Graduate School

I write this knowing fully that some readers of this blog are either in grad school or once were. I welcome their views in the comments or even in their own post. These are merely my thoughts. Lately I've been reading some blogs authored by current grad students and recent faculty, and it's set me to ruminating upon matters from my past. I'm also not saying that I regret going to graduate school - I love the people and experiences I had there. Also, this is long, even for me.

When I finished my masters and left graduate school, I assured all that one day I'd return. I just needed to get out of school for a while I said, get some piece of mind, recharge my batteries etc. etc. etc. Truth is - and I've probably never voiced this before - I've been certain for a while now that the odds are stacked against me ever returning. And not simply because it's a huge sacrifice of time and effort for a relatively small reward - it's because I no longer want to do it. I don't want to be a professor. I don't want to deal with research, entitled students, and the political game that is tenure/co-existing within a department. I have some good friends who are/will be professors and I had some professors as a student that I genuinely liked. By and large, however, most professors I've encountered as both student and staff are people I don't want to emulate. I think that generally the process - years of school, years of toil and sleep deprivation, years of immersion in such a small area, and years of jumping through hoops - do something to a person. And it's not a positive transformation.

I remember well those meetings with my advisor during my senior year of "college." We spoke often about such matters, as I did "work" for the man 5 hours a week and was one of his prized pupils. I sat rapt as he assured me that I'd be a huge success in graduate school - but I'd have to "play the game." He was talking politics (he mistakenly believed I was as conservative as he) but the advice proved to be of great use anyway. Better yet, he was certain that by the time I finished my Ph.D all those boomers (like himself) would be retiring and the job waters would part like the academy's own Red Sea. The professorial life looked like a sweet gig to me: sleep in (because of course I'd only teach in the afternoon, when young minds are most moldable and my own mental chisel was at its sharpest), work far fewer than 8 hours in a day, look all dapper in my tweed jacket, and for a few hours a day be the idol of my pupils. For as we all know, if a professor has but a vague shadow of an actual personality the students will eat out his/her hands.

This naive conception of academia is an example of John Larson's "teddy bear's picnic." Everyone is happy and life is good. Just as countless Greek ships set sail in the name of Helen, I have little doubt that many grad school dreams launch with images of cluttered offices and knit ties. I knew, as I sit there in that particular cluttered office, that if Grad school was the path to this lifestyle, I'd gladly sign up. Yes, there were other factors. Most pressing, I'd soon be graduating and really didn't have a plan B. School was a known - I was in my 16th year of it and to that point I'd skated successfully through it all. And it's not like it was an outlandish decision - I'd always enjoyed history and been told by "experts" that I was skilled in its application. Far be it for me to claim that I know why others go in search of a Ph.D, but I bet many of them shared some of my motivations.

I now know that most of what Dr. _____ told me those years ago is crap. It wasn't that he'd purposely misled me; no, it was more that he was out of touch with his field. He spoke to me from the shelter of tenure, seniority, and comfort. He'd put in his time 25 years ago, I'll give him that, teaching high school during the day and writing at night. But the grand exodus of boomers from the academy was as useful a prediction as the rapture. Keep saying it, it just might happen ... but don't hold your breath. I used to think that this was simply because there was no reason for a professor to retire. The job isn't stressful and it isn't strenuous. But then I came to understand academia just a bit more clearly, and realized that this was but part of the sobering reality. Counterintuitive as it may seem, in the humanities especially, a professor's retirement does not necessarily equal a professor being replaced. Often the position of retired faculty is simply eliminated. Sometimes the classes remained, but instead of being covered by a tenure-track position, they are handled by the veritable revolving army of adjuncts, a rent-a-faculty with newly minted diplomas and a (understandable) desire to not starve to death.

