Intermission

Brian at Crooked Timber paints a rather rosy-fingered picture of grad school, and John Emerson is having none of it.  Strong feelings on the matter, anyone?  Also of note: Mark Thwaite, of the peerless ReadySteadyBook interviews Andrew Merrifield, the author of a new book on Guy Debord; Scott McLemee confesses a fondness for French Roast, and David Lynch is still more or less daily proving weatherwen in LA obsolete.

Meanwhile, our own IT has posted the definitive blogpost on the recent philosophy conference at Birbeck, complete with sound recordings and, yes, pictures;   Doug Johnson responds to our symposium, and Darren at Long Pauses writes again about Beau Travail. I wonder if he's seen Tuvalu (like most Denis Lavant, a film positively slapstick sensual...surreal, bodily, and poignant).

Comments

[Craig]

The argument itself is kind of strange, "Sure, you miss some opportunites, but you get other ones". Same with enlisting to go to Iraq! Surprisingly, there is no mention of what it takes to (1) get into a top programme, (2) stay at the top in that top programme, (3) get a decent job. While the pay-off might be decent (a mostly acceptable, often unionized job), strict division of tasks (teaching, service, research) and the coveted course-release and sabbatical, that's only at the end of the line.

The author doesn't mention that you'll only people like yourself; which may or may not be a good thing, depending upon how much you can tolerate yourself. That all you'll do is read and write for four years. And I mean all. And that you'll soon find out your best friend was born in the same year as your father.

While I'm happy to be in grad school, it clearly isn't the place for everyone -- including roughly 80% of graduate students.

[Matt]

And that you'll soon find out your best friend was born in the same year as your father.

Well this sentence alone should be enough to dissuade me, as if that wasn't. Also second the recommend for John Emerson's various writings/quotations/resources on the matter (scroll down for the inevitable Zizek quotes).

[Matt]

(Just out of curiosity, Craig, "you'll only [what] people?")

[CR]

Grad school was the greatest time of my life. I didn't know it at the time, but it was. It helps a lot to be in NYC. Or some place like that. But there are times that I'd cut off my own arm to be back there, drinking at a bar in the West Village at 4 PM on a Tuesday with my grad school friends...

But I will admit that it very much retrospectively helps to know the outcome. I ended well enough. But the rest of my cohort (I went out a year early, sort of) is currently shitting themselves on an hourly basis, yes, because they're on the market.

Here's another thing: you will be able to tell right away who is going to make it and who won't. I mean reasonably clearly. Some people get there, and it's obviously not for them. (Mom and Dad were professors, so it seemed "natural" to do the same, that's often the case....)

But to have the 5th year back - no teaching, no classes. Just writing and writing and writing (and then drinking on Tuesday and Friday and Saturday nights...)

It's the assistant professorship that is tough. Profs always used to say, when I'd bitch about the work load, "Just be happy that you get to read." I now understand what this means. Real work, this stuff.

[CR]

Oh and one other thing. From my own perspective, I just can't imagine what other jobs there are out there that would be in the least fulfilling. During grad school, but greatest fear wasn't (simply) that I wouldn't get an academic job but rather (more specifically) that I'd have to get a non-academic job. Which seemed like soul death to me, honestly. It really does.

I'd love to hear what people are thinking about doing other than grad school, if that's where they're leaning.

[Craig]

(Just out of curiosity, Craig, "you'll only [what] people?")

"See". This is why I need an editor.

[Craig]

I'd love to hear what people are thinking about doing other than grad school, if that's where they're leaning.

Likely more appropriate at the Friday Confessional at The Weblog, but I confess that I occasionally wish I had gone to law school. Not only would I get to work the same thankless hours that I work now, but I'd also be making two or three or four times as much as I'm making right now. But then, I look at my father, and realize I could never be a lawyer.

[Matt]

Do any of the at least four female PhD's (or semi or soon-to-be PhD'ed) on the contributor list, or any in the anonymous panopticon, have particular thoughts on the matter?

[old]

Jodi Dean has posted some comments on the matter in response to John Emerson's post on the matter over at the weblog.

Also, are we in a permanent state of intermission?

[john emerson]

I never really get past the bitching part. But my positive idea is that linking of humanistic thinking to universities and to teaching, and the definition of scholarship as a kind of "work" producing a "product", is recent and contingent, and rather dubious too especially in literary studies.

