Why Did My Calling Have to Be This?

So it’s time I come clean and just say it:  I took a stab at the job market, and nothing happened.  It’s really ok.  I have a year of funding left, which means a luxurious 18 months in which to turn a merely defensible dissertation into an awesome dissertation, send off some articles, and generally get my house in order while taking another stab at the market next fall.  I made a promise to myself this summer that I would spend no more than two years on the academic job market before looking for opportunities elsewhere, and I am, for the most part, still committed to that.  At this point in my life, I am ready to leave the “student” qualifier behind and start making grown-up money.  I am not in any way enamored with the prestige that a university job confers, and I am open to considering a number of different career options in and out of education.  On some days, I’m even pretty sure that a high-powered academic job isn’t for me:  that the politics of university department are too oppressive, that jumping on the tenure track treadmill will require too many sacrifices, that I’m not sure how much longer I want to wait before reproducing, etc.

Then weeks like this one happen.  After an awkward first day, my class gradually begins to warm up.  They start asking interesting questions and propose provocative topics for their first writing assignment.  I spend an hour after class discussing Dante and C.S. Lewis and fantasy literature with one student.  Meanwhile, I’ve been emailing back and forth with an archivist at a research library that I want to visit this summer as she helps me identify holdings that I can reference in a fellowship application.  On the bus Monday, I got an email from her notifying me that the papers of a 1900′s female journalist I am interested in have just been made available to the public, and I think I may have squealed audibly, as this was quite possibly the most thrilling news of my month.  As I complete the funding application, I find that I am fantasizing–a little prematurely–about spending day after day walking to this library and devoting hours to perusing its holdings.  I can’t think of a single thing I would rather do this summer, and I’m sure that a little part of me will die if I can’t pull it off.

In short, I fucking love what I do.  I don’t love the low pay, or the uncertainty about where my career is going from here, or the students with shitty attitudes, or the colleagues with the shitty attitudes, or the ridiculous pressure to tailor research topics to the frustratingly narrow standards of “marketability,” or even the prospect of starting the tenure clock.  But during weeks like this, suddenly it all really seems worth it.  Maybe it’s just that I’m coming off a fellowship, where it was pretty much me and my computer in a daily staring match, and I’m remembering how much I love really working, how much I love my on-campus routine and just the experience of being at a university all day.  But all of a sudden, I’m sort of feeling like, “Dammit, I would really miss this if I did something else.”

When I read Historiann’s post on graduate school as a form of self-mortification with quasi-religious implications, the part of me who wrote this post last summer goes “Yeah,” and another part of me goes, “No, that’s not really it at all.”  In some ways, I am sort of attracted to the aura of sophistication that an advance degree confers, but in many other ways, I am just a huge dork who loves this crap and actually believes that what she’s doing is sort of important, even if no one ever recognizes it.  So in some ways, the analogy with religious vocation works.  Both academic and monastic life are about committing oneself to a belief, something you are willing to sacrifice a tremendous amount of personal comfort for.  And yes, there is a certain degree of masochism in that, as well as a certain degree of smugness.    But ultimately it is also about a kind of guileless love and naive belief and a willingness to put up a whole lot of bullshit in order to make that love the center of your life.

It’s a kind of sincerity that isn’t always easy to own up to at a time when irony seems to be the default mode of looking at just about anything, and as someone who has always prided herself on being responsible and pragmatic and adult about things, I’m hating myself just a little bit.  I’m reminded of an application essay I read recently in which the student talked about her complex relationship with her parents.  Her father was always the practical sort who was happy having a normal middle-class job and spending time with his family and taking pleasure in stability.  Her mother, however, was a former Navy pilot, skydiver, and documentary film maker who frequently sacrificed sleep and mental health in order to pursue her interests and follow her dreams.  The student always identified more with her father, having witnessed and resented the ways in which her mother’s aspirations impacted her life and always vowed that she would pursue a practical, remunerative career path.  Then she discovered that she loved acting, that she was outrageously good at it, that she never felt more at home, more herself than when she was on stage, and she went “Well, crap.”  Because there is nothing certain, nothing practical, and for most people, nothing remunerative about pursing acting either in college or as a career.  And yet, she writes, she feels she has to take it as far  as she possibly can.

In some ways, I’m not sure that we really choose our vocations or our dreams.  To a certain degree (mediated by biology, cultural background, family history, economic status, etc.), they choose us, and there is something profoundly weird about realizing that your vocation conflicts, to a certain degree, with your notions of what constitutes a healthy, productive, and socially responsible adult life.

TPYMIGS: The Busiest Person in the World

One of the things I loved about the response to my post on The People You Meet in Grad School was the number of individuals who were willing to admit (either in comments or email) to being one of these people.  Grad school and academic life both attracts and breeds particular types of personality dysfunctions, and being honest with ourselves about which ones we identify with is probably the first step to growth, or so I’ve heard.

I’ve been examining another academic specimen of late, and that examination has sometimes been a self-examination. The Busiest Person in the World is the person who breezes by in you the hallway.  If you try to catch zie’s attention, zie will say “I’m sooooo sorry, I just can’t talk right now” and then spend the next 10 minutes telling you how busy zie is.  The thing is that this person doesn’t necessarily have an observably fuller schedule than you.  You may be taking a similar course load, attending a similar number of conferences, teaching the same number of sections, and have similar family responsibilities, but TBPW (I’m all about the acronyms today) seems to live at DEFCON 5.  Zie is always sleep deprived, always barely making deadlines, but it would never occur to you that incompetence is playing a role here.  Because TBPW has turned harried exhaustion into performance art, a monument to zie’s commitment and passion and a reprimand to everyone who isn’t as tired and overworked as zie is, because clearly you all just don’t care or try hard enough.

I think there are various reasons why people engage in this behavior.  Some crave the sense of righteousness that comes from being a martyr to one’s work.  Some are addicted to adrenaline and can’t seem to finish a project or a semester without the catharsis of barely getting everything done on time.  And some are conditioned to think that the appearance of exhaustion grants them favor in the eyes of their colleagues and relatives.  I tend to occupy the latter category, coming from a huge family that always has too much going on, in which most members own their own businesses and yet rarely take vacation.  Everyone is late to everything because OMG, SO BUSY, and idleness is a kind of sin.  Before I started going to counseling, I used to sit around thinking of stuff to tell my parents so that I wouldn’t look like I was wasting my time.  We aren’t just that way about work either.  Overextending oneself, staying up all night to create a Martha Stewart Experience on holidays or birthdays was how you showed your love as well.

