder [it was Chet Pryor, but that’s not exactly what he said: read his post here], but that kind of relativism seems to me a secondary DECONSTRUCTION of power and normativity. The ideology that constructs our work as less authentic than the work of riveters, and even than the work of captains of industry, who after all ORGANIZE the making of things, is still solidly in place. It's in our interests to challenge that ideology, to deconstruct it; but just invoking a relativistic rhetoric doesn't make the relativism socio-politically or emotionally true or efficacious.”

Read the whole post.

Bill responded to me: “First, the type of work that we stereotypically ascribe to women produces tangible results. Cooking produces meals. Knitting produces garments. Childrearing produces adults. I think this type of work is authentic labor.” And: “Second, your point seems to shift to the degradation you perceive of men who use their intellect rather than their hands for work. The concept of masculinity is complicated and certainly has produced some ills in our society, but I'm not sure a man's occupation has much to do with it. While it might be an issue here and there, what a white-collar worker or academic does outside of work really establishes the sense of masculinity you're talking about.” And last, again, writing teachers and writing program administrators don’t produce anything. If, Bill says, he were a mechanic, he would be fixing cars so that they ran properly. "I would not be satisfied--my boss would be horrified--if I talked about the few whose cars I fixed properly while the many whose car were not impacted by my work slipped away." That, he implies, is what we do in writing programs: we take in students for a whole semester and send most of them away “unfixed.”

Read the whole post.

My response to Bill began by trying to differentiate between “defining authentic labor,” which I took him to be attempting, and “talking about the social construction of certain types of labor as more authentic than others,” my project. I wrote:

Traditionally "we" (patriarchy) haven't valued women's work. It's JUST women's work, because, of course, it's done by women, who are JUST women. Work is something done by men outside the home. Thus a woman of my mother's generation might have said "I've never worked" or "I'm going back to work after the kids are in school." She didn't think of the work she did in the home as "work." Three or four decades of third-wave feminism have taught us, men and women alike, to value the work women (and men) do in the home, so now we'd want to say "work outside the home" for the work that was earlier called simply "work." When you write "I think this type of work is authentic labor," in a sense you're just reflecting that new feminist conception of women's work inside the home--but there's more going on there as well. "I think" has an edge to it, a sense of setting yourself in opposition to something--and that something is, of course, the older patriarchal view that devalued women's work in the home and didn't call it work at all, let alone "authentic" work. Instead of saying "the type of work that we stereotypically ascribe to women is OBVIOUSLY authentic labor," you made your assertion a form of personal counterhegemonic insistence. And I suggest that's because the older patriarchal ideology is still at work within us. You felt it, and felt you had to resist it.

And it was that older patriarchal ideology that I was trying to unpack in my post--the ways in which it continues to saturate our thinking even despite those three or four decades of third-wave feminism, which has affected all of us, men and women alike, intellectuals and "authentic laborers" alike.

ONE HAS (to use the depersonalized phrase that Heidegger called das Man) certain normative assumptions about authentic labor: workers work (with their bodies); the leisure class sits around on yachts sipping martinis. Men work; women do things at home. As I said, we don't BELIEVE those things intellectually any more, but they continue to resonate powerfully at a deep socioemotional level, and to shape our thinking from that level.

As for the "tangible results" that you list, look at them again: (1) Cooking produces meals, (2) Knitting produces garments, (3) Childrearing produces adults. Notice the difference between the "tangibility" of (1) and (2) and the "tangibility" of (3)? If the adults produced by childrearing are TANGIBLE products of traditional women's work, then aren't the writers produced by FYW classes equally tangible? And if not all adults produced by childrearing are really "mature" adults--some kids never grow up, some become incestuous fathers or serial killers--isn't there a neat parallel there with writers produced by FYW classes that aren't really "mature" writers?

For that matter:

"I would not be satisfied--my boss would be horrified--if I talked about the few whose cars I fixed properly while the many whose car were not impacted by my work slipped away."

Would you be equally horrified if it were somehow proven to you that parents fuck up more kids than they are able to raise to be balanced, healthy, happy, productive citizens?

Or: would you be equally horrified if you were a doctor and weren't able to cure every patient that walked (or was wheeled) in through your door? If some of your patients died?

The obvious point to make here is that human beings are not mechanical systems like brakes, which makes it problematic (to say the least) to make the true measure of our success in teaching whether we are able to FIX our students as well as mechanics fix brakes. Parenting fails at least as often as teaching does, because both operations are performed on whole human beings. Doctoring probably has a better success rate, because Western medicine does tend to treat the human organism as a mechanical system. So by your lights, I guess a more behavioristic FYW classroom would be more conducive to success?

