English 6th Year Funding Letter
We, the graduate students of the Northwestern English department, urge the University to reevaluate its campus-wide practices regarding sixth-year funding for graduate workers.
We are fortunate to be in a department willing to acknowledge that it regularly takes students longer than five years to successfully complete and defend their dissertations. As a result, we are assured that sixth-year funding is generally available, but this guarantee is informal and remains absent from official department policies. Furthermore, the recent university-wide budget crisis has stoked concerns about the continued availability of these sources of funding.
Given the English department’s timeline for graduate student workers, finishing a dissertation in five years is unrealistic, if not impossible. Our first two years are devoted to coursework and teaching, and we do not begin dissertation work in earnest until year four. According to the department handbook, a student is considered on track if they complete a draft of their first chapter by the end of their fourth year. In order to be considered a viable candidate on the academic job market, English students are additionally expected to have an established publishing record and evidence of professionalization in the form of conference presentations and teaching experience. Completing the remaining portion of the dissertation within the fifth year while meeting these job market expectations is simply not feasible for student workers in our department.
Moreover, current sources of funding — internal fellowships, including but not limited to the Presidential and Franke Fellowships — have recently limited the terms of eligibility in such a way as to inadvertently exclude English students who, given the structure of our program, are not in a position to apply during their third year.
This situation is particularly concerning for those of us who are international students at Northwestern. Our visas often stipulate that we cannot work off campus. This reality, and the uncertainty about funding after the fifth year, creates pressure to spend critical time in our fourth year applying for external fellowships to ensure that we are not forced out of the country by economic hardship. Leaving the US. and losing the resources and support of our department and advisors would have a profoundly detrimental effect on our chances of finishing, and of succeeding on the job market. The added stress of a potential lack of sixth year funding — in labor, emotional stress, and moving or visa costs — experienced by international students exacerbates an already difficult contingency on the work force and in immigration status.
We, the members of the English Department, call on Northwestern University’s administration to guarantee six full years of funding to all graduate student workers.