“This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media.” In the wake of the turmoil engulfing the newspaper industry at the moment (see also: The Wire, Season 5), journalist Mark Pinsky argues in TNR for a 21st century revival of the Federal Writers’ Project. Given the woeful state of the academic job market during this current downturn, I bet there are quite a few historians out there who’d give this a “Huzzah!”
Tag: PhDont
I can smile in the face of mankind.
“Most of the time, I’m halfway content. Most of the time, I know exactly where it all went.” Maybe it’s the impending holidays. Maybe it’s dissertoral stress. Or maybe it’s the weather, or something like that. Still, it was one of those weekends…So, in light of that, Bob Dylan’s “Most of the Time” meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I never would have chosen this sort of hermit life for myself. But, given this is the hand I’m currently playing, at least there’re great movies and great music on my side.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.
“For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.”
By way of Little Bit Left, a new site by a Columbia colleague that’s well worth adding to the blogroll, the NYT surveys the sad plight of the modern ABD. (I’ll be 33 at my current expected finish date, seven years after starting, and my cohort’s attrition rate has been significant, so it seems the stats bear out in my case.) “Those who insist on dissertations are aware that they must reduce the loneliness that defeats so many scholars…’It’s easy, especially in our field, to feel isolated, and that tends to slow people down…There’s no sense of belonging to an academic community.‘” Oh, I dunno…Berk and I often have very scintillating conversations…progressive citizenship, New Era consumerism, socks, squirrels, you name it.
Coming Up for Air.
Also not noted here this past week, another school year ended here at Columbia. Since I’ve been on a research fellowship the past few seasons, I haven’t been teaching, and I rarely have reason these days to leave my home and/or the campus libraries, other than the occasional trip to the movies, the pub, or the dog park, I’ve pretty much fallen out of the usual academic rhythms of campus…but, nonetheless, another year has passed, so it seems like a good time for an update.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I did less well than hoped — as in multiple rejections, some expected, some quite surprising — in the grant-and-fellowship-securing department for the coming year. But, those disappointments notwithstanding, I have secured enough funding to offset my usual freelance writing projects, and I expect to spend at least one more academic year here at my current New York City apartment, during which quite a bit more dissertation-writing will (and, indeed, will have to) happen. From there, with dissertation presumably in hand, it’s either moving on in academia, at some university or another (one likely not of my choosing) or moving back into the political-speechwriting world…these days, well, it’s still a toss-up, but I feel it’s becoming less so. My future will depend a lot on the well-documented vagaries of the job market, of course, and if, miracle upon miracles, an academic job is available at a university that feels like a good fit, and they actually offer it to me out of the hundreds of qualified candidates, of course I may very well take it. But I’ve found myself increasingly thinking that I’d probably be happier back in Washington regardless, either in speechwriting or at a progressive foundation/think-tank type place, where there’s some sense of being involved in both the unfolding of current events and the daily struggle to make this world a happier, more progressive-minded place.
This is not to say I’m closing any doors. I do enjoy working on my dissertation, and can still lose myself for extended periods of time delving into the past. But, for varied reasons, be they the usual late-term graduate student blues, the often maddeningly parochial nature of many academic conversations, the sheer social isolation of dissertation-writing, or something else (and I can’t discount last fall’s awful romantic implosion, which cast a pall over the whole year and — still, beyond any recourse — wearies and depresses me pretty much daily), I’ve spent most of the past year feeling profoundly dissatisfied with my current circumstances, so much so that I find it increasingly hard to imagine a life along these lines.
But, we’ll see — as I said, there’s still one more year to go. I only mention it here as [a] between the graduates in baby-blue robes everywhere and my impending ten-year college reunion, it’s felt like nigh time for a state-of-life update and [b] the disconnect between my everyday state of mind and my GitM-blog voice has been feeling increasingly untenable. I really have no desire to see this site degenerate into weekly whimpering and moaning about woe-is-me grad student angst. (There’s enough of that online already and, besides, think grad school is tough? Try Iraq, buddy. Or, for that matter, working minimum wage.) So, I’m getting it out of the way now, in the hopes that voicing my existential discontent once and for all will free me to go back to blogging as normal.
