Thomas Benton has published another one of his thought-provoking columns in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. This time it’s about “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind.'”
He’s writing, as he often does, about the cruel bait-and-switch that happens when professors encourage people to go to graduate school because it’s the embodiment of a fabled dream.
[Professors who still bleat on about “the life of mind”] absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, “there are no guarantees.” But that phrase suggests there’s only a chance you won’t get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.
Some professors tell students to go to graduate school “only if you can’t imagine doing anything else.” But they usually are saying that to students who have been inside an educational institution for their entire lives. They simply do not know what else is out there. They know how to navigate school, and they think they know what it is like to be a professor. …
Graduate school may be about the “disinterested pursuit of learning” for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.
I think he’s right that the myth of the life of the mind is held up as a Good to which the best and brightest are called, while they stand little real chance of gaining entry to the profession as, well, professionals.
I don’t agree, however, that professors and departments and disciplines are, as a whole, being duplicitous and self-serving. I think many professors and departments and disciplines are, in fact, trying to communicate clearly with their students about their very real chances. But it’s not working. Why? Here are just a few reasons
Location, location, location
Benton makes the point that professors are talking to people who have spent their whole lives in school, so asking them to imagine something else is pretty difficult. But, by and large, professors and administrators have spent their whole lives, their whole careers, and their whole identities in school and academia. They’ve got very little experience, if any, outside the confines of academe, so asking them to give students a real, balanced, contextual sense of their chances is kind of crazy. How would they know how it compares? Why should we expect them to?
It really was different in their day.
In his review of Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas, DeanDad highlights some salient facts:
From 1945 to 1975, the number of undergraduate students in the US went up 500 percent, but the number of graduate students went up 900 percent. Since then, growth of undergrads has slowed dramatically, but graduate students just keep increasing. Menand pointed out that from 1989 to 1996, the number of graduate students in most liberal arts disciplines increased steadily, even as the number of undergrads nationally declined every year. As he correctly put it, by the 90’s “the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life.”
They’ve largely been inside this phenomenon, and their perspective is focused on a very small handful of students, maybe one or two of whom defend in any given year and go out on the job market. They’re wrapped up in these students as individuals — as they should be — and that means any explanations they have of why people do or don’t get jobs is going to be wrapped up in their students as individuals — not as individuals confronting a system.
Personal appeals to logic don’t work.
When there’s something you really want to do, when it’s held up as a Good, and when the person telling you not to do it is in fact embodying the thing itself, how likely are you to heed the “do as I say not as I do?”
My graduate director spent half of our PhD acceptance letters telling us in no uncertain terms what the reality of the job market was — and not a one of us listened. Because we would be different. Because she was just being mean and raining on our parade. Because we were special. We’d gotten this far, hadn’t we?
There’s a fundamental mismatch.
Whether or not it’s encouraged as such, people go to graduate school because they believe in the life of the mind — it was what they encountered in undergrad, it’s what they fell in love with, all that reading and thinking and talking and talking and talking. Graduate school largely continues that fable — and then we spit people out onto the cold shores of The Profession, only the very edges of which they would have — could have — seen from graduate school. (And let’s leave the professionalization discussion for another day.)
Telling young people applying to graduate school how bad the profession is — how hard to get into, how different from their dreams — is the equivalent of suddenly talking about purple pigeons. It’s just not the same conversation, because the reality of that is the better part of a decade away for people for whom five years is a full quarter of their lives.
Higher ed is not just torturing people for the sake of torturing people.
We can argue the merits of any individual member of the academy until the cows come home, but I continue to believe that most people are good-hearted and doing their best. I don’t think anyone is trying to exploit anyone.
However, the financial realities of higher education have changed, and those financial realities have meant it needs lots of cheap teachers in order to get butts in seats and therefore income into the school. Yes, that means adjuncts, but it also means graduate students, who are both cheap teachers AND butts in seats. Two birds, one stone.
