First, for your perusal (and potential embittered vindication): said article.
I've seen this article and the various responses it's spawned making the rounds lately on Facebook, and as a former graduate student in the humanities, I felt compelled to respond. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that between the time that I began drafting my response and now, I actually got a tenure-track job in the humanities and will be an Assistant Professor come fall. However, the meat of what I want to say has been in my head since before I even knew about my campus interview and my point(s) of contention with Schuman's article remains largely unaltered by my personal good fortune.
For me, said article presents one particular (and highly subjective) set of expectations about the grad school experience and how oneself should be as a grad student; Schuman's is a viewpoint that I disagree wholeheartedly with while realizing that many people (including many of my colleagues) have ended up in grad school precisely because they believe now (or believed at one point) what she seems to have believed before her recent disillusionment. I don't write to disabuse anyone of their particular notion of grad school or of their own grad studentdom; as I'm well aware, many of us only survive the grad school process (especially the doctoral program process) by clinging desperately to our ideas of ourselves as Graduate Students and not questioning them too much. I write, instead, because my experience of grad school in the humanities was almost entirely positive, and I'd like to think that even bitter, bitter Schuman would prefer that more students have experiences like mine than like hers in the future. In short, I find her point of view overly critical, one-sided, and as such, unhelpful, and I'd like to think that mine might work as a counterpoint that could help someone, somewhere, someday, and thus validate my hope that my experience is worth sharing for a few paragraphs on a stupid blog that hardly update anymore.
I'm going to attack this thing a bit systematically, because I don't want to miss anything. First, there's the probably-trolling title and subtitles ("There are no academic jobs and getting a Ph.D. will turn you into a horrible person" or "Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor," take your pick). Well, here's a counter-troll: I received my literature Ph.D. in May of 2012, and it did not make me an emotional trainwreck; in fact, grad school was the first time in my life that I felt challenged enough and had enough of a sense of purpose and sense of self to not be an emotional trainwreck. In many ways, beginning grad school was actually the culmination of a long, slow climb out of a lot of issues with depression and aimlessness that I've had since I was a young kid. It was hard academically, and in the sense that it required me to do a lot of soul-searching and self-evaluation that I might have not been motivated to do otherwise. But that was good for me. Oh, right, and on top of all that, grad school actually did make me a professor.
Next: I'm not sure if Schuman's opening paragraph is still trolling or not. Beginning grad school in any discipline with the apparent end goal of getting "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" is pretty naively utopian. Let's just say that if you're interested in pursuing a literature Ph.D. only because, basically, you don't want to work hard or you only want to work nine months of the year, then you're barking up the wrong tree right off the bat (how's that for portmantidiom?). How you could not realize this right away is absolutely baffling to me, which is why I choose to assume that Schuman's being a bit tongue-in-cheek here. Just like you shouldn't decide to become a doctor because you like riding in an ambulance and wearing scrubs, you shouldn't decide to become a teacher because you want summers off. If you need me to explain why that's dumb, I'd be happy to devote another post to it later this week.
The "two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning" line admittedly hits a bit closer to home, but this is one of the major points that I wanted to wrestle with anyway. I spent the first three years of my undergrad as a computer science major. I had started college with the twin beliefs that a) more education is just plain good for you in the old, liberal-arts sense and b) you still needed to be able to do something semi-practical by the time you graduated so you could get a job. I chose computer science because I liked computers, but I took as many electives as I could on the side, just because they were interesting. In practice, though, a) worked out quite well while b) did not. I struggled with computer science, not because it was a difficult major (though it was) but because I couldn't make myself care about the material. By the end of the second year, every single class period was spent in agony, waiting for the clock to strike the end of the hour so I could leave, say, Data Structures and head across campus to The Short Story. By the end of my third year, I'd changed my major to Literature and I fucking loved it. Of course, the obvious downside to a Bachelor's degree in English surfaced when I graduated and ended up spending two years working at gas stations, restaurants, and shopping malls. I had changed my major originally with the idea that I might someday become a college professor in mind, and of course I knew that that required graduate school, and yet I had absolutely no desire to attend a graduate school that would require me to pay tuition. Even with the specter of future decades of menial service jobs looming before me, I couldn't bring myself to accept a graduate student position that would require me to go into debt. I didn't want to have that sort of debt hanging over my head, and, more importantly, I didn't want graduate school to be framed throughout my entire experience of it as a gamble that I needed to win in the end (i.e. get a "real job") or else spend god knows how paying back loans while working at McDonald's.