I think that the enforcement of paradigms and methodologies in humanistic studies, and the resultant feuds, is a spinoff of the definition of scholarship as a job. You have to have reasons for hiring one guy rather than another.

I originally though that postmodernism would be liberation (ca. 1980-85) but it eventually came to seem like just another bureaucratically-enforced paradigm.

[anonymous female PhD]

We'll always crawl out of the woodwork when beckoned.

I'm bored by the class assumptions of Emerson's piece. Someone already took him (or maybe a commenter?) to task for acting as if an academic who gets paid $35,000 per year is staring into the gaping maw of poverty. Try being a social worker -- a job which frequently requires a masters and pays less than $20,000 at the entry level.

I'm also bored by the complete denigration of 4/4 jobs, as if landing one was the only real definitive proof of why no one should go to graduate school. There's a logic to the response thread that goes "you can be happy, so long as you don't land a job with a 4/4 teaching load." What then are we in the academy to make of jobs with 4/4 teaching loads or -- especially -- the people who hold them? Aren't these people also our intellectual colleagues? Do they not perform intellectual labor for which they are trained in graduate school? Do we really think of them as so far descended into hell that they really are an abomination on the graduate programs that produced them?

[John Emerson]

Anonymous PhD: it wasn't me. I've never earned more than $30,000 in my life. I am promoting non-academic scholarship, partly because I think that the present system is not viable on its own terms, but mostly because I think that the professionalization of the humanities has led to intellectual narrowness and methodological paranoia.

The losers in the present system aren't the 4/4 people, but the ones with lots of debt and no job at all, or only a series of part-time temp adjunct jobs.

Class and higher ed have all kinds of weird relationships, one of which is that parents will send their kids to college to party and learn nothing simply because it is believed that college graduates as such have a higher class status. Resentment of "cultural elitism", I am convinced, is in part a way for the Republicans to nail down voters whose relative financial success was achieved without college, and who resent snotty college graduates even if they aren't making any money.

In other words, the operative word is "cultural" and not "elite". Republicans love the financial elites.

[Jodi]

I agree with John Emerson that perhaps the most difficult place to be for academics who want to work as academics is in the adjunct world. That's lots of teaching, no security, and little time to think and write--or even develop your own courses.

On the 4/4--it's tough. But, it's work. In my experience many of the most interesting people are not at Ivy League or even top state universities. This doesn't mean that no one there is interesting. But it does mean that it's harder for radical or innovative thinkers to get there, which makes sense: if they are so radical, why would they be tenured by the University of Wisconsin?

I also think it's difficult for 'independent scholars.' If they want to publish their work or participate in large academic meetings, they can encounter lots of blocks, or differently, put, they don't have the lubrication of titles and connections. And that's a shame.

[John Emerson]

I don't think that the "independent scholar" route is the best for anyone right now, except for people who have been excluded from the system entirely, and perhaps for adjuncts.

As there are more and more fully-credentialed, capable, connected people who are not part of the formal system, perhaps the independent route will fo necessity become more accepted.

In my case, I am uncredentialed and unconnected. I've met a mixed reception, but if I had made a habit of going to conferences and networking, things might have gone much better. I don't feel that my contributions were automatically rejected, except perhaps by a single influential individual who had an issue with me. My areas of interest (Chinese philosophy, Genghis Khan) are not central, though, and I doubt that someone in a core area would do very well.

Just not being part of the network, though, means you don't have any natural allies and day-to-day contacts, and furthermore no one needs to care what you think.

I make comparisons with creative musicians a lot. A musician who can make a steady $30,000 a year plus medical insurance is doing pretty well for a musician. It would be nice if a comparable lower middle class career track for scholars were accepted and possible.

Working for a living while doing scholarship freelance crimps your family life terribly and may make a family impossible.

[DestructiveCharacter]

Are those large academic meetings really all that interesting? One hears mixed things. There does seem to be a sort of priapic block to navigate in "top" schools especially, but then as Emerson points out, maybe still preferable to the opposite side of the coin. The Crooked Timber piece, as afPhD aptly remarks, does seem to make some pretty crude class assumptions. Shouldn't one really go to grad school to study? To take the risks inherent to a life of sincere study (and though much romanticized or mythologized, are they really that much greater than before)? Debt can sometimes be a problem, sure...so why go into debt just for the glamourous coterie (and insular discourses) of a "top" school? (Slightly-less-than-top schools often seem more open, and to doing potentially interesting things, particularly with regard to "Theory" and continental philosophy, no?) Is it even possible to generalize about which is more resistant to the corporatizing trends at this point?

