Today, a reader left a valuable comment on an older post of mine. I thought that I would share it.
In the comment, the reader shares his or her personal story about the danger of specialization in PhD programs. Literary theories and department trends come and go–leaving the PhD student to put down a five year bet on which scholarly trend will win.
Victory means an average job, teaching at some college. Losing means a dissertation topic hiring committees scoff at and no job at the end of your program, a miserable bet. In academia, grad students pay the ultimate price for scholarly fads–their careers.
As Heidi Klum says on Project Runway . . .
In academia, one day you're IN
The next, you're AUS
Here’s the comment:
I entered [ grad school] as an older student, who was already educated and knew what I wanted my dissertation to be on when I was an undergrad. I got several grants and scholarships, finished with low student debt, and finished ahead of schedule. Several professors liked and helped me, including a “big name.”
But I was at odds with the “theory” of the day. The slightly older generation of scholars I cared about (including my “big name”) were all out of fashion, and I realized several years out that a tenure-track job wasn’t going to happen.
I take little comfort in seeing how those once-dominant and seemingly all- consuming theories have almost completely receded like a spent wave, leaving a few tenured barnacles who caught the wave at the right time and are now irrelevant space-wasters in the academy. Not only was the “theory bubble” analogous to the financial bubble, it was directly parasitic on the latter. All “theory” did was to make the humanities a laughingstock among that portion of the educated public that bothered to care. It contributed directly to today’s cynicism about higher education.
Grad school wasn’t a terrible or angst-ridden experience for me: just a complete waste of time with regard to my subsequent working life, except for the “chance” to spend 18 years as a low-paid adjunct with no security while working other jobs, none of which had anything to do with what I spent grad school doing, and trying to develop an alternate path. While the personal qualities that helped me get the degrees were still relevant in my subsequent jobs, the credentials themselves were of ZERO value in my working life, and I often conceal them to avoid intimidating or alienating others.
After years of temporary, part-time jobs that that ended for reasons other than my performance (my boss’ contracts with clients ran out, etc.)—including making sandwiches in a coffee shop in my early 50s while looking—I now have a fulfilling (but still low-paid) job with colleagues and bosses who like me and where I can be productive, so I can’t complain too much given today’s employment climate.
But if I hadn’t spent those years in grad school, where would I be in this field now? A lot farther ahead.
In my undergrad, we all bought big books on Derrida. We spent hundreds of dollars on those books and hundreds of hours reading and writing about them. One hot summer, I insisted reading Derrida all day for two months. My girlfriend was naturally mad at me–I wanted to sit in the house reading theory; she wanted to go to the beach. I was 22.
Only a few years later, at a grad school conference, we all laughed at Derrida. We laughed at theory wars. And jubilantly ran towards the next fad: historical analysis. In the few short years at grad school, you make an enormous bet on your future.
Even worse, the professionalization of research turns lives into trivial details. What is hot and trendy in one department is laughable crap in another. Methodology is pure ideology–everyone has got one, everyone knows they work and interpret that world within that framework, and the easiest, cheapest way to attack someone’s research is to attack their methodolgy. There is no defence.
What do you think? Is this another giant grad school risk? The danger of choosing a subject, only to emerge five years later from the archive to find your work outdated?
Who pays the price for scholarly fads?
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I’m a year away from finishing my PhD, and in the last few months I’ve been preparing myself for a gradual exit from academe. I have a full-time NTT position, but budget cuts leave me vulnerable in my current position and unlikely to receive a promotion or salary increase once I receive my PhD. So while I begrudge the ultimate uselessness of my PhD in academe, I’m pressing ahead with its completion as a personal and entrepreneural goal. I’ve started a college prep tutoring business so that I can be in full control of my teaching and income. My PhD will thus be a marketing and credibility tool. I have a feeling that it will carry more weight with the parents of struggling high-school students in my area than with my university.
