Heather Steffen
American Federation of Teachers, Faculty First Responders / Higher Ed, Consultant (FFR Asst. Director)
Heather Steffen is an adjunct professor and core faculty member in the MA Program in Engaged and Public Humanities at Georgetown University, where she teaches Introduction to the Public Humanities and the program’s public writing course. In spring 2023, Steffen co-founded the online, student-led journal, Interspaces (interspaces.georgetown.domains), in collaboration with the program’s second cohort of students, and she serves as the journal’s advisory editor.
Steffen also works with Faculty First Responders, a partner organization of the American Federation of Teachers. FFR (facultyfirstresponders.com) monitors the right-wing media ecosystem to track targeted harassment of higher education workers, to defend workers’ academic freedom and free speech rights, and to support workers targeted by the right-wing media. As FFR’s Assistant Director, Steffen is collaborating with AFT to develop webinars, resource guides, and model contract and handbook language to equip unions, AAUP chapters, professional organizations, and individual workers to protecting themselves before an instance of targeted harassment and to respond if an incident occurs.
Trained in literary and cultural studies, Steffen’s areas of specialization are the history of the university, intellectual history, and the novel in the long-twentieth century United States. Her current research project focuses on how workers in U.S. higher education have imagined their labor and its meanings, goals, values, and conditions since the late-19th century. Steffen’s writing on academic labor has appeared in New Literary History, Cultural Logic, Works & Days, Academe, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her other ongoing projects and collaborations include an analysis of critical, abolitionist, and decolonial approaches to university studies; encyclopedia entries on critical university studies and adjunct faculty members; and an international conference on academic freedom law, policy, and theory.
Steffen’s teaching areas include first-year writing, public writing, U.S. literature, the history of higher education, and the engaged and public humanities. She has worked as a graduate instructor at Carnegie Mellon University, a full-time lecturer in the UC Santa Barbara Writing Program, a postdoctoral researcher for the UCSB Chicano Studies Institute and Department of English, and a postdoctoral fellow of the Rutgers University Center for Cultural Analysis.
Steffen also works with Faculty First Responders, a partner organization of the American Federation of Teachers. FFR (facultyfirstresponders.com) monitors the right-wing media ecosystem to track targeted harassment of higher education workers, to defend workers’ academic freedom and free speech rights, and to support workers targeted by the right-wing media. As FFR’s Assistant Director, Steffen is collaborating with AFT to develop webinars, resource guides, and model contract and handbook language to equip unions, AAUP chapters, professional organizations, and individual workers to protecting themselves before an instance of targeted harassment and to respond if an incident occurs.
Trained in literary and cultural studies, Steffen’s areas of specialization are the history of the university, intellectual history, and the novel in the long-twentieth century United States. Her current research project focuses on how workers in U.S. higher education have imagined their labor and its meanings, goals, values, and conditions since the late-19th century. Steffen’s writing on academic labor has appeared in New Literary History, Cultural Logic, Works & Days, Academe, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her other ongoing projects and collaborations include an analysis of critical, abolitionist, and decolonial approaches to university studies; encyclopedia entries on critical university studies and adjunct faculty members; and an international conference on academic freedom law, policy, and theory.
Steffen’s teaching areas include first-year writing, public writing, U.S. literature, the history of higher education, and the engaged and public humanities. She has worked as a graduate instructor at Carnegie Mellon University, a full-time lecturer in the UC Santa Barbara Writing Program, a postdoctoral researcher for the UCSB Chicano Studies Institute and Department of English, and a postdoctoral fellow of the Rutgers University Center for Cultural Analysis.
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Publications by Heather Steffen
Presentations by Heather Steffen
At the same moment, American professors were increasingly adopting a professional identity, and they began to feel that they deserved a larger role in determining their working conditions, personnel decisions, and educational matters. As W. H. Cowley has shown, a sustained faculty insurgency and critique of governance emerged in the early-twentieth century and reached its apex between 1913 and 1920. My analysis of this critique asks: What rhetorical strategies did faculty governance critics employ? How did the values of professionalism, science, and progressivism circulating at the time help or hinder critics’ attempts to democratize university governance? How did democratic values become so entrenched in faculty thinking that they remain central to it a century later? I use James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944) as a case study to answer these questions. Cattell was a leader in this struggle, but his criticism mostly condensed and amplified claims that were also put forward by his fellow professor-critics.
