In Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education (2011), James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar lament what they call the “drift towards vocationalism”(14) currently underway in Canadian universities. Although Côté and Allahar focus on undergraduate education, the distinction they draw between the training that characterizes preparation for postuniversity vocations and the education that fosters critical thought is useful for understanding the process underway at the graduate level as well. While “training is more given to specialization and the acquisition of a narrow range of skills and information associated with a discrete or specific task,” they suggest, the concept of “education is more general and envisages as an end product a more cultured, open-mined, and civic-minded citizenry”(14). sshrc’s newly minted Talent program is only one example, of course, but its stated aims of “promot [ing] the acquisition of research skills, and assist [ing] in the training of highly qualified personnel”(emphasis added) is indicative of a larger shift in the humanities away from graduate student education and toward graduate student training. 1 My own introduction to the changing climate of the humanities came as a result of my fortuitous involvement with Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli’s “Culture of Research” colloquium, which I attended in the first semester of my PhD in 2006. Let me confess here that I was utterly and unredeemably lost throughout the weekend, although I’m sure this was abundantly clear to all who were around that table. My sense is that the vast majority of those currently entering graduate studies in Canada would be as bewildered as I was at such an event and, as such, are woefully unprepared to respond to the various ways in which their position in the university is shifting. As Jessica Schagerl points out, for students lacking a systematic introduction to the relevant networks of organizations and contexts of humanities scholarship in Canada, any debate surrounding their form or function quickly dissolves into “the equivalent of ‘blah blah blah blah, funding, blah blah blah blah, research’”(98). Schagerl turns to a re-investment in mentorship as a means to offer graduate students such

1 The vast majority of students in the humanities will ultimately work outside the academy, of course, but realigning graduate studies so that their economic value to private industry becomes the primary outcome is fatally misguided. If, as sshrc argues, the “skills” enabled by the humanities are to include the “intellectual assets of independent thinking [and] creative enquiry”(Framing 9), it should be obvious that any attempt to foster the humanities while funneling them into predetermined ends is, nearly by definition, bound to fail.