Friday, August 01, 2003
(11:35 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
We don't need no career options
We don't need no thought control
I'm delighted to have Mike back with us. I especially enjoyed his post on the tight job market for PhDs, and I think it provides a nice starting point for my philosophy of education.
It is shameful that the academic job market is so tight and that PhDs are being given out so promiscuously, as long as we look at the PhD as a straight professional degree. I don't think it is inherently a professional degree, nor do I think that the bachelor's or master's degrees are necessarily professional degrees. Each degree is a way of indicating a certain level of competence in an increasingly narrow area, until at the PhD level, one is expected not only to have assimilated a certain amount of knowledge, but to have actually produced new knowledge. One's loyalty in receiving such degrees is finally to knowledge.
Honestly, once one reaches that level, it is unlikely that educating undergraduates is going to be a terribly good fit, as shown by the cavalier disregard many professors show toward their classes. For one whose loyalty is finally to knowledge, the academic setting can be completely detrimental, with the grading, the lectures, the office hours, the pressure to keep publishing constantly lest you lose your job (even though most of the time, having published more articles is unlikely to have a direct bearing on how well one teaches undergraduates, who know nothing). In the best case scenario, this ends with tenure, when one can pursue one's research interests unfettered by any other worries, but we know that tenure is increasingly hard to come by.
Thus I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that most PhDs don't get academic posts. These are highly competent and passionate people who have shown themselves willing to go through a lot of very tedious and demanding work, all the while living at the poverty level. These are people who would excel at any job and who would likely have a broader and more objective view of their work than those who have staked their livelihood on it from the very first. In short, PhDs are the closest we're going to get to Plato's philosopher kings, outside the Jesuit order. I know that personally, I am not especially likely to find an academic post after completing my PhD in Zizek, and that does bother me, but I also know that my real passion is not to have a certain job, but to grow in knowledge. I don't think I'm much different from my esteemed associate blogger in this respect.
So yes, it's a really bad idea, but for that very reason, it might be the best possible idea. Pragmatism be damned -- pragmatism is exactly what's wrong with America. If I get done with my PhD and end up working at the bank or at Catholic Charities or for the United States Universal Healthcare Administration (cross your fingers), I don't think my time will have been wasted at all, even if I didn't get the most ideal job for my skillset.
Someone should save this post and rub it in my face ten years from now when I'm complaining about the injustice of the tight academic job market.