So let’s go over some red flags here, shall we?

Frequent illness and refusal to take time off. I’m not talking about people with actual chronic health problems.  I’m talking about people who come to work incubating streptococcal bacteria or norovirus.  Students are frequently terrible about this.  I love the ones who sneeze and drip and look miserable in my general direction as they hand their assignment in, proof of how much they sacrificed in order to make the deadline (this is a big reason why I don’t do late penalties or paper submissions anymore).

Poor time management that borders on self sabotage. TBPW often spends more time complaining about how much work they have to do than actually doing it.  This is especially true if zie is addicted to the adrenaline rush of having to stay up all night to complete a project or working up to the very last second.  Though they may not realize they’re doing it, TBPW may have a preternatural ability to orchestrate the conditions for an all-nighter or a panic-fueled rush to the finish by finding 1400 things that MUST BE DONE NOW before a big project can even be started, by obsessing over small details at the expense of big picture concerns, or by refusing to set reasonable priorities.  Zie’s philosophy seems to be that if it didn’t come close to killing you, it didn’t really count.

Radically underestimating the amount that can be accomplished in a set period of time. My boss’s book was due to the publisher on Wednesday, which meant we had to get it in the last FedEx shipment at 7:00 Tuesday.  At 9:00pm Monday night, he expressed the desire to edit the entire 500 page manuscript in the twelve hours left before he was supposed to hand it off to me for final proofreading (yeah right) and formatting.  He was also sick at the time and had spent the past hour editing a single photograph, an obsessive moment that I’ll cop to enabling (and sharing).  He asked if I would also be able to read the entire thing through for editing problems between 9:00 am and 7:00 pm (in addition to converting all photo files to TIFFs, re-paginating the manuscript, re-doing the Table of Contents, updating the captions list, and printing out three copies of the thing).  I actually said “no problem” without irony.  It’s been quite a week for both of us.

Constantly talking about how tired and overworked zie is. This behavior is especially insidious when it includes belittling the experiences of other people in earshot.  I was once in the vicinity of two colleagues, both of whom are parents, who had a 20 minute conversation, with many single and childless people listening in (we were in the writing center break room at the time, so there was hardly an expectation of privacy), about how women without children just don’t have their priorities straight and have no idea what being busy is really like.  Now, I have nothing but respect for graduate student and academic mothers and what they have to go through, but this behavior still struck me as gross.  Those of us in the throes of TBPW-dom are doing performance art, and this sometimes makes us assholes.  If someone is doing this in your presence, don’t compete.  Politely express concern for their exhaustion, but don’t play the game.  Even if you win, you lose.  If you got 2 hours of sleep, they got 1.

If you recognize any of these symptoms in yourself, take 2 Chill Pills and make an appointment with a massage therapist or a therapist of some variety.  You are a danger to yourself and others.  If you find yourself in the same office or house as this person, give them a wide berth, and woe betide you if this person happens to have some immediate supervisory capacity over you.

Certainly, there are times when work piles up, when the midnight oil must be burned due to no failing of our own, but so often this sort of stuff becomes competitive.  When we start taking too much pride in the physical and psychic scars we bear from our efforts and even begin lording them over others, we become toxic colleagues and teachers and toxic to ourselves.

Photo Credit:  mirjoran, Flickr Creative Commons.

Working and Playing Well With Others

We now resume our series on grad school survival by addressing Jadey’s question about how to get along and maybe even actually make friends with other graduate students.  This is one of those questions that’s actually refreshing to get, because I frequently feel like I am the only person on earth that has trouble establishing and keeping a more or less functional social life.  Like most nerds, I am frigging awkward around my peers, and tendency toward introversion usually means that I have no problem staying in on Friday nights watching The West Wing and talking to my guinea pigs (and possibly my spouse).  I often suspect that I am a rather odd duck indeed.  But graduate school seems to attract my kind, so you would think making friends among people who read Renaissance poetry for kicks wouldn’t be so hard.  But, in fact, it frequently is.

Which brings me to my first piece of advice:  stay in contact with or try to meet people who aren’t in graduate school. I haven’t been so good about this one, but my younger sister and her new husband recently moved into town, and I’ve been reminded how refreshing it is to get together for margaritas and a round of Settlers of Catan with people who aren’t boiling in the same fetid stew that is the Ph.D program.  It’s not that other graduate students aren’t wonderful, fun people to hang out with.  It’s just that you are all operating in an alternate reality, and it is extremely beneficial–mental health-wise–to get regular exposure to another perspective.

But when it comes to building friendships or good working relationships with other grad students, the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard is this:  resist the urge to think of the other grads in your program as your competition. This is going to be especially hard for you if you are in one of those sadistic programs that ranks their grad students every year or admits more M.A. students than there are spots in the Ph.D program, turning your first two years of grad school into Survivor (except you took out loans and put your future on hold to be there). But even if you aren’t in that sort of situation, it can be tempting to ruminate on the idea that these people are going to be applying for YOUR JOB when you’re all on the market in a few years. This is irrational.  The grad students in your department are no more your competition than any other grad student in your field in the rest of the world.  They are no more your competition than the people who graduated from college with your major.  Yes, on some level you are sort of competing, and yes, the pool is smaller, but there are going to be thousands of people applying for the jobs you’re applying for, so the person in the cubicle across from you isn’t really your biggest problem, and neither is the person who beat you out for the “TA of the year” award.  The only difference between that person and the thousands of other grad students who won their department’s award is proximity. Direct your outrage about your job prospects toward the dysfunctional university system, or better yet, channel your energy toward writing a really good thesis, and quit obsessing about the so-called golden children in your program.  Though we all still like to pretend that academia is a meritocracy, no one really knows why any particular person gets a job.  In terms of their impact on your professional future, the golden children matter about as much in the long run as the person who beat you out for Class President matters to you now.

Instead, think of the person in the cubicle across from you as someone who may wind up blurbing your book or writing a recommendation to the tenure review committee.  Think of this person as someone you might go to for candid advice about an article you’re working on or to help organize a panel for a big upcoming conference.  In other words, think of them as your colleagues.

