Leonard Cassuto is mad as hell about the state of graduate study in the United States, and he’s not going to take it anymore. Or, all right, he’s passionately concerned, and he hopes that his new book, The Graduate School Mess, will inspire directors of American Ph.D. programs to stop and think about what is and isn’t working.

Hint: Treating the tenure-track market as if the very brief postwar hiring boom is the norm isn’t working. Privileging graduate students who aspire to become clones of their advisers isn’t working. Coursework that focuses too much on the professors’ hyperspecialized scholarly interests, and not enough on the breadth of knowledge that students need, isn’t working. And pleading ignorance about how to prepare students for a multitude of careers? That definitely isn’t working.

I recently spoke with Cassuto over email about the "mess" he so eloquently describes, about the long-entrenched contributors to it, and about how best to grab a broom and start cleaning. (Our conversation has been edited here for length and clarity.)

The book’s excellent history of graduate admissions points to one of the largest and most all-encompassing problems in doctoral programs today: They’re trapped in the 1950s, in more ways than one. (A few examples: the inherent conservatism that favors admission and cultivation of normative students, the elevation of the research professorship, etc.) What are some of the best ways out of the Eisenhower era?

Cassuto: There’s a phrase that I like called "holistic admissions." It means looking at the whole candidate, and then assessing that candidate in relation to his or her own goals, not the professor’s. Holistic admissions takes more time — for one thing, you can’t begin with the GRE score to see if it makes a cutoff. I tell a story in The Graduate School Mess of how I admitted a student without realizing that I was responding to the way I thought she resembled me. When she was about to finish, she told me that her career goal from the beginning had been to teach at a community college. I thought back to when I first read her folder and had to admit the uncomfortable truth that I might have been prejudiced against her if she had stated that goal when she was applying.

Your layout of a better way to structure graduate programs (e.g., coursework that works with students and not against them; comprehensives that work for them in addition to the other way around) sounds eerily familiar. My own program at the University of California at Irvine was restructured to do exactly this shortly after I came aboard. I was actually the first student to do the "new" comprehensives, which consisted of a portfolio of four "sample syllabi" for German language and literature courses. I used almost every single one of those sample syllabi (watered down for undergrads) in the four years I taught. And I loved the way my program was structured. And yet — very few of my colleagues have gotten ladder-level jobs since 2007 (that’s going on nine years), and most of us left the field after many years of heartbreak on the market. Now my program’s in danger of being closed down entirely.