[Matt]

I'm not sure that sites of "resistance" so much as finding "the right person" to be advised by is the question (it goes without saying, someone whose courage and capacity and personal sense of integrity meshes with one's own, etc)...but then I am safely basing this on no personal experience whatsoever (and Ray Davis might agree, but not without some concomitant warnings). Ideally this "right person" will of course remain the right person, or at least a usefully semi-right person, or I suppose one becomes utterly screwed.

The musicians I know are...indeed struggling.

[Blink]

on the "creative class" via wood s lot:

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/11/25.html#a1351

[Jodi]

Matt, I think some of the emphasis on finding the right advisor or person to work with in graduate school is really overblown. I've come across too many ABDs who blame everything on their advisor--the fact that they don't have a topic yet or haven't gotten their proposal through etc. In my experience (which is clearly different from those in the sciences and quantitative social sciences), getting through is an independent process. On the other hand, it is possible for faculty and advisors to put up blocks, so I may have been fortunate in having advisors who didn't do that, who urged people to get through and did their best to make that happen.

What's also odd is the way that people can get through and still seem to have very little sense of the process and expectations around academic writing, publishing, etc.

[john Emerson]

I just posted about the creative class. The guy was really underestimating the medical jobs on the "growing jobs" list. The picture wasn't as bad as he said.

[Matt]

Jodi, you and Ray Davis may be right. That last sentence of mine was more than a little begging; it must have been infected by a grandiose breeze from somewhere...Of course I didn't mean to suggest one should simply blame one's advisor for everything, nor hinge every hope on her. Anything that smacks of the guru-cure annoys me especially. But amongst other pithy truisms, I do hear that it's the faculty who make the institution (and that most of the "top" celebrities have little time or inclination for the necessary investment a healthy and personal advising relationship requires). So if one's goal is truly other than to ruthlessly compete for the paltry few positions post-study, perhaps a slightly less than celebrity or top school is even more desirable...

What's also odd is the way that people can get through and still seem to have very little sense of the process and expectations around academic writing, publishing, etc.
Care to elaborate on that at all?

[CultStud]

The joke continues...

[Jeffrey]

...to walk, as it should. I don't see it getting old any time soon, either.

[Bill Benzon]

I'm an independent scholar. The money's tough & good thing I've not had a family.

I doubt that I could have done the intellectual work I've done while holding down a faculty gig. I'm too much of an intellectual swash-buckler, as William McNeill calls it. Some swashbuckler's find an academic gig and manage to stick with it; it hurts, but it's paycheck. It's hit or miss though.

As for grad school. Good times, but . . . . I once did a thumbnail calculation. I spent 200+ hours in seminars, you know, those small courses supposed to be conducted by talking with one another, everyone. Well, all but one of those hours consisted of faculty lecture, mostly rather poorly. The one hour of real intellectual interchange happened when the prof. forgot to prepare for class. He was deeply impressed with the interchange. Said we should do it again. Never did.

[CR]

Since when were the seminars ever the point of grad school? The seminars serve a purpose - they get you reading a certain canon, they might help model an approach, a methodology, they introduce you to other folks that are interested in the same materials...

But no - I thought it was a given that everyone is almost always disappointed with their grad seminars.

We all expect the crackle of the undergrad class, the thrill of learning things for the first time, which of course, can only happen once. And we are all disappointed.

Friends you make, the influence of advisors, the pressure cooker that leads you to do more work than you ever thought possible, the professional know-how that comes usually by osmosis, the library, the paper-exchanging, the works-in-progress talk, the chat after the celebrity delivered paper, the socializing, the idle talk, the drive home, of course above all the teaching, and yes the seminars. A lot goes into it, the grad school experience. Seminars are in a sense the least of it...

[Bill Benzon]

Maybe, but they're forced on you.

And I experienced an entirely different kind of group situation, one where real intellectual labor was done by a group of people. It was a heady experience. Because of that experience I think we can do better.

Though it will not be easy.