"Why did you come to graduate school?"
The question came from "Dr. Jason," my graduate adviser at "Elite National University." He and I were sitting in his office, getting to know one another at the beginning of my graduate work in English. Dr. Jason intended only to make small talk, but everyone in the profession should contemplate his question. If only about half the people who begin a graduate program in the humanities actually complete a Ph.D., and only a small portion of those get tenure-track jobs, and only a few of those jobs match the research focus of doctoral training, why do people go to graduate school?
I can't answer for people who pursue advanced studies in other disciplines or even for everyone who seeks a Ph.D. in English, but I can explain why I became a graduate student.
First of all, I plead ignorance. When Dr. Jason asked his question, I could've replied, "Why wouldn't I come to grad school?" I didn't say that, but I might as well have, because I was that naïve. Wise people may explore the downside of earning multiple degrees in the humanities before they apply for admission, but I didn't, and I've no good excuse.
I also have no one to blame. When I asked my undergraduate professors at "Flyover College" to write recommendations for me, not a one of them mentioned the potential pitfalls, but why would they? They had gone to graduate school themselves and come out winners, so my plan matched their own career choices.
Perhaps my professors didn't warn me, however, because they knew they would be wasting their time. I felt so excited about graduate school that I wouldn't have taken negative advice seriously, even if my adviser had insisted that I read Thomas H. Benton's "The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind.'" When it came to advanced studies, I lived the life of the imagination.
Because I majored in English, not chemistry or accounting, I didn't base decisions on facts. Instead, I constructed the world in terms of narrative. My life was a story, and I played the central role. The story began at college, where I wasn't the top English major, but I did well enough in my courses and published several pieces in the campus literary magazine. In my imagination, those minor achievements foreshadowed academic triumph. If the chair of the English department had handed me reports by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council of Graduate Schools, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching about the difficulties of finding a tenure-track position, I would have interpreted those challenges as a holy grail worthy of a hero's quest.
Next, I must confess something more ridiculous. I went to graduate school because I wanted a romance that paralleled that of Elizabeth and Darcy in a nerdy sort of way. Alas, my undergraduate attempts at romance fell short of the Jane Austen ideal.
One interesting young woman, a history major named "Harriet," saw the world in terms of facts. I told her that to me, history was a bunch of fascinating stories. Harriet said, "Stories are a waste of time."
"Maureen," a music major, wanted to live life like one big musical comedy. I'm tone-deaf.
"Colleen," a chemistry major, asked me out for dinner. During the meal we established that she found literature boring and hated my favorite movies. Colleen could name no favorite movies of her own because she "didn't keep track of such stuff," but she did follow professional wrestling. We never had a second date.
Clearly I needed to find someone who appreciated stories, and since she hadn't appeared at Flyover College, where would an English major look next? In graduate classrooms, libraries, and lounges, of course.
Now for a third confession. Although I wanted to do something mature like form a permanent loving relationship, I also went to graduate school because I had a childish desire to put off starting a career.
That desire came from stories I heard about people who had actually entered the working world. While a friend without a college degree became a groundskeeper, another friend who had earned a B.A. in English got a similar position with a lawn-care service—a contrast that suggested I might have wasted my time in college. Other English majors I knew took jobs as clerks of various sorts. Those jobs weren't awful by any means, but they weren't terribly different from jobs I'd had in college and in high school—again suggesting I'd blundered by choosing English. What's more, those jobs hardly compared with the excitement of reading about Ahab's obsession with Moby Dick. By immersing myself in graduate studies, I could fantasize about a great career for years without having to hunt one down.
Although I wanted to live in the realm of the imagination and deny facts, that other world intruded from time to time. The most benevolent of those intrusions came from an accounting major whom I'll call "Bitzer." While I viewed my life as an exciting narrative unfolding daily, Bitzer envisioned his as a well-thought-out business plan. One day when we were chatting in our dorm, Bitzer asked me the obvious question: "What are you going to do with a major in English?"
"I'll go to grad school and see what happens," I told him.
Bitzer said, "You ought to go to the placement office and see if they can save your butt."
The placement office at Flyover had a poor reputation, but I realized that Bitzer's version of the world might have some validity, so I attended a talk by a visiting speaker who helped people in the humanities start careers outside the nonprofit sector.
