Invisible Adjunct

The main reason for the problem is really very simple: hubris. Ask any faculty at a "Research 1" school about the overproduction (awful word that, but perhaps appropriate) of Ph.D.s and they will say the same thing: "Yes, we really wish some of the second-rate schools would stick to granting masters degrees." That, I think, is the first problem; a sort of tragedy of the commons.

The second problem is one of admissions. I can say with confidence that applications are not the best indicator of success. I myself was a (am a?) late bloomer, so when it is suggested that we limit applications to the "best" of our applicant pool, it worries me a bit. So it isn't simply a matter of cutting back the number of Ph.D.s you produce. If you cut back applicants, you rule out people early on. If you increase the rigor of the program (my preference) you end up with a lot more people working on a program they will not complete. The attrition in Ph.D. programs is bad enough as it is, this would only make it more accute. So instead, many Ph.D.s are put out on the market without a chance of competing in the market, and the schools, having granted the degree, can lay the blame on the students for not finding jobs. This isn't an easy problem to solve.

Finally, there is the larger problem of "the folks upstairs"--administrators who want to see soaring graduate enrollments. In our own department, we have managed to shelter the Ph.D. program from these demands, and growth has been largely in a terminal masters program. Nonetheless, as long as we think of the process of minting Ph.D.s as one of "production" increases in said production are likely to remain a significant metric.

One possible contribution here, in my humble opinion, would be an audit of Ph.D. granting programs that clearly indicated what each graduate was doing a year after receiving the degree, and 5 years, 10 years, and 20 years later.

Alex Halavais' comments leave little left to be said. But I was struck by a couple notes:

[I]f upon completion of your work, you fail to find a position (and this is a very real risk), you will experience it as a personal failure, and you will view your own person as an abject failure--

Graduate departments are remarkably good at appropriating the success of their students, while denying responsibility for the "failures." This was brought home vividly to me in the early days of departmental Web sites, when I noticed that a top history department's page of recent graduates... only included those who had tenure-track jobs. The rest were just erased from the official memory.

But a small dissent. Uncouple academia and the life of the mind. Despite the assumption among academics that there can be no life of the mind outside the ivory tower, it is in fact the case that 1) plenty of people lead vivid intellectual lives in other professions, 2) some of those people find that the nonacademic world is a better environment in which to conduct their research, and 3) it's possible to do interesting work in lots of different places. The life of the mind is portable: it's something you cultivate and carry with you, not something that you're granted access to by the dean.

Oops. Didn't convert that second blockquote tag into a close blockquote. Mea culpa!

Alex H. has an excellent point about the perils of weeding people out early. I think one reason that people are reluctant to make their programs more stringent is that it means that they themselves will be throwing students out of their program. Getting kicked out of a program can (I imagine) be pretty traumatic, and soft-hearted people might be reluctant to do things like that to people they know.

If someone is allowed to finish and doesn't get a job, at least the faculty can say, "We didn't stiff them--it was the people making the hiring decisions." Not to mention that it may be difficult to predict who would get a job, if allowed to finish.

I should clarify--I don't think that the thought "We don't want to do something awful to our friend, let the market do it" is necessarily a good reason to graduate all your current students. I just think it's a motivation.

"Graduate departments are remarkably good at appropriating the success of their students, while denying responsibility for the "failures." This was brought home vividly to me in the early days of departmental Web sites, when I noticed that a top history department's page of recent graduates... only included those who had tenure-track jobs."

Yes! My department's web site lies about me: They put me down as having been "placed" because I go a postdoc. Uh, excuse me? The postdoc was a 2-year holding strategy, during which 2 years I went "on the market" and did not place.

Audits would be very good. But many faculty and administrators resist this measure, because they don't really want to look at the numbers.

There's already quite a bit of weeding out down during the 5-7 years that it typically takes to complete a PhD. Graduate school attrition rates as quite high. I agree that limiting admissions would cut off chances for some, but I don't see a better solution at the moment. The real solution would be to convert or reconvert part-time adjunct work into tenure-track work, in which case there would no longer be an oversupply of PhDs and might even be a shortage. But this won't happen any time soon, if ever.

Alex, re: your comment about the life of the mind and its portability. I want to believe this, I really do. But at the moment I just don't see it.

Hi there,

A well-written post, but one that should have it's own warning label: do not read if you are currently working on your PhD in the humanities or social sciences (whatever you call political theory) and have already done more than 2 years!

My solution: hair of the dog--I'm applying to law school next to possibly make my career path even longer, crazier, and more arduous...we'll see if I actually end up doing that...