Collaborate when you can, whether that means co-authoring an article or putting together a dissertation writing group.  Some fields are more congenial to collaborative work than others, but taking advantage of opportunities to work with other grad students even in the most informal way can be an excellent way to learn from each other and develop a network of people that you can call on in the future.  For example, myself and two other grads formed a little peer mentorship group at one point, concurrent with our first solo teaching assignment in the English department.  We got together once a month to get feedback on our teaching methods and just vent in general when we needed to.

Don’t ask people how their dissertation/prospectus/M.A. thesis is going unless they bring it up. This is a sensitive subject.  You may think you’re saying it out of concern or interest, but you may also be saying, “I just want to check and see if I’m doing better than someone at the moment.”  No matter how you ask this question, it’s bound to provoke a slight sense of hostility.  Also, think about how you feel when your parents’ friends from church ask you this question and you have to stammer out something that a) makes it sound like you’re doing something with your life, and b) doesn’t sound like you are plotting the feminazi-queer-socio-fascist-kill-whitey-revolution.  That’s right, you hate that.

Do stuff outside the lab/library/writing center/TA office.  During my third and fourth year, I had a tendency to look at my writing center hours (especially when things were slow) as “social time,” since we would often just be sitting back in the break room complaining about working in the writing center.  That is a sad, sad fact about my life, so do as I say, not as I do.  Go out for pizza and beers.  Invite people over to watch So You Think You Can Dance or something where no one will be tempted to name-drop a French theorist.  Then resist the temptation to name drop a French theorist.

And finally, recognize that ultimately, not everyone in your program is going to be your bosom friend. As in every work setting, you will click with some people more than others.  Hopefully, you will find at least one person with whom you can discuss the multitude of personal and professional crises you are going to be facing, but also know that you won’t be able to trust a lot of people with that sort of thing.  Figure out who is a friend and who is a co-worker, a distinction that feels sort of odd since graduate school occupies that limbo space between college and the workplace, where peer relationships are dramatically different.  Also remember that both types of relationships are worth having.

Essential Grad School Reading

As promised, I’ve tried to narrow down two centuries of theory to a list of fourteen essentials in the fields of historical criticism, feminism, African-American and post-colonial studies.  These are the works you are most likely to encounter in graduate coursework in the humanities.  Some of them will probably be assigned at some point, but going ahead and reading at least parts (no one expects you to read the entire Marx-Engels reader in your first year, or ever really) of some of them in your fleeting moments of downtime really would be an excellent use of that time.  Other grads/profs can add their favorites in comments, but I didn’t intend this list to be encyclopedic.  It’s more of a survival guide than anything else.

Hegel–I would just go check out a Hegel reader of some sort and read a few excerpts.  If nothing else, you should be able to talk about the “Hegelian view of history,” which influenced guys like Marx and which guys like Nietzche and Foucault later revised.  In brief, the Hegelian view of history was proto-Darwinian, asserting that the trajectory of human history was toward greater and greater levels of improvement.

Marx–You will eventually want the Marx-Engels Reader for your personal library.  I guarantee you will see it assigned in multiple grad seminars. You should go ahead and read a little of it your first year, so that you can shut up The Theorist when it becomes clear that he actually doesn’t know what commodity fetishism is.

Nietzche–I think of Nietzche as semi-optional but certainly recommended reading for anyone who “does history” in some form.  Nietzche says absolutely batshit stuff at some points, but his answer to the Hegelian view of history is important for understanding more essential figures like Foucault.  If you see a Nietzche reader in a pile of free or cheap books, I’d pick it up.

Durkheim/Weber–Both are important figures in the field of sociology, though most folks in literature will get through grad school without having to read them.  Consider them essential reading if you are interested in the impact of economics on culture (Weber especially) or religion.  Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is one of my favorites.

Foucault–If there’s one theorist that you should start reading pretty much immediately, it’s Michel Foucault, because he turns up absolutely everywhere, and I think citing him in your term papers is mandatory (I kid, I kid).  You can start almost anywhere, but I wouldn’t jump head-first into The Birth of the Clinic or Archaeology of Knowledge without a bit of prep.  Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality,Vol. I are actually fairly accessible and are good introductions to his methodology.

Derrida–Derrida is definitely essential reading for revolutionizing the way we think about language, but don’t be ashamed if it takes you forever just to read a sentence.  I recommend small bites of Of Grammatology when you’re feeling particularly spry.  Eventually you’re going to cheat and just go read his wikipedia page for an overview, but you should give it the good old college try.

Freud–You are also going to want the Peter Gay edited Freud Reader for your personal library at some point.  It’s another one of those that will come up a lot. even though no one really cites him directly all that much anymore, he’s essential background reading if you want to understand Lacan or foundational feminist theory.  (I’m not putting Lacan in here, because just…ew.  But yeah, you’ll probably see him assigned as wella t some point).

Butler–Now we’re really getting to the good stuff!  Judith Butler is one of the founders of modern feminist theory, and you will want to pick up Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter once you’re tired of all the dead white guys I just listed.

hooks–bell hooks is essential for taking feminist theory beyond the study of white ladies.  She is also an essential voice in the field of feminist pedagogy.  Read everything eventually, but pick up Ain’t I a Woman:  Black Women and Feminism ASAP.

DuBois–I’m grouping these more thematically than chronologically, if you haven’t yet noticed.  DuBois is an essential voice in African American studies and in the study of race in general.  Along with William James, he was also central to pragmatist philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century.  And he’s refreshingly readable.  Get The Souls of Black Folk for your personal library.

Gates–Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s The Signifying Monkey is also a core text in African American studies and a really great read.  I would read DuBois and have a working knowledge of Derrida’s basic (hahahaHAHAHAHAHAHA…I crack myself up) ideas before reading it.

Said–The Palestinian theorist who described the Orientalist (a white Westerner who studies the Orient) gaze and more or less founded post-colonial theory.  Start with Orientalism and read Culture and Imperialism at some point.

Anderson–If you do anything in post-colonial/ethnic/area studies, you are going to hear Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities mis-quoted a whole lot by your fellow graduate students.  Go find out what it actually says.

