unræd

Congratulations!

Ugh, yeah, I feel for you. I didn't apply to Toronto for that very reason (plus their OE faculty's in such flux) but damn--that must be hard. Such an amazing program in academic terms!

Eh, I am very much with echo499 and VirtualMessage on this one. I mean, maybe he didn't need to enumerate every single one of the theorists, questions, or aesthetic texts Adorno is responding to in those three long paragraphs, but he was also very careful to reiterate that knowledge of none of those things would be assumed or expected. And I'm not quite sure why pointing out that knowledge of German is indeed helpful for a course devoted to the close reading of the work of a German-language thinker counts as pretentiousness? Also, note that that is just one course description (and from comp lit, not English). Having recently read, well, pretty much every one of their archived English course descriptions, it doesn't seem to me like an "arms race" so much as professors trying to develop rigorous, thoughtful seminars and then accurately describing their content and motivating questions. And there are certainly plenty of more terse, telegraphic, "we'll read a selection of secondary literature" course descriptions, as well! Obviously I'm a bit biased; I'll be starting at Berkeley next year. But a big part of the reason I made that choice--aside from the people: as many others mentioned above, the grad students currently at Berkeley are very warm and supportive of each other and each other's work--is, yeah, the explicit emphasis on rigor. I see a description like that, and I get pretty damn excited for getting my ass kicked around by my reading lists in the fall. ETA: There is of course rigor all over; I don't mean to imply Cal's got a monopoly on it, at all. That's why I still just don't quite get the evidence for Wonton Soup's "That course description was specifically written so that people would read it and be like "oh man Berkeley so rigorous much superior." As echo499 says, there are certainly other syllabuses at other schools that read like that.

I'm not going to speak for Sigaba, but I, for one, didn't read his comment as necessarily being directed at you. I could very much see it being directed at me, though, which I understand, considering I'm one of the current applicants who've been saying that yeah, no, they really do know how bad the market is. But I've also said (and in several different posts now in this thread) that while I do occasionally joke about the frequency of it, I appreciate more experienced members of the fora constantly bringing up the job market, and that it is definitely the case that no one can really know the emotional toll of that until going through it. And that's why I, at least, think this discussion is valuable, even if I'm curious about (and yes: admittedly troubled by) the language of "deception."

Glad to be back, although I returned to a thread that is severely lacking in cheery GIFs.

I agree completely, but the question wasn't really whether or not deception exists in graduate admissions in English. (Of course it does--as it exists any time two or more people are gathered together.) The question is whether or not it's endemic, and whether it's a structuring force--the "Ponzi Scheme" of the thread's title. I sure as hell buy that it was in the past; now, given the widespread publicization of the job market in the past few years, I'm not so sure how it could be, and that most of the deception involved in the process isn't self-deception. ("Ah, I'll be different! I'll be one of the lucky ones to make it!") Producing more PhDs than can find gainful employment is a special kind of sin, but assuming they're not saying those students will get jobs, it's not deceptive--just a turd move.

This has not been my experience, at all, as someone deciding between programs this year. Of the programs I seriously considered (which ranged in rankings from top 5 schools to top 25), all were very transparent about their graduate placement (including about people who hadn't yet gotten jobs), and while getting attrition numbers was more difficult, senior graduate students certainly knew those figures. As far as advisors, that also was not the case. I'm in a small specialty--there were roughly 25 medieval TT jobs last year--and all of the faculty were very upfront about the way the discipline has changed, how the ways medievalists need to market themselves have radically changed, and how even given that, placement is not a sure thing--all of which accorded with what I've heard from friends of mine on or just off the job market currently, and who certainly don't have any reason to paint me a rosy picture.

That perhaps came off as more strident than I intended. I'd really be interested in a discussion, from people on the other side of the process, about where and whether people see this kind of deception today.

The hyperbole people are reacting to isn't that the emotional distress isn't real, it's comparing that emotional distress with 14 hour backbreaking shifts in a dishpit. I'm not saying adjuncts should be happy with their lot--they shouldn't, at all. They should be (and are) mad as hell and organizing against their inhumane working conditions, and we should organize with them. But are we really comfortable saying that the reason the Wendy's analogy fails is because it's too weak? That at least dishwashers don't have to deal with the "hypocrisy and deception" of the academy? That seems to be what your last paragraph implies, and I think that's a tougher row to hoe. And can we talk more about the hypocrisy you bring up? It seems like there are (at least) two separate conversations going on in this thread. One is that people say that they know the market is awful, but don't (and can't, probably) internalize what that really means for when they go on the job market and find they won't be able to do what you've spent the last seven years training to do. That's an important conversation, and I appreciate the note of hard-nosed practicality from those who say the job market doesn't get mentioned enough, that it's a different thing to be on the other side of it, and that alt-ac isn't really some magic solution. But you mentioned "deception at work in higher education," "being Ponzied," and the title you gave this thread was "The Graduate School Ponzi Scheme." You feel like you were sold a bill of goods, but isn't that a distinct issue from the one above? Self-deception is one thing; a concerted scheme to dupe poor young applicants into setting their dreams on the tenure track is another. Looking at it from another perspective, is anyone at this point actually being told that they will get a job, or that academia is a meritocracy? Does anyone believe it?

