(1:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Higher Education

My reading of Invisible Adjunct has caused me to rethink my future career plans. First, I wonder if a masters degree provides significantly less preparation to engage in serious scholarly work than does a PhD, at least in the humanities. If I managed to find a PhD program that would pay for me, I would do it, and I am fairly confident that I'd be one of those lucky few who would finish within the time allotted, but at the same time, I'm sure that after another year and a half of masters-level work and after writing a thesis, I'll be fully capable of pursuing any scholarly interests I may have.

Of course, with an MA, I'd be even less likely to find a full-time teaching position -- but do any of us really want to teach undergraduates? I know I don't. The real fun is working in highly advanced seminars with people who really want to be there, rather than people who are just fulfilling an arbitrary requirement. I am beginning to wonder if there is any way of reproducing that kind of thing in the "real world." For a short time at the legendary Trigger's, we seemed to be coming close, presenting papers and short stories and poetry we had written, but we didn't always have very good dialogue -- probably because we were all writing about stuff that others hadn't yet read. I focussed mainly on Zizek, Bill Brower wrote about Deleuze and Mary Daly and a million other people, and Fred Ecenrode read part of a paper that was kind of on Benjamin, and everything was nice and interesting, but there wasn't enough overlap in our reading -- we couldn't really dig in, unless someone brought in Heidegger, but I think most of us were tired of Heidegger at that point.

I'm wondering if it's possible to get a group of people together reading the same thing and trying to write about it or discuss it in a focussed, serious way without necessarily having a grade involved. I would prefer for this to happen in person, but with a small enough group, some kind of online chat format might work -- I doubt it could be more than four or five people at once. I think I'm right when I say that that kind of activity is what attracts people to graduate school and is the fantasy they have of what their career will end up being like, so why not just, you know, do it?

We do seem to have enough interested parties right here in Kankakee, especially when school is in session -- even though Tara is working constantly and Kevin is living in New York and the grad program at Olivet is slowly disintegrating, I'm sure we could find four or five people to agree to read thirty to fifty pages of some book and get together for an hour or so of discussion, each week or so. If that went well, maybe we could step it up. Of course, the fact that I and almost all my friends who could be involved with this are actually in school might make the "point" of this exercise questionable for now, but anyway -- it's what I've been thinking about.

I propose that we read Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in any case.

| permalink | Main Page