Slashdot Mirror
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."
All the baby boomer professors will keep working for another 10 to 20 years. Until they retire, they are taking up a huge percentage of the available academic jobs. With regards to literature majors, the death of the publishing industry has killed any non-academic work. While there is still some work available, compared to even 10 years ago, it's peanuts.
You did a thesis on Kafka. You should have known that the world was a harsh, uncaring place...
Of course, a PhD in literature (of all things) is not going to be a meal ticket for the vast majority of people. How many tenure track positions SHOULD there be for literature studies? A couple of hundred in the US? It's a tiny, tiny sliver of adult life. If you have a burning desire to expound on the mysteries of "Gravity's Rainbow" and you think you need to devote your life to it, go ahead. The world might be a better place for it. But expecting to get a job doing that? Not so much.
There are PhD level studies that can reliably lead to gainful employment, but that's not what doctorate level education has been about. I think it would reflect nicely on our society if you COULD expect to devote your like to James Joyce and get compensated for your efforts, but we're a long way away from that particular utopia.
If you need money, get a job. If you have money, do what makes you happy and fulfilled. Don't necessarily conflate the two.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There are people in all branches of academia who have finished PhDs and are not finding meaningful employment. While a while back there was a study that declared that those who hold a PhD are seeing a much lower unemployment rate than the rest of the country (something like 2% vs the usual 9.999%) the problem is a lot of people who have that terminal degree are not getting the job they trained for. Many people are completing multiple post-doc positions and then ending up in dead end positions in academia (or industry) with no chance for professional advancement.
In other words, if the "unemployment" number for those with a PhD included those who are "underemployed" (in comparison to the job they actually aspire to hold), the number would be much, much, higher.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
No. This is what we as young academics have been told for twenty years: the Boomers and pre-Boomers are about to retire, and there will be a lot of jobs soon.
The reality is that no, there is no large spike of retirements coming down the pipe, and even if there were, it does not imply there are job openings. Universities rely on large classes, heavy teaching loads, and especially adjuncts / sessionals.
Moreover, it is well-known that in the next decade or so, there will be a slump in the number of students, due to simple demographics. So, fewer, weaker students, and fewer jobs per student.
The OP is not just bitter: this is the honest truth about academia right now. And it includes the sciences and professional studies, too.
The issue is that the jobs are taken by the graduates of the elite institutions. I don't know where Ohio State University stands in Literature, but unless it's ranked in the top ten for that field, the chances of getting a job when one opens up is virtually nil.
It's simple arithmetic. The top schools, Ivies and their equivalents produce an equal or greater number of PhDs than there are positions opening in any given year in the humanities. Why would any school that is hiring, when they have applicants from half a dozen Ivies bother looking at someone from a lower ranked program? Sure, there is more to it than simply the program that mints you: how good your dissertation is, if your adviser is friends with the people hiring etc., but remember that the people graduating from the Ivies will also have very good dissertations and advisers who are friends with (or former professors of!) the people hiring!
If you want to be a humanities professor, and think you can do it without going to a top school, then yes, your cause is lost from the beginning. But, if you are as great as you think you are, and can get into a top program, then your chances aren't as bad as people make it out to be.
Perhaps he's just suggesting that lawyers are horrible persons. I could get on board with that, as I've never met one that wasn't.
What have you seen that suggest that is true?
That was the kind of thing which happened while people's parents could still afford to send them to school to "find themselves", but over the last few years has mostly gone away.
We don't live in the Star Trek universe where we have unlimited resources, and you can pursue whatever interests you. And it was only ever a small percentage of all of the people in the world that had this illusion that we can provide for everyone -- the rest of the world has been struggling just as much as ever.
No, we need to look at it in the context of our current industrial age of feudal corporate economics which is the new god demanding a sacrifice. Everything now is measured by "shareholder value", and an expected year-over-year gain to keep the stock markets going up. A world where corporations want to tell universities what they should be doing.
