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Outside Evaluators’ Report on the Department of English at Georgia State University
Overview
The Georgia State University administration is justly proud of its English Department. The Department has borne up exceptionally well in the face of the severe problem of diminished resources facing the university in recent years. Its leadership has been strong; its faculty have been productive as scholars/creative writers and as teachers; its faculty recruitment program has on the whole yielded excellent results; its self-scrutiny and long-range planning processes have been admirably thorough; and its morale seems excellent.
In a climate of frozen salaries, insufficient support for graduate students, space crunch, and drastic library acquisitions cutbacks one might well expect to find moroseness and disaffection. It speaks extremely well for the department leadership and for the faculty as a whole that such is not the case here. On the contrary, Georgia State's English Department possesses exemplary energy, elan and esprit de corps. Its professors are actively engaged in scholarly and creative work of many kinds, and this work directly inflects their teaching and their departmental vision. The department’s commitment to teaching as well as to reaching beyond the university is sincere and admirable. Altogether, the department impresses us as eminently worthy of enhanced funding; and the majority of its stated goals seem eminently sound.
1. Observations on Departmental Culture
The Department gives ample evidence of embracing diversity, both within its own ranks and among its students. Professors repeatedly expressed their commitment to maintaining and serving a diverse student body. They seem pleased not only by the students' wide range of backgrounds and ages, but also by the ongoing challenge of teaching "mixed classes" at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, with students pursuing very different emphases in their studies. The students with whom we talked, in turn, credited the faculty with making a sincere attempt to introduce cultural diversity into their syllabi, even as they underscored the need also identified by the faculty for more specialized expertise and a stronger curriculum in those same areas.
Furthermore, the faculty as a collective also clearly support the vision of a multiplex department whose different “wings”—literature studies, creative writing, rhetoric/composition, and secondary education—interact with each other in a synergy, rather than function autonomously as rival camps. Literature faculty, for instance, spoke warmly of the advantages of having creative writers in their literary history classes, and of how much the presence of secondary education students, with their particular interest in teaching strategies, had transformed the professors' own approach to pedagogy. Faculty maintain convincingly that they have much to learn from these students, as well as much to teach them. They also seem very appreciative of their colleagues in other wings of the department.
A multiplex department which unites literary history, creative writing, rhetoric and composition, and secondary education might seem like a recipe for disaster—or at least for turf wars, dissent, irritability, incomprehension and scorn. Instead, the department is remarkably unified and harmonious. This is the effect, we surmise, not only of a longstanding departmental ethos of tolerance but also of several generations of energetic departmental leaders and of the strong, careful, even visionary hiring during the last cycle. Due to recent budget cuts and the fact that GSU is not Georgia’s official flagship university, university and departmental resources are lower than anyone likes. Yet the department works together to maximize its resources, and its mutual supportiveness helps maintain a remarkably good morale.
Good hiring has helped to enhance departmental culture on several levels. Of late, at least, all hiring (and graduate admissions) committees have included representatives from all branches of the department. This joint participation in decision-making has helped to build a sense of shared mission and intellectual consensus in the department. But so has the particular hiring strategy undertaken to staff the expanded Rhetoric/Composition Program and the much smaller (2-person) Secondary Education Program. In both cases, those hired—and thus also the programs they are creating—unite theory and practice in interesting and unexpected ways.
The two recent hires in Secondary Ed are thus PhDs whose research interests are in areas of contemporary literature the department has done well to strengthen (Southern literature in one case, postcolonial literature in the other); they also have significant practical experience as high school teachers. They seem to have a deep commitment to training future teachers—but their more specialized literary-historical research and teaching helps give breadth and depth to the literature program as well. Likewise, most or all of the Rhet/Comp faculty are pursuing research that is historical, analytic, and theoretical, yet they are also committed to the practical instruction of writing, and have worked together to establish or strengthen a range of strong and innovative programs meant to support student-writers.