Spivak–Gayatri Spivak may be the most erudite theorist alive right now.  She translated Derrida for sweet Baby Jesus’s sake.  A Critique of Post-colonial Reason is essential reading in the field of post-colonial and ethnic literatures, though it is indescribably dense.  You might check out her article “Can the Subaltern Speak” first, and my Amazon search tells me that she co-wrote a book with Judith Butler!  How cool is that!

The People You Meet in Graduate School

You're going to need one of these.

We had the welcome luncheon for new graduate students yesterday.  Given that I probably did everything in my power to scare people about the experience last week, I thought this would be a good time to dispense some practical and hopefully light-hearted wisdom about how to navigate the first year or so of grad school in the humanities.  I welcome questions, suggestions, and pitches for guest posts.  Email sfdrafts@gmail.com!

On my very first day, our grad advisor told us that grad school was about learning to participate in a scholarly conversation rather than merely jumping through academic hoops like you did in college.  In some ways, the very skills and strategies that made you successful as an undergrad (and therefore got you to grad school in the first place) are skills and strategies that may have to be set aside.  After the first semester, you will quickly discover that no one gets a B in a class unless they really screw up.  There really aren’t any tests (unless you’re doing something statistically based or taking a language or linguistics class) to study for.  There’s just A LOT of reading to do and a batch of term papers to write at the end of each term.

(PRO TIP:  When registering for classes, look through each course description carefully and note the final project.  Do not sign up for more than two classes with an article-length (20+ page) paper due at the end of term.  I quickly discovered that two is the maximum number of long papers a brain can reasonably be expected to produce within a month’s time.  Even if you only wind up with two, you’ll want to start one kind of early.)

Participating in a conversation means learning to deal with people in entirely new ways.  Success in graduate school does depend on making contact with the professors who do what you want to do and convincing them to supervise your M.A. thesis, prospectus, or dissertation down the road.  Most people begin making contact by taking classes with these people whenever possible, and seminars can turn into a sort of obnoxious cocktail party, with everyone vying to make the cleverest comment.  If the professor is attuned to that sort of bullshit, he or she will usually try to diffuse the tension.  It doesn’t always work, but you have to love them for trying.

It is virtually guaranteed, however, that in every seminar there will be  at least one ringer, one fourth or fifth (or tenth or twelfth) year asshole who has read every book in the entire world and seems to go out of his way to terrify everyone else into silence.  This person takes a variety of forms:

The Prof’s Advisee: She has been working with the professor for the better part of a decade and has read all of her books.  They seem to always enter the room together and complete each other’s sentences.  The student knows or is able to anticipate her reading of every text on the syllabus and her view on every political question and can parrot those views back while still managing to avoid sounding like the sycophant that she is.  They may affectionately disagree on one or two things, but you can be certain that the student’s dissertation is basically the sequel to the prof’s book.

The Medievalist: He is taking Nineteenth Century American Novels because he needs to show range and this sounds like an easy class.  He thinks your field is scholarship-lite because you don’t have to know Latin or Anglo-Saxon or whatever.  He has almost nothing to say about any given text but oozes disdain from every pore.  The prof in this seminar hates this student’s living guts but doesn’t say anything because his advisor is a known tyrant and probably in charge of tenure review.  This student’s advisor, by the way, was on my Qualifying Exam panel, and he pretended to fall fell asleep whenever we finished with his stuff and moved on to nineteenth century slave literature.

The Theorist: He read Derrida as an undergrad and was a philosophy major or something.  He seems to pipe up with something like, “I think Habermas would say…” at every opportunity.  If you are lucky, this person will have a single-minded obsession with a particular theorist, and everyone (including the prof) start rolling their eyes at her every time he goes off on a tangent about the brilliance of Adorno and Horkheimer.  Otherwise, he’s just going to make everyone else feel inadequate.

The Paragon of Lefty Virtue: Whether she is a radical feminist, socialist, pacifist, vegan, or all of the above, this grad student is there to sneer at your tepid political commitments and police any and all comments about her specific areas of activism for insufficient radicalism and theoretical rigor.  She will tolerate no nuance when it comes to questions like:  “Religious people–maybe not the absolute embodiment of everything that is wrong with the world?”  You feel embarrassed in her presence both because she has read waaaaay more Judith Butler and Marx and Weber than you but also because she is a walking right-wing parody of a lefty academic.  In other words, this is what your deleted blog commenters think you are like.

So yes, some variant of this advanced graduate student will be making an appearance in at least one of your seminars this semester.  Unfortunately, you can’t clam up.  Many new grads make the mistake of staying silent in class for fear of looking stupid and spend the whole semester bitching about that person behind their back.  That takes you further away from the primary goal of graduate school:  learning to participate in a scholarly conversation.  So the trick is figuring out how to make a contribution without getting shut down.

First, do as mom says and consider the source.  Advanced students in graduate school who show up in seminars that they don’t really need to take are, I guaran-god-damn-tee it, having a lot of trouble finishing–or even starting–their dissertations.  So yeah, this person may simply be trying to make themselves feel better at the expense of some noobs.  Furthermore, you have to remember that these students aren’t the fully fledged academic experts they may seem to be.  They may know more than you, but they aren’t perfect in their knowledge, and many of them can’t, for some reason, think critically about the ideas they parrot back from books.

The best thing you can do with these individuals is to strive to learn what they know and then raise the level of the debate.  You will quickly find that not everyone is as well-read as they pretend to be and not everyone understands theory as completely as it may seem to someone who hasn’t read it at all.  So, during this first semester, you will want to begin making a list of stuff that you need to read that isn’t on any of your syllabi, though in a future post I would like to put together a list on this blog to get you started.  Experienced humanities grads:  post your “must-reads” in comments or email your list to me if you have time.

Keeping Your Options Open in Grad School

Given the shittiness of the academic job market and the expense of higher education, common sense says that going to graduate school in the humanities is a pretty terrible idea.  Yet there are those of us who, for whatever reason, feel the need to go anyway.  For me, I think it was a combination of stubbornness, naiveté, and the fact that a Ph.D. in English has been a life goal of mine since 10th grade that led me to pursue graduate school and stick with it.  I don’t regret doing it, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone.

That said, I think there is a way of approaching grad school without being taken for a ride.  There is much about the university-industrial complex that is dysfunctional, including a tendency to exploit the labor of wide-eyed idealists.  For every potential graduate student who thinks that living a life of the mind is more important than making a remunerative wage, there is a university willing to milk that person for 5-7 years of cheap (or free) labor without either guarantee of or preparation for a real job at the end of that period.  For every person who wants to be in academia sooooo baaaadly, there is a university happy to pay that person $20,000 a year with no benefits in a one-year non-renewable adjunct or “visiting” assistant professorship.

