When my colleagues at a Midwestern liberal-arts college reminisce about their graduate training, they recall the excitement of applying critical theories to texts and speak of the passionate interest their mentors took in their development. I’m not sure whether they completed their work at universities in Shangri-La, Xanadu, or Utopia, but they claim they’d return to graduate life in a heartbeat, if only they could.
Because my memories of graduate life run a bit differently, I feel no such desire. Oh, I enjoyed meeting people from other cultures and exploring literature in new ways, but I recall graduate life at “Elite National University” as a joyless grind of teaching composition without proper training and humoring professors who believed the world owed them more glory than they had received.
Such an environment might have provided a bonding experience, if only graduate students at Elite National U. had had some rewarding social life, but I recall hardly anything like that. For example, my current colleagues claim that in their graduate days they played soccer against teams from other graduate departments, but at Elite National University, I never saw any of my fellow graduate students play sports or even exercise. We had access to athletic facilities, but the idea of encountering our freshmen composition students in the weight room or the pool or, worse, in the shower kept us hidden in our cubbyhole offices, grading and grumbling.
To be blunt, I recall graduate training as something to escape.
If I alone hated graduate life at Elite National U., I might cast myself as a hopeless malcontent, but my fellow graduate students there shared my opinion. One of the few students who could afford a car would, on occasion, invite others to drive far away from the campus, park in a vacant area, make fun of professors, and practice primal screaming. I suspect that was a fine bonding experience, but I can’t say. Whenever the call to drive and scream arose, I declined it reluctantly because it always came when I had to finish a paper or study for an exam.
Although I missed out on the primal-scream sessions, I did get in on a dreary discussion one day in the graduate-student lounge. Another student, a bold and extroverted young man I’ll call “Harry,” asked several of us, “What are we getting out of grad school?”
None of us had a satisfying answer. The students present had all come to Elite National U. because they liked to read, but hardly anyone at the university showed any love for literature. The professors modeled a lifestyle in which literature was a battlefield on which to prove themselves, build their reputations, and denounce others as fools. That lifestyle didn’t look attractive, but even if it had, joining it seemed impossible. Our colleagues who finished their degrees had to cobble together a living by teaching sections of composition at multiple institutions.
On that day in the graduate-student lounge, several people mentioned the possibility of dropping out.
Harry said, “We need to talk to someone.”
Everyone knew the person Harry had in mind: “Dr. Rosicky.”
Dr. Rosicky stood out at Elite National U. because he was one of the few graduate professors who ran engaging classes and forgave students their missteps. He even gave second chances. Once, when he told the class that he wanted us to take risks and write something truly original in a short paper, I drew parallels between Hamlet and the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. After he read my paper, Dr. Rosicky allowed me to rewrite it because he informed me that the first version was “too original,” which was more polite than saying “inane.”
Better yet, in class discussions, Dr. Rosicky hinted at what other graduate students and I suspected: Literary theories were nonsense. I don’t mean that he adopted one theory as the only true way to understand all literature and life, and denounced all the others; I mean he seemed to view all literary methodologies, even the ones he used in his books, as, at best, a game and, at worst, a silly waste of time.
Outside the classroom, Dr. Rosicky provided valuable assistance on occasion. Once when a graduate student had to move into a new apartment over a long weekend, Dr. Rosicky loaned her his minivan to transport her belongings. Several of us pitched in to help her move, even though her worldly belongings amounted to so little that they barely filled the van.
Furthermore, Dr. Rosicky sometimes gave career advice that went beyond immediate academic concerns. Once he went so far as to say that children create an incredible challenge to academic careers, and he hinted that he wished he’d never had any.
Although he confessed to not wanting to be a parent, the graduate students ironically referred to Dr. Rosicky as “Dad.”
So Dad was the best professor to approach with our doubts about graduate school.
That afternoon in his seminar, we didn’t even have to raise the subject. Sensing that his students felt grumpy, Dad asked, “What’s the matter today?”
“We were talking before class,” Harry said. “We came to Elite National U. to have fun with literature, but teaching composition is miserable, and graduate classes are drudgery. Even if we complete the training, we see how the job market works, and so we know we probably won’t get full-time jobs in the profession. Some of us are thinking about dropping out. Why should we stay?”
I don’t know what my colleagues and I expected. Harry had spoken the truth, and Dad could hardly rebuild the myth by saying, “The job market will get better soon,” or “If you’re good enough, a job will appear with your name on it.”
Whatever we expected, Dad did not comfort us. He snapped, “I can’t believe that you’re complaining about your situation.” He rebuked us with a story about an acquaintance of his from high school who never went to college but got a job working on an assembly line. The factory had just shut down, and the worker had nothing. “You are certainly in a better situation than that guy. You have possibilities. He doesn’t.”
Although I understood that he wanted us to appreciate our good fortune, I found Dad’s response typical of the dichotomous thought that pervaded the graduate English program at ENU: Becoming a professor was good, and any other path in life was ridiculous.
The dichotomy itself was ridiculous, the very sort of thinking I’d learned to undo as an undergraduate in Philosophy 101. Did contrasting graduate English students with an unemployed assembly-line worker address the issues we raised? No.
Did the contrast actually prove anything? No.
Granted that the assembly-line worker might be worse off than we were, did that mean graduate students in English had nothing to complain about? No. Did it mean that we couldn’t question and doubt our own endeavors? Of course not.
Could graduate students do anything for the unemployed worker? Our mastering literary theory wouldn’t give that person a job, but might it improve that worker’s life in some way? No.
I admire and appreciate the professor called Dad, and I want to be fair to him. He was used to helping individual graduate students solve specific, well-defined problems, and that day when he asked what was wrong, he probably expected us to present a difficulty with the registration process or the foreign-language requirements or something similar.
Dad certainly couldn’t have expected Harry to say, in essence, “Justify your own profession, now that we’ve seen through the bait-and-switch your employer is running.” To his credit, all Dad did was evade the issues, which perhaps reflected his kindness. Standard operating procedure at Elite National dictated that anyone who questioned anything about the profession deserved to be denounced. In fact, in the shame culture of Elite National U., professors and some graduate students seemed obligated to humiliate anyone who disagreed with them.
I should also add that we had misinterpreted Dad’s behavior toward us. Surprising a person with a request to justify his professional choices may seem outrageous, but Dad had shown kindness toward graduate students, had hinted that literary theory was nonsense, and had even hinted at regretting having children. Harry and the others and I misinterpreted these things as signs that we could ask him anything.
So Dad couldn’t give us what we wanted. Several graduate students did drop out of Elite National U.'s program, but I decided instead to view graduate school as a seven-or-more-year hazing that I had to endure, with no guarantee the club would admit me at the end. I just had to find a tactic to remain sane.
(Editor’s Note: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 of this series are online.)