you lucky ones

[dramos2016]

3 hours ago, search the scriptures said:

After getting rejected from every PhD program I applied to, I am pretty convinced that I am going to end the academic journey here with a masters and start looking for a job outside of academia  / professorship.  What will bother me is that if I ever wanted to write and publish a book, not having a PhD in the field will probably limit that opportunity significantly, or at least the reach of it.  I guess my only hesitation then is: what if you are the person with the knowledge and drive to create new, important research in a specific area, yet you lack the credentials for the audience to receive it and/or for it to be implemented in the places that it should (for example, you propose a new, well-researched interpretation of the Trinity based on biblical and extra biblical sources, but it never finds its way into academic discussion or curricula because you are not qualified to introduce such a method).

I don't want to get up and speak in front of an audience at a Biblical Studies conference someday (or even a Church conference) unless I have the terminal degree in the field, as I just won't feel comfortable or qualified.  Or maybe that's just pride.  I don't really know.  

I think this is a great point, because its something I struggle with also. There are plenty of avenues to publish now-a-days (small, overseas, vanity presses, independent), but its a matter of getting your work respected by the people/audience that matters.
 

Whether or not I pursue a PhD in Hebrew Bible won't be the end of my study. I will still read books and articles, attend talks, and write to some capacity on the subject. But my contribution will be limited without that credential. Not having a PhD does not make us any less "worthy" as human beings, but it does impact our status as academics.

[marXian]

On 3/25/2016 at 1:26 PM, AbrasaxEos said:

I say this with such conviction because I didn't examine these motives very carefully going into my program, I made a lot of excuses for myself that were built on notions of the 'inherent worth' of what I was doing.  One doesn't necessarily need to have academic, or tenure track employment in mind when doing a PhD, but if you don't why do one?

First, I really appreciate your candor in these posts and the one on the other thread, @AbrasaxEos. I'm in my fourth year, trying to finish my dissertation proposal, frustrated by getting rejected by external funding sources, wondering if it's all really worth energy. It gives me a lot of hope to hear about someone who just walked away (and I've heard a few such stories recently, in my own program as well.)

But even still, I want to resist the idea that "inherent worth" is trumped by the use-value of one's employment, i.e. that employment must have use-value in order to be worth pursuing. I suppose I feel the need to defend a PhD in any humanities discipline for a moment. And I guess my username gives away what follows to an extent. As a Marxist who is really interested in the Frankfurt School, whether or not I continue to pursue academia, I feel an ethical obligation to resist the reification of vocation-in-general into use-value. This was something I felt strongly about before I decided to pursue academia, and even if I decide to leave at some point in the future (not at all outside the realm of possibility), I will continue to resist this. The "uselessness" of the humanities is what (albeit ideally) makes them at least potentially effective against the hegemony of capitalism--because they are more apt to resisting reification into commodity. I realize that to a certain extent that's an incredibly naïve view of graduate school/academia since the vast majority of universities and colleges are already complicit in the logic of capital, such that it would be silly to hope for escape from that logic by entering academia.

Still, my appeal to the "inherent value" of what I do is part of a larger ethical political/economic conviction--not just a naïve defense of what I'm doing. I suppose I hope that to some extent the continued insistence of liberal arts educators that college students learn "critical thinking" (vague and often misconstrued, to be sure), learn to think outside the logics of capitalism and "natural" science, etc. is in part what has enabled a candidate like Bernie Sanders to have the wide appeal that he does among younger voters. This is an imperfect effect (e.g. criticisms that students today need coddling, that they're "offended" by everything) but I'd honestly rather deal with students who take [what are ultimately] post-colonial, post-structural, identity politics critiques too far than with students who insist on the "neutrality" of free markets, race, and liberal politics. There is inherent value in learning to think against those logics.

That was likely much more than you were bargaining for in making the comment about the inherent value of PhD work. I want to emphasize that I really do appreciate your perspective. I think, though, that it's probably fair that many in the humanities (thought by no means all) share the conviction that there must be inherent value to some kinds of knowledge production and dissemination. Otherwise, we are intentionally pitting ourselves against quantifiable sciences, and I don't think there is any winning that fight.

