Is The PhD Trap a Trap? (II)
The Thomas Benton article on the PhD trap that I cited last week makes a good case that young people enter graduate programs, especially in the humanities, blind to the terrible job prospects that await them in the university world and then are socialized to cope poorly with this situation once they’re finished. But he falls into a sort of grad student trap of his own in his depiction of the life of, well, the grad student. In fact, the trap he describes, the dire life-botch of setting out for a Ph.D. and then for an academic job, is only a trap (or only necessarily a trap) when viewed through a sort of grad student logic and pathos. That is, he doesn’t seem to acknowledge the existence of any freestanding pleasures of pursuing a humanities doctorate that might do some, if not all (but maybe all!), of the work of justifying that loopy decision. He reinforces the strange and unfortunate phenomenon by which the people least capable of seeing what is cool and special and potentially ecstatically fun about being a grad student are grad students. I saw this first hand (like really first-hand, as in, in the mirror). Benton talks about how grad students are socialized in various maladaptive ways. But he doesn’t talk about maybe the most directly harmful socialization grad students undergo, which, in fact, the general thrust of his several articles serves to reinforce: You enter a Ph.D. program and breathe in the supposition that your life is supposed to suck.
Maybe it’s the assortment of cautionary cases wandering the halls: the 13th-year ABD whose name nobody who’s still in the department has ever known, the guy who can’t nail down a dissertation prospectus after seventeen tries and now no longer makes eye contact or washes his hair, the guy who unexpectedly lands a dream job before finishing writing and then can’t finish because of the teaching load and then in desperation tries to present for defense the twenty pages of notes he transcribed over the summer, which just gets him failed, and then fired. You look at these people and think, there but for the grace of God, and also but for the endless fun-free days I intend to commit to this Sisyphean slog, go I. Whatever it is, people who think they should be actively trying to be unhappy are probably more easily convinced that they have no choice but to push grimly towards a single tolerable option, which is a tenure-track job and which, by the way, exists only in myth (but keep on plugging!). Maybe if grad students found it easier to see what probably most other people could see – that, even in conditions of relative penury, spending your days in reading and seminar discussions and teaching and occasional writing in a subject you have semi-officially declared yourself to be really interested in, as well as in bunches of casual conversations on elevated topics and elevated conversations on delightfully weightless topics, not to mention just living and working near/at a college, surrounded by college kids (many of whom are under the convenient misimpression that you’re really smart and knowledgeable) is actually pretty great – they wouldn’t view their grad school years as some woeful offense against the rest of their lives that can only be redeemed by a tenure-track job at a university, any university, anywhere. (That’s a funny thing that I’m tempted to attribute to this anhedonic ideology: the total persnicketiness about what category of employment one will entertain, combined with the quasi-religious acquiescence in the geographical location of one’s eventual job; it’s like a priestly calling to the already-miserable: Just because you’re not in grad school anymore, that doesn’t mean you have to stop hating your life!)
Like I said, I entered grad school determined to suffer for the sin of entering grad school. I had a lot less fun than I should have, and I did a much poorer job than I should have of realizing I was having fun when I was. I wasn’t alone. We were a virtual cult of suppressed enjoyment. Luckily, I also have this strong urge to rectify my mistakes, for the benefit of others, through systematic instruction and advice. It turns out I’m very good at teaching things that, when I first tried them myself, I was very bad at. Two examples of this jump to mind – surfing and Habermas. I’m pretty sure there are others.
Benton offers some white-knuckled suggestions in “this earlier article”:http://chronicle.com/article/If-You-Must-Go-to-Grad-School/45269/, but they pertain to applying to, not abiding within, the humanities Ph.D. program. My few suggestions pertain mainly to living in a grad program happily enough that you don’t have to entertain “thoughts of suicide” (another touch of real-life drama from Benton) in the event that you can’t land that job at the University of Alaska, Nome.