I don't mean to be flip; the OP's words about how even going in with rational knowledge of the terrors of the job market doesn't prepare you for its emotional toll make a good point. But at the same time, some of us are going into this knowing full well what's on the other end, having watched friends, family, and loved ones struggle on the market, and have appropriate other (it seems silly to say "back up" or "plan B" when they're perhaps more likely) plans/careers/ways to feed ourselves in place. (Moreover, the brand new account and level of surprise at the fact that that "the profession often actively undermines these labors in favor of careerism, self-aggrandizement, and nepotism" makes me read this a little differently than a pure warning of "you don't know how bad it is.")

I officially accepted Berkeley's admissions offer last week, and can't wait to start.

I chickened out and emailed--the DGS if I didn't have a lot of contact with the school, or the DGS and POIs if I did. I'm done with my notifications, so at this point I've turned down Notre Dame (Medieval Studies, the rest are English), Yale, OSU, UCONN, Stanford, Cornell, and Urbana. Hope there's good news in there for someone!

Wait a minute--are you saying there's some kind of job market crisis in the humanities?

I'm not at all rhet comp, and I don't mean to barge in, but: that is the single best idea, ever.

If you show up, I'll totally go along with it.

Which makes you wonder if at some point in the past that had happened! Probably not, but it's a funny/tragic thought.

I thought we all agreed it was an utterly specious, almost incomprehensible rhetorical move when Appppplication made it, so much so that it would be patently clear I was being very, very ironic. Apparently not--I'm sorry; I should have been clearer.

I have no problem talking about reputation, and I certainly don't think we should pretend it doesn't exist; I think it should concern a lot more people here on the board than it does, frankly. My wish for this thread to die quick, painless death has less to do with its incivility--although there was a bit of that--than with the extent it just got weird, especially since every moment we're posting here is another moment we aren't caring about trans* violence. In re the question of schools that fight above their weight in some subspecialties, though, wasn't Gustav's point that the importance of fit-vs.-rep can in fact be overstated? One of my profs talks about it as hoping your diploma will "glow in the dark," i.e. that everyone will know that your school, while not at the top of the heap generally, is actually super good for what you do. But the problem is that the people who know that are the other people in your subspecialty, who aren't really the ones whom you need to know that--that's the hiring committee, which might not have anyone on it who has any idea what's going on in your field.

Oh God, I thought it was dead.

Me too! *clinks glass*

When I left the thread this morning… I mean, you know when you're walking down the street, and you look up, and all of a sudden you have no idea where you are, or how you got there? Yeah. That.

Yes. A lot of this discussion has assumed that going to a top ten school somehow magically means the doors of the job market are flung wide for you. I don't mean to imply that the effects of prestige aren't real and pernicious, or that it doesn't replicate other systemic, structural inequalities, but the Slate article especially makes it seem as though all these top ten grads are getting jobs by sitting on their laurels. First of all, not all the grads from those schools are getting jobs, at all, and secondly, those few that do get jobs are having to bust their ass and hustle and sweat and go through years of postdoc-ing/adjuncting to do that--just like everybody else who's getting jobs, from any sort of institution. And Ap(howevermanyps)lication brings up a vitally important point: in a statistical sense, none (okay, very, very few) of us are going to get jobs. Once again, I'm obviously not saying that to discourage anyone from going to graduate school in the humanities. I'm going to go to graduate school in the humanities. But to pretend that that's not the case, or to go in thinking you'll be an exception and without considering any other career option besides being a TT prof at an R1, or to blame that on nepotism within graduate programs and not consider the vanishing scarcity of jobs, period, caused by large-scale changes in university hiring, misses how awful it is out there. ETA: I probably shouldn't even have posted this; I'm not sure how constructive this discussion is at this point. It seems like there's an awful lot of talking past each other, and a lot of our discussions about privilege--and I didn't mean to imply with my comment on my own background that I haven't been the beneficiary of enormous amounts of privilege in my life, and continue to be--ignore the fact that this whole conversation, on all sides, is positively marinating in it, as is any of us with the ability--in terms of intellect, prior education, time, or loan worthy credit--to go off and read books for six years. I think that the idea that people going to a small state school instead of a top ten to get their PhDs in literature are somehow necessarily engaged in a revolutionary project that fucks the system is a particularly hard sell.

My knowledge is all secondhand, and restricted to the UK, but I have a friend in a humanities field with an Oxbridge phd who's just taken himself off the market to teach secondary school after a long search. He says the market for permanent academic work there is just as bracing, with an added wrinkle: while UK PhDs tend not to do as well on on the US market and don't look for work in the US quite as often, the UK market is full of people with American phds, too. Double whammy in terms of oversupply, but it does appear that they're more comfortable importing people than many US schools.

Well--OSU is still sending out acceptances, apparently!

No, it was the Acceptances thread, but it's worth quoting here: As long as we're talking about respecting people's feelings and not using language like "podunk" and "dinky," let's cool it with the Ivy bashing, yeah? There are a lot of people on these fora who got into Ivy League schools this year, and presumably they're all pretty happy about that--I know I am. No, of course I don't take it as a pure measure of merit; yes, it has a lot to do with luck, and there are loads of brilliant people outside Ivies and dullards within them. But neither did I coast in on gilded wings of privilege alone; I never graduated high school, and spent the majority of my twenties working in foodservice. So yes, actually: I am damn proud of that. I have no interest in returning GC to the horror days of flame wars of yore. So let me just say this: if we aren't able to critique elitism and the inappropriate ways that higher education is structured without constructing arguments that manage to abject people at both satellite campuses of state universities, and at Ivy League ones, maybe that's a sign we need to be a little more careful with the language of our critique.