The key to not getting taken for a ride is to know where your interests lie, to decide from the very beginning what you are willing to sacrifice in order to get a Ph.D. and not sacrifice one inch beyond that point.  For me, it has meant deciding that wherever I land job-wise in the next few years, the Ph.D. was a worthy accomplishment in and of itself, a ridiculously huge bucket list item, if you will, and I refuse to see myself or my time in grad school as a failure if I wind up taking one of the less prestigious but actually pretty appealing alternatives to an academic career, like teaching high school or community college or running workshops on persuasive writing for a branch of the federal government (that is actually a real job, and it apparently pays really, really well).  I have, in effect, taken the words of perennial buzzkill Thomas Benton to heart:

Perhaps members of a generation that enters graduate school with no expectations of an academic position — who never even consider, for one moment, that they will become tenure-track professors — will bring about positive change in the way things are taught. Such students will be less beholden to advisers, and empowered to demand that courses have some relationship to existing opportunities. With an eye to careers outside academe, they will challenge the tyranny of the monograph; they might seek technical skills; they will want to speak to a wider public; and they will be more open to movement between academe and the “outside world” than previous generations, who were taught to regard anything but the professorial life as failure from which one could never return.

While I’ll be applying for academic jobs this year, I’m keeping my options open while doing so.  I’m trying to be a little bit entrepreneurial, a little bit mercenary about the whole thing.  I’m not pretending that money doesn’t matter, and I’ve laid out in pretty specific terms what I am willing to sacrifice lifestyle-wise in order to work at a university.  I am not going forward as if I can write my own ticket, but I refuse to be dazzled by the glamor of the MLA convention to the point that I’ll mortgage my life for the dream of playing in the NBA.

So what does an attitude like that mean for the way you approach grad school, and how can graduate students get through the experience without being psychologically and financially crushed?  If there’s one bit of advice that I could give prospective (or current) grad students, it would be this:

Graduate school is a job.  Don’t do it for free.

When I was applying to grad school in my senior year of college, I received two offers.  The first was from an elite Northeastern institution that wanted to charge me $20,000 a year for the privilege of learning and working there.  I kept their offer letter on my desk for a while, but ultimately I said no.  There was just no way I was going to go that far into a financial hole for this experience.  The second letter I received was from a less prestigious but nevertheless major public university.  They were offering 5 years of guaranteed financial support in the form of teaching appointments, including waived tuition, a living stipend, and state employee health benefits, with the possibility of two extra years of support contingent on performance and budgetary concerns.  I would never under any circumstances advise a prospective graduate student to settle for anything less.  Here’s why:

Graduate school is not worth a crushing debt load. I have a close relative who is now $150,000 in the hole thanks to college and law school debt.  His monthly payment is more than most people pay in rent.  Do not let this happen to you, especially given the earning potential of a fresh Ph.D. on the academic job market.  While even funded graduate students may require some student loans to meet living expenses, there is just no good reason to take out more in tuition loans each year than you will make your first few years as an adjunct or visiting assistant whatever.

Generous support packages indicate pretty good things about the university. As I quickly discovered my first week on campus, the generous support package was due to a strong history of collective bargaining on the part of graduate students and a faculty that “gets it” and is willing to go to bat for them.  The structured way in which graduate students progressed through their teaching appointments indicated a department with a savvy placement committee with a clear sense of what the job market required.  9 of the 12 people on the job market last year got full-time jobs at universities.  That is a ridiculously good record.

So that’s the first aspect of not doing this job for free, or more to the point, not paying for it out of your own pocket.  Once you’re in a program with decent support, don’t sign up for stuff that isn’t in your job description unless you’re making more money for doing it or there is a clear career reason for jumping at the opportunity.  Committee service and conference organization looks pretty good on a c.v., but it doesn’t look nearly as good as a finished dissertation or an article in a major journal.  If you want a shot at a job in academia, concentrate on the activities that are going to really help you:  writing, publishing, and teaching.  Everything else is extra.

I have, however, found that it can be both rewarding and beneficial to pursue paid work outside of your department.  In addition to teaching for English, I have worked as a research assistant in an interdisciplinary program without its own grad students, a freelance editor, a tutor in the Undergraduate Writing Center, a teacher in an outreach program working with underperforming high schools, and an application reader for an Honors program (that one paid ridiculously well, and I got to do it at home on my own time).  Each one of those represented two things:  1)  Extra income, which meant I could take a lower paying but less time-consuming job during the summer rather than teaching summer school in order to work on my dissertation.  I could also afford to go to 5 conferences this year.  2)  Exposure to alternative career paths in editing, writing center administration, high school teaching, and university admissions, and credentials in an interdisciplinary field.  I do not yet know if these are going to pay off in some way, but there is value in learning that you are good at things other than writing papers, that you can thrive in a variety of job situations, that there are, perhaps, other things you can see yourself doing after grad school.

There are, however, going to be numerous people at your university–administrators and faculty–who want you to do stuff for free, who will insist that it benefits you in some way to, for example, take on additional teaching and mentorship responsibilities with no extra pay.  Do not take these claims at face value.  Weigh your interests against theirs in the equation.  It is in their best interest to guilt you into doing more work for less money, to keep you around for as long as possible doing stuff for free and then paying them tuition when your funding runs out.  It is in yours to concentrate all of your energy toward finishing your dissertation, publishing stuff, and eventually getting a job.  While you can listen to advice from outside parties, you and only you can decide whether or not volunteering for extra stuff is going to be a good choice.

Finally, remember that leaving graduate school is not an admission of failure. In many cases, it is evidence of nothing more than unimpeachable common sense.  I know many people who left after the first two years for jobs that sound pretty awesome, and you are allowed to be one of those people, no matter what the bitter people who are determined to tough it out despite their misery or the shaming influence of a university-industrial complex whose interests are not aligned with yours.  When it comes to the decision to finish or not to finish, only one person’s opinion matters:  yours, not your advisor’s, not the department chair’s, not your parents’ or the people who attend your high school reunions.  If you come to the conclusion, at some point, that you would rather be doing something else or that you are the victim of a giant racket, GTFO.  Your career, your life in fact, is not a fraternity initiation procedure to see who can withstand something unnecessarily painful the longest.

