In a comment the other day on a previous post, I mentioned that doctoral students haven’t the time or energy to acquire the kind of generalist learning that used to go with a Ph.D. in the humanities. The main reason, I said, was that the secondary literature had become so copious that graduate students didn’t have the time to cover broad regions of primary texts.
There are other reasons, too, and one of them I haven’t seen expressed elsewhere, despite the attention the many sorrows of graduate training in the humanities and social sciences have received (such as here). It isn’t really a time issue, though, more a psycho-pedagogical one.
It lies in the fact that graduate students teach most of the service courses, often in just their second year in the program. The burden is not only heavy with work, but heavy with insecurity, and it throws them into a draining schizophrenic academic life. Suddenly, it seems, just 16 months away from being undergraduates themselves sometimes, they have to stand before a class with all the authority that they used to attribute to the teachers who inspired them to further study in the first place. First-year students often make no distinction between the second-year doctoral student at the podium in the 10 a.m. class and the distinguished endowed professor at the podium in the 11am class, and the new teachers have to live up to it. They must compose a syllabus and select readings, set assignments and grade them, deliver presentations to sulky freshmen, and handle complaints.
At the same time, graduate teachers are in the early stages of training, taking seminars and writing papers, pondering a specialty and thinking about an upcoming conference. At this point in their lives, they have absolutely no professional standing, and their professors often (intentionally or not) remind them of their present inconsequence. They know they haven’t read enough to be considered learned, and they have little accomplishment of which to boast.
And yet, they have to sally into that freshman class with all the authority of a sage grade-giver. It’s a strange existence, bouncing from commander to novice and back again every day. Few people can slide from total control to utter subservience with no ripples in their ego.
One way of coping is to hurry up your expertise, to make yourself knowledgeable enough to validate your teaching position. You end up specializing your studies prematurely, focusing on a narrow topic and reading deeply into it. Reading widely takes too long. If you spend a summer reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, you become more literate, but if they aren’t part of your research aims, you’ve lost three months. You need legitimacy fast, and so you go straight to the secondary literature in a small area.