It’s not that universities are trying to exploit people (although they are, in fact, exploiting people). They’re trying to survive. Badly, yes. With a lot of whistling past the graveyard. But trying.
My point, and I do have one
In short, I don’t think individual professors talking to individual students is the answer. The problem is structural, and the answer, too, needs to be structural — but the structures are in crisis, and the solutions only make them more so.
I don’t have an answer, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “just tell them it sucks!” So let me ask you: What would have dissuaded you? What would have changed your mind about going to graduate school — not “knowing then what you know now,” but then, in all of your youth and hunger?
I don’t think there’s anything anyone could’ve said within the timespan of my Master’s studies that could’ve dissuaded me from going for a PhD.
The groundwork for that decision was laid during my life. My father’s in academia, my mother has always felt slightly ‘less than’ because she wasn’t. I never had a healthy model of all the different kinds of jobs you could pursue, or that it’s possible to be en entrepreneur.
Apart from that, I always had the impression that learning and thinking were the only things I was good at, which is something I thought was only suitable for academia. (On top of that, I grew up with the idea that social behaviour and politics were something I sucked at, so that would rule out any non-academic work.)
I’m slowly realising what my strengths are, what my interests are, and that they’re wholly incompatible with my current job. Even if my boss was more supportive, the whole subject of my research is only vaguely interesting to me. I’d be enthralled if I read about it in a popular scientific magazine, but I’m not too hip on doing the research myself. Not a detail person.
And on top of that, my boss has been wholly UNsupportive of me, my working style and my needs for information. This makes an otherwise not-very-stimulating job into an excruciatingly frustrating one, although it’s slowly getting better emotion-wise now I see that I’m not actually SUPPOSED to be able to work at the top of my game in these circumstances.
But if anyone had told me three years ago I’d go through this deep unhappiness, I wouldn’t have believed it. And I would’ve signed up anyway. So I guess you’re right – starting was inevitable.
Not sure if finishing is equally inevitable, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing either. 🙂
I don’t think anything would have dissuaded me, and I try to keep that in mind when advising students who want to go to graduate school. I don’t tell them “don’t” – on the principle that, if they’re anything like me, they’ll respond by doing the opposite – but rather I insist they not go directly from undergrad. Do something else first, prove to yourself you can do something else, find out about different styles of work, get a life for a while, and then come back if you want to. Worst case scenario, you’ll be a better grad student when you come back. I took one year between undergrad and master’s and then four years between master’s and PhD, and now that I’m ready to leave academe, I’m VERY glad I have at least a distant memory of life “on the outside” to call on. But I do think if I had never taken the PhD route, I’d be at the same place, midlife-crisis-wise, except I’d be wanting IN instead of wanting OUT. I’d always have wondered about the PhD path not taken. I take that impulse seriously when I see it in my students.
Thoroughly Educated, I take your point, and I think you’re right that many people won’t be dissuaded. Does encouraging them to do something else for a few years work? Do they take that break from school, and if they do, how does it affect their choices?
I loved graduate school, and I wish more people could have that experience without the assumption that the professoriate is the next obvious step, especially when fewer and fewer people get to live the dream.
Maartje, what an interesting journey! So much of graduate school really is a crucible in which to learn about yourself.
Julie, I have seem some success with encouraging students to do something else for a while, though I don’t have a lot of long-term data on outcomes. One year, a student I would have judged “Most Likely To Be Sucked Directly Into A PhD Program” took my advice and went to teach high school for a couple of years. He then entered a Master’s program, had a good time, and decided that was enough, at least for the moment. Which reminds me: in the years that I taught at a good but fairly no-name regional college, I often urged students who were dead-set on grad school to try a terminal MA first, on the theory that a name-brand MA would up their chances of getting into a first-rate PhD program if they found they absolutely couldn’t live without the PhD. I have mixed feelings about that advice, because it’s usually not possible to get funding for the MA, but on balance I think I’m in favor of the stand-alone MA as a way of lowering the opportunity cost of checking out the grad school experience.