Experts among us

Humanities graduates have much to offer the workplace, and the workplace has much to offer them.

By Ellen Chrismer

Like many of her classmates in UC Davis’ English doctoral program, Sonja Streuber is a teacher and a trainer of minds. She develops new ideas and publishes her work.

The difference between her and many of her classmates is where she is working—not at a university but at Agilent Technologies, the global hardware and software company with offices in Folsom. After several years of stringing together part-time teaching jobs at local community colleges and universities, Streuber decided two years ago to find a place where she could use her research, writing and teaching skills—and make a decent living. Her expertise, honed in graduate school, is appreciated at Agilent, Streuber said.

As a senior technical trainer, she helps her company’s clients develop new business processes. She writes training-course curricula and mentors junior colleagues. And her years of teaching experience at UC Davis, Streuber said, “was really the kicker” that got her the job.

Despite her success, Streuber—who plans to finish her dissertation on 20th-century women’s dramatic performance this winter—hasn’t discussed her career change with many people at the university. Most would not have understood her decision, she believes. So, without using typical university networking, Streuber went out and got this job on her own.

Streuber’s story is not unusual at UC Davis, students and faculty members say. Graduate students in the humanities typically have been given one model of professional success by their mentors and peers: a tenured professorship at a major university.

Though students have acquired skills that would be useful in a business or nonprofit environment, they are not often given the tools or support to enter those non-academic fields, says Elizabeth Langland, dean of humanities, arts and cultural studies.

“Some people have a slightly different focus,” Langland said, “but there aren’t other avenues for them to follow.”

But that’s starting to change. With a mix of pragmatism and a true belief in the power of humanistic thinking to transform society, universities—including UC Davis—seek to better prepare humanities graduates to contribute to the workplace and the community. Their study of human history, culture, language and philosophy can be invaluable, say advocates.

“I really believe this is the moment for the humanities,” Langland said.

At Georgetown University, linguistics students have started a business, Strategic Language Services, that does everything from ethnographic research to product-naming for Washington, D.C.-area corporations.

At UC Irvine, the Humanities Out There (HOT) program takes graduate and undergraduate students studying history, literature, philosophy and other humanities disciplines into six Santa Ana public schools to teach core lessons on subjects like citizenship, censorship and creative writing, integrating traditions from the past with current-day applications.

After seeing the impact of their knowledge on a fresh audience, “graduate students are a different type of scholar-citizen than they were in the beginning,” said Julia Lupton, a professor of comparative literature at UC Irvine and the founding director of HOT.

Graduate students from the HOT program have gone on to change the focus of their studies and their career paths. One graduate student in English is now researching educational reform movements. Another former HOT participant is the director of the California History–Social Science Project where she researches and develops curricula for high school teachers.

And UC Davis, led by the efforts of Langland and faculty members Elizabeth Constable and Catherine Robson, plans to develop a master’s degree in applied humanities. The program hopes to serve students whose goals are to work in the private and nonprofit sectors. UC Santa Cruz is considering a similar master’s. Both would be among the first graduate programs with a specific focus on creating connections between humanities and the everyday world.

Langland foresees the program offering courses and internships to help students transfer their humanities perspectives to the public and workplace, helping people, for example, understand cultural conflicts brought to the fore by Sept. 11 or business ethics dilemmas like those faced by employees of Enron.

“We have to confront problems that have been emerging, such as the globalization of terror and the economy and the fragmentation of states,” Langland said. “Science has been our god in the 20th century, but these are problems that can’t be solved by science. We aren’t going to solve homeland security simply through specialized security devices. We need better understanding of diverse cultures.”

Jim Quay, executive director of the California Council on the Humanities, is intrigued by Langland’s idea.

“September 11 is just the latest demonstration of our need to know about foreign cultures and our neighbors who come from foreign cultures,” he said. “It’s another powerful example of how much we don’t know.”