View the Ph.D. as an end in itself: I was going to say “Focus on the journey rather than the destination,” but a Kantian phrase seemed more appropriate than a greeting card, given the topic. View the idea of an academic job as just one of several options that await when you finish your dissertation, or when you leave “voluntarily” after all your professors start whistling and looking at the ceiling when they pass you in the hall. Deemphasizing the brass academic ring is hard once you enter, because the departmental geist wants to constantly draw you into gloomy speculation about jobs, the shitty job market, the lack of jobs, the fact that departments and universities aren’t replacing dying faculty or else are replacing them with robots and call centers, etc. But I think the grim job-talk has special purchase in an atmosphere where people are already unhappy. I wasn’t even sure I wanted an academic job when I started, but then giving in to talk of the job market started to seem like the most reliable path to my overriding goal of being miserable. Benton creates great drama out of the idea that a Ph.D on the resume of a private-sector job-hunter is only slightly less damaging than a line noting you have a criminal record as a workplace murderer. I have no statistics on this, but the people I know from my field (political philosophy) who left academia have found good jobs in things like banking, consulting, and finance, not to mention the foundation and non-profit world. A couple went straight from grad school to top law schools and from there to the typical six-figure associates jobs. Having a humanities Ph.D. certainly doesn’t hurt if you need to go with such an expedient. At the least, it will help you kill on those sentence correction parts of the GMAT.
Try not to take too long: What I’m saying overall is that getting a Ph.D. but not an academic job is perfectly consistent with non-desperation in job and life after grad school. Commenting on my earlier post, Kristoffer Sargent notes “For a dude, being poor through your late twenties, when you are at the peak of sexual desirability to both nubile floozies and prowling cougars — these are high costs indeed.” So obviously you’d want to minimize those costs by not taking fifteen years to write your dissertation. (There was something else I thought of writing about the opportunity costs of not spending your twenties on a university campus, but discretion got the best of me. It’s a tradeoff is all I’ll say.) A corollary of this is: Be willing to cut and run. If you’re mindful of these opportunity costs, and the dissertation is looking like an endless task, quit. This will leave you with an M.A. and not a Ph.D. on your resume, which is either a net benefit, if you believe Benton, or distinction a surprising number of people will find irrelevant or unnoticeable.
Take an occasional moment to note that your “job” for the time being is to read books, some of them “great,” and talk about them: Self explanatory.
Take up a dissertation topic might get you sent to cool places for research, language-learning: I had friends in Florence, Rome, and Paris while I was in a medium-sized city in northern Bavaria. I don’t want to complain. I’m just saying it could have been better.
Socialize outside of your department: Pity parties are less self-sustaining when everyone is complaining about different things.
Socialize outside of the grad school: A corollary of the saying “Misery loves company” is “Misery hates unmiserable company,” and also, “Misery is less fond of company that is less miserable.” A few years into grad school and my social circle was composed of law students, undergrads, townies, the odd slumming professor, and Ph.D. students from my own and other departments. The obligation to be miserable was starting feel less binding.
Don’t turn up your nose at the undergraduates: As a humanities grad student, you may be entertaining critical cultural theories about commodities (or, anyway, modes of commodification) and gender and power and the like, phenomena or “practices” that you are supposed to vigilantly oppose (or at least be pervasively “suspicious of”) but that seem like the very building blocks of undergraduate life. Or you might just be a snob or something. Whatever it is, get over yourself about the undergrads. Go to undergrad bars. Go out with undergrads. I entered grad school convinced that Duke undergrads were spoiled rich kids and listened to crappy music. So a lot of them were, and did, but a lot of them were at least as natively smart as my grad school colleagues, and almost all were markedly less miserable. I started grad school wringing my hands about should I date undergrads blah blah blah, and then I married a (fantastic) woman I met when my dissertation was already finished…when she was a senior. So maybe I’m not the right person to ask about the Ph.D. as a path to mere personal enrichment. It does feel kind of like cheating, now that I think about it.
A corollary to your last three points: Don’t wait until you’re 30 to start. And if, stupidly, you do wait until you’re 30, don’t choose a school in a college town where no one else your age lives within 50 miles.
Not that I’m speaking from experience, or anything.
— Grunthos · Feb 16, 02:33 AM · #
I agree that you need to view grad school as an end-in-itself. Grad students have a chance to explore all sorts of interesting topics that the pressures of career and family won’t permit in later life. But don’t expect anyone else to understand or care about it.