There's little doubt that John Larson himself had told my advisor the very same thing as he prepared to embark on his job search - and he dutifully passed it on to me. But currently we're in a recession and even if we concede that boomers would have retired, their 401k's have been devastated by the current recession. Oh, and speaking of Mr. Recession, he's a common straw man schools will use as an excuse to "streamline," "cut the fat," "reorganize," or any other euphemism that makes the person who keeps their livelihood feel better about removing someone elses.

I'm not the first, best-informed, or most eloquent person to ruminate upon the damage "contingent" faculty practices have done to the academic job market. I do know that at my own undergraduate alma mater our Professor of Gilded Age/Progressive Era passed away back when I was still a student, but he's never been replaced, his classes are still taught by temporary one year professors who have no idea if they'll be brought back again - no matter how much they might want it. In grad school I have seen it with my own eyes. I TA'ed for tenured professors who did little more than show up for lecture, even going so far as to "selectively" appear for their 2 office hours/week. I saw friends exploited as cheap labor; teaching survey classes, writing lectures, grading exams, and assigning papers, while trying to make progress on their dissertation. I've also seen those friends lose their funding after an arbitrary # of school years, even if they've been a good soldier at the expense of their own work. I then saw them drive an hour, maybe 2, to fill temporary faculty positions - all while still working on that dissertation. Most frustratingly, I've had friends apply to dozens, maybe hundreds, of jobs without getting so much of a whiff. I've had friends serve admirably as one-year faculty and then told their services were no longer needed.

Research universities benefit from graduate students. As I've said, they're cheap labor. And frankly, unless it's a program obsessed with its "image," schools will often accept an irresponsible # of Ph.D students for that very reason. They'll give them a tuition waiver or maybe a stipend, and recoup their investment several fold in undergrad tuition and savings on faculty salaries. They'll assure these students, especially at the beginning, that they can compete with graduates from anywhere. They'll guarantee to you that they'll be there as your champion in the job search. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But with recommendation inflation and an overall shitty job market, what can they do, really? The names of the people you know are important, but so, sadly, is the name that appears on the diploma.

Regardless, even with fantastic rates of attrition, schools still churn out an irresponsible # of Ph.D's. The overall effect is similar to a pileup on the freeway: new graduates emerge every year, applying to jobs while graduates from previous years who are either unemployed/underemployed/unhappily employed also apply. A compounding effect. What this means is that after many years devoted to graduate study, an applicant emerges into a market where they have to be thrilled to get any job. Often the jobs they do get are ephemeral, there one moment and gone the next. Most in the profession do it at the beginning nowadays, hopping from academic lily pad to lily pad, uprooting lives, even families to move where the job is. Some do it longer than others, some are lucky enough to land a tenure-track appointment, some grow to accept a position that they would have scoffed at when they first entered a graduate program, and some leave the profession altogether. Few come out the other end with their idealism intact.

Let's look at the even the best case scenario: a tenure track position. Even when this goal is reached happiness isn't assured. From a psychological standpoint it's suprising. Assuming you finish your Ph.D at a relatively young 27, you've already devoted more than 20 years of schooling to reach this point. Your pay pales in comparison to other professionals (doctors, attorneys) and that cushy professorial lifestyle is less-cushy than you'd envisioned, especially a you try to meet publisher/editor demands. There's frustration with location (very rarely do you get to "pick" your location), frustration with students, frustration with other faculty, frustration with administration, frustration with legislators (in the case of publics), frustration with the tenure process, frustration with journal editors, in short, frustration.

A few weeks ago one of our student workers asked for (or I volunteered, details are sketchy) my views on graduate school. And really, this discussion is the germ of this massive post. She was looking at English programs (English/History double major at my employer), and I couldn't come to recommend it. Unless she was utterly consumed with her subject and absolutely obssessed with teaching/researching it on the college level, I saw no reason to endorse graduate school. At the moment it was harrowing for me and I really did feel bad that I was so negative. However, in the end I was honest, and that's probably worth more than hollow advice coming from behind a cluttered desk. You can see my reasons above.