Wow! Hadn't intended my initial post to be quite such a polemic! Of COURSE I'm not going to graduate school for purposes of acquiring cultural capital! Wow, this strikes me as a willful misreading, probably motivated by my strongly expressed skepticism about a lot of the knowledge produced within the academy (ie. my remarks about research interests).
What I was saying about "respected institutions" was that the only way, in our society at least, to balance the desire to spend one's life primarily in intellectual pursuits with the inescapable fact that we have to satisfy basic existential needs (food, shelter, occasional medical care--these things cost money!) is to attach oneself to institutions like universities that have been historically approved by society (read: funded by tax dollars! for the most part anyway) and that can offer financial support and a path toward a modestly paid career. These, I'm afraid, are simply the facts. I don't look to these institutions with any abnormal degree of reverence, I just understand them to be the places in which I can further my own education while also acquiring the skills/credentials necessary for a career that will in turn allow me to spend a lot of time growing intellectually.
As far as research interests go, well, yes I suppose in some very basic sense everyone has "research interests." As inquisitive, contemplative individuals we identify and identify with particular areas of human knowledge that we wish to know a great deal more about. What I don't think we have, or at least we wouldn't without the existence of a graduate admissions process, are these very technical, narrow, limited research interests. We come to define/express ourselves in this way (allow me to stress this: in my opinion!) only because we know admissions committees are thinking about finding folks who will reproduce the established approaches/methodologies/knowledge areas that already exist. I have no beef with research interests as such. I have them too, and for purposes of grad admissions I can refine them quite nicely (or at least the schools that have accepted me thus far seem to think so). My beef is rather with the ways in which we are narrowly constrained by the existing bureaucracy of knowledge in American academia. There seems to be nothing free about free inquiry as it exists in American higher ed.
But the problem is more than just with feeling constrained in the way we are allowed to self-identify. The problem is that, although this bureaucracy produces knowledge, much of it is of pretty dubious quality. And if you don't think so, you probably haven't perused enough academic journals. I think the humanities probably suffer uniquely in this way. This hyper-specialized model works quite well in the natural and social sciences (or so I've been led to believe) but it doesn't seem to me to be at ALL the way one should transmit humanistic knowledge. Again, just my opinion. But I should point out that it really isn't just my opinion. Richard Rorty said a decade ago most of what I've just said above and in my previous post. Louis Menand also has made a species of the same argument.
As for concerns about my use of the word "intellectual," I'm going to wager that those who raised concerns were doing the same kind of willful misreading that I described above re: cultural capital. I hadn't realized this was such a contested term among academics! All I'll say about this is that only in America can even the intellectuals be convinced that "intellectual" is a bad word. People watch too much damn television. Yikes.
For those who defended me against the more abusive/belligerent among us, thanks. Someone suggested that I must have spent a lot of time writing that earlier post. Alas, I probably spent about 3 minutes on the thing. Just meant to be an alternative perspective for someone I saw agonizing in much the same way I'd been agonizing about this crazy process. Maybe I should have spent a little more time and avoided the vitriol! Anyway, happy waiting to everybody.
