“Participate or Perish”: Reckoning with the time bind of graduate student life

Abstract

This article revisits a graduate course I taught between 2005 and 2014, ENGLISH 779--The Times We Live In, in light of the temporal stresses of graduate student life. Thinking with Donald C. Goellnicht's 1993 article, “From novitiate culture to market economy: the professionalization of graduate students,” alongside the more recent work of several graduate students (Blanchard, Wilks and Vogan 2022, Brown 2022; Stoneman 2012; Tootonsab 2022), the article explores the increasing pressure on graduate students to engage in and record activities that are “off-the-clock” of program requirements. In particular, the article considers the contradictory celebration of graduate students' participation in extra-curricular activities that challenge the temporal dynamics of capitalism and colonialism while those dynamics continue to define performance expectations within their graduate programs. Recognizing the complicity of faculty members in exacerbating temporal stress by encouraging the incorporation of extra-curricular activism into the timelines of graduate programs, the article concludes by considering ways to revise ENGLISH 779--The Times We Live in to address more honestly, if not to loosen, the time binds of graduate student life.

I started teaching a graduate course in literary and cultural studies called “The Times We Live In” in 2005, which continued until 2014. It emerged out of research I was doing on the slow movement, which eventually morphed into a collaboration with colleagues in English, Political Science, and Social Work on time and globalization. ¹ Reflecting this research, one aim of the course was to give students a critical awareness of how different temporal perspectives have shaped contemporary global culture and vice versa. The syllabus also invited students to consider “how cultural texts and practices represent, comment on, and play with dominant conceptions of time and experiences of temporal alienation” (O’Brien, 2014). A third, more nebulous aim, was outlined this way in the syllabus:

Finally, I hope we will develop a greater sense of ourselves as temporal beings. In conjunction with artistic and theoretical meditations on time, then, we will also reflect on how temporal ideologies shape our individual experiences, as scholars and workers in a university, along/in tension with other areas of our lives. (O’Brien, 2014)

I thought about structuring the course in a way that could somehow interrupt the typical temporal rhythms of a graduate course. One possibility I considered was replacing the usual end-of-term research paper with the opportunity to rethink, rewrite, or unwrite something the students had written for a previous course. I decided not to do that, mostly because it would make the requirements for this course so out of whack with other courses; it might look easier, even if it wouldn’t necessarily be easier, to spend time renovating something already completed than to make something new.

I couldn’t figure out a way to subvert the dominant temporality of graduate courses without violating what seemed to me to be some pretty core standards. The course syllabus described this conundrum, along with what felt like at least a gesture toward addressing it:

Institutional constraints mean that graduate courses tend to be organized along the principles of cramming as many texts as the instructor can fit into twelve weeks, punctuated by a bunch of assignments to keep everyone on task and to hang a grade on. Though this course pretty much fits this pattern, I have also tried to incorporate a small window for temporal reflection and/or flagrant time-wasting. The catch is that you have to write about it (see below).

The outline went on to describe the assignment that would do in a limited way what I would have liked the whole course to do: let students experiment with, and reflect on, their own relationship to time and get credit for that work. This assignment has since gone on to inspire other time scholars in their teaching (Huebener, Bastian) ² , and so although I taught it some time ago, I have used this piece as an opportunity to revisit it, including sharing how it was designed, while also reflecting on my broader concerns around the temporality of teaching in graduate education.

What I called the “out-of-time” writing assignment (or in different years, the “time-jamming” assignment) asked students to “engage in, and then to reflect on, a disruption of the temporal framework(s) that structure your everyday life.” The detailed assignment notes provided the following context/instructions:

What I’m asking you to do is to break the rules of time; to step out of the comfortable discomforts of your regular timebound activities and do something different. The experiences can be planned or spontaneous/accidental, and may include activities such as spending time in a place with routines that are radically different from your own (e.g., a retirement home; hospital or daycare); mismanaging or squandering your time (or over-monitoring it); shifting your wake/sleep or work/leisure patterns; playing with/transgressing the temporal rules of work, whether internally or externally imposed, etc. It’s up to you how long you spend doing the time-bending experience; it can be as short as a few minutes or as long as a few days—as long as it involves an element of temporal displacement. Your reflections should consist of 2-3 pages, where possible using theories or ideas from the course to illuminate your experience (and vice versa). (O’Brien, 2014) ³

Students approached this assignment, worth 20% of their final grade, with some enthusiasm but also (to me) a surprising amount of angst. They found it difficult to mash together the opportunity to go off the clock with the requirement to “clock” that experience, to turn it into a paper. A selection of titles will convey a sense of the ingenuity and range of the experiments:

“A Timely Love: Romantic Intimacy and the Acceleration of Everything” (Martak, 2014)

“Life in Cat Time” (Sheridan, 2014)

“Beating the Clock is Child’s Play” (Tanti, 2012)

“Gospel Music as Cultivating, for me, Wonder and Generosity” (Mo, 2014)

“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Perhaps Do Again: Time-Jamming Meta-Vacation” (Ngo, 2014)

Looking at the students’ papers several years later confirmed my memory of the course and the assignment in particular as a playful, mildly subversive intervention in the disciplinary regime in which we were all immersed. It had a faintly conspiratorial feel, as though I was licensing the casting off, however temporary, however symbolic, of the shackles of institutional time. The brilliance of students’ assignments supported my feeling that this was a good course. I’ve also been gratified to hear from former students who saw connections in the assignment to other temporal experiments (e.g., Michelle Peek pointed me to the wonderful arts-based time research of Nadia Chaney [2021]) or who, like Paul Huebener (one of my colleagues in the Time & Globalization Working Group) had adapted parts of it for their own teaching. Hearing (from Paul) about this journal’s Special Forum on Teaching Time made me excited to recall what I loved about this course and maybe to gather thoughts toward a reboot.

When I started reviewing old assignments in preparation to write this piece, one in particular snagged my attention. In “Passionate Attachment to Temporal Divestment: Or, What the Hell is Wrong with Academics?”, Scott Stoneman (2012) wrote about the excruciating anxiety he experienced on being offered, then taking up, an RAship, which represented equal parts opportunity and liability, gift, and burden. He wrote:

I am supposed to want to participate in the discipline in precisely these ways. It is expected that I overburden myself in the interest of more avidly trading in ideas with others. Screw simplifying things: overextension is a sign that you are doing things right. That you have enthusiastically interiorized the injunction to a certain self-importance that drives the exhausting will to enter with all one's rigour and in excess of one's vigour the conversation. Participate or perish. ⁴

Reading Scott’s assignment helped to solidify a vague feeling that the joys and pains of graduate school weren’t exactly what I’d imagined them to be, and that things that I thought of as opportunities for creative departures—like the time-jamming assignment in my course—might not alleviate the pain, in fact they might contribute to it. I still look back fondly on the course, but the feeling that it was a collective experiment in subverting dominant temporal rhythms has given way to a recognition that the burdens of academic time are much more unequal than I had recognized at the time.

My growing understanding of this temporal inequality is much indebted to the work of graduate students. In their contribution to McMaster’s Critical Mad & Disability Discussion series, Kaitlin Blanchard, Aisha Wilks, and Katrina Vogan (2021) highlighted the way in which the regimentation of time works to facilitate the carceral operation of the university. Students with disabilities in particular are subject to institutional discipline and surveillance as a condition of their learning—for example, by mandatory disclosure of private health information to be granted the time required to complete program requirements. COVID-19 did not see a relaxation of these punitive accommodation policies (which notably don’t include tuition relief for disability-related extensions); the policies just became more visible to more people. Some meaningful changes did occur during the time of the pandemic, emerging, as innovations often do, not from the center but from the precarious edges of the institution. For example, PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow Marika Brown (2022a) sought to implement a more equitable and accessible way of assessing students’ work by using contract grading in her second-year course. ⁵ Aiming to introduce greater “care and flexibility” into the classroom, the experiment had the collateral benefit of giving students greater control over the allocation of their time, while also freeing up the hours the instructor and TAs might have spent assigning and rationalizing grades for the provision of meaningful feedback. This course enacted the kind of structural change that I lacked the knowledge, imagination, and courage to enact in my graduate course on time.

As these examples show, graduate students bring enormous value to the university, beyond the obvious economic benefits of tuition and external funding. Students also undoubtedly receive benefits from these experiences beyond their value for CVs that are increasingly expected to demonstrate evidence of extra-curricular flexibility, ingenuity, and leadership. But, as Stoneman noted in his assignment years ago, the cultivation of these qualities also takes time away from the completion of requirements for the degree that is a pre-requisite for an academic employment. So, the cost–benefit ratio for students of doing the work that falls loosely under the category of “professionalization”—however enriching that work might feel, and even when students are paid for their time, as they are (inadequately) as Teaching Fellows—is questionable. The ratio doesn’t get better when the projects students undertake are directed toward progressive social transformation. It might even get worse, as activities that are meant to undermine the structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, of which the university is a pillar, actually serve to prop them up by burnishing the university’s reputation as a champion of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Decolonization (EDID), and accessibility.