Is this sort of depressing?  Ok, kind of.  But it’s important to know up front that graduate school can be a devastatingly disempowering experience, shockingly unlike college.  The difference is like that of a minimum wage worker at a retail outlet versus that of a customer at said retail outlet.  As a college student, the faculty and administration were collectively working together on your behalf. As a graduate student, you are a laborer–a laborer whose primary goal is to finish graduate school–and the key to having a rewarding experience is thinking of yourself as such, as someone who deserves to benefit from the work that you do.  Furthermore, if you are able to think of yourself as going to work every day rather than going to limbo, it can actually make the long run seem bearable.

Grad Student Employment and Institutional Batshittery

As often happens in the careers of graduate students and academics, I encountered a bit of institutional batshittery at my university this summer, institutional batshittery that I was going keep off this blog, because some part of me felt that complaining about it was inappropriate, but Tenured Radical’s brilliant post (via Historiann) on overwork and exploitation within the academy has inspired me to put this turd of a situation right out there and call it what it is.  TR and the blog commenters highlight the pressure to overextend oneself, a pressure that tends to be particularly acute for vulnerable employees from underrepresented fields:  the adjunct who takes on more than her fair share because there might be a full-time position opening up next year, the instructor in Native or Queer Studies who feels the need to allow more students into his class or take on more advisees because he’s one of only two professors doing what he does, or the “girl” at the committee meeting who volunteers for every project in order to avoid the awkward silence and the disappointment of the chair.

TR’s point is that the modern dysfunctional university system thrives on people who are willing to overextend themselves, who are willing, in fact, to set aside the activities necessary to actually building a successful academic career in order to do the work that the university needs done (advising, writing recommendations, serving on search committees, reading applications, etc.) but that holds no opportunities for advancement, prestige, or remuneration:

Worse, the generative political urgency in the various fields that make up American Studies, Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies often moves us to throw our personal energy at immediate needs that are actually the result of long-term institutional dysfunction that our sacrifices help to maintain. Don’t make up for the deficiencies of the institution by taxing yourself. Don’t. The academic world is littered with broken and bitter people behind who thought that institutional neglect was only temporary.

Graduate students face this dilemma as well.  ABDs in particular are told that their first and primary concern is finishing their dissertation.  But let’s not kid ourselves:  graduate students supply an ample, inexpensive, and often quite eager supply of labor for the university.   Graduate students teach introductory classes, grade papers for the faculty, sit in the archives transcribing stuff for their professors, and checking the mail of advisors who are doing invited lectures abroad.  Yes, this is part of our “apprenticeship,” but it is also a job.  Let me just say that one more time:  it’s a JOB. Yet graduate students are often conditioned to think of this labor not as a job that they may enjoy and for which they will also be justly compensated but a privilege for which they must simply be thankful because we rejected 9 of 10 applicants in the year you got in. And very often we are encouraged to think of this work as something we should be happy to do for free.

Here is one small example before I get to the big one, but I must surround it with layers of disclaimer before we proceed.  I work in an English department at a major state university that is, by the standards of English departments at major state universities, lavishly well-funded and strongly committed to the careers and overall well-being of their graduate students.  We have a Graduate Advisor–who will play a heroic role in the sob story I’ll get to in a little bit–and a group of faculty that are nothing short of phenomenal in their grasp of the issues that graduate students face.  That said, this English department resides within a massive bureaucracy that doesn’t necessarily share their commitments or give them the resources to fulfill them.  In fact, due to a recent budgetary clusterfrack, this massive bureaucracy now taketh away quite a lot more than it giveth at the moment.  There used to be a pedagogy course that first year TA’s could take concurrent with their first teaching assignment, in which they got to work three hours a week for credit with their faculty supervisor, learning methods for leading classroom discussions and grading and developing their own teaching philosophy, and whatnot.  As of this year, that class is being cut, and last May they announced that it would be replaced with a system in which current experienced Assistant Instructors (all graduate students) will mentor new TA’s.  On one level, that sounds like the sort of program that I might volunteer for if I were asked. But I was not asked.  This extra hour or three of work per week was simply added to my job description, and we are not even getting cost of living raises this year. Furthermore, new TA’s will be taking the standard full load of courses and working as a teaching assistant without the benefit of close faculty mentorship.

Now, to the credit of my department, I think someone realized that this was a little effed up, as we’ve been getting emails asking for volunteers for a mentorship program that sounds pretty similar, and no one has broached the topic of required mentoring since that May meeting.  Or that could be wishful thinking on my part.

That’s a small example.  But about a month ago, I was given the sort of reminder about how the university views my status at this institution that made me start perusing Monster.com for full-time jobs requiring editing skills and good time management.  Since last June, I’ve been working as a part-time research assistant for a professor who is very well known in his field.  Some would think of this as a pretty plum job in terms of the c.v. line and the recommendation that I’m going to get for the job market, but let me just repeat:  this is a job.  This is work for which I deserve to be compensated (I have to repeat that to myself like a mantra), not merely another educational opportunity for which I should merely be grateful.  This work that I have done for this professor has been crucial to the publication of a monograph which will confer more status on this professor and this university.

Here’s the thing, though:  research assistants at my university are not given tuition assistance.  During the fall and summer, my tuition was semi-covered because I also had a part-time teaching position.  However, in the summer, most departments employing research assistants do a little trick in order to ensure that research assistants don’t have to enroll for a class and pay tuition during that term.  They appoint them as a Student Technician rather than a GRA.  GRA’s have to pay tuition.  Student Tech’s don’t.  It isn’t really clear why.  Last summer, there was no issue appointing me as a Student Tech.  None at all.  I made my measly $700 a month and got a lot done on my dissertation thanks to the flexible work schedule and the fact that we had enough in savings (my husband, a high school teacher, is paid over 12 months as well) to cover the deficit created by the cut in pay between summer and the rest of the year.

In June, however, (the day before my sister’s wedding, in fact), I was notified by the admin in the department that was hiring me (not English) that my appointment as a Student Tech did not go through, that the university was forcing me to take the GRA title, enroll in a conference course, and fork over $1500 in tuition and fees.  Let’s run down all of the absurdities of this situation, shall we?

