Was it worth it?

My Turkey blog seems to be turning into a teaching-in-Turkey blog, which I can only imagine is probably less interesting to the majority of you. For those keeping track at home, my 3-3 teaching gig got switched to a 2-4—fully with my consent, this isn’t a complaint, I’m very much still in love with my job. But this has kept me tied to Ankara a little bit more, since this is my first time teaching this load and my weekends have been spent relaxing and working on research rather than traveling. Look for Turkish wonders, or even anecdotes about colorful socks, to resume shortly.

            What I’m going to say at the outset is that I’m trending into dangerous territory here, and—I will say this in advance—I am not sure if I’m right about any of this. I’m completely open to being told that I’m an asshole about any part of this, and you will probably be right. I still haven’t sorted out my feelings about this subject, but I also—in my gut—know that something that I read is wrong, deeply wrong, in a way that made me want to respond. This may fall into the tl;dnr category for you, particularly if you’re looking for anecdotes about Turkish life—and my essay about finding bright-colored socks is upcoming, I promise.

What I’m going to write about is an article that’s been making the rounds, and which has been addressed at me a couple of times. For those who haven’t read it, the article is here: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/04/there_are_no_academic_jobs_and_getting_a_ph_d_will_make_you_into_a_horrible.html . (And you can pretty much get the feel of it by the hyperlink.)

So, was it worth it? My former teacher Sandra Macpherson made me want to write this by posting about her time at ASECS, the primary conference for eighteenth-century studies. (I do not want to deface that beautiful name by stating what it stands for.) She writes about academia, and I quote: “It's pretty amazing, and nice, nice work if you can get it.”

Sandra is bucking a trend, as the Slate article—and about a million other pieces I’ve read over the course of the last, oh, ten years—will demonstrate. People going to humanities graduate school exist as special sorts of idiots in the popular imagination in a sort of perfect storm of things generally disliked: believing one’s self to be cleverer than other people; not immediately applying one’s self to the most lucrative thing possible; and, of course, participating in an activity (the modern humanities) generally reckoned to be about as beneficial to mental self-development as, oh, membership in the Manson Family.

I worked, part-to-full-time, all the way through undergrad. Yes, poor me: suffering at one of the world’s major research universities. But when I started grad school, the choice really was this: work at a library for five-to-seven days a week (which I have done)? Or spend the next indefinite number of years getting paid to read in a new city? There never was a choice, on those terms.

Oh, but do I regret it now? Do I regret not going to law school? Sometimes. Years ago, a dear friend of mine, now a lawyer, told me to do what I most wanted to do—to follow my dreams, basically. I’m glad that I did: I think I’m happier—having gotten lucky-and-a-job—than I would have been as a lawyer.

So, was grad school worth it? I’m going to say that it was, although it needed to be validated by getting a job—although at first that job wasn’t a professor job. At the moment, with an Assistant Professor job that I love, an active research schedule, students I very much like, and assorted other trimmings, I’m very happy.

How can I possibly write the above statement, given the number of deserving people who don’t have jobs? I can’t. I shouldn’t. I’m deeply sorry. The depth of quality people in my field who would make huge differences in students’ lives and who don’t have jobs is just sickening. If you read this, and think that I’m prancing my privilege around like a trick pony, you have my permission to punch me in the face.

But what I do take issue with is the basic statement that humanities grad school training is just prima facie useless—that it destroys your ability to enjoy literature, trains you to hate humans and humanity, and leads to a job that will just make you miserable anyway.

Was I miserable during periods—long, long periods—of grad school? Boy howdy. Those of you who talked to me during that period probably, again, wonder where I get off talking about grad school as worthwhile. I don’t know what that person I was would say to this, either. He’d probably want to punch me in the face.

Yet—again, yet—talk to any young professional, or indeed anyone beginning a career. This might seem a somewhat random comparison, but read chef memoirs: something like Bill Buford’s Heat, or (bless me) Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. We just sort of live at a time when getting the interesting jobs requires a lot of work. Cooks, in these books, are told to suffer endlessly for no money and maybe they’ll make sous-chef. It’s a terrible deal, and one that I would encourage no-one to take—unless, sigh, they really loved what they were doing. And then I would say try to find a situation that lets you follow what you love while still making some sort of living.

That’s what grad school gave me for probably too many years. What ended those years was luck. I got lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Let me say that right now. The only thing separating me from fifteen other candidates, and I mean this literally, is that someone else took a job elsewhere and my program hired me rather than them. I am convinced that any one of those people could do my job as well as I could, and they are welcome—this will be a leitmotif—to punch me in the face. It took me four years—four years!—to get this lucky, but in the end I’m just as lucky as anyone else who gets one of these jobs.