Don Goellnicht incisively described a version of this dilemma in his 1993 article, “From Novitiate Culture to Market Economy: The Professionalization of Graduate Students,” which analyzed the changes in graduate education that occurred throughout the late 70s and 80s. The intellectual content of training reflected the burgeoning of theory in this period—critical, or capital “T” Theory, along with feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theory. At the same time, the form of graduate training increasingly came to emphasize professionalization: the preparation of dossiers, grant applications, and the circulation of research via conference presentations and peer-reviewed articles, etc. The dual developments produced what Goellnicht describes as an “ironic contradiction”:

[I]n our programs of professional training we supply graduate students with the strategies to become competitive individuals in a market economy at the same time as we bombard them in our courses with theories whose ostensible aims are to produce a more egalitarian and equitable society, to combat racism and sexism, to introduce methods of collaborative pedagogy and scholarship, and so on. (1993, 479)

Goellnicht welcomed the withering of the old model of English graduate education wherein students, steeped in the orthodoxy of New Criticism as a path to spiritual betterment, were seen as “the equivalent of novices, training through an elaborate system of unquestioning imitation … to become the next generation of academic clerics” (1993, 476). However, he questioned the uncritical embrace of professionalization and the harnessing of nominally progressive theory to the ethos of competitive individualism and went on to observe:

We as instructors are, of course, complicitous here … In our blind rush to professionalization, we participate, however unwillingly or unconsciously, in the commodification of our discipline, not to say or our students, thus robbing them of much of their potential to change society. (Goellnicht, 1993, 479)

The dilemma Goellnicht outlined has intensified over the last 30 years, as job prospects shrink, while our expectations of graduate students have ballooned to encompass extra-curricular activities that fall far outside the compass of academic work. We—in departments of literary and cultural studies, anyway—put special value on activities in service of social change, explicitly un- and even anti-academic activities that translate our critical theories into action.

Like the earlier phase of professionalization, the implications of these changes are mixed. On the one hand, the increasing valuation of extra-curricular experience, “leadership,” and activism is a welcome development, in that it recognizes community involvement and diverse forms of experiential knowledge. It also creates an additional hurdle, one that might, ironically, further disadvantage the students from under-represented groups that it is ostensibly meant to help. Those students not only have to do exceptionally well in traditional metrics in order to overcome institutional biases—read: they spend a lot of time focusing on academic excellence; but they are also more likely to hold jobs, including service jobs that are hard to parlay into politico-aesthetically alluring CV lines. Those students may also be involved in community organization and activism, but the meaning of that work shifts when it becomes a requirement for success in graduate school; no longer only for the organization or the project, it also gets converted into capital for the university, whose funding depends increasingly on the demonstration of social relevance as well as economic usefulness. And for faculty members like me, who are working with graduate students who are engaging, not only in dissertation research but also in socially meaningful work, it makes our own complicity with institutional dynamics feel a little lighter, a little less cynical, a little more meaningful, and quite a bit more fun.

This is the landscape I’m surveying as I set out to revise “The Times We Live In”—a landscape that the course can do next to nothing to change, beyond offering better illumination of it.

When I offer the course again, it’ll encompass a few changes. I will continue to ask students to explore global and planetary timescales, via the critical lenses of the postcolonial environmental humanities, critical race, feminist, and queer theories. But I will do so within a framework that is much more attentive to temporal jams in which graduate students get stuck. To this end, we will look at the way time is understood and valued in literary and cultural studies, considering topics like citation, collaboration, and what PhD candidate and poet Zahra Tootonsab (2022) calls “ethical (s)paces.” We will also look closely at temporal practices and technologies within the university, such as time management apps, accommodations policies, the concept of work–life balance, emotional labor, self-care, and burgeoning demands to professionalize, demonstrate leadership, and engage in transformational social activism. Finally, I will broaden the “out-of-time”/“time-jamming” assignment starting with a different name: “Take your time.” The assignment would invite students to pursue whichever of the different resonances of that phrase spoke most clearly to them: “take your time,” meaning go slowly and carefully; “taking” time in the sense of stealing/hacking it in a way that feels illicit (closest to the time-jamming assignment), and finally, “take your time,” meaning claim your time to do whatever most needs doing, whether that’s an assignment for another course, the dishes, coffee with a friend, or a nap. This last version of the assignment is not designed to be particularly interesting or creative; what it aims to do is offer grad students momentary relief from the constant pressure to simultaneously tick boxes and go outside them (though they’ll still need to write about it). This revamped course may not do anything to loosen the time binds of grad school, but I hope it will help both the students and me to see them more clearly and talk about them more honestly.