About class and doctoral programs -- and an antidote to William Pannapackers elitist take on the PhD as non-future. This post resonates with something I have been saying for a long time: to declare that training students for a humanities PhD is unethical is, well, not ethical. Ethics is about opening up choices and futures for those we work with, not closing them down ahead of time, as if we always know on their behalf what is best. I especially like how the blog post ends: And so, please don’t tell your students that if they’re not rich or well-connected that they shouldn’t go to graduate school in the humanities. Tell them if you don’t think they are cut out for the work, and please tell them how difficult it can be at all points along the way. Also tell them that if they want to go to law school or culinary school. But if they still want to go, help them figure out how to be the person they think they want to be, how to become the person that will be satisfied. They will need skills. They will need to pass tests in practice and in academics. They will need to make friends, make professional connections, perform themselves in interesting ways, and they will need luck. It’s a lot easier along the way if you have lots of liquid capital and a private safety net, and that has only accelerated under the transition from liberalism to neoliberalism. The ladders are being pulled up everywhere. But that doesn’t mean that it’s “your irrational love for the humanities” that “make[s] you vulnerable to ongoing exploitation.” It’s your irrational love for existence that makes you vulnerable to ongoing exploitation whether you like to read novels and critical theory or quarterly financial reports or case law or mathematical problem sets. Whether or not I get a tenure-track job – and I really hope I do – I have been given the opportunity through college and graduate school to do things and meet people that are not entirely consumable by market logics. That might not sound sufficient to someone like Pannapacker, that might sound like I’m letting “love of learning” blur my understanding of the corporate university and of working conditions. Well, not so. Before I set foot in a seminar room, I’d burned and cut myself at work, seen people die on the job, and worried about my family’s financial stability. I’d pushed paper and come to understand some areas of teaching as a kind of detention center management. And then someone showed me that, my lack of wealth aside, some other way of going about things was within my reach, and that I might like it. I’m glad I went. Thanks, Patricia Ingham, for sharing this.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 11:15:24 +0000
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