I mentioned in class earlier this week that one of the reasons that I have been an adjunct for the past several years is that I have wanted to be a college professor of English since I was thirteen years old and I love teaching and research. For many of us, the less tangible rewards of academia can offset the lack of monetary or other compensation, at least for a while (for some, this lasts longer than it does for others, obviously): working with young, bright adults; watching that lightbulb go off above their heads; seeing their writing or other skills improve; gathering and sharing new knowledge; contributing to an ongoing academic discussion.
However, one of the other reasons so many people end up adjuncting for so little compensation for so many years has to do with the culture cultivated in many (most?) humanities graduate school programs, especially of the doctorate-granting variety, that the tenure track is the only profession worth pursuing--that to follow a different route (into, say, nonprofit organizations, teaching outside the academy, public policy, government, or even the corporation) constitutes failure, which is of course anathema to those many overachiever types who end up gaining admission to graduate programs and to those who have sacrificed the extensive time, energy, and money required to engage in graduate study. This assessment of failure is obviously unfair, and in the current financial crisis and with the recent unemployment figures, some have come to realize that getting any kind of job--academic or nonacademic with even the most minimal income--might just constitute "success"! But I cannot tell you how many colleagues I have known--talented teachers, gifted researchers--who have nearly lost themselves in bouts of severe depression when that all-important tenure-track job did not materialize because they ended up internalizing the crass myth that academia is a meritocracy: they believed, mistakenly, that it wasn't the system that was broken but rather their own qualifications that were lacking. I say "colleagues" as if I were not part of that group, but I would be lying if I did not--though I will refrain from recounting that process of grief and self-disparagement here. :)
To give another example of this weird academic mindset about what constitutes failure, several years ago, I hosted a workshop for current graduate students who were considering careers beyond the ivory tower. I invited alumni from my graduate department to speak about why and how they took up nonacademic career opportunities (in university development [money matters], publishing, etc.), and on the way up in the elevator, one of my speakers encountered a former professor of hers who asked why she was in the building. She explained about the workshop, and the professor's reply was, "I'd like to know who's attending that kind of event because I certainly wouldn't want to waste my time working with them." Many of these types of professors are unaware of--or indifferent to--the practical difficulties facing graduate students in the humanities. They often feel that it's the academic way or no way, so students and alumni of such programs should do whatever they have to do and for however long they have to do it in order to achieve that often-unreachable goal of the tenure-track job--even if that means teaching four or five courses per semester at various institutions for less than minimum wage and no health care or retirement benefits for ten or twenty years. These faculty exhibit a form of academic tunnel-vision: they often fail to see that some students pursue a graduate degree in the humanities for some of the same reasons that they pursue majors in the humanities as undergraduates: the love of learning, the desire to acquire critical thinking skills that may in fact be transferable to other types of job situations, the motivation to become a better writer and a more engaged reader, the opportunity to pursue an in-depth, independent research project under the auspices of mentors in the field, etc. (go liberal education! see Newman, Fish, Kronman). But given this pervasive attitude that not getting--or, even worse, not pursuing (gasp!)--a tenure-track academic career constitutes failure, it's not hard to understand why so many humanties graduate students and alumni end up feeling like there is no valuable, viable alternative to teaching and researching within the confines of the university--and they are often led to believe, either by this environment or by their own insecurities, that they are actually incapable of doing anything else. And so they fall into the trap of exploitative employment, unemployment, financial insecurity, and emotional turmoil that is often the aftermath of an "unsuccessful" job hunt in the academic humanities.
Of course, I sometimes wonder if some undergraduates majoring in the humanities are sometimes led to believe that graduate school is the inevitable trajectory after college . . .
I do not necessarily regret my own choice of pursuing a PhD because it has given me the chance to do what I've wanted to do for ten years, and I am grateful for the various experiences I would not have had the opportunity to enjoy if I had not gone to graduate school. But I will admit that I sometimes wonder: if I had known about the sometimes poisonous, unhealthy environment of graduate programs plus my current 80+ hour work week, low pay, and inability to afford seeing a doctor, would I have followed the same route? Or would my romanticism about the profession still have won out in the end?
Ultimately, I think students who are considering graduate study in the humanities need to be better prepared for (and thoroughly impressed with) what might be in store. These two articles by "Thomas H. Benton" (William Pannapacker) in The Chronicle have generated immense discussion on various message boards and listservs since their publication. These two articles certainly provide a realistic assessment of the situation, and the moral seems to be caveat studentor (OK, that's not real Latin, but the Latin word for "student" isn't quite as concise, so that's my lame way of being cute/clever):
"So You Want to Go to Grad School?"
"Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go"
I read the article "So You Want to Go to Grad School?" by Thomas H. Benton and thought it was very clever. If you major in humanities, you don't necessarily have to go to grad school and become a professor. But that also brings up the question of what would you do instead? What in the world does a humanities major bring a person? A humanities major is similar to an art major in that only a few select people actually make money from what they learned in college.
ReplyDeleteI think Benton makes a valid point when he writes that a lot of students continue on to grad school for a lack of anything better to do. If the economy is bad and you can't find a job, why not wait to start working, go to grad school, and put off the inevitable? The truth is once you get out of grad school all you will have is a useless degree and lots of debt. Even if one goes to graduate school not considering becoming a professor, there are still problems in finding a high enough paying job to compensate for all the schooling.
In the article Benton gives the impression that going to grad school to further a humanities major is not smart, but one should consider that going on to graduate school in the hopes of being any kind of professor is probably not a very smart idea. Benton makes it seem like only humanities professors face the problems he described. It seems to me that the whole economy is the cause of this graduate school problem. There simply aren’t enough jobs to go around, which leads to desperation and adjunct teaching with very low pay and no benefits. People can’t make enough money without a graduate degree, but once it’s acquired it is still basically useless. The whole system needs to be fixed, not just graduate school for humanities.