Graduate School in the Humanities: A Bear Trap?

Anyone who's read PMB's interview in the Michaelmas Term 2009 issue of Linacre Li(n)es knows that PMB completed his doctorate at Linacre, but only after taking some time off to swim the Atlantic and create the Internet. Things have worked out well for PMB, but we must admit that he is a rare success story.

There are many sound arguments against pursuing a graduate and then academic career in the humanities, primarily because trends in academic labor are looking grim, and have been looking grim for decades. It's cheaper for universities to increase their reliance on contingent academic labor: adjunct faculty who are paid by course and not by salary, often receive limited or no health benefits, and can be dropped at any time (this often creates a rift between full-time, tenure-track faculty with job security and benefits and a majority adjunct underclass). Outside of academia, it remains difficult for people with humanities PhDs to find work. The assumption is that someone with a doctorate is too expensive, overqualified, under-experienced, potentially disruptive, not socialized for the 'business world' or the 'real world,' and perhaps just too old at that stage to compete with a newly-minted double-major in English and Economics with a BA from Yale. William Pannapacker, alias "Thomas H. Benton," an tenured English lit. professor and columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education, has made a name for himself by elaborating in a series of articles on these arguments against graduate school, culminating in his latest, here.

Though "Benton" approaches the situation fatalistically and unproductively, and I thoroughly abhor his approach, it's hard to disagree with most of what he says on the topic. I would just offer a few points to supplement and to counter his "just don't go" oeuvre:

1) There is no such thing as a 'life of the mind,' and everyone knows this or ought to know it. Benton goes after this alleged romanticizing of the 'life of the mind,' which is supposed to be inherently more valuable than being able to pay your rent or feed yourself or your family; yet this is the weakest argument of his detractors, and quite frankly the easiest to dismantle. Benton takes on this argument precisely for the reason that it's a straw man easily taken down. The real reason why people knowingly sacrifice stability and earning potential to enter graduate school and pursue academic careers in the humanities, often with less assurance than Harry Potter on the tale of a Snitch, is because of the mitigating value (or even potential value) of having more control over one's schedule, working for oneself in a sense, on the work that one likes to do, with relatively few obstacles and overseers and managerial types to heed or appease. While studies and surveys have shown that professors actually work as many hours or more and for less pay than other elite professions, professors do have the benefit of working more on their own terms than, for example, an investment analyst who works 70 hours/week in a cubicle or small office and whose employer bans the use of gmail or Facebook or iTunes to "ensure" productivity. So enough of this 'life of the mind' stuff. If anyone actually enters the academic profession because they believe that it's some kind of heterotopic space where occupants live a majestic and sequestered 'life of the mind,' they deserve to be unemployed. Benton either knows this and is disingenuous or doesn't know it and is naive after being tenured; but either way he's picking the wrong fight.

2) While Benton defends his advice that only the independently wealthy should pursue graduate study in the humanities by arguing essentially 'thems the facts, I'm just reporting, I'm not advocating the situation,' his approach and the 'just don't go' mantra only reinforces the threat of humanities scholarship becoming once again the prerogative of the wealthy, or the 'gentleman scholar' scenario. The problem is that, in practice, by making it policy to actively discourage everyone but the wealthy to become humanities professors, you will end up with only the wealthy as humanities professors. By contrast, if you accept that young adults and in some cases old adults looking for a second career have the capacity and the responsibility to make their own informed career choices, rather than reifying the in loco parentis situation beyond the undergraduate years, humanities fields will continue to productively sort themselves out, as they always have, with a broader range of perspectives and a larger pool of competitive and intelligent and driven young scholars.

