Anonymous Rex’s Weblog

On Sunday, Marc C Taylor announced in The New York Times that graduate education is “the Detroit of higher learning.”  Essentially he said what all graduate students know in their hearts but refuse to face: That we are being trained for jobs that do not exist and being exploited to keep university budgets low.  This is nothing new.  As a faculty brat, I have been hearing this since sometime in college.  It’s the reason I got teaching certification.  Taylor’s analysis is far less dour than an article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month entitled, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go.”  All graduate student have seen The Simpsons clip where Marge explains, “Don’t make fun of graduate students, they just made terrible life choices.”

I found it very refreshing to see a chaired baby-boomer admit this injustice in The New York Times.  Furthermore, Taylor proposes actual improvements!  I have now seen the Taylor article posted on facebook almost a dozen times.  This is partly because my colleagues mostly study religion and Taylor edited that ubiquitous orange theory book we all had to read.  But I also saw a lot of my peers mocking Taylor’s ideas to “end the university as we know it.”   I found this shocking for two reasons:

First, I simply cannot understand anyone in my position having loyalty to the academic system.  It’s a system that’s universally condemned and yet hasn’t changed since the Middle-Ages.  Think about that for a second: everyone hates it, but it never changes.  The only thing that sustains it is the empty promise of a tenure track position.  Tenure has become the opiate of the masses.  As an inner city teacher, I saw literally dozens of angry youth that had every reason to be engaged in social reform.  They didn’t because they were going to be rap stars.  There is little difference between a graduate student aspiring to get tenure and a rap fan aspiring to be a rap star.  I spoke to a college administrator recently who told me that many colleges now have 60% adjunct faculty.  So once you have accepted that you will probably never get a tenure track job, how can you not rage against the system?  Realistically, there is almost no change you could make to academia that would not benefit me.  If Taylor said all universities need to be put on stilts, I would support it: I’m not scared of heights and maybe some of the baby-boomers are.

Second and more importantly, everyone mocking Taylor fails to recognize that dissertations, circumscribed disciplines, all of the things Taylor wants to jettison are totally arbitrary, culturally constructed marks of intellectual achievement.  If you don’t believe me, think of all the moronic people with PhDs you’ve met.  They managed to jump through the same hoops.  Like paper currency, dissertations are worth whatever value we ascribe to them.  And right now that value is pretty low.

I can support Taylor’s changes based on personal experience: I went to Hampshire, a college that has already implemented a lot of these ideas: there were only four departments, no majors, no tests, no grades, no tenure, and while a year long project was required it did not have to be a thesis.  Now I’m in a position to observe undergraduates in a giant university and I am more convinced than ever that I got a better undergraduate education.

One thing I learned is that tenure isn’t really the issue.  Hampshire didn’t have tenure but faculty that had been there more than ten years were completely confident that they would never be fired.  Accordingly, some of them engaged in all the worst abuses associated with tenured faculty: sexually harassing teenage advisees, showing up to work drunk, refusing to grade assignments, etc.  (Ever since high-school, I have had the strange fortune of seeing the underbelly of institutions.)  Furthermore, tenure is not really a guarantee of academic freedom.  This is the real reason that Larry Summers was driven out of Harvard: He was micromanaging every department and the faculty rebelled against him (but not before we lost Cornell West.)

Now let’s talk about projects.  This seemed to be the one item on Taylor’s list that my peers were most skeptical of.  Hampshire students must spend a year doing a “serious” project.  While many students wrote a thesis (my undergraduate thesis was longer than some dissertations), some of the non-thesis projects were astounding.  The campus has solar cells, a windmill, and a skywalk that were all built by students.  Many graduates have gone on to publish, market, or patent their respective project.  Of course there were flops: one student filled a room with slashed up teddy bears soaked in red paint.  I thought that was pretty cool but it should not have taken an entire year.  Then again, art isn’t my discipline.  Maybe the teddy bear massacre was incredibly significant.

By any normal criteria these projects are far more valuable than a typical dissertation.  Taylor is right: What is the point of spending two years of your life to write a boring dissertation that will never be published, printed, or read?  Projects are better for three reasons: First, they tend to acquaint the student with the outside world, making it more likely the student will find a job they love outside of academia.  Second, an impressive project is more likely to earn renown.  And although no one would ever admit it, I believe renown is an asset in fighting for teaching jobs, especially if the college or department doing the hiring is trying to pull more students.  If you were hiring a professor for a small college, would you want Sid Myers, the creator of Civilization, or someone you have never heard of who wrote a thesis on early uses of zinc?  (Before you decide, the second guy’s letter of recommendation says this a very important contribution to the study of Anatolian bronze production.)  Third, these projects will attract the attention of the community and break down these disgusting walls between “town” and “gown.”  How is it we wonder at the surge of anti-intellectualism in this country when we ourselves hate academia?  Projects might prove to the public (and ourselves) that we so-called experts can actually do something of value.

Finally, I want to defend Taylor’s idea of project-based programs instead of permanent departments.  Everyone panned him for suggesting “a water program.”  (Obviously he was thinking more of the hard sciences with that idea.)  The two most rewarding things I have ever done in academia are working for the Pluralism Project and the PRSE––both groups that have a strong sense of mission.  Not surprisingly, my involvement with these groups is also what most impresses people reading my resume.  No, I wouldn’t sign up for a “water program.”  But I would rather be in an interdisciplinary “meaning program” than where I am now.

Who knows.  Maybe a swine-flu pandemic will decimate all my peers and there will be plenty of jobs.  It worked in the Middle-Ages, why should we think of a better solution now?