The Structural Vulnerability of Doctoral Students: A Political and Ethical Issue for Doctoral Programs in Women's/Gender/Sexuality/Feminist Studies

Abstract

Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Kristina Gupta The Structural Vulnerability of Doctoral Students: A Political and Ethical Issue for Doctoral Programs in Women’s/ Gender/Sexuality/Feminist Studies This article begins with two key assumptions: first, PhD programs in women’s, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies (WGSFS) should be feminist not just in terms of content (that is, what is taught) but also in terms of form and process (that is, how we decide what is taught); and, second, a commitment to feminism as a process includes, at the very least, a commitment to addressing structurally created vulnerabilities within our own institutions. Given these two assumptions, this commentary grapples with the reality that contemporary graduate education is a fraught endeavor. Taking a practical, rather than theoretical , approach, I ask: What can a department do to create a PhD program that responds to the structural vulnerability of PhD students and promotes doctoral student well-being? It is often assumed that PhD programs in WGSFS will be, by default, feminist in form, but this is assuredly not always the case. I argue that if PhD programs in WGSFS are not explicitly designed with feminist goals in mind and with an attention to addressing the structural vulnerability of graduate students, they may end up reproducing patriarchal, racist, classist, heterosexist, and ableist norms and thereby create a hostile environment for graduate students. To make this argument, I begin by outlining the fraught status of graduate education today and the structural vulnerability of PhD students more broadly, emphasizing that WGSFS PhD programs will not magically avoid reproducing adverse conditions simply by virtue 410 Kristina Gupta of the fact that their faculty are feminist scholars. I will then outline some suggestions for policies or best practices that WGSFS PhD programs can adopt to mitigate the structural vulnerability of graduate students . I limit my discussion to the humanities and social sciences, as this is where most WGSFS departments and programs are located. I also limit my discussion to PhD programs in the United States, as systems of higher education vary substantially in different countries. Graduate Education Today: Hardly a Feminist Environment The vagaries of contemporary graduate education have been discussed in a variety of settings from blog posts, to book-length studies, to reports from major professional associations.1 In this section, I outline several of the most troubling aspects of contemporary graduate education as a whole. Unfortunately, data specific to WGSFS PhD programs are not available for many of these indicators, so I mostly provide data about PhD programs in general, with a focus on the humanities and social sciences . In the next section, I speculate about some of the ways that WGSFS PhD programs may be different from other programs in the humanities and social sciences. First, graduate students across disciplines are plagued by economic insecurity, both current and future, and by the attendant physical and mental stress caused by such insecurity. It is a truism that graduate students live in poverty; although comprehensive data is hard to obtain, many PhD programs do not guarantee funding and even those that do often providing funding at or near the federal poverty line.2 According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), more than half of doctorate recipients in the humanities and social sciences graduated with graduate 1. See, for example, “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School,” August 7, 2017, http://100rsns.blogspot.com; Leonard Cassuto, The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Modern Language Association of America, “Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature ,” May 2014, https://www.mla.org/content/download/25437/1164354 /taskforcedocstudy2014.pdf. 2. See Vimal Patel, “To Improve Equity, Focus on Stipends, Graduate Students Say,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2014, http://chronicle.com /article/To-Improve-Equity-Focus-on/144759. Kristina Gupta 411 education-related debt in 2014.3 And it is well-known that PhD graduates face a difficult job market, whether they are looking for jobs within or outside of the academy.4 Obviously, it has always been the case that not...