At other universities, the leadership of composition or secondary ed programs is often left to literary scholars who would far rather have secured positions in literary studies—or conversely, to "ed school" pedagogues without much sense of literary or historical scholarship. Georgia State, in contrast, has succeeded in hiring young faculty who are genuinely excited about the chance to shape new practical initiatives and build up programs and institutions like the Writing Studio—but who also can participate fully in the broader intellectual life of the department.
From all we could observe, the department does an excellent job welcoming and mentoring its younger faculty. Junior faculty talked very enthusiastically about their role in departmental culture; some spoke appreciatively of the reduced teaching for beginning professors, others of how lucky they felt, in general, compared to former classmates at other institutions. The junior faculty clearly appreciate the department’s manifest commitment to them: they are told from the outset that they are being hired with the expectation of tenure, assuming they continue to do good research, teaching and service (indeed there seems no recent history of contentious tenure cases in the department). In return, they seem eager to help the department build new programs and carry out new initiatives.
In our various social interactions with the faculty, finally, we were struck repeatedly at how pleased they seemed to have the chance to spend time with each other, as well as with us. If the university’s “commuter” nature extends partly to the faculty (in the sense that they live in many parts of Atlanta and its suburbs), they appear to have genuine respect and affection for one another—and this helps to create an extremely good work climate in the department.
2. Faculty Positions and Curricular Structure
By all accounts, English is one of Georgia State’s most intellectually robust and vibrant humanities departments. Unsurprisingly, departmental courses attract significant numbers of majors and other interested students—and this very popularity puts real strain on the department, its faculty, and ultimately also its students. Numerous undergraduates talked of having to graduate one or more semesters late because they were unable to gain admission to the remaining courses in their majors. This is presumably a university-wide problem, but it may be especially acute in a large, multi-faceted major like English.
The obvious solution is to hire more faculty—and we strongly hope that over the next cycle the university will be able to fund all or most of the positions requested. We would encourage the department to continue the same broad hiring strategies which proved so successful during the last cycle but also to conceive of new appointments within a divisional as well as departmental context.
Indeed, the department’s own atmosphere of warm cooperation may have left some faculty or programs somewhat less motivated to seek out interlocutors and collaborators in other departments. We were particularly struck by the relative absence of ties between English and units like Communications, foreign languages/literatures, and area studies. It may not make sense for creative writing to hire its own specialist in nonfiction writing without first thinking carefully about its possible interface or overlap with existing journalism faculty. The English department rhetoricians would potentially gain from dialogue and collaboration with the rhetoricians in Communications (and any further appointments in political oratory would need to work carefully so as not to replicate what might already present in the other department). Likewise, the literature program’s plans to hire new faculty with interests in ethnic and comparative literatures should take careful account of possible synergy—or replicating overlap—with the foreign language and area studies programs.
A. The Literature Program
We strongly support the program's hope of new hiring in the fields of ethnic American, and post-colonial/global literature. This is very much the national direction of English studies—and both undergraduates and graduates were vocal in their demands for more courses in these areas. Undergraduates also complained of the relative absence of foreign literature courses taught in translation. Faculty too saw a need for new colleagues able to teach synthetic courses on transnational movements like modernism and transnational genres like the novel and poetry. Such courses are potentially important not only for those in the literature track but also to those in creative writing and in secondary education. Writers need to know as much as possible about the traditions of their genres in languages other than English; to train their own secondary students to be cosmopolitan world citizens, future teachers need to be able to offer their students a much wider selection of literary texts than they themselves were probably taught in school.
We strongly endorse the department's plan to hire one or more faculty with degrees in comparative literature. Since the job market in Comparative Literature is very poor--there being very few jobs explicitly soliciting comparatists, or even which encourage junior faculty to develop comparative courses-- the department should be able to attract excellent candidates. Comparatists are usually generalists, interested in a range of periods, genres and literatures, with considerable pedagogical flexibility and range. (Their vision of the global, transnational and diasporic will likely be of real importance to the department in developing its own priorities.
