As graduate students, we often complain that the undergraduates we help to teach focus too much on the results (grades) and not enough on the process (sharing ideas). Yet in our own studies we commit the same error, fretting so much about whether we will get tenure-track positions and move out of our dingy studio apartments, that our journeys through graduate school become oppressive.
Such thinking is unhealthy, and it is completely antithetical to fostering the kind of scholarship that makes graduate programs worthwhile in the first place.
How many of us glimpsed a frightening vision of our future selves in Daniel Clowes's Boomerang Generation cover of The New Yorker, featuring a recent graduate who hangs his Ph.D. on the wall of his childhood bedroom, as mother and father look on with pity and dismay? How many of us took a dark delight in forwarding the Internet cartoon of a young professor begging her eager student to avoid graduate school, which, she warned, would leave her romantically repellent and financially ruined?
Like my peers, I have engaged in such gallows humour as a way to inoculate myself against the harsh realities of a lousy job market. I hear of peers far more qualified than I am floating in the purgatory of lectureships and job talks. I cast a disparaging eye on all those healthy looking senior professors who don't appear to be retiring anytime soon. I worry—when I should be writing.
What gets lost in all of that anxiety is the joy and value of learning for the sake of learning. How can we maintain an environment conducive to the spread of new ideas when we are so singularly obsessed with attaining future employment? How many advisers have dissuaded their students from pursuing research topics they felt would not make them strong job candidates?
I assume that part of the reason tenured professors give such advice is because they know how competitive the job market can be, and they do not want their students to unknowingly hinder their future prospects. But that kind of guidance is not necessarily in our best interest.
Exploring ideas that make those who are more advanced in their careers a little bit nervous is one of the best ways to push scholarship into new territory. But only the boldest of graduate students will defy outright an adviser who is preaching a more cautious approach. How many exciting (and job-getting) dissertations have been scrapped because graduate students have been too frightened to ignore that kind of safe advice, which itself has been partially motivated by fear?
I am told that universities have overproduced Ph.D.'s in some fields, and that administrators and tenured professors should share the blame for promoting such an atmosphere of dread. But department heads and advisers suffer as well under such a market-obsessed academic environment. I can only imagine the tremendous pressure advisers must feel as they shepherd their lambs toward those first elusive jobs. Department heads, too, presumably lose some sleep over how their placement records will influence their program budgets and ranking. The idea of rating college programs like pageant contestants is also a troubling one, and leads to the kinds of anxieties that I am describing.
Yes, it is important to know how cutthroat things will be for young scholars. We are active and willing participants in the marketplace of ideas, and markets breed competition. I will not stick my head in the sand.
But I am doing my best to focus on the tasks at hand: writing a strong dissertation that will hopefully advance new knowledge and spark debate, being a good teacher, learning from other scholars, and participating in the academic community.
I try to remember that before graduate school, I was lifting boxes for $10 an hour, and that Howard Zinn drove a forklift full time to support his family while pursuing his Ph.D. I have been fortunate enough to have had two institutions invest nearly half a million dollars in my education (when one considers fellowships, tuition waivers, travel grants, and health insurance). In a sense, these universities have also been financing the writing of my first book, and I doubt many first-time authors outside of the academy can claim to have received such a healthy advance. I have been able to live and study in New York, Paris, and Los Angeles.
But those are just the perks. More important, I have argued, written, read, presented, and had my logic torn to shreds. I have had the thrill of helping undergraduates realize that there is more to history than the textbook narratives they had in high school. I have lectured, been tested, changed peoples' minds, dealt with grade challenges (and students who seemed to lose a different grandmother every week), traveled, been published, seen my peers promote discussion in scholarly forums and national newspapers, learned when to play by the rules and when to push against them, formed lasting professional and personal bonds, and had my head filled with new ideas along the way. I have become a scholar.
Will my first job be a tenure-track position at a major research institution in a vibrant city? I cannot know. Will I be employed in some capacity in which I get to apply my learning and training to help others? I am certain that I will. Neither result can diminish the joys that I have already experienced as a student and as a teacher.
