The Death of the Graduate Student (and the Birth of the HQP )

Abstract

The Death of the Graduate Student (and the Birth of the HQP) Robert Zacharias (bio) In the middle of a sleek little brochure entitled Framing Our Direction 2010-12 (2010), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) announced its plans to gather together its graduate student and postdoctoral funding programs under a new umbrella program called "Talent." According to the SSHRC website, the primary context for the establishment of the Talent program is the granting council's efforts at "promot[ing] the acquisition of research skills, and assist[ing] in the training of highly qualified personnel in the social sciences and humanities" ("Talent Program"). The Talent program is not the first time that SSHRC has adopted the term "Highly Qualified Personnel" (HQP) as a euphemism for "graduate students," and SSHRC is far from the only granting council in Canada deploying this rhetoric. But for a recent PhD graduate and current postdoctoral scholar such as myself, SSHRC's decision to link the major granting programs for all graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and collectively frame them as a training program for highly qualified personnel offers an occasion to pause and consider what is beginning to look like the death of the graduate student in Canada's increasingly corporatized postsecondary institutions. The time has come [End Page 4] for an impassioned defence of graduate education as education, a process that could begin with a pedagogy of critical professionalization. In Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education (2011), James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar lament what they call the "drift towards vocationalism" (14) currently underway in Canadian universities. Although Côté and Allahar focus on undergraduate education, the distinction they draw between the training that characterizes preparation for postuniversity vocations and the education that fosters critical thought is useful for understanding the process underway at the graduate level as well. While "training is more given to specialization and the acquisition of a narrow range of skills and information associated with a discrete or specific task," they suggest, the concept of "education is more general and envisages as an end product a more cultured, open-mined, and civic-minded citizenry" (14). SSHRC's newly minted Talent program is only one example, of course, but its stated aims of "promot[ing] the acquisition of research skills, and assist[ing] in the training of highly qualified personnel" (emphasis added) is indicative of a larger shift in the humanities away from graduate student education and toward graduate student training.1 My own introduction to the changing climate of the humanities came as a result of my fortuitous involvement with Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli's "Culture of Research" colloquium, which I attended in the first semester of my PhD in 2006. Let me confess here that I was utterly and unredeemably lost throughout the weekend, although I'm sure this was abundantly clear to all who were around that table. My sense is that the vast majority of those currently entering graduate studies in Canada would be as bewildered as I was at such an event and, as such, are woefully unprepared to respond to the various ways in which their position in the university is shifting. As Jessica Schagerl points out, for students lacking a systematic introduction to the relevant networks of organizations and contexts of humanities scholarship in Canada, any debate surrounding their form or function quickly dissolves into "the equivalent of 'blah blah blah blah, funding, blah blah blah blah, research' " (98). Schagerl turns to a re-investment in mentorship as a means to offer graduate students such [End Page 5] an introduction, and, as someone who was extremely fortunate to have strong mentors throughout my graduate studies, I can certainly attest to the value—both intellectual and economic—of strong and invested mentorship. As a recent member of the wider graduate student community, however, I can also attest to the vast inconsistencies and inequalities that show mentorship to be a fatally ad hoc pedagogical model. A more systematic introduction to the shifting contexts of the humanities in Canada is necessary not simply for the precious few students who will ultimately join...