note for the dispirited graduate student

Music: Mind.In.A.Box: Certainty (single; 2005)

This funny post, as well a conversation with my Chiropractor yesterday, reminded me of a blog entry I've wanted to write for a while. As my back cracked I found myself saying to the doctor, "stalking students, university politics, salary compression, all this crap goes with being a professor. Why can't I just write my essays and teach my classes? All this Kafka-esque bureaucracy!" He responded, "well, I don't suppose you can do your job without people?" Point well-taken.

Every year I have a discussion with a graduate student, sometimes on email, sometimes in person, about choosing an academic career. These conversations usually come at a moment of crisis in the student's life. They usually come the second or third year into graduate school, when you've had time to realize what you've gotten yourself into was not what you dreamed it was like as an undergraduate. I call this the "twenty-something graduate school crisis." If you've endured it, you know what I mean. If you have not, these are the kinds of questions you'll find swimming in your head:

• What the bloody hell am I doing here?
• How did I get myself into this?
• Am I smart enough to do this job?
• Will I ever learn how to write well-enough for publication?
• Can I live on a professor's salary?
• Will I be ok living in the middle of nowhere teaching at Such-and-so State?
• I'm a fraud; will I be found out?

When you start having these kinds of questions, don't panic: most of us did, some of us still do. Me? Sometimes I despair I've chosen the wrong profession, but most of the time I think I'm in the place for me. Now, if you never have these questions, please leave the academy immediately: you are what we term an asshole, and it's arrogant people like you that end up making our conferences unpleasant experiences.

For one of my comps questions as a Ph.D. candidate, I wrote an essay titled "The Fantasy of Being Found Out." I forged an analogy between urinating the trough-style urinals common in bar and stadium bathrooms and the nascent fear that looms in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: that biology and neuroscience might eventually obviate the mind/body problem that makes psychoanalysis a viable hermeneutic. I don't know about other guys, but I have trouble peeing in those trough things because (a) I don't like splashes from others; but (b) and more importantly, I don't want anyone checkin' out my junk. That is, like Freud, I don't want to be found out.

This anxiety of being found out plagues graduate students: what if people discover I really don't read as much as they do? What if people can tell I'm not cut out for this? My answer is that we are all frauds, not in an unethical sense, but in the sense that to be an academic one must always be confident and seem self-sure. Take heart grads: we're not. This academic place requires the façade of confidence, but really, your professors are getting by, just like you, as best as they can. Grin and bear it, as they say in the Sunday funnies.

Gradually that anxiety about the façade does fade: you get more comfortable, you learn that no one really expects you to be brilliant all the time; you don't have to read every article that comes out in our journals; you don't have to always be prepared for class. People will, in general, let you be a normal human being. And I suspect by the time folks get to full professorship, the comfort level has increased even more.

Yet aside from the confidence anxiety, what about the rewards? It's true you must make sacrifices to do the academic gig. Relationships with non-academics are tough, and relationships with academics may mean long-distance relationships for long stints. The system penalizes women if they want children (though some schools and programs are better at protecting women than others). Students demand more of women teachers in terms of wardrobe and dress. In general, students have become consumer orientated, and will sometimes treat you as if you are a drive through attendant (I had one student a couple of years ago write in a reflection journal that she should not have to read Marx and other left-wing "bs" because she paid my salary). Some students and their parents will harass you if the student received anything below an "A" as a grade. Compared to the corporate world, salaries are ridiculously low, and in some poorer states, insufficient to meet basic cost-of-living needs (believe me, I should know). And unlike the corporate world which somehow manages to navigate bureaucracy a little bit better, the university setting has so many policies and procedures and gatekeepers it takes months to file a simple request for basic job-related needs.

Culturally, the professorship is devalued. Unlike in other parts of the world where teachers are revered (e.g., Asian countries), in the United States intellectual labor is not regarded as real labor—certainly not valuable labor. Those of you with a full teaching load know that it's absolutely exhausting and physically draining, however, many outside of the world of education have the impression that teaching is somehow effortless. Worse, the professoriate has a reputation of being well-off, pompous, and arrogant. A recent TIAA-CREFT commercial promotes this view, for example: a woman in a very nice business suit is contemplating her retirement in a huge office with mahogany furniture. Yeah, right. My office is a janitor's closet with no windows. And film after film depicts the professoriate as snooty, while NYT article after article depicts what we do as nothing other than the invention of jargon and the production of useless knowledge.

In short, the cultural and economic rewards of being a professor are few.

So we return, again, to those pesky questions: why am I here, exactly? I think, dear dispirited, there are only two good answers: you are goaded by curiosity and have a lust for ideas; and/or you enjoy those magic, ah-ha moments in the classroom, when a student begins thinking on her own and not relying on this or that cultural/social script. To be a happy academic you must be, in one sense or another, a breakthrough junkie.

There are other good reasons, of course: our schedules tend to be more flexible. If you want to raise a family, child care is easier to arrange. Some students admire your teaching and will tell you that you have inspired them to this or that good thought or thing. Working in an academic department usually means your colleagues often become life-long friends. The environment of a department is, more or less, community-oriented and less individual-oriented (which may be a disadvantage to some, but not me). Yet ultimately I think it’s the high of the breakthrough, that magic moment when you've come up with an argument or idea that might change minds, or that instance when you see the light go on in a student's eyes---an excitement in their speech. The motive is curiosity; the grail is the breakthrough.

None of us in the humanities do this job for the money. It's for love and addiction.