[Joseph45]

This is a nice conversation, all around. I've largely stopped commenting on the cafe, or going to it, but I occasionally surf here in order to remind myself of what it was like to be so excited about applying and getting into a PhD program. (I had quite the difficulty getting into one myself). Just to give people an idea about where I'm coming from, I'm defending in May (at an Ivy).

First, about the job market. This past year (applications for jobs that will start in the fall) was worse than usual in my field. That said, there were five jobs to which I could apply--one open rank Stanford, another at Yale, another at a small liberal arts that was open field, and then two more regular job openings for assistant profs. I want to stress that I was not limiting myself to elite schools or a specific geography. I applied to every job that was a conceivable fit. (Very religious schools were not an option, but, if you are very religious, that also limits you to a very few set of schools in another way.) All of which is to say, there were basically two jobs in the entire country that were hiring in my area. Think about that for moment. It makes getting into a PhD program looking like a F*%$* joke. Think of all of the people applying for those jobs, from people in the Ivies and Chicago, Duke, Stanford, etc., people who might have inside connections, people at great programs with slightly less prestigious RELS programs (Virginia, UNC, Indiana, Syracuse).

Also, depending on your field, very few people actually graduate in five years. This means that you're not just sinking five years of your life into a program, you're more likely sinking 6-7 (and many people can't finish, so there's that.) And it's one thing to be okay with doing this when you're younger, un-partnered, without kids--it sounds basically like doing a second round of college. It's exciting, you'll get to read so much. If, however, once you're in your 30s (probably) you might end up married and with one or more kids. Now, all those evenings reading and writing seem so much less exciting and important. They instead feel selfish and somewhat pathetic. At best, you're getting a stipend that covers your living cost. You'll likely run out of that for your last year or two. Your partner has to pay for the rest, and your partner suffers as you read another $Y(**#*() book on that topic that you find so much more important than spending time with him/her or your child(ren) (or at least getting paid).

Again, it's different for everybody, but there are a lot of high costs that go into getting a PhD.

Additionally, at this stage, there is passion, but it's not just reading what you want to read. With or without partner and/or kids, it's about producing extremely competent work. (And it will never be good enough.) I appreciate the person (above) who doesn't want to write a book or lecture on a topic without a terminal degree. Chances are, however, that you won't write the book you want or have anybody who wants to listen to you when you do have the terminal degree. You'll be trained so intensely that nobody will want to read the monographs you write, becasue they won't understand what's at stake in the first place. I don't know how to put this without sounding harsh, but it's really not about reading or writing for fun at this stage. There's a very slim bit of scholarship that I find interesting right now. The rest I need to know to properly bolster my arguments, to footnote. And that's the stuff of scholarship. Most of it is pretty pedantic and predictable. Most of the interesting stuff is BS. Even if you publish early, it's still no guarantee of getting a job. You will almost assuredly not present enough, publish enough, or do such outstanding work that you'll feel okay about yourself.

Again, I don't want to be harsh, dispiriting, or condescending, but, for me, it does not seem like a decision between following my passion for academic quesitons (which I still have) and the job-risk it entails versus just getting a "normal" job, it's that very little of doing good PhD work involves following your passion. It's a job. There are moments of glory. There are good things about it. It's also intensely competitive. Your work will never be good enough. You'll soon see that most of what you read as an M* student was the best of the best in your field--most of the rest of it is sh*t. Then you'll start writing and realize you are part of that sh&t. Then you will start teaching, and you will realize almost none of your students find your area interesting at all. They view you as the enemy, because you are a teacher. They will not read. Even though you thought you would love teaching, you realize it is much harder when the students are not excited to be academics, and they do not care about your field. [or they have the most simplistic understandings of the field, but will not listen to you, even though they've never read so much as a single book on the topic under discussion.]

And all of this is assuming that your advisor is helpful and supportive, that s/he doesn't leave or retire, or get arrested because he hit a prostitute (true story for a friend of mine). If you have a bad advisor, or even an average one, there are whole other nightmares with that.

I can't say whether anybody should do a PhD or not. And it's certainly a better experience for some rather than others. What I will argue though, is that it is rarely primarily about pursuing one's academic passions. It's a job at best. You get to read about as much in your area of academic passion as you would if you were outside of the academy. You do have people pushing you on your reading, people who will call out your BS, which does have great advantages, but that's about it from my perspective.

