Stephanie Kirk is Director of the Center for the Humanities and Professor of Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also holds affiliate appointments in Religious Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As director of the Center for the Humanities, she runs several programs and initiatives focusing on graduate education and career outcomes, undergraduate research, public humanities and research groups on Reproductive Justice and Environmental Humanities. In a conversation with Digital Public Fellow Charlotte Lindemann, Professor Kirk discusses her multiple projects that support humanities students pursuing careers beyond academia and how humanities centers across the globe are collaborating in this effort. 

CHARLOTTE LINDEMANN: I’d love to start with the story of how you came to be involved in higher education reform. What inspired you to go down this path?

STEPHANIE KIRK: I’ve been at Washington University in St. Louis for 21 years. I’m a professor of Hispanic studies and women and gender studies, and I joined the Center for the Humanities as director two years ago. One of the reasons why I wanted to join the center was to think about how to enhance support for graduate students. I’ve had a number of graduate students over my career. I’m still close with most of them. In fact, I just got off a zoom with two of my old students, because we still do projects together. Those relationships are some of the most important relationships that I’ve had as an academic.

I took some time off between undergrad and graduate school, about seven years. I’m a first-generation college student and was in the UK where funding for graduate studies worked differently and I wasn’t in a good place economically to go to grad school. So, I began my PhD a bit later than some, and so I think I tackled it better than I would have if I’d been straight out of undergrad. Graduate school is tough and isolating and there are a lot of statistics that speak to the mental health challenges students can face. This, of course, has been exacerbated by these two pivotal moments, the 2008 financial crisis and then the pandemic. I want to find better ways of supporting students that go beyond my own graduate students. I think my generation needs to help support your generation because the ground has shifted so radically that all the things we took for granted before are not there.

There are some people doing some fantastic work at my university supporting graduate students outside of the Center for the Humanities. But I do think there is a resistance on some people’s part to understanding the shifting landscape, and recognizing that not everybody, no matter how brilliant or accomplished, is going to get a tenure track job at an R1 university. And that doesn’t mean they’ve failed, but just that things we take for granted are no longer there. We need to support students as they look for academic jobs or non-academic jobs, and those choices need to be theirs. I remember a colleague telling me, well, it’s not right that they come in saying they don’t want an academic job, that they definitely want to go into a non-academic field or an academic adjacent field. But I wonder why that’s not okay? Why do they have to want an academic job? I want to support both outcomes. I’m really interested in trying to give power to students to enable them to help themselves. Because as faculty we don’t always know best. We don’t.

That’s what interested me in taking over the position of director of the center. And it’s been a learning experience about what graduate students need and what graduate students want. I am very lucky to have two assistant directors, one for student engagement who works with graduate students and undergraduates, and one who does research and public engagement, and she also works with graduate students. These are two young women, both of whom have humanities PhDs, and both of whom knew that they did not want to be a faculty member but wanted to keep working in something mission driven. They are amazing because they know better than I do what graduate students want. They’re a fantastic resource for me to bridge the gap between my experience as a graduate student in the late 1990s and early 2000s and students today.

I know you work with both graduate students and undergraduates at the Center for the Humanities. I’m curious how this work is similar or different across those two demographics. Maybe let’s start with the two projects you have going right now at the center, Redefining Doctoral Education and Humanities at Work. What are their goals and how are they related?

Redefining Doctoral Education is a Mellon-funded grant. It started in 2018 and was secured by my predecessor, Jean Allman. It was around $1.5 million, which is a lot for a humanities grant. The project is designed to rethink humanities graduate training through next-gen pedagogy and alternative career preparation, with a strong focus on transdisciplinary and community engaged research, collaborative projects and public humanities. The centerpiece is the Studio Lab classes. The life of the grant has three. Two of them have already wrapped up and we have one more coming. They’re team-taught classes and offer a post-doc to a WashU graduate student and last a year, which allows for a sustained focus on a theme or problem. They’re very well resourced. The question with a project like this is, and perhaps one that is relevant for all who have been fortunate to receive major grants for graduate education development, how do we take something that’s had a $60,000 budget or more and run those Studio Lab classes again, without the same budget? How can we retain the values of community engaged research and diverse skill development?

