Oh the humanities!

To be a humanities grad student is to be a constant object of mockery. It's competitive enough to get into PhD programs, but once you enroll, your career choice becomes evidence that you are spoiled and white or dim-witted, female, and politically-correct. Or maybe all of the above!

Christina Hoff Summers explains: "Departments of physics, math, chemis­try, engineering, and computer science have remained traditional, rigorous, competitive, relatively meritocratic, and under the control of no-nonsense professors dedicated to objec­tive standards." She thinks that the disproportionate presence of women in the humanities is linked to (what she sees as) the field's silliness. Where there was once important scholarship, there's now high-pitched whining about patriarchy. So that's where we're getting it from the right.

But over at Stuff White People Like, the humanities grad student is a joke because he or she is white. "The best subjects are English, History, Art History, Film, Gender Studies, Studies, Classics, Philosophy, Political Science, Literature, and the ultimate: Comp Lit. MFA’s are also acceptable." So from the left (or whatever one thinks the site constitutes), the critique is that the field is filled with the stuck-up, rich, and pale. Grad school is effeminate in the same way that whiteness is effeminate, but grad students need not actually be women for there to be useless-knowledge acquisition.

But it's not just that the field is considered too white and too female to be of use. (I see a connection to Hillary Clinton's candidacy, but not enough to develop into anything.) The humanities are criticized for being too political, or when not political, for being too irrelevant to contemporary politics. We're either moral-relativizing our way through the subject of Islamic terrorism and scrapping masculine pronouns, or presenting papers on obscure subjects no one cares about anyway. PhD programs are among the few grad programs whose students are, while still students, economically self-sufficient. Yet unlike law, business, or med students, those of us in doctoral programs are, we often hear, avoiding the 'real world.'

I was startled to read Amber's recent remark that law school is where those rejected from PhD programs end up. It was one of the few times I've seen grad school presented, if implicitly, as a respectable choice. (The fact that just about every UChicago grad I know has at least considered applying to doctoral programs doesn't count, because, as with the 'new college hook-up culture,' the U of C is always the exception that proves the rule.)

So, in our defense: Research and teaching are interesting; doctoral programs (often? usually?) pay; and if academia works out for you it pays decently well, while if not you can always figure out something else to do at the ripe old age of, say, 28, which is not too late to start a new path if need be. I don't believe that being in a doctoral program is more or less noble than any other career choice, or that the most brilliant minds gravitate to this rather than, say, business or law. There are smart people doing all kinds of things. Nor do I think academia is a divine calling. But it's not as silly as some would have it. Or so says this pale, female grad student.