Collected wisdom: 12 ways to save the lives of grad students (with poll)
"Wisdom Emblem" by George Wither (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Recently, much digital ink has been spilled over the fate of the university and, particularly, the humanities. Connected to those larger structural concerns are the fates of graduate students, be they recent Ph.D.s or soon-to-be Ph.D.s or prospective students, during a time when budgets are bad, morale is low, and job prospects are even worse. After all the posts we’ve devoted to these topics here, I thought it would be good to offer a list of things that have been floated to help grad students. What follows is a summary of the accumulated wisdom gathered from a number of sources (OK, they’re all from columns from the Chronicle of Higher Ed) we’ve been following that put some concrete–if not easily achievable–suggestions on the table for universities, grad programs, faculty, and students alike.
William Pannapacker, aka Thomas H Benton, aka the advice columnist at the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
1. Don’t go to grad school in the first place!
“It’s hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it’s right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning.” (from “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go”, 1/30/2009)
2. If you do go, know that grad school is a trap that’s based on a lie of the love for learning
“Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.” (from “The Big Lie of the ‘Life of the Mind'”, 2/8/2010)
3. If you’re still thinking about going, get all the info you can about admissions, student aid, teaching, time to degree, attrition, job placement (from “Making a Reasonable Choice”, April 18, 2010)
More wisdom, after the jump…
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