Pretty much the entire economy since about 2008 has been moving away from this enlightened society you seem to think is still around.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It that you will *think* you're a horrible person. If you can't get a job in an academic tenure-track position, you'll think that you're worthless, a failure, that you haven't lived up to your own expectations of yourself and everybody else's expectations of you.
You won't *be* horrible, but you'll *think* you're horrible.
I've been there. Right now, I'm one of the EXCEPTIONALLY LUCKY in that I'm a 40-something who's in a Unviersity job. (We don't have tenure where I am, but it's a small teaching-oriented liberal arts college of exactly the sort I always wanted to teach at.) But, I've been in the position of trying to find a job and not being able to, and of being on the tenure track with certainty that I was going to get turned down because I couldn't get money out of highly overtaxed funding agencies. And I felt like a complete, worthless failure, somebody who's life didn't add up to a damn thing, somebody who couldn't do anything. THAT is how a PhD (mine is in Physics) turns you into a horrible person.
I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, tapestry, and porcelain.
- John Adams
Pretty much the entire economy since about 2008 has been moving away from this enlightened society you seem to think is still around.
I would argue that this started happening around 1980: Ronald Reagan.
Baby boomers or not, the number of PhD graduates far exceeds the number of professors due to the simple logistics of teaching. Suppose you start a professorship at 30, and retire at 70. How many PhD students do you advise per year? Let's say 1.5 just to be on the low side. And suppose they each take 5 years to graduate. You just cranked out a dozen PhDs, and created one faculty opening by retiring. One should expect an advanced degree to increase one's job prospects, but it's numerically silly to expect, specifically, a faculty position. This is why every university hires people with degrees from an even better university---not because NIU frowns on NIU grads, but because the market for the teacher's job is so competitive that only the best CVs get in.
That's a typo, professor.
I don't really think that's a judgment we're capable of making. Since the work itself is the only insight we have, we have to assume every word is carefully and deliberately chosen to further the narrative. For example, it may be a deliberate (if subtle) way of demonstrating that even an accredited professor is above simple, mundane mistakes. Or, perhaps the error is meant to convey information about the narrator's state of mind: is she stressed? Hurried? Breaking down? Maybe it's a deliberate violation of our expectations in diction, such as Lovecraft's deliberate use of archaic anglicisms, or Burgess' use of Nadsat slang in A Clockwork Orange, or the way Shelley repeatedly uses the same five adjectives in Frankenstein. Perhaps in her post-network context, "you" and "your" cease to exist as meaningfully distinct words. The ambiguity is ripe for future analysis. At least until the second edition comes out. Then it may be corrected.
> 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.
I'm an electrical engineer and software developer, and I find your comment incredibly ignorant and offensive. Once a society gets above the level of mere subsistence, culture is pretty much the entire point of human existence. The extreme materialism and utilitarianism implied by your post shows how poor and undeveloped your worldview is.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Holy cow, this comment is ignorant. I have a Ph.D. in literature from a top university. I got a job at a tenure-track, Research I university right out of graduate school -- which was a miracle in and of itself, given what jobs were out there at the time -- and after 5 years of living in a remote area far removed from friends and family, not to mention being underpaid, I decided to move back to the East coast to live closer to my family. I searched for another teaching job -- any teaching job: high school, public, private, tutoring -- for three years. What's available aren't "hundreds and thousands of education jobs in high schools or for tutoring or private schools" (did you just pull that out of your ass?) -- What's available are thousands of education jobs that 1) pay no benefits, 2) pay by course and generally below the poverty level, 3) are on a per-semester contract basis.
I'm now going into instructional technology, which has vastly greater prospects. The future of teaching -- high school or otherwise -- is in contingent labor, laborers who will be vastly undereducated in comparison to those from previous generations of teachers who were properly compensated and appreciated by students, parents, and their society at large.
Get a fucking clue, dude. Your private catholic high school experience does not remotely qualify you to claim some knowledge of the job industry for teachers.
Rebecca, it's not polite to comment on your own article...