Still, I don’t yet know what it is, or what form it will take, but, doggone it, something has to change in my life. Several great trips and the always pleasant company of l’il Berk notwithstanding, another year unfolding like the last one did is really just too depressing to contemplate.
No Cred for Indy.
“The committee concurred that Dr. Jones does seem to possess a nearly superhuman breadth of linguistic knowledge and an uncanny familiarity with the history and material culture of the occult. However, his understanding and practice of archaeology gave the committee the greatest cause for alarm.” One sad note amid all the excellent election news: Despite the best efforts of Dean Marcus Brody, Indiana Jones has been denied tenure at Marshall College. (By way of The Late Adopter.)
Freedom of…D’oh!
Here’s a depressing civics poll: While one in five Americans (22%, doesn’t that seem low?) could name the five members of the Simpsons family (Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie…but you knew that), only 1 in 1000 could name the five rights protected in the First Amendment (religion, speech, press, assembly, petition), and only a measly 8% could name even three of them. I got all five in both, but, then again, in the inimitable words of Marge Simpson: “Don’t make fun of grad students, Bart. They just made a poor life decision.“
Unpopular chic.
“If a book is conceived with only historiography in mind — with academic disciplinary debates and research agendas dictating the focus and the form — it’s unlikely to succeed in the public realm. If it’s conceived without historiography in mind, it’s unlikely to succeed as scholarship. So, how do we develop what we might call a Goldilocks approach to historiography?” In a very intriguing two-part article for Slate, David Greenberg of Rutgers University makes the case for historians breaking out of the Ivory Tower.
My friends and colleagues here have heard me rant about this on many opportunities — For all the talk of transnationalism and blurring borders in the field right now, the border between academia and popular history remains rigorously guarded by historians who too often equate accessibility with poor scholarship and second-rate thinking. On many occasions, we’ve been told by visiting scholars — including some very big names — that, for better or worse, we’re fated to do “history-professor history” that will have “no effect” on how Americans see their past.
In short, I find this line of thinking very disquieting. Frankly, writing American history tomes that only a rarefied community of scholars will “get” seems to me a rather sad way to spend a life in the discipline. Whatsmore, it’s no accident that right-wing interpretations of the past, be they neo-con or free-market fundamentalism, for example, tend to gain a wider currency in today’s political climate than left-wing ones do. It’s partly because academics on the right seem to have less qualm about popularizing their ideas for a mass audience (and they’ve got more institutions to disseminate them, but that’s another story.)
I find something profoundly irritating about scholars who claim that “ordinary people” will never understand their ideas, and then go on to complain about the nation’s right-wing drift. While it may be hubris to think that any one scholar’s work will make all that much of a difference, it’s still a worthier goal, to my mind, than composing a work of great theoretical insight that’s completely inscrutable to all but those academic elites similarly ordained in the historical arts.
Ghosts in the Machine.
“In order to be eligible to teach the classes, you must have: a Ph.D., experience teaching the subject matter, a good teaching record, and an intangible quality that we don’t want to define because we feel that definition would make it tangible. We will pay you roughly $4,000 a class regardless of your experience.” Some academic gallows humor courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education: Dear Adjunct Faculty Member. (There’s also a pretty funny piece on the psychological afflictions of grad students making the e-mail rounds, but unfortunately it’s premium content.)
Supastar!
The Boston Globe examines the rise of the academic star system, the ensuing university rat race, and how they both affect those scholars who actually do the teaching. Sadly, as you might expect, it means even less money to go around for the bulk of PhDs.
Reality Check.
“Like actors, however, humanities graduate students have to realize that – except for a few jackpot cases – there is no market for their product. When you choose a career path with no market, you have to love it enough to do it for free.” Breaching the Web passes along a rude awakening for the academy-minded. Statistics like these are always a bit disappointing…still, I think a PhD can be helpful in other career tracks besides academia, and particularly in a field like History or English that lends itself to a lot of overlap with the “real” world. The numbers are grim, but most fellow graduate students I encounter seem to know the score.