So, for two years I mucked around doing various minimum-wage jobs until I got an offer from Washington State University, whose English department would pay my tuition for two years while I got my M.A. degree as long as I taught freshman composition classes for them. Tuition paid, and just for doing what I wanted to be trained to be able to do anyway?! It was a no-brainer. A few days later, I was packing up my things and preparing for a long cross-country drive to Washington state, and the rest is history.
As a result of this opportunity, I was able to not only go to grad school for almost-free, I got on-the-job training and was (in theory, at least) more hireable out the door as a result. If after getting my M.A. I didn't get a job, so what? I wouldn't be any worse off than I'd been before, and I'd have a graduate degree to show for it. As it was, I went on to get a Ph.D. at the same school with the same deal, and then got a job, but the point of all my blabbering here is that I'd decided from the start that if I wasn't able to get into a school that would pay my way in exchange for teaching or research work, then I just wouldn't go to grad school at all. It was important to me to be able to treat grad school as its own valuable, meaningful opportunity, and not just a means to an end or a long-odds gamble on some future money. At WSU I did real work in both research and teaching while fulfilling my degree requirements and if anyone ever had the nerve to insinuate that what I did for my eight years there wasn't a "real job" because I was a grad student, I'd probably dropkick them in the face and then calmly explain why they couldn't be more wrong. It seems to me from Schuman's article that she only perceived of grad school as means to an end, and then when that end wasn't reached, she took it out on the experience of grad school retroactively.
I didn't by any means get paid a massive amount for my graduate school stipend, but it was enough to get through the year on as long as I spent carefully. So, yeah, I did research for most summers, but I got to make my own schedule for the most part and I wasn't really "unpaid" in the sense that it was explained up-front that I would only get paid for nine months of the year. Easy math (even for English majors!) said, then, that I save a quarter of everything I made and set it aside for the summer. Voila! No longer "unpaid" research! It also helped that the research I was doing was, by and large, seriously fascinating. For my M.A. thesis, I regurgitated a bunch of information about Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" because I thought grad school was about impressing imagined muckety-mucks who wagged their fingers at me from the top of the Ivory Tower in my nightmares, and it was miserable. When I came back for the Ph.D., I sat down and literally (like, in a list!) identified all the things that made me unhappy about the research I'd done thus far and found a way to reinvent my work so that I was doing something I truly enjoyed. Subjecting Kafka to first-order logic sounds fucking horrible to me. I'm sure to someone out there, it would be endlessly fascinating, but it's one of those topics that, at least at first blush has the ring of "I chose this to impress my committee" rather than "I chose this because I love thinking about it and talking about it and teaching about it." Why would anyone set themselves up to do that much work on an become that immersed in something that they don't really care about? Obviously, it didn't make Schulman happy. My research was based on finding similarities between a few of the things that were important to me (hiking, video games, and geocaching), and then figuring out how the theorizations of writers like Heidegger, Tuan, and de Certeau might help explain how those practices were just as worth talking about in academia as Chaucer and Shakespeare and the global literature author-du-jour and "the long eighteenth century." And it was a blast. I spent as much time hiking, blogging, taking pictures and playing Minecraft for my research as I did writing. And at the end I still had a 300 page dissertation to show for it, which I'm now in the process of turning into a book manuscript. Because it was fun. Not because someone was forcing me to do it. There are much easier jobs than this one. Why the hell would you choose to do this one if you're just going to do what you think you have to do?