Moreover, you’re assuming that grad students have lots of money. If you want to hit the town or enjoy the company of non-grad students, be prepared to shell out some money. If you are forced to go to Europe for research purposes, you will experience some real hardship. Exchange rates in Europe are better now, but when I went over five years ago, I experienced real hardship (unclean room, inadequate food, unable to wash clothes as often as I should have, etc.). My friends and family kept writing with ideas of where I could go on “vacation.”
— Boz · Feb 16, 03:25 AM · #
Given my reputation around here, I am loath to praise anything posted, for fear of damning it with my appreciation, but I can’t help myself. This seems exactly right.
Also: it has never been the case that you can’t hedge your bets, that you can’t go to grad and prepare for the future, that your heart can’t be in the thick of romantic longing while your head keeps an eye on your checkbook. My program, which is indeed technically in the humanities, has had a 100% hire rate for the last 5 years. That doesn’t put me in some sort of rarefied air. It does suggest that there are more ways to move forward than many suppose.
— Freddie · Feb 16, 04:18 AM · #
Your comments make a lot of sense, particularly the part about seeing grad school as an end in itself (that can be said of a lot of things in life), but I have to question one part of this. You say: “I have no statistics on this, but the people I know from my field (political philosophy) who left academia have found good jobs in things like banking, consulting, and finance, not to mention the foundation and non-profit world. A couple went straight from grad school to top law schools and from there to the typical six-figure associates jobs.”
All that may be true, but did the people who got jobs “in things like banking, consulting, and finance, not to mention the foundation and non-profit world” do so because of their PhD or in spite of it? Also, did they have connections that were more important in the job hunt than their education? While such things don’t destroy the argument for seeking a PhD, they need to be fairly considered in a discussion about the hard facts of employment (which is separate from many issues you discuss here, admittedly). Further, in the case of law (and I’m speaking as someone who is an attorney and did the top law school – highly paid associate thing), I’d suggest to you that unless the people you are talking about received PhDs in fields relevant to their law practice (like scientists who became patent attorneys), their success in law is likely to be an example of success in spite of a PhD. In fact, I can tell you that a lot of legal employers are dubious of people who have PhDs because they aren’t sure if such candidates are serious about sticking with the law, and not many big firms like hiring new associates who are over 30 years old, unless those associates spent some time in a field that helps the firm’s business.
— Mark in Houston · Feb 16, 05:16 AM · #
Also as a top school, biglaw associate, if people have to spend more time billing away their life in six minute increments to pay for debt accrued getting a PhD, it may be worthwhile to think about the tradeoffs.
— jlr · Feb 16, 05:55 AM · #
But nobody— nobody— pays for their own PhD. That’s essential relevant context. You get paid to get the degree. You can talk about opportunity cost if you’d like, but it doesn’t make sense to talk about getting a doctorate as a net financial loser for most people.
— Freddie · Feb 16, 03:39 PM · #
matt
really good points here. as a current (hopefully finishing) phd student in organizational strategy, I can’t relate to all the points of criticism about humanities specifically, but I resonate strongly with your general affirmation of the POTENTIAL personal benefits of getting a phd. many of my colleagues have not found this to be the case, and if you hang around them too much, it can start to shape you as well… but i have had a great time. great friends, new hobbies, learned how to think better, improved at writing, etc etc. not a bad gig for, as freddie points out, a free degree
pb
— peter boumgarden · Feb 16, 03:51 PM · #
I didn’t want too much of my annoyance over the job market to spill out in my initial post, but I’ll say it now—saying that PhDs can go become lawyers at white shoe firms or consultants is as morally serious as saying “let them eat cake.” The supply of 6 figure associate positions is right up there with the supply of tenure track positions in the Humanities.
The basic dilemma for PhDs entering the non-academic workforce is that they are “overqualified” for entry level positions but don’t have the substantive expertise and experience to work at mid-level positions. There are ways to get around this—(unpaid) volunteer work, do an (unpaid) internship, freelance—but there are no guarantees.
I think your basic idea (if you’re smart and hard-working enough to earn a PhD, you’re smart enough to succeed in other fields) isn’t necessarily wrong but you severely underestimate the obstacles in making that transition.
