History, Activities, and Charge
History
The Executive Council established the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession (CSGSP) in 1998. The 1990s saw a worsening job market (after a few good years in the mid to late 1980s), and the MLA was working on many fronts to understand and alleviate the job crisis. Because graduate education was one of the council’s special concerns, the CSGSP was created to help the council and the MLA staff identify and address issues affecting graduate students in modern languages and literature and to address the role of graduate students in the association.
The committee is unique in that all its appointees are graduate students. Accordingly, the committee’s first objective was to increase communications with graduate student members and encourage their involvement in association activities. The CSGSP explored collaborative projects with other association committees and held convention sessions on a variety of topics of importance to graduate students (e.g., publication and professionalization, mentoring practices, teacher training, unionization). In recent years, the committee has engaged in publication projects that deal with best practices in a number of important areas (e.g., leadership and service, institutional policies affecting graduate students).
The council renewed the CSGSP in 2003, 2008, and 2013. When the committee was due for renewal in 2018, it asked the council to change its name and revise its charge. This request was prompted by the many challenges facing graduate student members and constituents of the MLA, whose fields of study extend beyond the boundaries of language and literature and who are finding fewer and fewer opportunities to transform their master’s and doctoral degrees into tenure-track teaching positions. The council renewed the committee with a new name, Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities (CSGSH), and a new charge (see below).
The CSGSH continues to collaborate with other MLA committees, with directors of graduate studies, and with MLA staff members to address issues of concern to graduate students, including compensation, the inclusion of graduate students of color, the role of the MA degree, alternative academic careers, and the meaning of professionalization for twenty-first-century students.
Activities
Each year at the MLA Annual Convention, the CSGSH provides a Graduate Student Lounge where students can relax and meet members of the committee.
The committee compiles a list of MLA convention sessions of interest to graduate students, posts the list on its Web page, and notifies MLA graduate student members by e-mail about convention activities of particular interest to graduate students.
The committee produces informative documents for graduate students, such as A Graduate Student Guide to the MLA Annual Convention.
Charge (revised Feb. 2018)
The Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities will consider a range of curricular, intellectual, and labor issues that affect master’s and doctoral students and workers in the humanities. The committee will advocate for the well-being of graduate students in all aspects of their educational and professional lives. To this end, the committee will organize convention sessions, evaluate policy, create reports on experiences and best practices, and engage in other projects that will support students while they pursue their educations, gain work experience, seek employment, and make a transition to a wide range of workplaces. The committee will also report on issues that concern graduate students to the Executive Council, the MLA staff, and other MLA committees whose work deals with activities that affect graduate students (e.g., the MLA Career Center).