In my post on the humanities grad school trap, I included links to Benton's article on not encouraging undergraduates to go to graduate school. Benton has written a second article now discussing some of the flaws in arguments written by respondents to his original article:
"Just Don't Go, Part 2"
Benton mentions some of the criticisms he received in response to his original column:
There is one criticism about my last column that resonates with me strongly: that turning students away from graduate school is abandoning the values of the scholarly life. One letter writer lamented that my soul had died. Others — usually older, tenured faculty members — said that I had overlooked the value of learning for its own sake, underestimated the joys of the "life of the mind," and placed too much emphasis on making a living.
This kind of opposition just seems somewhat close-minded; at what point did "the life of the mind" become limited to only the academy? I know plenty of non-academics--doctors, lawyers, office workers, librarians, teachers, editors, museum curators, actors, musicians--who can also be said to live this "life of the mind." The university in no way has exclusive rights to "learning for its own sake." Furthermore, anyone who thinks that "making a living" shouldn't be a priority is either independently wealthy, dependent on others for income, naive, and/or ignorant of current events.
Benton also writes about the heady rhetoric that circulates among those of us in the system:
It is striking how often the word "love" is used by defenders of the current job system in academe; they would never use the word in their serious work. There is a double-consciousness about graduate school in the humanities. We often pretend that it is a continuation of the undergraduate, liberal-arts experience when it is really — like law school and medical school — professional training for one kind of position: a research professor at a university, and, failing that, a teacher at a liberal-arts college.
All of which comes back to the point: What good is professional training for a job that you are not likely to get, after a decade of discipline, debt, and deferred opportunity?
Alexa asked me one day in class why I continue to adjunct despite the lack of compensation. I believe I answered, "because I love teaching." This is not an untrue statement, obviously, but the notion of continuing in a career merely as a labor of love does, as Benton notes, rings somewhat of naivete. I believe I've said before on this blog that I discovered the profession of college teaching as a high school sophomore, having done a career research project for six weeks in an English class. I fell in love with the idea of being able to teach college students about literature and writing while researching a specialized topic of my choice, and being a college student and then a graduate student only deepened that passion. I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to follow my heart (ambition?), as it were, for so many years--not everyone finds a career that they really love, and not everyone gets to indulge in that beloved profession, and I have somehow managed to accomplish both. But the unendingly frustrating aspect of many adjunct professors' situations is that we have found something we love to do, we're devoted to it, but our love is apparently . . . unrequited. And unfortunately, academia is not quite the romantic comedy we might hope for: it's rare that the resolution for adjuncts works out so that a more permanent relationship, one that is fulfilling and mutually respectful, emerges out of all the obstacles, misunderstandings, and anxieties. I think one of the other challenges is that once we have found this professional true love, we have to wonder whether any other career can be quite as satisfying. Yes, the analogies comparing the grad student or PhD and the university with the romantic couple abound, but perhaps the adhesive binding these concepts together most strongly is the idealism that can so easily turn into confusion, desperation, and crushing disappointment.
Benton brings up a separate dysfunction of academic humanities:
Graduate schools are not much help either. They play obfuscatory games with their placement records and rarely give students a realistic sense of what it is like being in graduate school — how it's not all about the "life of the mind" as two years gradually turns into a decade of contracting horizons and growing desperation.
This is a point that more prospective graduate students need to understand. I've actually protested against my own graduate department's obnoxious practice of misrepresenting its own job placement record. On its Web site, the department states that I have obtained a position at Trinity University, but they do not clarify that this is a temporary, adjunct job; any casual observer would more than likely assume mine was a tenure-track position. Several others on the list who are given as having been hired at institutions of varying caliber are also actually adjuncts, or else they are postdoctoral fellows or visiting professors (more coveted yet still temporary positions). A few years back, an acquaintance of mine who was hired as a tutor in the university writing center was labeled simply as being placed at Harvard. Granted, some of the people on the list did get tenure-track jobs at the listed locations, and I certainly believe that the other names on the list are more than worthy of tenure-track positions at some of the most prestigious institutions, yet to imply that all of us actually obtained said positions is simply deceptive and unethical.
Benton may be somewhat idealistic himself in believing that only those who do not plan on becoming professors should be pursuing humanities graduate degrees; it's difficult to imagine the cycle reversing itself. But at the very least, if I had been able to give myself advice from the perspective I now have, I would advocate Alexandra Lord's sage recommendations about the need for graduate students to prepare themselves for Plan B while in grad school--taking on internships, community service, non-academic jobs, etc. as a way of giving them the training and tools that will pave the way for other types of careers. As I've said several times in class, this type of planning should be going on at the undergraduate level as well: universities that encourage students to focus solely on their studies and do not facilitate meaningful extracurricular/extramural activities that will provide students with necessary real-life work experience and perhaps even mentorship are doing their students a real disservice. But until institutions of higher education step up, it will remain up to co-eds to take initiative and seek out these opportunities as a way of avoiding future limitations.
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