— Boz · Feb 16, 04:17 PM · #
Freddie,
That’s just ignorant. As of 5 years ago (the last time I really checked), there were elite universities that did not offer incoming students a stipend (tuition remission, yes). Most stipends are not adequate to live in a major metropolitan area. You can get by, but try replacing your laptop when it breaks or fixing your car when somebody sideswipes it overnight and drives off. If health problems come up, then you are really up the creek. All this time, according to Matt, you’re supposed to be hitting the town with the undergrads and hanging out with lawyers, presumably associates making six figures.
Check out the Chronicle of Higher Ed forums for some of the angst surrounding money issues for academics.
— Boz · Feb 16, 04:43 PM · #
Boz, I am a subscriber to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and I read the forums often. I am well aware of how little grad students make. I am also aware that there are some very misguided students who try to get a PhD without funding. But they are a tiny minority, in large part because the administrators at the programs they want to attend are usually quite upfront, to their credit, about the fact that getting in without funding is really getting rejected. On the doctoral level, going without funding is not a serious option, not merely because of the finances involved, but because you are not taken seriously as a student by the department. (Non-professional school masters programs exist, to a large extent, to fund the doctoral students.)
More to the point, these people are adults who are entitled to make their own financial decisions, and responsible for making them. The great lie about all of this is that it is some secret, that information about the low wages of being a graduate student and the poor job market is hidden or unavailable. That simply isn’t true. The information is out there, and is brought up again and again and again…. Part of what makes articles like the one in question so frustrating is that every time some professor dreams one up, they act as though they are the first ones to make that point. That’s nonsense. Potential doctoral students are inundated with this information, and rightly so.
I’m a doctoral student; many of my friends are doctoral students. I experience and see the difficulty of living on a small stipend and a part time job every day. But I, like my peers, knew the risks, know the reality of the job market, know the odds, and made a decision. I have no sympathy, none, for a doctoral student who takes all the necessary steps to get admitted but doesn’t do the due diligence of understanding what his or her financial life is going to be like. This isn’t a conspiracy, and the information is readily available. Do your homework before you commit your life to a 5 year (or more) degree.
What I really wonder is, do people give a similarly hard time to people who go off to Hollywood to “make it”? The odds there are much, much lower than they are for doctoral students. Yet, somehow, those people are allowed to make the decision to try anyway without being constantly insulted. And why? Because adults are allowed to make adult choices, even choices that other adults wouldn’t make for themselves. What a country, huh?
— Freddie · Feb 16, 05:04 PM · #
Here’s another hint: go do something else for a while after your undergrad years, preferably in the “real” workaday world where bosses have unreasonable expectations, there’s plenty of office politics, etc. After spending a few years as an Army LT, grad school seemed like a dream.
— Bryan · Feb 16, 07:08 PM · #
All well and good, except your advice is for the single, obligation-free grad student. What if one is married? Worst yet, what if one has children, or must care for parents? There go the summers in Florence and the year abroad in Bavaria, and grad school as leisurely life of the mind, end-in-itself becomes an unsustainable premise when external obligations arise. Do you suggest that grad students avoid such commitments, thereby remaining not-quite-adult during their studies? Or do you think that those who have accepted such obligations have more grounds to grumble
I also second Mark’s question about just how your fellow political theorists wound up in finance and consulting, and whether it was at all on the basis of their PhDs, or because they made some earlier, unrelated decisions to also study economics and befriend useful people.
Freddie: Correct me if I am wrong here, but your first argument seems to be that there are no unfunded PhD students because all the ones who <i>are</i> unfunded knew the score in advance and so are actually unfunded morons rather than unfunded grad students. And your argument against articles like Benton’s is that they are trying to inform and influence the decisions of people who are free to make decisions.
— Rita · Feb 16, 08:00 PM · #
There go the summers in Florence and the year abroad in Bavaria, and grad school as leisurely life of the mind, end-in-itself becomes an unsustainable premise when external obligations arise
But this is no different than any other decisions people make about their lives: decisions are made through an accounting of the various benefits and hindrances that they will bring to the life of the person who is deciding. We call the right to evaluate and make life decisions based on your own personal preferences “being free.” The only difference I can see between someone who leaves a less rewarding, higher paying job for a more rewarding, lower paying job
your first argument seems to be that there are no unfunded PhD students because all the ones who <i>are</i> unfunded knew the score in advance and so are actually unfunded morons rather than unfunded grad students. And your argument against articles like Benton’s is that they are trying to inform and influence the decisions of people who are free to make decisions.