"Don't market yourself as an English or art or music major," he advised the five or six students who showed up. "Think of yourself as a toolbox full of skills, and figure out which employers need your skills."
I liked the image of the toolbox because it made me think of Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen when he cobbles together junk to turn his boat into a torpedo. But when I checked my own toolbox, I didn't know what to do with the contents. I could interpret literature. I could do research. I could write. In fact, I'd sent out pieces of writing to journals and received more than 50 rejection slips. One of them was personalized and handwritten, which a professor told me was an honor to receive. Somehow, though, I couldn't imagine applying for a job and saying, "I'm good at rejection."
Graduate school seemed like the only place for my qualifications.
On the day that Dr. Jason asked why I had come to graduate school, however, I could hardly reply, "My toolbox is empty," or "I'm still single," or "I want to avoid adulthood," so I said simply, "I like to read."
Dr. Jason frowned: "You may have come here for the wrong reason."
I intuited that the topic of motivation for graduate studies at Elite National U. worked like an old-fashioned understanding between gentlemen: If you had to ask for details, you didn't belong in the club. Nonetheless, it was my turn to talk, so I asked, "What would be the right reason?"
Dr. Jason drew himself up and said, "To become a literary professional." He told me a story about a time during his graduate-school days when a paper he had written received applause from his fellow students in a seminar. He went on to publish it.
Dr. Jason's tale differed so much from my own shallow motivations that I needed some time to absorb it, but eventually I understood that my graduate professors' focus on publication resembled Ahab's fixation on the white whale. Nothing else mattered. If someone had stated that as a simple fact when I was an undergraduate, I would have laughed it off as absurd, but now that I was in graduate school, Dr. Jason wisely spoke the language an English major would understand. He told me a story to help me match my narrative to that of graduate school.
Today, when I work with my own advisees, I encourage them to take courses that include practical writing so that they have more options than I did, but if they want to go to graduate school, I ask them what they imagine it will be like. They invariably say that advanced studies will be like a series of the best seminars they've had as undergraduates, only a lot more fun. I assure them that I hope they have a great time, but I also inform them that there's more to graduate school than just reading and writing. To illustrate that, I tell them my stories.
(Editor's Note: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 of this series are online.)
Comments
1. cmcclain - April 27, 2010 at 07:04 am
An often overlooked difference between the sciences and the humanities...
Postgraduate education in the sciences teaches you to discover and create. Postgraduate education in the humanities teaches you to appreciate other people's discoveries and creations. You don't get to become the next James Joyce; you have to keep writing more papers about Joyce and his works. It reminds me of when I first came across the term "philosophology" in Robert Pirsig's novels.
If you want to write compelling literature, you don't go to graduate school. You get a job, interact with people, and seek out kernels of surreality among otherwise mundane events. Then, if you happen to read something wonderful, you may be inspired to write something wonderful. An academic career will require you to merely write about what you've read.
2. tappat - April 27, 2010 at 07:57 am
It seems like, when you were young, you wanted to exercise your imagination, cultivate a romantic sense of existence, and read, read, read, rather than figure out how to exploit people, by giving them less than they give or by giving as little as you can get away with giving. Sounds like a terrific society you lived in, to permit (perhaps even encourage?) such a life. It sounds as if you are not in such a society anymore, and that rather than bemoan the social change and imagine how to effect further social change, you wish you had not taken advantage of what sounds like a glorious life when you could. By acting in a different way back then, you seem to feel, you could be . . . now . . . what? Financially rich? Go exploit people right now, and you stand a good chance of being richer than you are now. Writing such columns won't do that -- so, being financially rich can't be it. Hmmmm.
3. exilium - April 27, 2010 at 08:31 am
I'm glad that Adams finally realizes that the only academic "bait and switch" is his own, that he set the bait for himself and has only himself to blame for his own disappointments.
4. totoro - April 27, 2010 at 08:32 am
I don't get it either. The writer is a professor at a liberal arts college. It sounds like he succeeded in his dream. What exactly is he trying to say in these articles? That he was clueless and naive but somehow it all worked out? I think that is the case for most of us, whatever our field.