Quay believes people with graduate humanities training are a powerful resource for libraries, foundations, nonprofits and others trying to make sense of the events of the past.

“We run looking for our experts, but they have been here all along. I’m very excited about the prospect of the UC Davis program,” he said. “I hope it happens.”

An applied humanities program not only benefits the business world by providing a source of expertise; it benefits humanities graduates by better preparing them for work in industry and by making them more marketable. That training hasn’t been emphasized at UC Davis in recent years.

“Much is being said taking about taking a more practical approach to graduate education,” Agilent’s Streuber said. “But the fact of the matter is, I had to look for my own education in business and technology.”

Often, she said, professors have good intentions, but they don’t understand that the job market can be just as tough outside academia as within it. Streuber remembers being told that if she didn’t land a job as a professor she could become a screenwriter in Hollywood—a move the faculty member presumed to be quite easy.

But Streuber positioned herself to find a corporate career. She worked as a research assistant and editor at the Graduate School of Management and became an expert in Web design. Then she and a staff member at the Internship and Career Center transformed her curriculum vitae, a summary of academic achievements, into a two-page resume to send out to employers.

Streuber’s marketing of her academic work to the corporate world is unusual, says UC Davis’ Robson. In contrast to other graduate disciplines, such as the sciences, “the humanities have been terrible about sharing their work with society,” said the associate professor of English. “We look inward and don’t tell the rest of the world what we are up to.”

Giving impetus to the program is a dwindling job market for tenured humanities professorial positions. Robson—who worked at London’s National Portrait Gallery and in publishing before receiving her doctorate—was motivated to work on the project after years of trying to help graduate students find jobs.

“I think the academy wants very badly to create miniatures of itself,” she said. “The feeling is that if you don’t get a job at a research university, you’ve failed, and the university has failed.”

But according to a 1997 study by the Modern Language Association, which regularly researches the job market for doctoral graduates in English and foreign languages, only half of the 7,000 students in line to earn degrees between 1996 and 2000 were expected to receive tenure-track posts within a year of graduating. More recent association surveys have shown that colleges and universities are increasingly turning to untenured part-timers to fill humanities posts.

“If disciplines like history and English were sovereign countries, they would be in the longest and worst depression in the history of the West,” wrote Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, in a 2001 Chronicle of Higher Education essay. The foundation’s Humanities at Work initiative helps promote the value of humanities training to society.

The drought has Ph.D.s like Amy Gerbrandt Wiley, who received a comparative literature doctorate from UC Davis last year, scrambling for work. Living in relatively isolated San Luis Obispo, where her husband teaches architecture at Cal Poly, she’s given up hope of finding a tenure-track post in her field. She now hopes to teach part time at a community college satellite campus 60 miles away and find office work through a temp agency. “Things are pretty bleak,” Wiley said.

Cheryl Shell, who received her doctorate in Shakespearean and Renaissance English from UC Davis in 2001, took a job as a personnel specialist with Washington State University’s ROTC program after similarly finding the academic competition too tough. She made the decision after working toward her advanced degrees for 12 years and finding her only teaching option was part-time work.

“I just didn’t want to live like that—I still don’t,” she said. “I want to make a contribution to society, to have work that is meaningful and useful. I think I have many talents and skills that could be used wherever where they need good workers.”

Shell, who manages the paperwork for 125 cadets, said she enjoys the interaction she gets with students in her job—some even turn to her for writing help. But she isn’t pleased with her $30,000 salary and little chance for upward mobility.

Employees with graduate degrees can also face an unexpected bias in the workplace, Streuber said.

“In the industry, the Ph.D. is one of those degrees that is viewed as a little impractical,” she said. “Doctoral students often have to prove they can think on their feet more than someone who has a B.A. or a master’s degree.”

Some temp agencies have even suggested that Wiley, the San Luis Obispo resident, eliminate the Ph.D. from her resume to align her skills better with those recognized by the business world. She hasn’t.

