Administrators should save the linguistics graduate program

By Bazile Lanneau     10/28/13 7:00pm

High-level administrators at Rice University are uttering half-truths to graduate students so that they stop asking questions about the alleged review of the linguistics doctoral program. Having gone more than six months with no official communication regarding the review, I and four other graduate students in linguistics met with Provost George McLendon, Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Paula Sanders, and Dean of Humanities Nicolas Shumway. The meeting, which occurred Oct. 22, was for us a simple fact-finding mission. What we found instead was a misrepresentation of facts clearly designed to portray our faculty as second-string and our program as underperforming.

First, McLendon told us our faculty really does not have much respect within the field of linguistics. If the provost is familiar with our program, he should be aware of the caliber of linguists who regularly recommend Rice's graduate program to their students. I, for example, came to Rice under the recommendation of Bernard Comrie, the director of the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. If an endorsement of Rice linguistics by the Max Planck Institute is not evidence of respect, I do not know what is.

This disconnect between expert opinion and the provost's construal of reality is a familiar theme. After all, it was the provost and the deans who flouted the opinion of experts by going against the core recommendation of the external review, which states in bold font, "Our primary recommendation is to retain the [graduate] program." It cannot be stressed enough that this report was written by leaders in the field of linguistics.

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The administrators smeared our faculty further, claiming that the five of our six faculty members who are not full professors must not have been promoted because they are doing poor work. Shumway in particular used the spooky number tactic often employed by politicians, stating that "84 percent" of our faculty members are not full professors. However, one of those faculty members has not been here long enough to be considered for tenure, much less full professorship. Two other faculty members have been at the associate level for well under nine years, and it is not until at least nine years at the associate level that most professors are considered for promotion to full. As for the remaining two professors, the external reviewers had recommended that both be put up for promotion to full professors based on their satisfaction of the promotion requirements described by McLendon. Shumway's reference to "84 percent" was at best disingenuous, as was the administrators' reasoning, which is belied by the fact that Sanders herself spent 16 years at the associate level from 1992 to 2008 before rising to the rank of full professor.

Later in the meeting, in an effort to convince us that our placement rate is not as good as we think it is, Sanders claimed our doctoral graduates have a job placement rate of "40 percent." As the Rice Thresher has already reported, "Of the 31 students [who have received doctorates in linguistics since 2000] for whom information is currently available, 22 are professionals within the field of linguistics." The "for whom information is currently available" portion is a polite reference to the fact that two of the people who have earned doctorates since 2000 are sadly deceased. This means that 70 percent of doctoral graduates since 2000 work in linguistics. Sanders' misrepresentation of the success our graduates have in obtaining jobs within the field seems designed to weaken our willingness to ask tough questions.

McLendon, Sanders and Shumway are ostensibly "reviewing" the doctoral program in linguistics. In the meeting, they claimed they have not decided what they will recommend for its future. If that is the case, then why did they so aggressively try to persuade us that our program is not up to snuff? Why would highly educated people rely on such shaky reasoning? They have clearly made up their minds about what they will recommend and have spent the last six months looking for data to fit their argument, rather than doing their jobs in good faith.

Let's all demand that Rice administrators, instead of maligning our faculty members, follow the external reviewers' recommendations to maintain and strengthen the linguistics graduate program.

Bazile Lanneau is a doctoral student in linguistics.

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