They should also be particularly helpful in rethinking the World Literature survey. Intended to contribute to the general education of majors and other interested students, it is a very large-enrollment (up to 700 students a year) whose design seems very ad hoc: a wide range of faculty teach the course, whatever combination of Western and non-Western texts they feel able to manage. The department envisions the course functioning quite differently in the future, as an introduction to issues of globalism, diaspora, and hybridity, and as a gateway to more specialized classes. A thorough redesign, and greater centralization of the course should help individual teachers begin introducing unfamiliar texts they might otherwise feel unable to handle—and at the same time reduce teachers’ tendency to fall back on universalizing generalizations about the texts under study. New hires able to add to the departmental knowledge base will be crucial to this redesign. But the department should also take advantage of ongoing national debates about world literature curricula—by organizing a departmental symposium, speaker series or readings-based colloquium on the subject.
Those redesigning the course should carefully about how to avoid too much presentism (it should continue to contain a significant number of pre-modern texts) and too much ethnocentrism (starting with the implicit notion that globalism and hybridity were always hallmarks of world literary experience). Arguably, it should also become more completely focused on non-Western literary forms (bringing in Western texts solely as points of comparison). Imaginative hiring should help a great deal. Young comparatists interested in the Spanish-speaking Americas, for instance, are increasingly well versed in the colonial period as well as present-day “ethnic” American literature.Likewise, the department’s excellent plan to begin its comparative and ethnic studies hiring with a junior specialist in Indian literature in English might mean an eventual hire able to help shore up the non-Western part of the World Literature curriculum (as well as the university’s area studies cluster).
Although the Department has already begun to review and reshape its curricular structure, the literature program still gives priority to comprehensive period coverage; faculty too still see themselves primarily as belonging to various period clusters. Over the next cycle, the department should continue to rethink its commitment to coverage and period identification in light (a) the movement of the discipline as a whole away from such strict categorization, (b) the department’s own stated and admirable plans for diversification of curriculum, (c) the Department’s ethos of synergy through diversification in other respects, and (last but by no means least) (d) expressed undergraduate student disaffection with attainment of coverage at the expense of depth. Perhaps some such disaffection also underlies the faculty’s expressed desire for a greater array of advanced course options. The coverage model also runs the risk of erecting artificial barriers between faculty—and indeed of circumscribing the potentially boundless curiosity of individual faculty members. Particularly given the department’s exemplary openness and porousness in other domains, it is important that the Americanists work closely with the British literature specialists, and that someone hired to teach the British 18th century, for instance, would remain free to develop teaching or research interests in American modernism or in postcolonial poetry without anyone feeling that an assigned post had thereby been deserted.
The department had previously considered trying to increase strength in “theory” (even changing the name of the literature program to underscore that emphasis). We would recommend, instead, that the department continue to encourage research and teaching that models applications of theory, while simultaneously trying to define and build on existing areas of methodological strength. We were struck, for instance, with the number of literature faculty from diverse bailiwicks doing significant work in textual editing, bibliography, and history-of-print-culture studies. Given this—and given the number of journals being edited in the department—it would make sense to think of the department as offering, among other things, a focus on textuality or book history studies; textuality itself could encompass theories of textual operations and readership as well as more empirically or materially based work.
The newly established Northumberland program offers another potential model for a more interdisciplinary approach to literary, cultural and historical study. As we understand it, that program involves alternate years of study in Britain and in Atlanta, unites a small, constant core of American and British students, conjoins courses or curricular units in history, literature and folklore, and asks students, over the long run, to integrate their study of Britain and their study of American literature and culture. This initiative is important, given a relative paucity of options for undergraduates to take relevant courses outside of their own major. (One undergraduate mentioned that she had hoped to take a course in English history, to get better context for her studies, but found she lacked the numerous history department prerequisites which would have enabled her to register for the course.) At the moment, the Northumberland program serves a small cohort of students—and its classes are not open to other majors. Yet it might be viewed as a pilot program, whose attempts to forge a more holistic or cross-disciplinary approach to culture (and to combine the study of British and American literature) might help catalyze a new range of departmental courses as well.