specialagency.net: Let's not call it Dickensian, okay?

May 03, 2004

Let's not call it Dickensian, okay?

I wasn't sure, at first, what to do with this Village Voice article on the horrors of being a humanities PhD. No, I mean, if I'm being honest, my initial reaction was that I knew exactly what to do with it--dismiss it. That's mostly because the first paragraph is almost offensively hyperbolic. Graduate students do not, so far as I can tell, work in Dickensian environments; I tend to work in cheerful rooms and take frequent snack (and television) breaks. In fact, aside from the whole money thing, I think I've got a pretty goddamn good lifestyle going, mostly because I have so much flexibility in it.

I don't mean to get all utopian about it, though. I'm sure that the whole quality-of-life equation changes if you're at a school that demands a much higher teaching load, for example, and there is always (oh, there is always) the money thing. That's where I started to take the Voice article a little more seriously, when it started talking about the debt burden and the crap salaries of adjunct faculty. But I think that also factors in to my whole skepticism about the categorization of graduate students as an oppressed minority. I see an academic job as the endpoint of this whole PhD thing, but I have also been saying from the start that I'm willing to toss academia aside if the job search doesn't work out. If I complete dissertation and my academic job search and the only thing available to me is an adjunct position that pays eighteen thousand a year with no benefits, I'm leaving. I don't know what else a history PhD qualifies me to do, but I'll figure it out if I have to. (Actually, the Voice article opened up another door there: Beyond Academe, a website devoted entirely to the question of what else a history PhD qualifies me to do.)

I think I've spoken before (although maybe not on this site) about the dangers of the insular world of the graduate student. If your whole life is lived (metaphorically or literally) within the confines of your graduate program, of course you feel oppressed by the system. You have nothing to compare it to.

Posted by Susan at May 3, 2004 05:07 PM

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