I think this conversation greatly overestimates the number of unfunded doctoral candidates out there, but I’m afraid it really is only an “I think” situation. Look, anyone is free to decide to be an unfunded PhD student. My point is only that focusing on them is a poor way to conduct this conversation because they represent such a small portion of doctoral students.
The information that attending an unfunded PhD program is a poor idea is freely available. The dismal academic job market is freely available information. I don’t begrudge Benton for providing that information, anymore than I begrudge Andrew Delbanco for doing the same. What bothers me is, first, that they have an extraordinarily reductive vision of why one would get a PhD, as Matt Feeney describes; second, that they assume that the people who choose to get a PhD are uninformed; as a corollary to the second, they think that we must be uninformed because they are such rational judges of our choices. It is the condescension, and the weird, palpable resentment towards grad students that lurks beneath the surface, that makes these many stale arguments aggravating. (And they are many. Check out the latest issue of the journal Pedagogy for just a taste.) Surely anyone can understand what it is like to be kissed and slapped, or how it feels to have someone insisting to you that they are arguing in your best interests while their actual argument is deeply insulting to you.
I’m an adult, other PhD students are adults as well, there is a wealth of information available to us, and the fact that Benton et al. find our choices so hard to understand is not proof positive that we must be making those choices in ignorance.
— Freddie · Feb 16, 09:21 PM · #
Ugh. Sorry.
*the only difference I can see between someone who leaves a less rewarding, higher paying job for a more rewarding, lower paying job and someone who leaves a job for a doctoral program is that grad students are the victims of anti-intellectualism and distaste for the academy.
— Freddie · Feb 16, 09:23 PM · #
But this is no different than any other decisions people make about their lives: decisions are made through an accounting of the various benefits and hindrances that they will bring to the life of the person who is deciding.
I’m not disputing the choice involved in marrying, having children, etc. My point is that Matt’s description of grad school (and yours, as I gather from your response) seems to be incompatible with these particular choices. Are marriage and childrearing signs of anti-intellectualism? Should anyone who desires them before the age of 30 (and thus takes the much-disparaged realist position that entails concern with things like employment prospects and the possibility of one day having health insurance for one’s children) simply leave academia because he is clearly not dedicated solely and purely to research?
Still sounds to me as though your grudge against Benton boils down to the tautalogical, “I’m all grown up, and (apologies to Sandra Tsing-Loh) I choose my choice!” Fair enough, but that hardly undermines Benton’s warnings, which are not infringing on your autonomy. (Moreover, Benton likely does not find your choice hard to understand since he claims to have made his for the same idealistic reasons.)
— Rita · Feb 16, 10:07 PM · #
But I haven’t made the choice for idealistic reasons. That, again, is the category error. A good gloss on my exasperation with the constancy of Benton’s line of argument is that so many presuppose that only idealism could lead to the choice that I have made. The argument isn’t “I choose my choice,” the argument is “I was informed when I chose my choice, and Benton et al. assume that I wasn’t, and moreover the reasons I chose my choice are entirely separate from what Benton et al. insist they are.”
— Freddie · Feb 16, 11:03 PM · #
Re: For a dude, being poor through your late twenties, when you are at the peak of sexual desirability to both nubile floozies and prowling cougars — these are high costs indeed.
If the guy is good-looking and not looking for a permanent relationship, who cares if he’s poor?
