Getting a Literature Ph.D. Will Make You Into a Horrible Person

An anonymous reader writes "An assistant professor at Ohio State University who recently earned her Ph.D. in literature writes a warning in Slate for others following the same path. She says, 'I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct. After four years of trying, I've finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job—and if you go to graduate school, neither will you. ... Don't misunderstand me. There is unquantifiable intellectual reward from the exploration of scholarly problems and the expansion of every discipline—yes, even the literary ones, and even if that means doing bat-s**t analysis like using the rule of "false elimination" to determine that Josef K. is simultaneously guilty and not guilty in The Trial. But there is one sort of reward you will never get: monetary compensation from a stable, non-penurious position at a decent university. ... 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. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.) ... In the place of actual jobs are adjunct positions: benefit-free, office-free academic servitude in which you will earn $18,000 a year for the rest of your life."

Comments

Re:This is a warning many need to hear

[moeinvt]

" we can easily afford a basic income, and challenges to stimulate individuals"

Who the hell is "we"? Society? The productive people IN society who do the innovation and perform the real work of providing valuable goods and services? These people should sacrifice the fruits of their labor so that others can "study what they want", regardless of how useful/useless the results of their studies might be?

People who want to study useless $H!T like art and literature should do so on their own dime and make sure they have a plan to earn a basic income of their own.

Wait

[argStyopa]

Here is THAT PhD's OPENING paragraph to her article:
Who wouldn't want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired? Such is the enviable life of the tenured college literature professor, and all you have to do to get it is earn a Ph.D. So perhaps you, literature lover, are considering pursuing this path.

So let me see if I understand this - you didn't want a JOB, you wanted a FREE RIDE? And now you're whinging that your free ride didn't pay off, AND that your 'investment' in the free-ride track turned out to have screwed you.

You're like someone who invests in lottery-tickets and is pissed that they not only didn't get rich, but are now poor.

You may have a PhD, but I have to say it: you're a really stupid bitch.*
*and I mean that in a gender-free sense, but I really do mean it.