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T A B L E_ T A L K

Surviving and finishing the Ph.D.: Give and get advice on life during and after graduate school in the Education area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Seven Deadly Sins
By Mindy Hung
Zipped: The secrets of a grad student virgin
(11/04/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
Forget Foucault: How to fill the gaping holes of a liberal arts education
(11/04/98)

Idiot Savants?
By Kristina Zarlengo
Science War II: A new battle cry from intellectual prankster Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
(11/02/98)

Confessions of a news nun
By Fufkin Vollmayer
The trivia and torment of 24-hour news
(10/30/98)

Beer, babes and beatings
By Joshua Green
What the college admissions brochure doesn't tell you about your freshman year
(10/28/98)

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BY ANNALEE NEWITZ
I was 20 years old when I entered a Ph.D. program in English at the University of California at Berkeley and devoted what I believed would be the rest of my life to contemplation. Except for a month spent working at a sandwich shop, I had done nothing with myself but attend school. Both of my parents were teachers; and so it came to seem that the entire universe was some kind of educational institution. If you broke my life down to a quantum level, you'd find qualities of particles whose entire existence depended on a form of reality known only as "metaphysical."

If not graduate school, then what? Oblivion.

In retrospect, I realize I had convinced myself that being a graduate student was an end in itself, a destination rather than a temporary stopping-off zone on my way to something else. My inexperience, combined with Berkeley's academic insularity, encouraged my fantasy of everlasting graduate school. Especially these days, when graduate students are expected to teach and publish before they earn their degrees, a professorship really is just graduate school with better pay.

The further along I advanced in my program of study, the clearer it became that most of my professors lived under the tyranny of the tenure review in the same way I lived under the tyranny of grades. And yet this knowledge had the peculiar effect of blinding me to the fact that I was being trained for a job. I can recall a politically minded classmate demanding in our introductory theory seminar that the professor address what it meant to learn about literature just so we could go out and make money as teachers. His concern -- so distant from what I considered real -- was easy to ignore in a class devoted to the idea that social reality is only discourse. "What does he mean, make money?" I thought belligerently. "This is about consciousness." For me at that time, economics was just another metaphor. Because everyone around me behaved as if this were true, as if professorships and tenure were about intellectual vitality rather than salary, it was hard to see how "making money" mattered.

Now, nine years later, that politically minded colleague and I are both unemployed. In the words of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Professional Employment, we have "failed . . . to find the kind of employment for which [we] had presumably been trained." According to this same committee, we are hardly in the minority. They estimate that 55 percent of people receiving Ph.D.s in English and foreign languages will not find "appropriate" employment as tenure-track professors within a year of receiving their degrees (and some of those students have already been on the market five years, while getting their degrees). As pundits and professors have been saying throughout the 1990s, there is indeed a job crisis in higher education, particularly within the humanities and social sciences.

What's telling about the recent outcry over this crisis is that the disappearance of traditional academic jobs is largely being mourned by academics themselves. Often, it's the relatively privileged professors, those with tenure at research institutions, who seem most despondent over my predicament as a victim of the academic job meltdown. Rarely have I seen any public protest from unemployed Ph.D.s or flex-timed adjunct professors. Most of us are too busy commuting to three part-time teaching jobs, or trying to beef up our skill sets by learning Java and HTML instead of Latin and Old English.

But there's more to it than that. It's not that the famous tenured radicals such as academic labor activist Cary Nelson speak for us because we are too tired to speak for ourselves. Something else is at work -- a system of beliefs that has sent the professorate into melancholia and people like myself into silence and paralysis. Not to put too fine a point on it, this system is as old as the ivory tower itself: It's known as elitism.

I don't mean to accuse Nelson and his colleagues of elitism. After all, it's from his own work and that of other public intellectuals, like professor-cum-Village Voice pundit Michael Bérubé and NYU postmodern rabble-rouser Andrew Ross, that I learned the full meaning of the word "elitism" in the first place. What I want to suggest instead is that elitism is still -- despite the so-called democratization of higher education -- built into the structure of the academy. Ever since the G.I. Bill and affirmative action programs drew a less typically aristocratic population into universities after World War II, campus radicals and liberal social critics have celebrated the potential for higher education to bring intellectual interests in line with more egalitarian ones. And yet earning a Ph.D. in the humanities or social sciences is, at this point, supposedly good for nothing but university teaching. We're studying and laboring with the antiquated idea that higher education should give back only to itself and not nourish other communities and industries.

Understandably, of course, professors don't want to see the industry that rewarded them fall apart before their eyes. Having devoted their lives to teaching future scholars and publishing academic work, they're threatened by the job crisis in academia with feeling like irresponsible mentors. After all, it was under their watch that many talented scholars were downsized. Moreover, as the university system crumbles, so too does their intellectual authority. And therefore, professors who are appalled by the state of their profession continue to recommend reform of the academy: In the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lingua Franca and dozens of other professional journals, they argue that graduate programs should cease to "overproduce" Ph.D.s; university administrations should stop converting full-time positions into part-time ones; and most of all, state and federal governments should stop cutting back on university budgets.

For Ph.D.s heading into the academic marketplace, however, all these wise recommendations have not, so far, helped us to find jobs in the academy. More important, the elitism that suggests a Ph.D. recipient is only as good as her professorship fosters a crippling sense of shame when we are forced to discuss what are whisperingly referred to as "alternatives" to academic careers. Although our professors clearly mean well, their responses to the job crisis shy away from questioning why we must consider university-level teaching the only appropriate use of our Ph.D.s. Within the sciences, after all, there is no shame attached to leaving academe and pursuing a career in industry.

Why do we in the humanities and social sciences cringe when told that we may have to use our knowledge in that place we jokingly call "the real world"? Beneath all the wry remarks lurks the knowledge that we're being kept out of the intellectual frat house. Without entree into the land of learning for learning's sake, the academic identity seems not only worthless, but ostentatiously faked, like counterfeit money printed on construction paper. Those feelings hit me hard when I realized that I would be joining the ranks of Ph.D.s graduating without professorships. Like some sort of addict, I had been in denial about my little problem until one night when I found myself curled into a fetal position on the floor of my lover's bedroom, naked, crying and shivering uncontrollably. Melodramatically, I imagined that I had become the living dead. Having somehow survived my own demise, I was doomed to walk the earth like an intellectual corpse, my knowledge gradually rotting away.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. I'd spent my whole life preparing to be Professor Newitz