5. velvis - April 27, 2010 at 09:49 am
@ Totoro - I agree...but apparently the small liberal arts college isn't what he wants.
@ cmcclain - You're right. My MEd was mainly about other people's work. Like a 2 year extension on my undergrad or the undergrad classes I didn't take but wanted too.
My PhD is turning out to be totally different. I'm being told,If you want to stand on other people's shoulders that's fine, if you want to create, awesome go for it.
Many of my classmates are choosing to appreciate. I'm choosing to create.
6. amnirov - April 27, 2010 at 11:37 am
ARRGH. Please stop writing. I'm so sick of it, and yet I am obsessively to drawn to reading this claptrap in the dim hopes that something, anything, will emerge from the morass of whining, self-obessessed nonsense. An autopsy of graduate school is unnecessary when the pathologist is a faculty member at some university. What we need is a story of believable failure, not of a success that comes, truth be told, for no reason whatsoever. What we have heard over and over again in this series is that the author loves reading... I don't even believe that much. I see no evidence for it. Not a single hint that literature holds anything special in his heart. It's all tell and no show. To me, these blogs are merely the annals of inertia, the ongoing story of a career that took shape and ended up where it was naturally inclined, like water running downhill to pool. What do I want to see? The person who really did love literature, who really tried to become a professional critic, and who did not make it. No one in their mind is going to believe a cautionary tale penned by a lottery winner.
7. dhume - April 27, 2010 at 11:49 am
I agree with commenters 2 through 6. Also, I seem to remember that a long time ago, when this series began, it was supposed to have something to do with the need to improve graduate students' preparation for teaching composition. That obviously got lost under all the pettiness and self-pity somewhere along the way. However, it's a subject that's quite deserving of treatment by an author who can actually stay focused on it.
8. douglashusca - April 27, 2010 at 11:57 am
cmcclain, I'm afraid you don't have much of a clue about the humanities. Criticism is a creative act of discovery, and like scientific inquiry can either be done well or poorly.
9. mrheiner2647 - April 27, 2010 at 01:07 pm
I confess that this installment is the first I have read. It is interesting what a person's perspective does to the assessment of this article/narrative/self-exploration or whatever the author actually intends. I have spent 15 years in university career services and have directed 3 different college career centers. I changed often in my continued quest to improve things. What I have found in my own work and thousands of hours of sessions with people of all ages (I take private clients as well) is that the fundamental problem, which is also what I am "hearing" in this authors writing, is that people are not taught how to make a decision.
Any simply career decision-making model can be used to assess whether someone actually followed a thought out process. When people do not, at some point they face a career crisis of "choice". They realize within themselves that they didn't really study it out and therefore feel like they may have missed something. Often, however, they still don't know how to guide themselves through the process. As one comment above suggested, many people simply find a way to come to terms with where they are at.
I intend to read the remainder of these essays about "bait and switch" but will from the eyes of assessing this persons ability to follow a decision-making model/process. Hopefully, at the very least, the author is learning to teach others how to follow a decision-making process. It doesn't assure that things will work out wonderfully, but those that follow the process are able to repeat the process when they find that, after "arriving" at whatever they thought they wanted to do, it isn't all they had hoped for (family changes, personal values, the people they work with, all those factors play in the career satisfaction). Unlike those that are "discovered" and handed a job by "uncle joe" and therefore never actually "choose", those that followed a choice process can in fact repeat the process to get out of where they are at. (Many career crisis are actually people simply realizing they are stuck and don't know how to change).
Sorry for the long comment but this author got me to hop on my soap box....
10. amnirov - April 27, 2010 at 01:08 pm
Sorry douglashusca, but it really isn't. Literary criticism is simply nowhere near as useful as inventing new biological weapons or explosives. No article on Joyce is ever going to have the creative power as the guidance equations used for steering intercontinental ballistic missiles.
11. realtyannie - April 27, 2010 at 05:56 pm
Um, Adams is not unhappy in his life. He (She?) knows his career has turned out remarkably well given that he was like the dozens, scores, hundreds of other students he has seen plug away for years, only to end up in debt and nearly unemployable. There but for the grace of God. . . .