 

[AbrasaxEos]

@marXian Don't get me wrong, not that you were getting me wrong necessarily, but I don't want to come off as suggesting that the Humanities are useless or worthless.  I don't think this this the case.  What I'm talking about is a getting a terminal degree in the humanities, which I would argue represents exactly the kind of collapse of vocation and utility that you are talking about.  It is a commodity, and you become an extension of that commodity.  It is the story that everyone has been talking about on GradCafe, and in the Chronicle, and everywhere else.  You get utterly dissolved and recast into the mold of your degree - you become an 'expert' in a 'field' and gain some kind of capital, both symbolic and economic (ha-ha) from it.  I'm not a philosopher, and Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse were some time ago for me, but a terminal degree in the Humanities sounds exactly like what they are talking about.  

So, I think it is one thing to regard the abstract concept of 'critical thinking,' reading about Livonian werewolves, and being sure you understand the difference between Foucault's archaeology and his genealogy as inherently worthwhile.  I still won't agree to them having worth that inheres, because I think that's really a theological argument, and I rightly pass as an atheist.  However, I am glad to give you that argument, as I think it makes sense in a certain way, and I generally find the Frankfurt school convincing, if a bit Freudian for my taste.  What I think needs some consideration is exactly what you identify above, the collapse of vocation and utility that I think is inevitable within a PhD.  You don't need to get into the PhD game to study the humanities, or read good books, or to learn to think critically.  By engaging in a terminal degree, one where you are (hopefully) being paid something, one where your "work" is exactly the reified commodity that you note as a problematic element.  I think the degree is designed to get you to shift your thinking about your vocation as I'm Odysseus-tied-to-the-mast-safely-listening-to-the-siren-call-while-his-men-row-with-their-ears-plugged-to-his-frenetic-cries into commodities of various sorts, be they actual things, like monographs or peer-reviewed articles, or something abstract, like "an original contribution to the field."  

My posts aren't designed to denigrate the humanities, just the notion that doing your PhD somehow gets you around the utilitarian calculus of homo oeconomicus simply because you are doing what you are passionate about, or feel called to do.  As Žižek so wonderfully puts it, we're all already eating from the trash can all the time. 

[displayname]

@AbrasaxEos, brilliant post.  I also hope every admit and early-career student read's @Joseph45's post, especially this part:

17 hours ago, Joseph45 said:

Also, depending on your field, very few people actually graduate in five years. This means that you're not just sinking five years of your life into a program, you're more likely sinking 6-7 (and many people can't finish, so there's that.) And it's one thing to be okay with doing this when you're younger, un-partnered, without kids--it sounds basically like doing a second round of college. It's exciting, you'll get to read so much. If, however, once you're in your 30s (probably) you might end up married and with one or more kids. Now, all those evenings reading and writing seem so much less exciting and important. They instead feel selfish and somewhat pathetic. At best, you're getting a stipend that covers your living cost. You'll likely run out of that for your last year or two. Your partner has to pay for the rest, and your partner suffers as you read another $Y(**#*() book on that topic that you find so much more important than spending time with him/her or your child(ren) (or at least getting paid).

This realization was the turning point in my own mind.  When I entered my program, even as part of a couple, it was easy enough to say: I love my field so much that I am willing to sacrifice a stable income and viable career path for the next 5 years. But about three years in, I realized that my PhD was also a significant sacrifice I was forcing my partner, family, and children to make. Of course, there are benefits: you have a flexible schedule that may allow more contributions to raising your children, and you might enable your partner to travel place they otherwise wouldn't have seen.  But the pursuit of one pleasure may come at the expense of very real, very beloved, others.

[doobiebrothers]

On 3/23/2016 at 1:01 PM, gidadu said:

Doobiebrothers -- when you say that this is "the dirtiest game I, or anyone I know, has ever played" -- can you explain more what you mean by that? I want to know what I'm getting myself into and how to best prepare for those things...  I'm wanting to do my PhD for the sake of the research and creating a more robust conversation in the church and academy around my particular topic, but I'm under no illusions that I'll have a job secured afterward. So I think I'm "ahead of the game" in the respect that I'm really not doing this for the sake of becoming a professor (although I wouldn't be opposed to that), but rather, am in it for the sake of the work itself. But I'd like to know what you mean when you talk about it being the "dirtiest game" you know.... 

Pm me, I'm happy to discuss