• The conference course that I would have registered for would have been the same conference course that all dissertation writers register for.  It’s not actually a course.  It’s just trading emails and having a meeting or two with your advisor, which I would be doing whether or not I was actually enrolled.  I would be paying tuition and fees and receiving no instruction. I would just be paying to work.
• I was informed of this two weeks after the job had technically begun.  Had I known about the problem ahead of time, I could have applied for a teaching assistant job in my home department, which would have come with tuition assistance (and better pay).  By waiting so long to notify me, they effectively prevented me from obtaining any other employment at the university.
• The basis of the denial was that this work would somehow interfere with my progress toward the degree.  That’s bullshit.  Asking me to pay this much in tuition would have meant getting an extra job at Starbucks or something, which would have interfered with my progress toward the degree a hell of a lot more.
• The university insisted that this had always been their policy, but they had just never audited it until this year.  This is also bullshit.  As it later turned out, three GRAs in the institutionally savvy English department also got screwed.  This end-run around the summer tuition issue had been common practice long enough that new admins in each department were instructed to do it as part of their job training.
  

This was, in every sense of the word, a shake-down, an attempt to avoid paying employees by exploiting the slipperiness of the terms job and education, student and employee as they are applied to people in graduate programs, redefining their status whenever it’s convenient.  As employees with jobs, we would be entitled to something.  As students getting an education, we should merely be thankful for the learning opportunities provided by working with such excellent faculty.  As students, we should me in awe of the opportunities such contacts will give us on the job market (not that I have any illusions that knowing one famous professor is a ticket to a plum job or any job at all for that matter).  I can very well imagine a situation in which a graduate student would be told by her boss, by the hiring department, and her graduate adviser that she should  be so very grateful, that this work she is doing is part of her education, not her job.  Luckily, I was not in that situation.  Luckily, my boss, the hiring department, and the Graduate Advisor in my home department collectively pitched a fit, writing letters to the Dean and getting the decision reversed for myself and the other research assistants who had had the rug pulled out from under them.

I am immensely, indescribably thankful that they went to bat for us, but truthfully, I am galled that they even had to.  I am galled that my subsistence this summer depended entirely on a) working for people who get that graduate students can’t feed, clothe, and shelter themselves with a dissertation, and b) were institutionally savvy enough to fix the problem.  And truthfully, there was a little voice in my brain, the “girl” voice that kept saying that I really should be willing to do this work for free, that all jobs have problems, that I really am very very fortunate to be working with this person and to be in this program AT ALL, and after all I’m not so bad off considering I have spousal support, and OTHER graduate students would probably be thankful for this opportunity, and NO.

If other graduate students are willing to do this sort of work for free and just be “thankful,” STOP.  The truth is that if I hadn’t appealed to all of these people, if I had just sucked it up and worked essentially for free, it would be sending the message that universities can get away with this sort of thing.  NO.  STOP.  Ironically, the most politically significant thing I could have done in that situation might actually have been going and getting a full time job at Starbucks, and screw the university’s time-to-degree and attrition statistics. Now, that might have been a little bit like cutting of my nose to spite their face, but hey, I’d have more money at pretty good health coverage, and knowing myself, I’d probably still finish my dissertation in due time.  The truth is that the academic labor market–and we really need to include dewy-eyed 22-year old grad school applicants (like I was) when we talk about that labor market–is not only oversaturated, it is oversaturated with people who are willing to put up with crap, who are willing to do their jobs for little or no money, who are willing to buy into the idea that they should just be grateful for this opportunity to learn and work in such an enchanted place.  Yes, there are unethical and exploitative and morally horrifying employment situations all over the place, but I’m pretty sure that even Wal-Mart doesn’t charge you $1500 just to walk onto the property.

Today in Cognitive Dissonance: Graduate School and the Market

Zuska has a thoughtful post up about  the influence of advertisers at ScienceBlogs.  I’m not really interested in blog monetization just yet, but I found this particular statement to be particularly quote-worthy:

If an enterprise like ScienceBlogs cannot be funded except by taking money from sources that you and I, Dear Reader, deem offensive and unethical – why should I continue to contribute? I think this is another version of skeptifem’s question. I will rephrase it for my own purposes, more generally, thus:

How are we to live in this world when every action we take is tainted by some sort of injustice, some infliction of injury-at-a-distance? (and sometimes not so distant.)

I don’t know. It’s nearly impossible. Tread as lightly as one can. Each person has to decide where the breaking point is for her or himself. Pal’s or Grrl’s may come sooner than mine. Without a job, ScienceBlogs is like my workplace, where I hang out at the water cooler and catch up on the gossip. I am loathe to lose that, even though my primary care physician told me pointedly at my last visit that caffeinated sugary beverages are the devil’s drink. And their decaf, no-cal substitutes are no better, she added. Water! Pure clear water from the tap for you! she commanded.

I often feel like the blogosphere, graduate school, and academic careers are packaged as spaces that are somehow free from the market, unfettered by corporate influence and therefore “pure” in a way that, I don’t know, financial planning is not.  In yesterday’s Tales From the Writing Center, I think I revealed a little bit of my rancor toward the mammoth business school at my university, because it gets so much goddamn attention and resources.  Seriously, I work in a building that hasn’t been renovating since the Nixon administration, and their study areas are like palaces, PALACES I tell you.

So, in some ways, my snobbery toward business school is an effort to reduce cognitive dissonance, to prove that I made the Right Choice because graduate school is a place that produces pure-hearted lovers of literature and lefty politics and business school produces evil corporate overlords.  It’s about my desire to believe that this choice–which places me considerably behind those business school graduates in terms of present and future income–makes me a Good Person, a person who will not go on to exploit employees or trash the environment or perpetuate the suffering of women of color in the third world.  I probably don’t need to tell my readers just how naive and arrogant this attitude is.  For one thing, universities are basically corporations these days, and it does me no good to pretend like I won’t ever be complicit in that system.  But even more importantly, my ability to attend graduate school, to pay for graduate school, to even conceive of the possibility of going to graduate school is predicated on privilege, and it’s delusional to pretend otherwise.  Pursuing academics or even art as a career does not exempt you from systems of privilege and exploitation (and the illusion that it can may be part of the reason why so many graduate students and adjuncts are themselves willing to tolerate a certain amount of exploitation) nor does it give you access to some pure, untainted Life of the Mind, as Thomas Benton at the Chronicle of Higher Education has said:

Graduate school may be about the “disinterested pursuit of learning” for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.

