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06/28/2004 Archived Entry: "grad school"
Seems the Chronicle's every other week contributor (not his real name) Thomas Benton has run out of things to say. Grad school is a cult? Oye. Now we have reached hyperbole overdrive. It's no cult, and neither is it the dreadful drudgery experience so many Chronicle pieces portray. These kinds of pieces do one good job: they remove agency from the students and put all the blame in the system. The system is messed up for sure. But students have agency; they can speak their minds, do their work (and do it more or less on time without complaining that they don't have time), find a more suitable profession that matches their skills if they don't like grad school, find advisors who will respect their work and not make them do the advisor's project, do better homework before they head off to grad school (where to go, who to study with, what to professionalize in), etc. Too many of these kinds of essays paint an inaccurate, sweeping generalization of the humanities graduate school experience that may reflect some experiences, but don’t reflect all. And in the end, we get a cartoon vision of graduate school and the results of acquiring a PhD - one not unlike the hyperbole which surrounded the Invisible Adjunct's weblog, it’s demise, and all the follow up "I'm leaving academia look at me ain't I brave and grand" speeches which appeared quickly on other blogs in that circle.
Replies: 3 comments
Right. The Humanities isn't heaven. But I grow so tired of the take pity on me I went to grad school speeches. Grad school is learning how to join the profession. It does carry an apprentice tradition. If you are unable to function as an apprentice or show the maturity in dealing with an advisor, balancing a work load, etc. then maybe you have chosen the wrong profession. What got me in so much trouble with fellow grads at UF was when I would respond to the mantra "I'm so busy" by saying "Wait till you get a job. Then you will know what busy really means." No one seemed to like that answer ("Rice is a real smart ass").
Posted by j @ 06/29/2004 09:16 AM EST
More seriously: Florida's program does (did?) allow a greater degree of freedom than some others, where examinations and syllabi are much more rigidly shaped by the department, not individual students. And for those of us in rhetoric & composition, being assigned a 2/1 load of English 101 and 102 is great. So I understand some of the complaining about drudgery.
Having said that, I agree that a lot of people do a lot of unjustified complaining, and portray humanities graduate work as a lot more onerous than it really is. Ask a student in Ag Engineering how much control over "her" PhD work she has...
Posted by cbd @ 06/29/2004 01:15 AM EST
Meanie!
Posted by cbd @ 06/28/2004 06:31 PM EST