Skip to main content Skip to navigation
CAS in the Media Arts and Sciences Media Headlines

Doctoral Training Is Ossified. Can We Reinvent It?

Lessons from the short-lived Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. program.

Todd Butler.
Butler

In 2016, Todd Butler, an English professor at Washington State University, joined a committee charged with exploring changes in graduate education. At first, the group’s planning sessions felt typical: the slow consensus-building, the circling conversations. But then something shifted. “Two months into our planning process, the dean of the grad school said to all of us who were assembled there, ‘Are we just going to talk about doing something, or are we going to do it?’” Butler perked up: “I was not interested in writing another internal white paper that would get read, be appreciated, and stall out somewhere.” He saw the work as vitally important — an opportunity not just to improve graduate education but to articulate the importance of the humanities to a rural, land-grant university like Washington State.

Butler and his colleagues had received a grant from National Endowment for the Humanities under a new grant program called the Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. Begun in 2015, its mandate was broad, offering funds for graduate institutions to rethink doctoral education in the humanities. The goal was to focus on what the NEH delicately called “disparities between graduate-student expectations for a career in academe and eventual career outcomes,” and to further the role of the humanities in public life. Colleges could apply for either a planning grant, with the NEH matching an institutional commitment of up to $25,000, or an implementation grant of $350,000, to further efforts already under way. In 2016, the NEH awarded an initial round of grants: 25 planning grants and three implementation grants. Grantees planned to study a host of possible changes in doctoral education: practicum internships, curricular reform, professionalization, changes in academic advising and mentoring, and even new dissertation formats.

And then, in 2017, the program was quietly canceled. What went wrong?

Find out more

Chronicle of Higher Education

Transgender women found and created community in the 1980s internet

The internet has played an outsized and very visible role in the massive political and social gains of transgender people over the past two decades. But while it’s easy to point to modern-day social media and smartphones as instrumental tools for the trans community, trans people have actually been utilizing the internet to connect, learn, and organize since the 1980s.

Avery Dame-Griff.
Dame-Griff

Dr. Avery Dame-Griff, PhD, is a lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies and assistant professor of Digital Technology and Culture at Washington State University. He’s also the founder and primary curator of the Queer Digital History Project, an independent project tracking queer* digital culture from the 1980s to the 2010s. His forthcoming book focuses on the relationship between the “two revolutions” of the transgender political revolution and the computer revolution.

Dr. Dame-Griff’s research and archival work digs extensively into the earliest communities of trans people online: BBS or the “Bulletin Board System.” The BBS was a precursor to the modern world wide web and social media. Launched in the late 1970s by computer hobbyists, BBSs allowed users to dial a number through their modem and access an online, text-only “bulletin board” where users could post messages. By the mid-to-late 1980s, as the technology needed to access BBSs became more affordable and accessible, BBS groups focusing on niche interests — including transgender communities — were popping up across the US and, soon, the world.

These early online trans communities were secretive and ephemeral by necessity, Dr. Dame-Griff tells Avast. Trans women in the 1980s were likely to be presenting publicly as men, oftentimes with wives and families, and exposure could result in them losing everything — their jobs, their families, and even their lives. Some lived as “crossdressers,” allowing themselves to dress in women’s clothing at home (maybe with their spouses) but rarely, if ever, in public.

Find out more

Security Boulevard

WSU Fulbright awardees bound for Hungary to teach, research

Washington State University math major Annie Lu and alumna and staff member Amethyst Freibott have received Fulbright awards to research and teach, respectively, in Hungary, the Distinguished Scholarships Program said.

Amethyst Freibott.
Freibott
Annie Lu.
Lu

“Both Annie and Amethyst have detailed plans for their Fulbright experiences that start this fall, and they will be excellent ambassadors in Hungary for both WSU and the U.S.,” said April Seehafer, DSP director.

“I am flooded with gratitude to have Fulbright support me in this opportunity to do something I love so much,” said Freibott, who received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) award. She works from Boise as assistant director for the top scholars initiative in the Office of Admissions.

“I’m excited to receive the Fulbright U.S. Student award to study and research abroad,” said Lu. “It’s very rewarding to have years of hard work pay off in this way. I’m lucky to get this opportunity and have a platform to show my work and contribute more.” Lu conducts research into computational mathematical biology with mentor Nikos Voulgarakis.

Find out more

WSU Insider

George Nethercutt joins Foley Institute Advisory Board, establishes lecture series at WSU

A one-time political foe of the late Tom Foley is helping enhance efforts to promote their shared commitment to public service and productive discourse.

Former U.S. Congressman George R. Nethercutt Jr., a Spokane Republican who in 1994 famously defeated Foley, a Democrat and speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has joined the advisory board of Washington State University’s non-partisan Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service.

“Since 2008, my foundation has promoted civic education among students, so they are prepared to engage with our democratic system—a system that depends on the participation of informed citizens, open dialogue, and compromise to function properly.” said Nethercutt, a Spokane native who graduated with a degree in English from WSU in 1967.

Find out more

WSU Insider
The Spokesman-Review

Science journalist Michelle Nijhuis to give V.N. Bhatia Lecture March 30

Award-winning author, science journalist, and reporter Michelle Nijhuis will discuss her 2021 book on conservation of endangered species at a 6 p.m. event Wednesday, March 30, in the Honors Hall Lounge at Washington State University. The free, public event is co-hosted by the WSU Honors College with the support of the Department of English and its Visiting Writers Series (VWS).

“We’re pleased that the author is coming to WSU Pullman to meet students, visit classes, and engage in conversations with the community,” said Peter Chilson, English professor and VWS supporter. “Throughout her career she has blended science with writing, and we look forward to hearing firsthand her insights into building that kind of career.”

The VWS is part of the WSU Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences. For 40 years the series has brought hundreds of noted poets and writers of fiction and nonfiction to campus for creative readings, class visits, workshops, and collaborative exchanges across intellectual and artistic disciplines.

Find out more

WSU Insider