Adams, like Benton, is simply trying to warn foolish youth that the investment will not, in most cases, pay off. Yes, it's their own fault if they go to grad school. Yes, it's their own fault if they drop out or fail to find a job or any sense of achievement or adult success. Fine! He's trying to get the message through a few thick skulls before they sign on for the ride. He thinks the trend toward increasing graduate enrollments should be discouraged.
That's all. Why do you take it so personally?
12. jnicotra - April 27, 2010 at 06:39 pm
If nothing else, this is certainly an interesting study in seething ressentiment.
13. l_rau - April 27, 2010 at 07:18 pm
This chills me to the bone.
14. l_rau - April 27, 2010 at 07:20 pm
And amnirov, take a chill pill. This author has heart and you know it.
15. johntoradze - April 27, 2010 at 07:56 pm
The author appears to be a masochist based on the commentary(s). :-)
The main thing I have absorbed from these columns is that the mystery author has a sense of responsibility to his students to tell them the truth. He recognizes that his situation as a "winner" in the professorial rat-race is unsual. I get the impression that he wants to do his best to disabuse others of the idea that they are likely to win.
In this respect, oddly, this liberal arts English major displays a level of (perhaps intuitive) numeracy out of keeping with his calling. It is an odd thing, but so many in the sciences seem allergic to probability and statistics, even if they are conversant in calculus. And here is this andiron banging out his weird tale of successful warning.
I must applaud you, thou nameless warrior of the life-of-the-mind, for at least you are a puzzle.
16. anonscribe - April 27, 2010 at 09:35 pm
"No one in their mind is going to believe a cautionary tale penned by a lottery winner." there it is. don't take a chill pill amnirov. you're tops.
most people fail, don't try it, bla bla bla. most, meaning more than 50%, of people with ph.d.'s in english end up teaching English with tenure. the statistics for "most" college English instructors being adjuncts includes about 50 billion CC instructors with M.A.'s and a good number of folks who a perpetual ABD. such is life. how about we give a job to someone who needs it, like the person who isn't tenured at a liberal arts college? i mean, seriously, talk about structural inequality: even the articles about why you SHOULDN'T go to grad school are penned by tenured professors!
17. boiler - April 28, 2010 at 12:02 am
I seem to remember that when these columns started, they were supposed to be a sort of expose of deceptive practices in English graduate education -- the whole "bait and switch" thing. Over time, they've morphed into a meandering memoir of a defensive and self-important person's grad school years. With this column, which includes details about the author's undergraduate love life, they seem to have departed from any attempt at criticism at all. All this will surely be useful material for his therapist someday, but isn't it time to put this series to bed?
18. seamustheclassicist - April 28, 2010 at 02:57 am
I have to laugh at these naysayers, remember the university is the Arts and Sciences everything else is an add on to gain profit: engineering basics can be fitted into two years with the rest learned in industry, same goes for business majors. One goes into higher education to learn wisdom, wisdom from Professors and generations past. Civilization wasn't built by number crunchers (consider that such glorified occupations today were in ages past the province of slaves)it was built by the liberal arts and it's precursors (hence the term liberal meaning free.)
I see some people mention feats of engineering, like intercontinental missiles, the person who mentioned that is clearly ignorant fo the larger point they were making about technological process and it's effects on humanity. Power and violence, a larger club or sharper sword, as if the ability to incinerate whole cities is an admirable pursuit. Science and technology gave us the nuclear age, now the West worries about the proliferation of Nuclear arms among states like Iran and North Korea, but why? Trying to stop them from acquiring arms is like trying to stop the spread of Iron technology or gunpowder. Even with the West's great weapons and tech, the military is basically impotent against an enemy trusting the age old way of surviving: kinship and use of fecundity, a belief in an after life reward for the worthy, and a vicious fanatical devotion to their god. Remember Archemedies even with all his advanced technological defenses of Syracuse was killed by a Roman sword thrust while scribbling in the dirt.
No, the Humanities are important, and the University is their proper domain.
19. historyphd - April 28, 2010 at 02:50 pm
After I read these I think: if you don't like it, get out of academia and get "a real job."
20. marka - April 28, 2010 at 04:22 pm
Hmm ... if folks don't like this article & series ... you have a very simple & pleasing option - don't read it/them anymore, and stop posting here, unless you really have something to say other than you don't like it. There are only a couple of insightful posts here -- most are, ironically, carping & whining about what they claim is someone else carping & whining ...
