Thursday, December 01, 2005
(4:00 PM) | John Emerson:
Should I go to graduate school?
Unfogged and Crooked Timber are asking this question again, so here are my all-too-familiar conclusions on the subject. (But there's a new twist at the bottom.)1. Don't take on any debt.
2. Don't study things you're not interested in for the sake of the credential.
3. Build up chops -- even if you don't continue in the field, foreign languages and statistics, for example, are multiple-use.
4. Have some alternative career plan established, preferably by having job skills before you enter grad school. If you're not blessed by the gods, like the 18-year-old Saul Kripke, think of grad school as a high-stakes gamble. Being a tenured professor with a light load at a research university is like heaven, but for this very reason very few of those qualified for these positions will get them.
5. Don't work for more than two years as an adjunct. Maybe three.
6. Keep your eyes open while you're in school. Everyone else is in the same position as you, and maybe they will have solved your problem for you.
That's the practical, nuts-and-bolts side. Here's the idealistic side:
Humanistic studies, like childraising, is an irrational but meritorious form of altruistic activity. In the past, it was normally either an aristocratic indulgence, or else the self-destructive obsession of people who couldn't really afford it.
In our bourgeois world, the humanities have come to be defined as a form of productive work. A bourgeois career track for faculty and job training for students have all been sited at the university, which is simultaneously the venue the production of high culture, for the dissemination of high culture, and for the ratification of quasi-aristocratic social class. It's a godawful mess and the system is showing signs of falling apart.
And culture production was a lot more fun when it was an aristocratic indulgence, and when scholars were not disciplined, methodologized apparatchiks keeping an close eye on one another's places in the pecking order.