I added a P.S.: “FYW produces tangible results in the more mundane sense as well, the sense in which cooking produces meals, or at least in which a factory foreman produces widgets. I require that my students write a paper, and they write a paper. They follow my specifications, and I assess the products of their labor for quality. Their papers are no longer physically tangible--I grade and write comments onscreen, and send the "papers" back to my students electronically--but they are digitally stored on various computers and servers, and could be given physical form at any time. My marked-up and graded papers could be stored and analyzed for program-assessment purposes as well. My grades are stored digitally in Blackboard, from which I transfer them to the online grading forms that are made available to me in the middle and at the end of the semester. Those grades are tallied up and averaged and so on, and they help students get jobs or admission to graduate or professional schools. If that's the main kind of productivity you value, we've got it. Certainly it's the kind of productivity administrators and accrediting agencies and assessment companies value most highly. But five decades of process and now post-process writing theory have tended to call that the least important of what we do. The fact that the "whole student" we're trying to transform in FYW classes is a considerably hazier entity than a grammatical error seems to bother you, as it does the administrators and the rest. If we had administrators and accrediting agencies and assessment companies for parents, the haziness of childrearing would bother the hell out of them as well. But to my mind, the complexity and difficulty of what we do are part of what makes it interesting and important work.”

Read the whole post.

To my post, Mary Goldschmidt added:

I think both Doug's and Bill's posts regarding the gendered nature of work need to be fleshed out (and, of course, have been by many scholars in other contexts) to address race and class, at least. Let's not forget that many women worked in factories and were thought to be perfectly capable of sweating, even while their middle and upper class “sisters’ were thought too delicate to do physical labor, open doors, or--and this is key--do intellectual work beyond ‘finishing’ school. Too much exertion of the brain caused problems with the uterus. REAL women were these women, not the working class women who served as their maids or worked in factories or who still did agricultural work. REAL women were certainly not enslaved women from Africa who ‘worked’ (unpaid) in the Americas. As you can see, what we're getting at here is identity politics.

Class, race, gender, and sexuality all exist in interconnected hierarchies which determine one's power within society. Often, that power can be measured by income, which to a great degree also determines one's power. For example, upper-middle class women in the 19th and early 20th centuries were encouraged to do lots of (unpaid) volunteer work. In other words, the proper sphere for these women had everything to do with maintaining the class and gender identity of their husbands (or fathers), even as it *also* worked to keep women from financial independence, influence, etc.

All of this is to say that which kinds of work are seen as "authentic" (and which ones end up supporting one's "authenticity" as a real MAN, for example) keep changing based on what brings the most income and power, and who needs to be excluded from this group, beyond a small number of tokens.

In thinking back to where this thread began, I'd have to say that these assumptions do indeed inform hiring committees, even as other value systems and hierarchies more specific to high education do as well.

Read the whole post.

To Do Research--Or Not

Gregory Zobel at Adjunct Advice is an adjunct teaching first-year writing at the College of the Redwoods, a community college in beautiful northern California, and asking himself whether he should grab himself by the scruff of the neck and get into a Ph.D. program: "Every couple months I think about going for my doctorate. 'It would be wise,' I tell myself, 'and I’d be so much more employable.' However, it would take a chunk of five or seven years out of my life." Not to mention the fact that he loves living in northern California, and to get a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition he would have to move; and:

Second, I do not want to spend 30 hours a week writing a dissertation. Based on what I have read on the WPA-list and heard from many Ph.D.s, getting the diss done requires that amount of work. If I am going to write 30 hours a week, then I want to write fiction, narratives, book reviews, essays, blogs, and so on. I do not want to spend that much time on composition theory or rhetoric at this point in my life. I wrote two MA theses two years ago and I am not interested in repeating that process any time soon. Perhaps in the future, but not now.

By "the WPA-list" he means WPA-L, the writing program administrators' list, which did indeed recently spend several days on a thread entited "How to Cut Ph.D. Time to Degree," beginning with a December 17 article in Inside Higher Ed (no longer on the web) about Harvard's plan to speed up progress to the doctorate, noting: "Recent data from the Council of Graduate Schools, for example, show that only 36.7 percent of humanities students have finished their dissertations by year 8, and only 49.1 percent have done so by year 10." The WPA-L posters mostly focused on questions regarding the factors that slow Ph.D. candidates' progress toward a degree, such as faculty unhelpfulness, heavy teaching loads, and various conscious or unconscious motivational problems, such as not really being sure whether you even want a Ph.D.--Gregory Zobel's specific concern in his post.

So what--if anything--should be done? Should universities take decisive action to shorten time-to-degree for Ph.D. candidates? What should that action be? What would the emotional and intellectual effects of this pressure be on Ph.D. candidates? The WPAers agreed that some would probably respond well to it, while for others it would just increase already redlining stress levels.

And what about the Ph.D. candidates who aren't really sure they should be working toward a doctorate? Should they be left to flounder with their indecision for years, or would ruthless pressure in their cases ultimately be a form of mercy? I'm personally inclined to let those who need to flounder flounder indefinitely, but within an institutional context of limited resources, that seems increasingly unrealistic.

Perhaps the answer is more consciousness-raising posts like Zobel's?