There are many other online articles, and other opportunities to comment, so I'm at a loss why some folks feel the need to repeatedly bash this author, this article, and this series. I somehow expected more out of a forum addressed to academics - but perhaps the truth is that some academics really don't have anything better to do ...
For me, this rambling narrative on 'bait & switch' is part of a story, and who else should write about this -- an embittered 'loser'? I can just see the same folks carping @ such a 'loser' writing 'sour grapes' ... ;-)
On to other articles & other fora ...
Cheers, you all.
21. amnirov - April 28, 2010 at 05:13 pm
Conversely, if people don't want snarky comments then they shouldn't publish self-indulgent whinging nonsense.
22. qzxcvbnm - April 28, 2010 at 08:10 pm
x
23. qzxcvbnm - April 28, 2010 at 08:19 pm
It's predictable that most of the negative comments here are left by effete academic snobs. No doubt that many of them went to grad school for the same reasons as the author and had similar experiences. It's easy to recognize the comments left by people with non-academic backgrounds. They are invariably the most insightful (and are usually better written).
Aside from serving as a warning to undergrads, these columns affirm that those of us who did not take the academic route have made a valid choice. Things are much more cut-and-dry in industry (thankfully), but we can all tell similar stories. The grass always seems greener on the other side.
My compliments to Mr. Adams. This series is fun to read and I hope it continues. I would like to hear about his experiences getting his first job, how he got tenure, and what (and how much) he had to publish to get there (and how he feels about it now).
24. boiler - April 29, 2010 at 09:10 am
in response to marka (#20): The point of a comment section in a publication like this is to encourage comments, both positive and negative. If someone writes something that you think is factually wrong, you can correct it. If someone writes something with an opinion you don't like, you can dispute it. And, in this case, if someone is claiming that the academic world is hypocritical and unfair, and I think he's just projecting his own personal issues onto the profession around him, I can say so. Should I stop reading his stuff? Probably -- it would lower my own blood pressure. But if I do read it, and I have a strong opinion about it, why shouldn't I say so? Isn't that what this section is for?
25. newmath - April 29, 2010 at 01:38 pm
"Postgraduate education in the sciences teaches you to discover and create. Postgraduate education in the humanities teaches you to appreciate other people's discoveries and creations."
I disagree with #1. For example, a graduate student in pure mathematics is taught mostly to appreciate (understand) other people's discoveries and creations. Only when the student embraces the PhD thesis is he/she expected to create new mathematics. Of course, this is where probably most graduate students fail in obtaining their PhD, and with good reason.
26. gadget - April 29, 2010 at 02:54 pm
Right now I am teaching freshmen how to write and in the summer I will be teaching sophomores research design and statistics. I doubt that any of my students will end up as English majors, much less professors, or psychology graduate students. But what they learn in my classes, and that of my coleagues, is immensely important for my students in their present and future roles as parents, workers, and citizens of our planet. Were my (inchoate) ideas different in graduate school? Yes, but so. Not everyone in the trenches is unhappy that our grad school dreams were abandoned.
27. bad_wulf - May 05, 2010 at 07:48 am
At least the title of this article series is correct, it is a bait 'n switch. We tell our students that they will have a career in higher academics when we know that this will probably not be the case. Do not get me wrong: I love what I do for a living. I teach at a smaller school that values multi-tasking; therefore, I teach in two different subjects for two departments, and at present carry nearly a full load in both because of budget cuts. However, this is the price I pay to continue doing what I love.
Yet, I can certainly understand the concerns that this article highlights. Our industry is over-glutted and could stand some trimming down. Well more than 50% of graduate students will not be academics, and yet we try to keep them focused on a degree in higher education. In our small, out of the way school 300 bona fide PhD students applied for a single job opening. We ignore, or avoid the subject of alternative choices that would be both a benefit to society, and the student. Unfortunately, if we start churning out fewer students with advanced degrees heading off for another advanced degree or a post-doc we do not get to teach as many graduate level courses. That would mean teaching fewer graduate level courses, and gasp, teaching more undergraduate courses. And the administration does not help with it's over-emphasis on publication and the invention of knowledge.