Hi Melissa,
Good for you–and I think that it is smart to use the PhD as credibility and get value out of it that way. We need more entrepreneurial humanities grad students. Best of luck with your new business,
James from Selloutyoursoul
Reading this actually made me feel fortunate that I attended such a theory-heavy undergrad English Studies program. I got to see the theory wars and their ridiculousness by the end of junior year. My department wasn’t a “poststructuralist” one or a “queer” one or a “historical” one… it was just a “theory in general” department.
I searched and searched for a “legit” professor who I could take seriously, but eventually discovered that they were all at odds with each other, and none could promise that anybody else in the world respected their approaches.
Sometimes I think people who attended more “classical” English undergrad programs had it better. But I also wonder if maybe it was fortunate that my program turned me away from grad school.
Thanks Ben–and you are lucky
James from Selloutyoursoul
I had to laugh at the ‘reading Derrida all day for two months.’ Like you, I graduated with an MA in English and was encouraged to pursue a Phd. I always felt like I was never legit because I opted the beach, every time.
That means, you were smarter than me–because I’d go for the beach now rather than Derrida!
James from Sell Out Your Soul
Was the book released on the 29th? I haven’t gotten the e-mail with the 50% off coupon code yet.
Hi Desk Jockey,
Sorry about that–I just sent an email to all the sign-ups with the new release date (it’s on this Monday). Thanks for waiting and sorry about the delay. And you will get your 50% code.
But Monday it’s here.
Thanks!
James from Sell Out Your Soul
Great article. I witnessed this fad-chasing trend when I dipped my toes into an English department in 2008-09. Post-colonialism was faltering, and many of the profs and adjuncts seemed to be as nervous as the workers at private company when a consultant is hired to streamline. Will we keep our jobs? Is our training up-to-date?
Funny thing is that back in the early 1990s, Camille Paglia was predicting basically the same things you describe here: that the faddishness of the ‘theory’ camp would lead to the disenfranchisement ( if not the outright destruction) of humanities in higher education. See her essay “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf). But because she doesn’t regurgitate theory and toe the radical feminist line, Paglia’s basically ignored in most universities. So mmany people in academia never saw it coming despite the clear warnings.
I forgot to mention that if you’re not already familiar with it, I recommend Chip Morningstar’s article “How To Deconstruct Almost Anything.” He discusses Derrida’s deconstruction specifically, but also offers insightful comments on English departments generally:
>Looking at the field of contemporary literary criticism as a whole also yields some valuable insights. It is a cautionary lesson about the consequences of allowing a branch of academia that has been entrusted with the study of important problems to become isolated and inbred. The Pseudo Politically Correct term that I would use to describe the mind set of postmodernism is “epistemologically challenged”: a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves. But the tangle offers a safe refuge for the academics. It erects a wall between them and the rest of the world. It immunizes them against having to confront their own failings, since any genuine criticism can simply be absorbed into the morass and made indistinguishable from all the other verbiage. Intellectual tools that might help prune the thicket are systematically ignored or discredited. This is why, for example, science, psychology and economics are represented in the literary world by theories that were abandoned by practicing scientists, psychologists and economists fifty or a hundred years ago. The field is absorbed in triviality.
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
I’ll keep this brief:
As the holder of a humanities PhD I have to agree with the original commentator: as far as subsequent employment goes, the whole thing was a monumental waste of time; indeed, my current employer does not even know that I have one! Prior to embarking on my “academic career” I worked as a millwright where I made a pretty reasonable living. Post-PhD and realising that there was no way I was going to find tenure, I found myself highly-qualified but virtually unemployable. The post-PhD euphoria and anticipation had long since evaporated and the awful realisation that I’d wasted the last 10 years of my life finally dawned on me when I found myself applying for entry-level graduate government positions on half the pay that I was getting as a millwright ten years previously.
I now work as a millwright.