A good example is our most recent Studio Lab (funded by our Provost rather than Mellon) on the topic of race and reproductive justice. The class was led by a professor in African American studies and Anthropology and a lawyer who works on reproductive justice cases in St. Louis. The students had the opportunity to speak to and collaborate with different community groups working on reproductive justice in Missouri’s challenging political climate and work on projects that enhanced the group’s work while providing learning opportunities for students. The students also participated in lobbying work at the Missouri state capitol.

While the Studio Labs are the centerpiece of the Redefining Graduate Education grant, other smaller funding packages were awarded to faculty to develop training in new areas (translation, law, digital humanities) that would then allow them to enhance their teaching and help students develop new skills. When I became director, I felt this funding model needed a reset. It felt very piecemeal, very individual and perhaps not sustainable. So, we flipped it. Now all the workshops that we had for faculty are now exclusively for students and the faculty grants we award are for departments to develop more transformative and widescale projects, such as a Philosophy of Emerging Technologies PhD Minor and our Comparative Literature Department’s hybrid dissertation project.

Our new student focused Mellon-funded workshops have included topics such as community engagement where students worked with Davarian Baldwin from Trinity College and St. Louis-based community organizations on how to collaborate with community partners in an ethical and responsible way. Another workshop was entitled “Writing as Advocacy.” We brought a group of women, some of whom are academics, some of whom are using their PhDs in non-academic, community engaged spaces. One of the women was working on carceral education, for instance. We had them work with our students about how to advocate for yourself through writing, how to advocate for the communities that you want to through writing. It was an amazing two-day workshop. And I think our graduate students really felt empowered after that with new skills and new ways of thinking about writing. So that’s what we’re doing now, we’re focusing very much on students. One of the statistics I recently read that really struck me is that apparently 89% of humanities grads don’t know how to articulate the skills they possess. This was one of the ideas behind Writing as Advocacy, how to give students the frameworks for talking about their own skills. Giving students the tools to be able to articulate their own value is so important when applying for different jobs, within or outside of academia.

Personally, I’m not terribly interested in “upskilling,” in a business sense. That is, the idea of students acquiring micro-credentials workshops that will allow them to work in business. It feels very neoliberal. Of course, some students may want that but I do not believe that’s the role of a humanities center and, in my experience, that’s not what many students want. I don’t think you do a PhD in the humanities because you want a job in a hedge fund. You’re smart enough, and if that’s what you want, great, but I don’t think most students enter their program with that goal. So, we’re trying to enable them to develop skills that are transferable beyond the academy, but still connected to the core values of research, storytelling, advocacy, and global and local understanding.

That seems so important. So, thinking in terms of the big picture, what would success for these programs look like for you, if it’s not exactly the traditional academic job, but it’s also not placing PhD students at hedge funds, for instance?

I think the kind of work that our students can do, that all graduate students can do, is the kind of work that takes place in social justice organizations, values-based community organizations that work with the different populations that their research has allowed them to understand. Maybe that’s not the place where you’re going to make tons of money. But, for most of my students, that’s actually not their priority. You don’t pursue a PhD in the humanities because you want to be a multi-millionaire. Sure, we all need to live. We all need to feed ourselves and our family members. And if someone wants to use these skills to go into business, I’m supporting them 100%. But I don’t get the sense from most students that that’s what they want to do.

Right. You’re already working with a self-selecting demographic, so that’s information you might as well use.

Yes, 100%. Although, of course, graduate students are not a monolith. But most of the graduate students in the humanities that I encounter have a particular view of the world, with different nuances, but generally, I find that they’re really interested in values-based work both global and local. That’s who I’m encountering. Maybe there’s a whole set of humanities grads out there that have a different way of thinking but they’re not registering for our programs and workshops.

I want to make sure that the graduate students that we support at the center are given as many opportunities as possible to develop skills and to articulate those skills. We have a lot of graduate students who are embedded in the center who work on projects with our two assistant directors. We’re thinking about trying to get a graduate student to work with our communications person, which could help them develop a different set of writing skills. We try to think about what we can do in the center itself, and what we can do through outside grants, like our recently awarded NEH grant, “Humanities at Work: Graduate Internships for the Next Generation,” which is much smaller than the Mellon but will still be impactful.

Laura Perry, our assistant director for public engagement, has built great relationships with regional community partners, and the idea was to be able to give graduate students internship experiences with those organizations. The grant money goes towards paying them and the community partners. The graduate interns will also help organize a career fair that will feature different types of organizations and then a big Midwestern conference that will convene programs and individuals engaged or interested in this work to see how we might build some sustainable structures to facilitate it. St. Louis is an interesting place to do this. There’s a painful history of structural inequity in the city. There are, however, groups of people doing really great work to engage with the region’s challenges as well as enhance its cultural offerings. It’s a great learning experience for our students who want to be in space that corresponds to their mission driven ideals, but also to learn practical skills that they can then articulate both inside and outside of the academy.

