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In this episode, I sit down with two of my former Ph.D. students, Adam Schuster and Elaine Cannell, both now full-fledged doctors and professors of English. I ask them what it’s been like to inaugurate their careers during this extraordinarily challenging time for higher education broadly and the humanities in particular. Adam and Elaine spent the better part of a decade learning how to conduct research, teach undergraduates, and write publishable scholarship in literature and cultural studies here at UW Madison. They were also among the kindest, most intellectually generous, joyful, and loving members of our community; as the first two of my students to get their Ph.D. under my mentorship, they hold a very cherished place in my heart. Today, Adam and Elaine are both beloved and respected professors at their universities, Cal State University, Bakersfield for Adam and Saint Mary’s College for Elaine. Despite the bleak conditions of university humanities education, the two have found themselves surrounded by students from every class background, geographical origin, and age, eager to gain the variety of human capacities and professional skills that come with learning how to study literature and popular culture, explore histories of Black and feminist activism, and harness the power of the arts to transform public life for the better. Neither starry eyed and idealistic about the profession, nor cynical and hopeless, Adam and Elaine model a clear-eyed, pragmatic view of today’s intellectual scene. In this episode, they remind listeners that: 1) young people still need community, mentorship, and direction to achieve their goals; 2) despite all the pomp and circumstance about declining literacy rates, Americans still love reading, watching movies, consuming YouTube videos, and playing video games, all of which require some ability to interpret or make meaning of the cultural products we cherish; and perhaps most importantly, 3) sitting in a classroom with thirty to three-hundred and fifty student students at a time during a mass loneliness epidemic is a nourishing and life sustaining practice.