Well, I suppose this entire blog should carry a warning label. Warning: this blog is written by a cranky and disgruntled history Ph.D. who is attempting to deprogramme herself from the cult of academia.

My husband left a political theory programme while ABD to go to law school. Thank God. He now has a real job and a professional future.

One terrible thing about graduate school not often mentioned is that a large number (in my experience, very large) of PhD candidates lose/get rid of a partner during the process. I've read an article (the precise citation now lost in the decay of memory) which discussed the reasons for this, which included both the lowered expectations of a "normal" life and how the process of forming of an intellectual identity tends to alienate you from that "normal" life. A lot of the divorces I've watched (as the husband of a grad student, all of whose close friends went through divorces) came about because the couple could no longer carry on a conversation. The budding academic simply couldn't be bothered with a 9-to5 life and two weeks of vacation when he or she was engaged 24/7/365.

The life of the mind can be pursued outside of the academy, but often at nearly equal cost. Our age demands that we prove our intellect on paper and that takes time, time that ordinary jobs do not afford. Extraordinary jobs are another thing altogether, and those are the product of entrepreneurial talent (not necessarily yours...) - the supply of which is always scarcer than need.

Yes, graduate school can wreak havoc on personal relationships and domestic life. So can post-PhD underemployment. So can academic employment and the pursuit of tenure.

One of the main reasons why my husband left grad school for law school was so that we could stay together. We saw couples go "on the market," desperately trying to secure academic positions in the same city/region. We saw no reason for optimism. I personally know and also know of a number of couples who took jobs 5 or more hours away from one another. Many have now split up.

A lot of this has to do with the general "speedup" of academic life (or what John Guillory calls "preprofessionalism"). You need to start behaving like a full-fledged professional early on in the game -- conference papers, publications, a teaching portfolio and so on -- but without the benefits of money, time and support, and within a context of constant anxiety and insecurity. All of this is inimical to the increasingly quaint and archaic notion of the "life of mind."

Couldn't these audits be required by accrediting agencies? Then they wouldn't have a choice.

HT, I sit here in my office at a major research university, a stone's throw from getting a PhD. So far, the choice of a program (philosophy, cultural studies, ethics, or theology) has kept me from ever filling out that application--along with the usual fear and trepidation.

But more and more you're convincing me that I'd be better off getting a creative writing masters or a liberal arts degree to get my academia fix and then go about my merry way. I know I can do the work in a PhD program, but the political bullshit would drive me batty. It's bad enough setting here on the edge and watching it from a distance.

If I had some guarantee of my boss' career path, I might do it: he's close to retirement and got tenure from writing one (admittedly excellent) book and a couple or three articles.

But then I think, will anyone listen to me without a PhD tacked on to my name? Or will the academic rat race render me incapable of saying anything meaningful anyhow?

Sorry, not HT but IA. Still coming off a 12 hour road trip.

Just a follow-up on the law school thing...

The grass is always greener. My wife is in law school now, and I took the LSATs once out of undergrad, and again after my MA, and did well enough both times to make my way into law programs. The thing that stopped me each time was that I got the impression that people were only in it for the money. And at the time, I thought this was a bad thing :).

Now, having experienced 1L vicariously, I find it intriguing, but wouldn't have given up graduate school to do it. I guess, even with all the downsides, I really enjoyed my grad program. For me, becoming a prof was really just a chance to keep being a student a while longer, with the bonus of getting paid a bit.

All that said, as a potential following spouse in the next few years, going back to law school doesn't look all together unattractive :).

I take your point about the grass being greener.

However: my husband went from a top-ranked PhD programme in political theory to a top-ranked law school, and the difference between the two was striking (and to both of us, rather shocking). Law school was a grind, yes, but it didn't foster the kind of collective neurosis that characterizes graduate school. There was a lot of work, and a good deal of pressure, but the difference was: people had prospects and they knew it. As my husband put it, by the end of the first year of law school, he could already see his future. His law school has a 98 percent placement rate: in other words, you really have to mess up in order to come out without a job. Whereas his PhD programme had a placement rate of...well, nobody can really say, actually, because they don't keep accurate statistics. But certainly, full employment at the end was by no means a given.

I don't mean to suggest that my grad school experience was uniformly bleak and negative. It wasn't. But given the fact that my field is slowly but surely being eliminated, and the growing realization that my prospects of finding full employment in the academy are dwindling down to nothing, it just does not seem worth it to have given up so much of my adult life.

The sense of failure that you mention is very deep. Its a way the academic institution governs the self. A bit like Catholics and guilt.