And how do undergrads fit into the picture?

Interestingly, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has decided to really push the undergraduate engagement piece, which they had never done before. They were always focused on graduate students. Now they’re thinking about pipelines and job outcomes for undergraduates, which is fantastic. Paula Krebs is a visionary leader. From the perspective of the Center for the Humanities, my interest in undergrads right now is on creating and enhancing transdisciplinary opportunities for undergrad research outside of their majors and departments.

How do we stop the humanities from becoming a major only for the elite? I’m a first-generation college student, and I did a humanities degree, but then my dad was like, get a job in marketing. And a lot of students now have similar experiences in feeling they have to select majors that have a more overtly practical application. So how do we provide meaningful humanities research opportunities to all who might be interested? I think about this in two ways. One is to think about what are some humanities research experiences that can we give to undergrads who may not be humanities majors or to students who want to research something beyond their major. We’ve been piloting these small humanities research stipends for undergrads. We did one on banned books last year, another very urgent topic in Missouri. They worked with our assistant director for student engagement, Meredith Kelling, and did these independent research projects. And then they did informal presentations to other students at the end of the semester.  

Next year, our focus will be on the Environmental Humanities and we’re partnering with Environmental Studies at WashU. The model will be similar and we hope it will be sustainable. The point is twofold: one, to hopefully reach students, and two, to give them concrete research experience. A lot of the humanities students I meet don’t feel like they’ve had the same research opportunities that you get in STEM subjects. Everyone in biology gets research funding. So, the question was, how do we make something in the humanities that’s tangible for undergrads? Research is the thing that they seem to really be interested in. How do we do research? How do we do it outside of the classroom?

Because that’s a legible skill on their resume when they’re applying for jobs?

Yeah, I think so. Defined research skills are an important draw for employers. But I’m also thinking about undergraduate research in the humanities as a goal in itself, because students really are hungry for it. There are tons of science labs at WashU where students get real research experience, but there are far fewer opportunities like that in the humanities. I teach a two-year undergraduate research seminar, and it’s very competitive. There’s a cohort of seven juniors and then seven seniors, and they spend two years working on a research project, on an article, an academic or public facing article. And every year we get so many great applications. But we can only take seven because of funding. It made me think, what other smaller things could we build out along these lines that would reach a wider swathe of the students.

We’re trying to think about doing some kind of partnership with WashU’s Taylor Center for Student Success. This is a wonderful entity that supports many first-gen and low-income students. I’ve learned a lot from some of the students. One student in particular told me that some members of his cohort were nervous about humanities research. Students are not always sure what it entails, and they don’t think it’s for them. I’d love to build out a program that offers more opportunities; there’s plenty more to think about here. And I know other people are doing great work in this area across the country, I’d love to be able to organize or participate in a national convening to generate ideas and learn from others.

I’ve only experienced this from the graduate student side of things, but I wonder if you have any position on the question of recruiting students to the humanities when there likely won’t be jobs for them there when they graduate. There’s a lot of talk about graduate admissions in humanities programs as an ethical dilemma. Have you encountered this debate in your own work, either with graduate students or undergraduates?

I feel a little bit less conflicted about undergrads because most of the data shows that earning outcomes are very similar across disciplines. I’m speaking very broadly, but there’s a lot of research that’s appeared in the higher ed press that substantiates this. Maybe not if you’re doing robotics, or computer science but if you’re doing Econ versus Psych or French. A lot of my students go to law school. So, the ethical piece worries me less there.

The graduate student piece around admissions is a difficult one. I think that we need to trust students to make decisions for themselves. A colleague once told undergrad students considering graduate school in the humanities that they should go to graduate school if they so wished but do so with their eyes open. Enjoying the six or so years of funding and health insurance to read and exchange ideas but realize that the pipeline to an academic job is quite broken and that jobs like hers and mine are not now available the way they used to be. But I feel that we have to be honest with our students. In my home department of Romance Languages, we’ve seen a variety of outcomes in recent years. Occasionally students will get tenure track jobs, but many more get postdocs and visiting positions. More students are entering the program with less interest in the academic market. A student just secured a fantastic position in museum education, more often reserved for PhDs in Art History. She really made it happen for herself, seeking out opportunities both within our university and at other cultural institutions in the city. I’d love for us to be able to offer more robust support for a student like this alongside the academic training we offer. I also think class size is important; I don’t think we should necessarily have huge classes, but we need a big enough of cohort to provide that community experience, which is incredibly important. You need a group of people around you as a graduate student.