In this paper, I will argue that Cattell’s work reveals two important elements of the genealogy of thought about governance in the U.S.: First, it demonstrates that democratic control is not inherent in the university’s form or history. Instead, critics like Cattell had to craft a “democratic narrative” of university history that cemented the image of a lost “free republic of scholars” within the academic imaginary. Second, Cattell’s work broadens our understanding of the sources of our commitment to shared governance. In Cattell’s oeuvre, the German model plays second fiddle to a much stronger influence: science. Cattell’s conception of science as the precondition of democracy was at the heart of his campaign against autocratic governance, and, through his writing and many professional activities, values from the scientific community migrated into and become foundational to American thinking about academic governance.
All this might seem to hold only antiquarian interest. But in our troubled era—when the contingent faculty majority lacks a voice in governance, when administrators assume control of educational matters, and when it is crucial for faculty to seek a greater role in university financial discussions—we must mobilize all our resources to protect and expand shared governance procedures, and the experience of past academic reformers and critics is a resource that has much to teach us.
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Because significant numbers of graduate students perform service labor and because it has not yet been quantified, analyzed, or included in most contracts, the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession feels that now—when all academic workers are experiencing increased speedup as higher education budgets are slashed at every level—it is more important than ever to understand the full extent of the contributions grad students make to their universities and their profession and to take a hard look at how to make sure that their labor is equitably compensated and recognized for its importance and, often, excellence.
Prior scholarship on service labor performed by people of any academic rank has been scant. Michelle Massé and Katie J. Hogan’s 2010 edited collection, Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces (SUNY P), is the first extended analysis of service work. The collection focuses on how service labor is disproportionately performed by women and minority faculty members. Because the scope of their project included only professors, the aim of this roundtable is to build on and extend the analysis of this kind of academic work.
To meet this goal, the presenters on this roundtable will consider questions similar to those Massé and Hogan posed to the contributors of Over Ten Million Served: What types of service have you performed while in graduate school? Can you safely say “no” when a service opportunity is offered to you? How is graduate student service recognized and/or compensated at your university or in your professional organizations? Have you ever served as an administrator at your university, and what challenges have you faced as a graduate student in that position? What advice have you received about how service work counts or doesn’t on the job market? What advice have you received about how to balance your service with your teaching, research, and program requirements? How do your fellow graduate students discuss service work? Do you find patterns in who is asked most often to perform service work in your department, institution, or profession?
The presenters on this roundtable, all but one of whom are graduate students with extensive service records, will seek to look at both the benefits and disadvantages of serving departments, universities, and the profession while in school. They will narrate a range of service involvements at a variety of institutions and will reflect on how we might begin to critically examine the ways this often unpaid, unacknowledged labor shapes graduate student experiences, the university, and the profession.
Modern Language Association Annual Convention
Friday, January 10, 2014
3:30-4:45pm
Presiding: Heather Steffen, Carnegie Mellon U (session organizer and proposer)
1. Gregory Brennen, Duke U, “The Evolving Value of the Humanities Ph.D.: A Data-Based View of Graduate Students’ Perspectives on the Future of the Ph.D.”
2. Katie B. Angus, U of Southern Mississippi, "'Student' vs. 'Teacher': How 'Time to Completion' Influences the Professional Development of Foreign Language Graduate Students"
3. Magdalen Stanley Majors, Wake Forest U, “Graduate Student Engagement and Time to Degree: Collected Thoughts on a Manifesto”
Respondent: Leonard Cassuto, Fordham U, Lincoln Center
The goal of this session is to advance the discussion about humanities graduate education reform by bringing graduate students’ perspectives into the conversation. The plight of the twenty-first-century humanities has spurred intense debate about how doctoral education should adapt. With average time to degree over nine years, a labor system in which 73 percent of college teaching is performed by educators off the tenure track, and a tenure-track job market whose bottom has dropped out, graduate education now appears to be, as Michael Bérubé has put it, “a seamless garment of crisis.” Out of the mess, though, reformers are stepping up to the challenge to do more with less: how, they ask, can we prepare doctoral students for a much broader range of careers in much less time?