Despite the stories and statistics, humanities advocates like those at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation do not believe universities should practice “doctoral birth control,” as Weisbuch wrote in his Chronicle essay last fall.

“Instead of saying we need to produce fewer humanities Ph.D.s, we said we need to employ them better,” said Hadass Sheffer, a Woodrow Wilson Foundation director.

UC Davis’ program will give students skills to find meaningful employment in a number of areas.

Robson, who has been investigating curricula for the program, envisions it including new courses on legal issues in the humanities, group dynamics, nonprofit accounting, and intellectual property rights in culture, along with existing classes in the humanities, such as critical theory, cultural rhetoric, American folklore and the history and philosophy of philanthropy. Students would cap off the program with a summer internship and a project that integrates their humanities specialty and their area of career interest.

Though the applied humanities degree would be a master’s level program, students studying for their doctorate or those who have just completed their degree could “dip in” to applied humanities offerings at will, Robson said.

Community and business input would be essential to UC Davis’ program, too, she said. Robson has been impressed with the way that Graduate School of Management Dean Robert Smiley has cultivated relationships with Sacramento-area businesses and hopes to develop a similar rapport.

Langland plans to draw together a faculty committee this winter to develop the program and hire a director by the end of the academic year. She believes the program could form quickly and with minimal funds since many of the faculty members who would teach in it are already on campus. She’s hoping other faculty members, who, like Robson and Constable, have worked in professions outside the university, might want to get involved in the program.

Law school dean Rex Perschbacher said he’s in favor of any interactions between the professional school and students in the humanities and social sciences. “They produce benefits on both sides: on one hand broadening legal education and on the other side providing some expertise in law and business.”

UC Davis’ program needs someone who has some real knowledge of today’s complex job structures, Wiley said.

She hopes the program will give students a real sense of how their research and analysis skills, along with any management or teaching experience they may have picked up as graduate students, could substitute for any on-the-job experience they may have missed.

Yet to be determined is whether businesses and cash-strapped nonprofits in today’s volatile economy will be willing, in great numbers, to hire graduates possessing skills in applied humanities.

“Are there organizations that can offer these positions? Some yes, some no. But there is a need,” said Quay, the California Council for the Humanities Director.

The Woodrow Wilson Foundation has had mixed success with its efforts encouraging humanities graduates to branch out into different fields. It currently supports a program that pays graduate students who find internship positions in fields ranging from journalism to museum work and urban planning. But last year it discontinued a program in which the foundation committed to provide 80 humanities Ph.D.s with a year of paid work at a corporation or nonprofit, Sheffer said. “It turned out to be [too] time-consuming for us.”

In launching the pioneer program, Robson acknowledges that UC Davis might have a hefty task in front of it.

“Our aims are so broad,” she said. Graduate programs in public policy and arts administration, which also combine academic theory and practice, are designed to place graduates in specific types of jobs. That isn’t the case with the applied humanities program.

“The reason that it hasn’t been done before is that it is difficult,” Robson said. The new program aside, Robson would like the campus’s humanities departments to do more to encourage graduate students to consider a wide range of careers.

“It’s only fair to make all graduate students aware that the academic job market is not the be-all, end-all,” she said. “You don’t want to dampen their ardor about an academic career, but it’s very useful for them to think about wider audiences and how to present their work in different ways.

For the student passionate about a career in academia, moving outside that world can mean some difficult adjustments, Agilent’s Streuber admits. For instance, the writing she does now—for reports, training manuals and course guides—doesn’t carry her name. She’s lost much of the sense of authorship that’s a “benchmark of academic achievement in the humanities,” said Streuber, who still teaches a course each at San Jose State University and Sacramento City College.

But she’s found the rewards are similar whether her ideas are published in a journal or show up in a manager’s initiatives for the company, Streuber said.

“The sense of satisfaction relies on the sense of contributing to a communal good.”

Ellen Chrismer is associate editor of Dateline, the campus’s faculty-staff newspaper.