One thing I agree with Schuman on is the idea that getting a job after graduate school is, generally speaking, not really related to how "right" you do things. The application and interview process for academic jobs was/is pretty much the most depressing, harrowing, agency-less process I've ever been through in my life. But, throughout the two years I was on the market, I kept two things in mind. First, that I had begun and had always continued graduate school as its own experience/reward. I came out of my Ph.D. program (as a result of preplanning) in no debt, and with tons of experience in writing, publishing, and teaching that I hadn't had before I started. I'd had a great time, and it had made me a better and happier person in so many ways than I'd been before I started in 2005. That was enough for me. If I didn't get The Job and had to end up working for a publisher or teaching at a community college to make ends meet, so what? I'd had a great time and gotten to do what many, many people haven't been lucky enough to get to do already. Demanding more seemed (and still seems) ungrateful.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, I really don't understand how getting a job in academia is any harder than getting a job anywhere else right now. To hem and haw and hand-wring and so on because you spent six years (or however long) preparing to get a job that doesn't now exist sounds (again) like you made a bad gamble, setting aside years of your life for some imagined payoff down the line, especially now when you can no longer claim that six years ago "things were better" with the job market (both in academia and in general). People at various levels of education and with all sorts of types of specific training are jobless and even homeless all over the country; do we really have to keep pretending like the employment situation in academia is a special, extra-horrible case?*
Perhaps the most troubling part of the original article for me is this: "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. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)" I never believed any of these things, and I firmly believe it's because of the attitude I had toward grad school, which I described above. Ultimately, for me, grad school was a job. Admittedly, it was a job that paid less than most, required more hours than most, and, at times, seemed more thankless than most...but it was still just a job. I was willing to continue to do it in spite of these poor(ish) conditions because I thought the trade-off was worth it in the name of getting to do a job that actually meant something to me. And it was worth it. As a result, it was never in danger of consuming my identity, of usurping the other values and activities and relationships and facets of my personality that I valued before I began and that I still value now. I have known and know people who react to grad school in the way that Schuman describes, and I can't help but think that to react to a job in such a way must indicate an intense, perhaps repressed need to make a significant change to one's view of oneself, and that that fetishization (Aha! Grad school word!) of the grad school experience that results is meant to be the catalyst for that change. When the end result is "failure" (i.e., not getting a tenure track job) that shatters this new self-image and results in embitterment. But "the system" or "The Man" or grad school isn't to blame for this disappointment: none of those things are ever going to transform you into a special, magical (and possibly holier-than-thou) butterfly. Only you can do that.
In the end, I know that I, to some degree at least, got lucky. I got lucky to get into WSU in the first place, then I got lucky again to be allowed to come back. Then I got lucky to get a postdoc position, and again to get a faculty position. Of course, it wasn't just luck; I also worked really damn hard throughout all of that in pursuit of those opportunities. But it likely wouldn't be too far off base to say that all my hard work had very little to do with where I actually ended up, and that's a depressing thought. It's also, I think, the main thing that Schuman and I can both agree on. It's unfortunate that taking the "right" track through academia doesn't automatically result in a tenure-track job, yes, but show me a place and time where everyone always gets what they earn and I'll invent a time machine and move there. The trick for me was (and I mean this in the hippiest way possible) to enjoy the journey and worry as little as possible about the destination. I didn't have a backup plan going into graduate school because I waited until I didn't need one. My research wasn't drudgery because I wasn't willing to let it be. Grad school didn't consume my life because I entered grad school so that I could have a life, and live in a place where I could be myself, before, during, and then after I learned what that actually meant.
When I read pieces like the one that Schuman wrote, they don't make me happy that I "figured it out" (or whatever I did). They don't make me feel like I won and others lost. They make me sad that there's no way to explain my experience to more people, so that others can get what I got out of the grad school experience. It was really the best 6 years of my life, but it didn't just magically happen that way; I made it that way. I have a suspicion that when it turns out to be the worst 6 years of your life, the same thing is still true.
* I'm talking generally here. The treatment of adjuncts, especially in the humanities, as a form of cheap, easily disposable labor is a trend that definitely needs to be talked about and, hopefully, stopped.
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