Thanks Jeff–it just goes to show that education isn’t what it used to be. If I had known at the beginning of grad school that my friends outside of school would make more than me, I would have given it up in an instant. While I can appreciate the intellectual side of academia, I think my blog, and stories like yours, show that many of us were there under the false promise advanced education is a good smart thing to do with your life. Most people laugh at the idea of working for 30,000 grand per year. Not academics.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
–James
Doesn’t this show that at the end of the day academia isn’t really about the truth after all? At the end of the day, we’re just like pop radio: looking for the next catchy hit. The downfall of Post-Structuralism (oh what a day it is when Post-Structuralism is “old news!”) and the rise of whatever is big now (New Historicism right?) is about as arbitrary a shift in fads as going from Michael Jackson (80′s) to Katy Perry.
When you first show up to your campus as a naive 18 year old you really do believe that college is all about the truth and your professors teach you what they do because it’s actually been proven to be true. By the time you graduate you realize that truth is something we consciously don’t care about anymore, and this has hurt our reputation with the general public, as the original comment noted. Now, there actually was a time when the Humanities was a serious search for truth but that day is long past. Now we’re no more serious than a battle of the bands in some guy’s basement (and perhaps that’s where we should be anymore.)
Love this comment. I totally agree and can remember being horrified that all the hours I spent mastering one literary theory fad was just going to be replaced by another. I remember at a conference, a young scholar was talking to me so excited that we were moving away from the interpretations of modernism as a formalist movement and rethinking it within historical data. I just had a picture of 15 years in the future, the exact thing happening again. As I was doing the same with my own work on Ezra Pound, it was hard to see the overall point.
Maybe philosophy is better. True philosophers debate with the ones before them, but literary studies seems to shift pretty fast. I think I’d rather read Kant and watch a true mind at work.
Or maybe, the proliferation of scholarship is really just second-rate minds trying to say something about authors and philosophers who are much smarter than them. John Metcalf, the Canadian novelist, said that last point about scholars of Canadian fiction. So don’t hate me for saying it.
That said, there have been some brilliant works produced, even of scholarship, which are insightful regardless of whether they are out of fashion. The problem, I think, is simply people are asked to publish too much. But as I’ve moved further away from grad school, I think that aesthetic principles are really what the humanities is about. And I used to laugh at my old professors who preached that as it seemed so dated.
“The problem, I think, is simply people are asked to publish too much.” That’s the problem exactly; one point my philosophy professors in undergrad said over and over was that the professionalization of philosophy is really this weird new thing (though not for too much longer) that has perhaps been more damaging to the field as a whole. It’s hard to believe all those great works of the Modern era (Spinoza, Descartes, Hume etc.) were actually written by guys on their free time and not because they had to satisfy some checkpoint in their academic careers.
One thing I like to laugh about with my friends is wondering how many of those caustic critiques of capitalism that came out in the post WWII boom were actually written out of sheer capitalistic necessity? In other words, how many of those books and articles denouncing capitalism were actually written as just another duty in somebody’s capitalistic career, no different than a factory worker’s need to produce another commodity of any other kind? I know there were times in college when pumping out another paper really felt like factory production, “Time to find a way to fuse Marx and Henry James and pretend the text is denouncing capitalism, just as I just did in my 18th century course with Defoe. All by the end of the night to make the deadline tomorrow, of course.”
The thing that really bothers me in retrospect, though, is that the factory production mentality, at the end of the day, cheapens the product itself too. It really does seem ridiculous to have spent so many hours or weeks on a paper that in the end only one professor would read (often not even thoroughly, I can safely say from my experience of grading papers.) I remember a story in my college newspaper about a PhD recipient who left a 20 dollar bill in the middle of his dissertation in the library, knowing the first person to read it would find the money. 10 years later he returned to the library, opened up his dissertation and found the 20 dollar bill still there. Not a single person had read it in all those years, though he’d undoubtedly devoted a large chunk of his life to writing it.