I really wish grad programs began asking "does this serve our students?" Does this assignment teach necessary skills for a broad job market? Do students have time to develop skills during coursework? Or is the program asking students to learn these outside of class hours? 1/6
What is the program directly preparing students for? What connections does the department maintain with the federal sector and other business sectors? Are students being introduced to worlds outside of academia? 2/6
To ask the hard question - why should a student go to grad school in a certain program? What is the incentive? When the job market looks like this and real career training is non-existent? 3/6
Are degree markers useful? Or just ingrained habits? How do comprehensive exams serve a student who will likely never work in academia (or will not need niche information to do so)? What about dissertation projects? 4/6
Does it make sense for students to write full monographs? When the program can't ensure economic funding to ever publish the book version? And when, perhaps, the academy doesn't deserve students' academic ingenuity and labor after casting them into insecure positions? 5/6
What are we producing, and for whom are we producing this work? Does it serve us to produce knowledge for a field that underpays us, casts us into endless cycles of VAPs, and tells us to figure out career training on top of it all? 6/6 #AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter
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