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![[links]](/it/src/1998/car_links.gif) ![[Ivory Tower]](/it/src/1998/it_flag.gif)
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Surviving and finishing the Ph.D.: Give and get advice on life during and after graduate school in the Education area of Table Talk
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OUT OF ACADEMIA | PAGE 1, 2
It was all made so much worse by my having spent my entire life preparing to be Professor Newitz. I did everything to make myself into a ragingly proficient scholar. While teaching and writing my dissertation, I also published articles in prominent journals, co-edited a widely publicized anthology of essays for an academic press, presented my research at national conferences and incorporated a small educational nonprofit organization that promotes the critical use of new and alternative media. My work was considered such an unusual example of graduate scholarship that I was profiled in Lingua Franca's Real Guide to Grad School. And yet, although I interviewed over a period of three years at a number of excellent universities, no job offers materialized. I watched similarly qualified job candidates have the same experiences and try vainly to keep their spirits up. We found creative ways to be polite about what was happening. Rather than asking, "Did you get a job?" one would inquire, "Will you be here next year?" (i.e., "Are you unemployed and therefore not moving to another university town to work?") Walking around in my newly zombified state, I finally got sick of all the humiliating pleasantries and began asking people what they were going to do. "Really, I have no idea," said one unemployed colleague who had been awarded the department's top fellowship when she entered the program. "Perhaps I'll go into the music industry." Two of my fellow graduates are heading down to Hollywood to break into scriptwriting. One is going back to law school; another is temping while he continues to lead a reading group on Marxist theory. Our tales of woe and financial uncertainty are apparently so universally poignant that they've even been given the Gen X twist in a Spin article about Ph.D.s with crappy jobs. But I'm not so sure we need to be hauling out the Sturm und Drang just yet. The problem is not our so-called crappy jobs; it's an educational system that teaches us to think we are not proper intellectuals unless we are employed as academics. Why should my colleagues and I be ashamed to take our considerable knowledge and work as writers, designers, administrators, researchers and teachers outside academia? Why should our worth as scholars be measured in tenure tracks? In theory, everyone in the United States has the right to be educated. And yet, rather undemocratically, we continue to isolate education (and the educated) in certain elite institutions, effectively eliminating the possibility that useful ideas developed in the academy will ever reach a public that truly needs them. Being more educated than other people does not mean we should escape the real world. We should use our education to change the world for the better rather than hiding from it. It's only within the past few years that organizations like the Modern Language Association have suggested that graduate programs in the humanities prepare students for nonacademic jobs. In part, their previous reluctance to make this recommendation has perpetuated the silence of recent Ph.D.s like myself. We've been too ashamed to speak up because once we leave campus, our nonacademic lives become Careers That Dare Not Speak Their Names, reminders that academia is as much about getting a job as it is about smarts. But now that the job crisis clearly isn't going away, graduate programs will have to rethink the role of Ph.D.s in the "real world." It is imperative for graduate students to understand that becoming a professor is only one of many careers they might pursue with their advanced degrees. During my less apocalyptic moments, I've become somewhat gleeful thinking about Ph.D.s pouring into Hollywood, writing sly sitcom scripts and weirdly symbolic movies of the week. I like the idea of teachers at Heald Business School who have studied class consciousness in American poetry, lawyers who have analyzed the humor of sexual transgression in literary obscenity trials and technical writers who have explored the way information technologies change the way we use language. These are the people whose higher education is relevant to their lives, despite the fact that their experiences fall outside the purview of university curricula. What I want, finally, is for Ph.D.s to be proud of what they've learned, not because they've been granted the title of professor, but because they've done something useful with their minds. Likewise, I hope that professors will come to appreciate that all teaching does not have to end in the production of more professors. We should not be wringing our hands over the loss of tenure-track jobs, but trying instead to build an honorable tradition for thinkers who work outside the university system. Although my despair over the loss of an academic future has begun to wane, and I've found work as a freelance writer, I finally realized that I had to leave Berkeley. Every campus building and student-clogged cafe made me feel like I was watching an ex-lover flirt with other people as if nothing were wrong between us. So I moved to San Francisco. Now it takes me over an hour and a half on public transportation to get to the place I thought of for 10 years as my refuge, my true community, my raison d'être. Like everyone who has ever been in a dysfunctional romantic relationship, I had to learn new boundaries. UC-Berkeley became a place I would visit only when I was offered something concrete, like a part-time lectureship. No more would sweet promises and false hopes lure me back. Except, of course, if the offer were good enough. I'm still infatuated with research, still solicit the occasional teaching position. I'll even confess to being on the market again this year, looking for academic jobs. This time I'm seeking many other types of employment, too: I know my intellectual dignity does not rest on being called professor. And yet no matter what happens, I suppose I will always foolishly, perhaps even self-destructively, adore the university like a first lover, who broke my heart but taught me the true meaning of seduction.
Annalee Newitz is a freelance professor and writer; she is the co-editor of "White Trash: Race and Class in America" (Routledge Press), and her work has appeared in Bad Subjects, FEED, New York Press, Minnesota Review, Film Quarterly and numerous academic anthologies. Going adjunct The grueling plight of underemployed academics and the violent fantasies they entertain
Take your thinking elsewhere!
While academia disembowels itself with theory's blunt knives, young scholars must still pursue intellectual livelihoods outside the ivory tower
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