Now, I do think that some of the hand-wringing about the state of the academic job market obscures the fact that finding a job sucks for everyone right now. There has never been a worse time to graduate with a college degree, much less a post-graduate degree.  My brother-in-law who has both a law and an accounting degree (and a sextuple-digit debt load) was recently laid off and is trying to establish a private practice along with my sister, who also has an accounting degree.  He will tell you that just about anybody in their garage can get accredited as a law school these days and that–as with Ph.Ds in the Humanities–these schools are churning out far more lawyers than the market can possibly support. In some areas of the country, lawyers are taking clerking jobs at $20,000 a year with no benefits just to be “doing something with their law degree.”

However, graduate school seems to be particularly problematic in the way it frames what is (and frankly should be) the pursuit of remunerative work as a pledge of loyalty and sacrifice for something greater (and those sacrifices are frequently real, as when my university demanded that I pay $1200 in tuition in order to make $2300 as a research assistant this summer, even though I’m taking no classes).  In many ways, it reminds me of what my uncle says about seminary.  Having grown up in a highly religious part of the country, attending Evangelical High, I know quite a few people who have attended the seminary in my hometown.  Keep in mind, this isn’t one of those Ivy League Modernist Divinity Schools but rather Bastion of Southern Fundamentalist Seminary.  My uncle is the former admissions director and is now the dean of something or other.  I think that the reasons many of these twenty-somethings went straight from college to seminary are similar to the reasons many twenty-somethings wind up in grad school:  it sounds like an honorable living, we feel–perhaps–a sense of calling, we like school and are interested in furthering our education, etc.  But many seminary students get tricked into believing that the ministry is also strangely “outside the market,” that it is a place where one can pursue a Life of the Spirit.

Now, one might think–given the rate of growth among evangelical congregations these days, that many of these seminary students would be just fine.  But while these congregations are expanding, the number of well-paying church jobs out there remain decidedly few.  The celebrity pastors who bring in seven figures on book tours and lecture circuits are to the average seminary student what professional athletes are to the average high school athlete.  Furthermore, many of those celebrity pastors became such by a curious combination of luck, charisma, and business acumen, not because of how well they translate Hebrew and Greek.

My uncle’s son (my cousin), like many young Christian men who grow up in this environment and spend their summers as camp counselors, wanted to be a youth or music minister.  It was his father’s unhappy job to point out the fact that youth and music ministers have a pretty short self-life, since most of the big, ultra-hip churches aren’t interested in hiring 50 year olds to do those jobs.  What my uncle and some other honest folks in this line of work have repeatedly said is that it is possible to have a spiritual life without committing oneself with to the ministry.  And, in fact, I know plenty of former pastors who went into the ministry because they felt compelled to and then burned out hard ten years in only to find that their spiritual lives were improved when they no longer carried the burden of having to be an “example” for their congregations and when they were free to struggle with spirituality far from the judgment of parishioners. I believe that the same is true of the Life of the Mind.

Living in a way that is 100%congruent with one’s intellectual, spiritual, or political ideals is nearly impossible today, as Zuska says, we have to negotiate our boundaries.  When I’m not feeling bitter about the fact that some professor at the business school is kind of a douchebag about the humanities, I’m able to acknowledge that it is possible to live an intellectually and spiritually fulfilling life, even a life that is based on altruism and compassion, with a business degree, but you have to try.  Furthermore, it is possible to life a stultifying and spiritually vacant life based on selfishness and assholery with a graduate degree in the humanities or a degree from seminary.  Pursuing a particular academic path or a particular career does not make you a good person and should never allow you to feel comfortable with your particular place in systems of privilege.  No matter where you are, if you want to live a life of compassion of idealism of fulfillment and of change, you have to really, really try.

Grad School and the Fraud Complex

So, I’ve been going through my RSS reader–which has been filling up due to my being preoccupied with my paying job–and discovered this wonderful pair of posts by Historiann on feeling like a fraud in academia. I think most graduate students are familiar with this particular complex, skulking the hallways expecting to be exposed any day and thrown out of grad school because of something suspicious on your undergraduate (or even high school) transcript, like Jeff Winger of NBC’s Community (ok, I was sort of looking for an excuse to post a picture of Joel McHale. Also, Danny Pudi as Abed. Hi Abed!)

In the first post, Historiann responds to a post by Notorious Ph.D about the gaps in her graduate training that have become painfully immediate and obvious as she writes her second book. It reminds me of that first grad seminar I took when it became clear that most of the people in that class had read Derrida, but I hadn’t read Derrida, and the other students in this class made Derrida sound as he were the most important critic who ever lived and also that I probably should have been reading him back in second grade. Also, Foucault. And I wondered why they had ever let someone with such a third rate undergraduate education into this program, because while I had been reading Gilbert and Gubar at the College for Hirsute Feminists, everyone else had been reading about post-structuralism and semiotics.

Then, you know, I remembered that these were all just books and that I was perfectly capable of checking them out and reading them without any external guidance. And I read me some Derrida and some Foucault and some Marx and other crap and moved on and then realized that most of the people who said they had read Derrida and Foucault and Marx as undergrads had, at best, simply moved their eyes uncomprehendingly from left to right across the page, and I had some satisfying moments in grad seminars in which I was a total asshole and corrected some pretentious douchebags on the definition of “commodity fetishism” and the post-structuralist critique of the Enlightenment. Ah, grad school.

But I digress, the quote I wanted to take from Historiann’s post went as follows:

But, were our graduate programs designed to make us experts in one tiny sub-subfield for the next forty years, or did they aim more broadly to teach us how to teach ourselves for the rest of our lives? I go with the latter theory of graduate education myself, since most of us find that the shelf life of our specific training is pretty short.

That’s such a beautiful way to look at it. In the process of writing my dissertation, I have had to give myself a crash course in topics that no one in my department really knows anything about, stuff like nineteenth century medical history and the sacred texts of weird religious movements. But that’s knowledge production, I guess, connecting different bits of context and unearthing primary sources that no one has ever talked about before in order to present the world with a new way of looking at something pretty familiar, like the works of Mark Twain. I love my job.