Even though my work in political life is successful and enyoyable, I still have not thrown off the sense of failure - from not gaining tenure whilst an academic. Its crazy stuff as I am far better off than I ever was in academia; but like guilt the failure is there deep inside gnawing away.

The failure makes no sense in political life but its there as part of the comportment. All the stuff about being clever, smart, educated etc etc is very effective as a mode of governing the soul.

It was the misery it caused that made me decide to get out.

I wish i had some labour alienation.

thing about the economic schizophrenia is that i can still buy consumer items made in china that i dont want

why does no one talk about consumption alienation?

alienated from the promises

and

i wish i could feel guilty...
but then i am out of phase

There is a moment in every graduate student's life where you realize (and it's usually late in the game that this happens) that no amount of merit or skill or dedication or talent or intelligence can suffice to win out and obtain a good academic career for yourself. I actually think that there's some grounds for believing that a certain kind of driving ambition coupled with talent does win out in many other professional careers. But not in academia. Once you've seen a few job searches from the other side of things, you're even more aware of the random vagaries that structure who ends up with a good tenure-track post and who ends up bitter about having wasted 10 years of their lives.

Frankly, I try to discourage the students who I regard as especially intelligent in a broad, humanistic, multifaceted way from going on to a doctorate. I think it's usually a mistake. The people who succeed best are the people who can keep their heads down, their minds focused, and who are not especially restless or overly curious in their thinking. There is a kind of bright, admirable student who succeeds reasonably well in graduate school, but it's a very particular kind of intelligence. And then there's people who go on because they love learning and they think that academia is more of the same.

It's not. It ought to be, but it isn't.

The tough thing then is to figure out how to change things. Because once I do have an undergraduate who is convinced he or she is going to go to graduate school, then I feel obligated to help them be "preprofessionalized", to give them a window onto the socialization processes that are going to shape their lives. I tell them how to be aspirant mandarins. That's the responsible thing to do. If I had graduate students, I'd have to do even more of that, because it's incredibly irresponsible to try and invent a new practice all by yourself and in so doing guarantee that your students are going to fail badly on the market.

I really don't know how to think about changing the system. Maybe if we could get entire institutions to "opt out", to announce that they were by conscious design going to privilege candidates who didn't look like the very model of the modern academic in making hiring decisions? But the problem there is that the only people who survive the careerist pressures of graduate school and retain some distinctive sense of deviance from the standard model ARE deviants--e.g., messed-up and confused, or cluelessly unaffected by anything, or monstrously arrogant. Everyone once in a while a devious mensch slips through the net, too, but they tend to look impeccable on paper. If you could find a way to make it clear in a hiring process that you're looking for the devious mensches who have a passion for learning and knowledge and have managed to stoke that passion in secret during graduate school--well, you might be onto something.

I don't see how things can change either. Given the ratio of well-qualified candidates to full-time jobs, the hiring process will favour careerists with impeccable credentials and picture-perfect CVs. In such a tight "market," there just isn't room for a more creative approach to hiring.

I know some here have left, or wish they had, graduate school to pursue a law degree, but let me tell you, eveything you wrote in your blog entry about grad school can be applied to the law graduate. It is rough out there when you 100k in debt and some slimy firm is offering you 35k a year. law schools a re the worst when it come to being up front about employment prospects.

Congrats, all. I now want to kill myself.

I made it to ABD in Philosophy and quit, for reasons well-explained here. I'm the "restlessly intelligent" type Burke mentions, not the "head down and focused" type.

So I left. But now, here I am, after a series of stupid corporate jobs, *totally* unsatisifed. I have a great wife and a kid on the way, but on the professional side, I feel like I'm squandering my life.

I suppose that, like some have said, I could create my own life of the mind--start writing editorials or something. But that takes a degree of self-starting and plugging away that many folks, myself included, just don't have. Part of the attraction of academia is a secure, structured environment where people like me can work.

It isn't that any more. But no place else is either.

Fuck.

Oops! I forgot to post that "enter at your own risk" label on the front page of my blog.

"Part of the attraction of academia is a secure, structured environment where people like me can work."

Alas, this was the attraction for all of us. We didn't enter because we wanted fame and fortune, but because the academy is one of the very few spaces in which to pursue scholarly work. But that space is shrinking.

Of course, I am one person offering a perspective based on my experience and observations (well, based also on the experiences of others, including some of the people I went to grad school with, who are also without academic jobs). Others have had different experiences, and others see things differently.

But with a baby on the way, the stakes are that much higher. Please do not blindly or blithely enter into a graduate programme! Get as much information as you can: talk to people, read the newsletters and other publications of the relevant professional associations, get at least a feel for the "market" (better yet, see if you can get actual stastistics).