A Hire Education Concerning your piece on graduate students [spring 1999]: Let me add to its already complicated nature. English teaches 11,000 students annually in composition; 30 faculty can't do it, unless we were to try in 1,000-student lectures. All of the languages use graduate students for basic instruction. (German has only five faculty. If they all taught language, they couldn't teach literature as well, and the major would collapse.) If language programs cut back on graduate student enrollment, then who teaches the basic courses? I'm not saying that grad students should (although it's a valuable part of their training); I'm just pointing out another factor in the equation. To hire faculty to teach all these students would be extremely expensive. To hire lecturers continues to take advantage of those same graduate students after they've received their Ph.D.s. No easy answers. Pete Hays Professor of English