Slate published a piece today titled (or perhaps
subtitled?): "Getting a literature Ph.D will turn you into anemotional trainwreck, not a professor." The author speaks from
experience. There are several poignant moments, like this:
"So you won’t get a tenure-track job. Why should that stop you? You can cradle your new knowledge close, and just go do something else. Great—are you ready to withstand the open scorn of everyone you know? During graduate school, you will be broken down and reconfigured in the image of the academy. By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why."
And this:
"When this happens to you—after you have mailed, at your own expense, the required 60-page dossiers to satellite campuses of Midwestern or Southern universities of which you have never heard; after you endure a deafening silence from most of these institutions but then receive hope in the form of a paltry few conference interviews; after you fork out $1,000 to spend your Christmas amid thousands of your competitors at the Modern Language Association convention; after said convention, where you endure tribunal-style interviews in hotel suites where you are often made to perch in your ill-fitting suit on the edge of a bed; after, perhaps, being invited to a callback interview at a remote Midwestern or Southern campus where your entire person will be judged on the basis of two meals and one presentation; after, at the end of all this, they give the job to an inside candidate they were planning to hire all along—when this happens, and it will, it will feel as if the entirety of your human self has been rejected because you are no good at whatever branch of literature-ruining you have chosen."
And it is published at a time when I find myself in a nice,
stable job that pays well and bores me to tears, prevents me from spending time
with my children during between-semester and summer breaks, and makes me spend
40-hours a week in an office in front of a computer. 6 hours every week
or two, I train people on how to use software.
It is published when I find myself stretching tentative fingers in the direction of academia after a 2-year, unwilling hiatus. (I did actually publish an article during this time, but they solicited me.) I am beginning to send out abstracts, and beginning to apply for a handful of jobs. This article mirrors the horror out of which I have been crawling over the last 10 months. And it makes me fear being beaten down again.
But what I want to ask now, is what I will tell to my children. I have been an idealist and a dreamer. I have believed that what we want to accomplish, we should be able to accomplish with education. My goal was to do what I loved--to have a job that allowed me to talk about books, just as the author says (though I do think I escaped literary theory relatively unscathed). And now I find myself (as I was telling my son about an hour before reading this) in a situation in which I have no one with whom to talk about books (though I do write about them, and have a friend or two who follow) It didn't seem like a huge ambition. It seemed imminently attainable. And now I find myself in an office, reading, learning, and repeating motions on Microsoft Office. It's a good job, but it's not for me.
So what do I tell my children? I want to tell them to aim high--that they can do anything the put their minds to. But I don't want to set them up for failure. I think about the things I love--the things that lied to me. Like the Muppets. Remember "Rainbow Connection"? Remember "Bein' Green"? They taught us that if we were just the people we were meant to be, everything would turn out right. If I finally give up believing that, I will not know who I am, so I guess I'm not there yet. But is it right to build up hope in the next generation? I have a son who will be entering college. He's not really thinking about what he wants to do, but he has dangerous liberal arts tendencies, as I like to say. But to him, and to my daughters, do I say what I want to believe, but which has not at all been fulfilled in my life?
Or do I tell them to pick something safe--something that they can bear--something that will pay the bills--and move through life like everyone else?
