OK, Let's Teach Graduate Students Differently. But How?

Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, writes regularly about graduate education in this space. He welcomes comments, suggestions, and stories—including descriptions of the kinds of innovative graduate teaching described in this article—at lcassuto@erols.com.

A couple of months ago, Anthony T. Grafton and James Grossman made a "very modest proposal" that wasn't very modest at all. As president and executive director of the American Historical Association, respectively, the two mounted history's official disciplinary pulpit to endorse a new way of looking at graduate education in the field.

"Many of these students," the authors wrote, "will not find tenure-track positions teaching history in colleges and universities"—and it's time to stop pretending otherwise. The job market "is what it is." We face no "transient 'crisis,'" but rather "the situation that we have lived with for two generations."

That's a refreshing assertion, and an encouraging sign that the graduate-school-industrial complex is beginning to embrace not just the not-so-new economic reality—which has, after all, been apparent for a long time—but also what that reality means for the future of graduate programs.

"A Ph.D. in history opens a broad range of doors," wrote Grafton and Grossman, and graduate programs should prepare students for an "array of positions outside the academy." It's not the first time such ideas have hit the open air, but we need to consider who's airing them. This is an important statement for the official leaders of a discipline to make, and a necessary one....