3) Related to above, it's not humanities research that results in the poor job market for the humanities. Students aren't shying away from taking a course in history because they fear a syllabus full of Hayden White. They don't know who Hayden White is in the first place. They're not taking courses in history because their parents are telling them that, interests aside, they'll get a better job if they take a course in business. Further, while the most esoteric examples from humanities subject matter are often held up by critics in comparisons with the most 'applied' examples from other fields (the Lacanian real vis-a-vis applied statistics or disease spread modeling: choose wisely), most of us fail to grasp the fact that the vast majority of everything in academic study in all disciplines, including the sciences and math, is not directly useful at all, and doesn't automatically prepare one better for any particular career. This is not to equate the usefulness of research in the humanities with that in the STEM fields, but rather to suggest that academic training and teaching, i.e. college or university, is not necessarily vocational, nor should it necessarily be. In light of this, it's the lack of value placed on teaching and learning in the humanities, and the assumption that the attendant skill sets and experiences are less valuable in the broader market than other degrees or disciplines, that puts extra pressure on academic job markets in the humanities. Humanities research has never been valuable directly, nor even accessible or widely read. Humanities research exists almost entirely to support teaching, and to foster innovation in what is being taught in the classrooms. No student would want to hear the same thing about Shakespeare that a student ten years before was hearing. And no field of inquiry, across the board, would retain interest and value should it become stagnant. This is all to say that rather than telling people not to try for an academic career in the humanities, we would do better to welcome people who are motivated and feisty enough to take upon themselves as a crucial mission and fundamental aspect of the profession the burden of communicating to the public what humanities work is, what it does, and why it's necessary. A dissertation on the Harlem Renaissance won't have any direct public impact whatsoever; but what that study does for academics as they prepare to teach Langston Hughes to a predominately black and latino class at Howard University is indeed important. As important as it is for another professor getting ready to teach the same material to a predominately white class at Columbia.

4) Benton is right to gesture toward a more comprehensive ranking system for doctoral programs in the humanities. Such rankings exist for philosophy programs, and are sorely needed for English literature programs. Prospective students should have better information, including, also, job placement statistics and maybe even exit interview excerpts, in order to make smart decisions about graduate school. The MLA and the AAUP should be taking care of this. I haven't met many academics opposed to oversight on Wall St.; why not better organization and job-placement oversight for ourselves?

PMB is thus a firm (insofar as glue and rolled-up newspaper can be firm) supporter of higher education in the humanities, and will always have a wrinkled eye on the issue as he proceeds in politics.

Issue 4: Cats Eat Grass

Being a responsible politician requires attention to detail, as well as an ability to make decisions based on discernible facts. This is especially the case when the discernible facts contradict one's personal experience. Voters frequently delude themselves into supporting the intuitive hero type, the politician who 'shoots you straight' or acts 'from the gut' or 'the gut feeling.' There's a certain populist appeal in that kind of approach, derived from an unfortunate sense that a leader shouldn't be more knowledgeable than the rest of us, but s/he should nonetheless be a 'natural.' For the British readers, Churchill comes to mind. Independent of his policy chops, the man remains a celebrated international figure for his fortitude rather than his discerning mind. No one cared if Churchill applied sophisticated policy analysis (granted, the whole WWII thing was kind of a no-brainer), just that he was committed to an intuitive sense of being on the right side of history. That's what the people wanted to hear, and that's what they still hear in the echoes of Churchill's name. A crass, American example ('crass' and 'American' are, for the British, almost synonymous) of 'from the gut' populism is G.W. Bush (does Churchill turn about in his grave at this comparison? Maybe, maybe not). Bush is perhaps the modern-day epitome of a political leader who generated enough support to satisfy his agenda through sheer, unenlightened conviction. Whether for good or ill, blind conviction is a powerful and dangerous political instrument. A responsible politician must know when to heed the material facts that stand between conviction and outcome, so that the outcome is a product of discernment and deliberation and not merely dedication. Outcomes tend to be better across the board when they reflect some accounting of material reality.

This is all just a preamble for my primary point: cats eat grass. Now you're saying 'look, Bear, cats are carnivores, they don't eat grass. Cats eat mice and moles and other small rodents, sometimes bugs, whatever else we feed them of the meat variety, occasionally milk or cheese. But if I put a plate of asparagus in front of the cat it's surely not going to eat the asparagus.' Well enough, but if you put a plate of grass in front of your cat then you will soon observe that the cat will eat the grass. 'But Bear, that makes no sense. I've personally never seen a cat eat grass. And I know that cats eat mice. And I never give my cat any grass, and my cat does fine without any grass.' Maybe so, but if you were to feed it grass it would eat the grass. Further, the grass would improve its digestive health. Further, the grass would serve as a supplementary source of vitamins A and D. To put it simply, you should really start feeding your cat some bits of grass every once in a while, because this will produce better outcomes for the both of you. Counterintuitive, I know, but that doesn't make it wrong.

'Bear, how am I to trust you. Are you not a politician?'

Photographic evidence here, including a fun bit of swatting around 40 seconds in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz-b0zuCqNk

PMB Issue 4 thus concludes with PMB Maxim 4: Regardless of conviction, the grass on the other side of the fence is not necessarily greener, but your cat would eat it regardless.