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.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Ouch ...
... The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'. (hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Students in graduate school (in English departments, for example) have always been particularly naive about the facts of life, which can be summarized as follows by using a very small English department as an example: A dozen tenured professors in a typical, financially strapped university (where no new fulltime hiring is on the horizon) serve as mentors/teachers for dozens of graduate students each year who will eventually either leave the campus in hopes of becoming a tenure-track professor elsewhere (even though very few jobs are available anywhere in the country) or suffer indefinitely as poorly paid parttime adjuncts (without any hope of fulltime employment anywhere in academia); the dozen tenured professors (mentioned above) are, by the way, fully aware of the fact that the chances for jobs for their students are slim or nonexistent, yet these tenured professors continue to delude the naive students by suggesting to them that futures in academia are possible (but the dirty secret remains that, barring retirement or death, none of these tenured professors will budge from their positions, so no positions will be open for the foreseeable future). And here is the ugly part of the reality: the graduate programs continue to seek, enroll, and graduate students because--and here is the real issue--the students are the only reason that the graduate programs (and tenured professors) exist. So, multiply the foregoing example by hundreds of times (to include all universities), and you can see how the vicious cycle perpetuates itself.
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