I support the students that definitely want academic jobs by being realistic with them, helping them make their materials the best they can be, helping them navigate that process, and at the same time trying to build out opportunities that will help students articulate their skills and have different experiences that are then legible to people outside the academy. I feel less conflicted about admitting people than I do about what happens when they’re here. I think we need to find ways to give students more autonomy to chart their own paths with resources we make available and better pathways for training beyond the traditional model. There are faculty doing outstanding and innovative pedagogical and advising work, but the all-powerful adviser model is not healthy and should be rethought. I feel so strongly about empowering students to do this work for themselves. Graduate students must be given autonomy to make decisions and we faculty need to help guide them. We need to really listen to students and listen to students about what they might want.

Are there other people doing this kind of work who you’re collaborating with or looking to outside of WashU?

100%. A lot of it is coming out of humanities centers. Every center has a distinct personality, and every director has their own suite of interests. There’s an organization called The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), headquartered at Berkeley. I was there in June for the annual meeting. It’s an interesting conference in the sense that it has a lot of really amazing practical sessions on how to run a center, what are the best practices, and there’s a lot of workshopping and people exchanging ideas. But it also takes on some of the big ideas that the humanities addresses in more theoretical, research driven sessions. It’s a great opportunity to discuss with people what they’re doing with their graduate students, what they’re doing with their undergraduate students. Center and institute staff and faculty attend and there are many opportunities to sit and exchange ideas in a non-hierarchical space. I’ve really valued the conversations I’ve had with staff members from different centers. Humanities center staff are an invaluable resource because they’re on the ground, doing the work. So, yes, there are definitely other people doing this work to support students along with all the other things a humanities center does.

I love this idea of humanities centers from across different universes coming together and putting their heads together.

It’s a great way to exchange ideas. The MLA does fabulous programming too. I gave a talk in June at the MLA’s MAPS Leadership Institute at a plenary session entitled “Pathways to the Future: Sharing the Language of Values in Humanities Career Preparation” in which I addressed issues around the type of support we offer to grads in this area. I, of course, discussed our grant funded work, but I also talked about what we can take away from these grants that we can sustain ourselves, and what are some of the ideas that can be implemented differently, at a lower cost. I’m at a wealthy institution, but a lot of the money doesn’t come to the humanities. People can have this misconception when they look at WashU or Stanford, what could we possibly need? But it’s the humanities; we still face budgetary constraints. So, we spend a lot of time writing grants. I’m lucky to have staff support for grant writing. That’s, again, a point of privilege. And, of course, we are funded much more generously than some of the colleagues I meet at CHCI. I met a director this year who was just fantastic. And I told her, you’ve done so many great things, how big is your staff? And she said, it’s just me, and some shared staff. The ecosystem is not created equally, and I do feel very lucky. But still, we have to think about how we can take some of these grant funded ideas and then make them sustainable without the massive amount of money that’s attached to them.

Right, because we don’t want these efforts to be grant funded forever.

And it’s just not available to a lot of people because they don’t have the infrastructure or the time to write grants. We have to think about how this works across the board.

Have you encountered any pushback from the university or from different departments on this kind of work?

I’m lucky that my dean is very supportive and although he’s not a humanist, he’s deeply interested in the humanities and understands its value. He really wants our center to be a space of connection and community for humanists where research excellence can flourish. Speaking more generally, one challenge I see for humanities centers is how to find alignment on public humanities and community engaged work with some faculty and administrators. While everyone supports faculty and graduate student research not everyone understands or sees the value in the community engaged public facing work that is part of the mission of a humanities center. One of the things we’ve done to help bring people along is to explain that a lot of grant money now is going towards public humanities and community engaged work. And most humanities centers are applying for many of this sort of grant. But we also have to keep helping students and faculty who want the more traditional research engaged support from a humanities center, and we do a lot of this with fellowships, funding opportunities, and research groups. It’s all about balance. 

Thanks go to Rachel Karas and Lauren Adams for their collaboration in the early stages of this piece.