— Jon · Feb 17, 01:01 AM · #
Rita, I tweeted a fellow TASer: “My model PhD student is basically an intellectually ambitious slacker,” which would make grad school an extended post college caesura, not unlike moving to Brooklyn, which is how I tried to describe it. So, yes, to keep the post (relatively) short I kept certain things implicit. Funded, unmarried, youngish PhD candidates are the ones to whom my 3/4 serious advice applies best (but parts of it apply to most if not all grad students – just because you’re married and have kids, it doesn’t mean you have to let the job-gloom eclipse the good things, and it still doesn’t mean you have to give in to equating “getting-an-academic job” with “having a tolerable life/career.”) One of the frustrating things about the Benton articles is that he does not set out any hierarchy of relative risk/hardship, as if everyone is basically as screwed as a married 42yo with three kids and a sick wife if things don’t go just right. Options diminish, and costs increase, as one deviates from the model. But that is merely to throw us back onto Freddie’s sensible analysis. Even if you don’t have the fine-grained data-picture that Benton wants departments to provide, all you have to do is read the papers, do some rudimentary research, to know that the odds of passing relatively smoothly from year one of the PhD program to year one of the tenure track job, in the most straitened disciplines/fields like English (and political theory and, I hear, Cultural Anthropology), are pretty long. Throwing those dice when you’re a free agent is one thing. Adding dependents should add a considerable degree of gravity and the kind of risk awareness that dispels some of the wishful thinking that kept a lot of us plugging along, even though we knew it was wishful thinking.
The most ridiculous thing I’ve read in this thread equates, however tenuously and rhetorically, PhD students with Marie Antoinette’s poor, as if grad students have fallen into their desperate condition (that is, being grad students) via social-structural forces that have robbed them of options, jobs, and meaningful volition, such that a discussion of their plight obliges one to adopt a “morally serious” tone: [generic Mid-South accent] Well, the Chinese forced the local textile mill to close, my mother who raised me alone since my dad died from textilitis when I was two got real sick and there was no one to take care of my little sister and so I had no choice but to go out looking for PhD programs in Scandinavian literature. By which I mean, among the decisions people across the social landscape face, the one to enter a PhD program in the humanities has to be right up near the top when it come to being an un-compelled, free, downright leisurely decision. Few people have the latitude that prospective academics do to place themselves into such a well-defined matrix of cultural content, immediate economic conditions, and long-term professional prospects.
— Matt Feeney · Feb 17, 01:30 AM · #
Going home with the local talent after three $3 pitchers isn’t exactly what I had in mind. No flawed consumer here.
You see, when I finally accepted the truth that I live and die once then nothing forever, my first thought was shit, that sucks. My next thought was fuck, what am I doing here, then I’m thirsty, then something about Nashville and Artax and fractal boundaries and Caesar and crushed lines of adderall and hot semi-naked chicks with Nelly and a gravel pit and dancing flutes of bubbly Cristal almost spilling on the leathery backseat of my homeboy’s Yukon…
Wait a minute. No, no. Yes! That’s right. Sorry! I got you confused with that time I caught TRL at the tail end of an acid trip. Nothing to do with what we were talking about.
It does get expensive, though, this good life. Decadence kills the wallet before it kills the soul and the liver. Thus an imperative: fill the wallet.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Feb 17, 04:24 AM · #
This is really a very good lesson for those grad students.
— ヤフー被リンク · Feb 17, 01:31 PM · #
Matt,
My rhetoric got a little heated, but all I was trying to get at with the Marie Antoinette comparison is that alternative options for Humanities PhDs without jobs simply aren’t that easy to come by, let alone rarified options like 6 figure associateships and consulting positions. My experience has been that these skills just aren’t as transferable as we’d think (for good and bad reasons).
I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with Freddie that the information about difficulties for Humanities PhDs is out there, but the more pertinent question is whether or not 22 year olds who have been very successful can really evaluate themselves and how successful they will be in grad school, i.e., how much all this bad news applies to them. 22 year old brashness makes this hard enough but when luck is factored in, the judgments are very hard to make. Should somebody know whether or not their advisor will leave, whether a new dean will arrive and rewrite funding rules, whether the other grad students will be interesting and helpful?
