Thursday, December 11, 2003
(11:46 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Love me
Happy preemptive birthday to Anthony -- although I'm ashamed of him, since I would never use this space to encourage people to buy me stuff.
Today, through Zizka (a frequent commenter at Matthew Yglesias and other sites), I found a nice new blog that caters to my own specific paranoia: Invisible Adjunct, written by an adjunct professor of history. He or she writes posts discussing his or her ambivalence about grad school and academia, and there are often over a hundred comments on a given post. Since I have so much schoolwork to do, I definitely did not spend way too much time reading all of those stories.
All of this harkens back to a post by contributor emeritus Michael Schaefer, in which he questions the wisdom of continued graduate education, and my response, in which I basically accuse him of being a sell-out. Now I'm not sure.
One of the commenters at Invisible Adjunct mentioned something about doing dual-degree programs in which one could get the impractical PhD in Comparative Cultural and Cross-Critical Studies together with a practical MA or even (gasp!) an MBA. PhD/JD programs also exist, and in my periodic attempts to skim through the secondary literature on a given topic in order to get token quotations (such as tonight), I have frequently noticed that attorneys are publishing in academic journals -- not on "law and literature" or something, but just as though they were specialists in that field. I know that Jared Woodard hates lawyers, with good reason, and I know that I hate schmoozy businessmen, but man -- why not? How authentic am I really trying to be here?
If I could work somewhere for only forty or fifty hours a week, be satisfied with my work (i.e., that I'm doing a good job, not necessarily that it's important -- I've felt very satisfied mowing lawns and crunching numbers in the past, when I know full well it doesn't matter "in the grand scheme of things," whereas I guess an analysis of Benjamin's theory of drama as it relates to the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar does matter "in the grand scheme of things), and have sufficient leisure time to pursue my academic interests as an avocation, maybe I could be happy. But hell, if I could make a career out of it, I would work at a university run by Satan himself. SATAN HIMSELF!