The CUNY Graduate Center, for instance, recently joined Stanford and the University of Colorado’s German program in announcing plans to restructure its arts and sciences programs around a 5-year timeline. At Stanford, past MLA President Russell Berman has collaborated on a streamlined Ph.D. program that combines year-round financial support with ranked lists of career plans submitted by second-year students to guide the remainder of their studies. The Stanford plan integrates aspects of reforms being piloted and tested elsewhere: The University of Minnesota and CUNY will offer students credit for research before they’ve taken exams, and exams will be geared directly to dissertation topics. At Michigan State and Stanford, students will receive summer support for concentrated research and writing or internships outside academe. David Damrosch’s comparative literature program at Harvard models improved dissertation advising with its requirement that a student’s full committee meet each time a chapter draft is submitted, and a number of institutions are exploring new dissertation formats. Humanities departments at CUNY, Michigan State, the University of Virginia, Stanford, and Emory offer the chance to create collaborative dissertations, dissertations with public humanities uses, digital resources, or suites of articles as capstone projects.
Beyond individual campuses, a reform movement is beginning to take shape as its major players come together in professional organizations, philanthropic foundations, and scholarly groups. The MLA is a leader in this movement. It has convened a Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature with Berman at its head to determine how to “review information on the current state of graduate education” and “identify graduate programs already exploring new approaches to doctoral education.” At the 2013 MLA Convention, the Task Force introduced their work with a panel on “Reforming Doctoral Study,” and a number of other panels addressed graduate education reform and the related area of preparation for alt-ac or non-academic careers.
Our panel seeks to continue and expand this discussion at the 2014 Convention. Doctoral education reformers are getting a lot right: reducing student debt, increasing diversity and access, and adequately preparing students for alternative careers are all critical steps. But a worrisome trend in the reform movement is the absence of graduate-student voices. This panel will begin to fill this gap by showcasing the work of three young scholars who will present quantitative and qualitative data on graduate students’ perspectives on doctoral education reform.
Speaking first, Gregory Brennen will describe his study of graduate students’ motivations for pursuing graduate study, their expectations and experiences of graduate school, and what they value about graduate education. Building on the recent national study of humanities graduate students in alternative careers conducted by Katina Rogers and the Scholarly Communications Institute, Brennen has launched an open, online survey of current Ph.D. students at http://humanitiesphd.org. His presentation will contribute substantive, data-based findings about English and modern languages students’ levels of support for the reform proposals described above and how they view the relationships between reducing coursework requirements, restructuring the dissertation, increasing summer funding, and reducing time to degree.
After Brennen’s overview of graduate-student stances on reform in general, Katie B. Angus’ presentation will focus in on foreign language students’ professional development as teachers. Drawing on her dissertation research, Angus will consider how the pressure to minimize time to completion impacts graduate students' views of teaching and their participation in professional development activities. How, she will ask, does the pressure to focus on their “student” role influence their “teacher” role? Using data from a nationwide questionnaire with foreign language TAs, language program directors, and foreign language faculty, as well as follow-up interviews, her study updates and expands upon existing research by Klaus Brandl and by Margaret Gonglewski and Ann Penningroth in an effort to inform and improve graduate student professional development.
In the third paper, Magdalen Stanley Majors will complement Brennen’s and Angus’ data by reporting graduate students’ responses to her own reform proposal, “How to Change Everything by Changing Nothing at All: A Minimalist Manifesto to Recreate Graduate Studies and Reclaim Higher Education.” Majors’ proposal argues that student engagement is the key to getting students into, through, and out of Ph.D. programs in a timely fashion. Furthermore, she argues that getting students into jobs is dependent upon an aggressive and programmatic model of student engagement. For Majors, engagement consists of the implementation of specific strategies (strengths assessment, goal setting, and accountability groups) to help students navigate the system and create intellectual capital as they develop concrete skills that are widely applicable both within and outside academia. Her proposal will be published on MLA Commons and other social networking sites in June, and her paper will describe responses from graduate students and other observers.
As respondent, Leonard Cassuto will open the discussion period with questions to the panelists and the audience, and we plan to limit each paper to 15 minutes in order to preserve at least 25 minutes for conversation. Overall, this panel will not only contribute to the pool of ideas about reforming doctoral study, it should also provide a space for Convention participants to think together about reforms that will affect both the next generation of students and the future shape of the profession.