(Here’s a depressing thought for you academics: imagine the fields that won’t get changed, the paradigms that won’t get shifted, the ideas that will die stillborn because of the depth of talent that’s not finding academic work.)

So, what did I get out of graduate school? I’ve been teaching Adam Smith—the Smith of the Wealth of Nations, alas—to my students, and I realize that all of the following would simply be off the axis of what he considers interesting. But, here’s what I got from graduate school: a PhD., which, contrary to what you may hear, people respect. I was as paralytically depressed as I have ever been, or will ever allow myself to be again. I got to live in a tremendous city for two years, and then eight years in another tremendous city, during which I was steadily paid, had health insurance, and even—for the last sixteen months—a full-time job. I learned to read and write to a level of precision that still amazes me. I nearly had any number of nervous breakdowns. I saw tremendous amounts of opera, theater, classical music, author readings, and dance. I got to take a class with Sandra, and other similar people, and learned things I would never have come within a parsec of knowing otherwise. I ended relationships because I was bitter and paranoid and jealous of other people finding work. I once, in a recreation of a historical riot, was invited to dress up as a police officer and had foam bricks thrown at me. I have savings. I was never bored.

Also, I got to know the best people. Really and truly. There were moments when the intellectual atmosphere at [Graduate University] was harsher than the Mean Girls lunchroom—and there were moments where I’m sure I didn’t help with that. There are things that I might, as a faculty member, do differently than some of the things that I saw—and, in fact, get to do those things now. But I was never without people who believed in me, and never for a moment doubted that I was among the smartest people. (To watch the best minds of your generation being destroyed by a terrible economic crisis is, of course, to know the best minds. Who are, of course, free to punch me in the face.)

Is this work worthwhile? Yes, yes, a thousand times. There a moments in the classroom that feel as close to any experience of the "holy" as I've felt, and yes I do full well know how inane that sounds. Fuck it. I spent the last six months writing about a poem: reading it, sending it out, getting feedback, sculpting it, thinking more deeply about it. Again, fuck it: those were six good months.

Also: to say that “you will never get…monetary compensation from a stable, non-penurious position at a decent university” (I quote the Slate article) is false. I did. You can punch me in the face again: many didn’t. But, during the sixteen months when I used my PhD. to find alternate employment (again, by getting lucky), did I “withstand the open scorn of everyone [I] kn[ew]?” Christ on a butterscotch sundae, no. My friends, colleagues, and—yes—the institution that gave me my PhD. felt bad for me, and tried to help. And I got a job.

One thing that this Slate article really gets is the hermeticism of academia. Michel Foucault, theorist of self-specularity, is popular among academics for a reason: he theorizes being your own worst enemy, harshest judge, jealousy fiend, substance-abuse-recommender, and so on forward. The notion that you will come to hate yourself if you do not find a job in your field is true. I wish I had anything to say to that.

My own recent happiness—and, let me tell you, I am extremely happy, thank you—comes at the same time as getting a job. I would like to think it is somehow separate, but I suspect this is not the case. Yet with this comes a sense of something I didn’t have in grad school: an ability, I guess, to start valuing things on my own, rather than because other people value them.

Here’s advice I was too dumb to listen about grad school and, I suspect, any professional career: you have to learn to make yourself happy. (And oh, look at me, with my new job, telling you this now that things have stabilized for me. Again, I really do mean it about the face.) I do not have a tenure-track job, because there is no tenure in this country. And four years ago I would—I mean, I hope not, but I might have—been one of those people who sneer at anyone without a particular sort of job. But four years ago I would have been too stupid to imagine that I would fall head over heels in love with something slightly, just slightly, off the beaten path.

I’m onto the third page of writing, and I suspect I’m not any closer to reaching a crisp conclusion about this subject than I was three pages ago. I guess in the end any advice I would give on the subject of grad school would be: don’t go if they’re not paying you, and if they don’t have on-campus jobs after your funding runs out.

Posting this to Facebook lets me conclude by saying something that is off-topic, illogical, but also deeply true: you people, my friends and mentors who put up with me during my grad school years, are maybe half of my reward for choosing to do what I did. And I suppose this is what makes me want to post this ungainly monster of a reply to a routinely stupid Internet article: because you all, and everyone trying to do the “nice work” that I get to enjoy, deserve better. This is a great job that more passionate people need to get.

You may still punch me in the face.