— Boz · Feb 17, 06:05 PM · #
Boz, sounds like the goalposts got moved especially capriciously in your case. My sympathies. I’m sure I lucked out in that regard. My advisors and environment were probably steadier than I was. But I don’t see why someone who has put in the mental work of doing a PhD wouldn’t emerge from the experience a better overall employment candidate than he or she was going in. Granted, it wasn’t the economic clusterfuck that it is now, but from what they told me, my friends did better getting into law schools, and were more attractive for their various private sector jobs (jobs that tended to value a sort of generic analysis/writing quotient), because of the intellectual training they’d undergone through five or seven years of intensive reading and then arguing and writing for a highly skeptical audience. And let’s not forget semesters of teaching as training for just holding your shit together and talking in front of groups of people. And whether or not law firms are skeptical of PhDs, as Mark from Houston argues and which I suspect operates in specific but not universal terms, I know from working in the admissions office of Duke law school while I was in the grad school that, for admissions officers looking at piles of apps clustered fairly closely, quantitatively, a PhD stands out.Whether you want to go to law school is a different question, but it’s an example of PhDs focused on the one big thing tending to undervalue themselves for other things. And also tending to overvalue the one big thing. Grad students get glassy-eyed looking at their ReseachU professors’ gigs, but that’s probably not going to be their gig. Their gig, their brass ring, might well, partly or fully, suck.
— Matt Feeney · Feb 18, 07:12 AM · #
But Benton DOES admit that there is something to the “life of the mind.” He just says that most people can’t afford it, and should not pursue it unless they have a steady stream of outside income. All of which seems… true.
Yes, studying can be fun. So can blowing a bunch of lines in a club and driving around in a Porsche. Seriously, you want to talk about chicks? That’s chicks.
But here’s the thing: Most people can’t afford that kind of fun. So they should not engage in it. Maybe anb eight-ball here, or a Monte Carlo SS there. But you can’t go all in.
Same as studying. Go ahead and read all you want. Join a book club. Get a group of really smart guys together and talk about Foucault or Aeschylus or whatever. That’s fine.
But to quit a job that pays $30,000 a year and offers some kind of advancement, in favor or going to grad school and taking out $20,000 a year in loans (even people who have a stipend have to eat) seems pretty indulgent, if what you are doing it for is “fun.”
— Sam M · Feb 21, 09:26 PM · #
Freddie: I was actually under the impression that most people (rightly or wrongly) did have an unfavorable attitude toward would-be actors, so that is not a point for your side.
— James Kabala · Feb 23, 07:31 AM · #
In my observation, for most people a PhD is not simply an end in itself, but a means to an intellectually rewarding career that will provide financial stability and at least a middle class level of sustenance.
It is for these people that Benton’s essay is useful as he warns that this is MUCH harder to obtain than many undergraduates assume. The comments to the article (and my own experience) support this.
But if you are in fact not expecting to get any type of career out of your PhD or are willing to be a “permanent adjunct” teaching 4 courses a semester at minimum wage with no health benefits well after most of your non PhD friends have established stable professional careers, then Benton’s advice does not apply and you can cheerfully go ahead and pursue “the life of the mind.”
— Benny · Feb 26, 03:42 AM · #
There’s inevitably a lot of arguing-past-each-other here, because things like this are as much about where the author is coming from as they are about the words themselves. That said, sure, there’s both structure and agency.
It’s certainly true that a culture of unhappiness is a huge part of what makes some phd students miserable, but “turn your frown upside down!” isn’t always so easy; recognizing the problem isn’t the same as solving it. Individual students can attempt to change their dept’s culture bit by bit, but it’s hard, and harder still to institutionalize. Pure luck—who’s your cohort?—often plays a big role w.r.t. happiness, especially if the department is relatively hands-off.
So, yes: sure, phd students are adults; but it’s also true that, 1, phd programs are often most appealing to those who really just want to stay in college; 2, once within a program, there are very real psych/sociological forces that often make it harder rather than easier to evaluate options clearly; 3, those who have the greatest ability to change this, the senior faculty, have extremely attenuated incentives for so doing (the better their position, the less likely they are to notice the ‘drowning’ grad students, &c.).
It’s the last that is most crucial, and I think the whole point of screeds like Benton’s is to put pressure on departments to change. It was organized pressure from outside the departmental decision-making structures, after all—Leiter’s PGR deserves a lot of credit—that opened up philosophy placement data. It’s going to take similar pressure to work on the structural influences on grad-student misery.
In conclusion, can’t we all just get along?
— x. trapnel · Feb 26, 07:22 PM · #