PhDs and garret hermits

L.V. Anderson looks at why adjuncts* don't find other, better jobs. The piece pretty much covers it - adjuncts stay because it's really hard to go from perma-adjunct to tenure-track (yet if that's what you aspire to, it looks bad to definitively leave the field), and because, when it comes to jobs outside academia, the market's tough generally, and you can't just leave once you've committed to teaching a course.

What I'd add, though, is that someone with a humanities PhD is in a weird position in the non-academic job market. Not necessarily hopeless, just weird. For one thing, there's the grad-student stereotype - think Buster from "Arrested Development" - of someone too delicate and eccentric for the real world. There's remarkably little truth behind that cliché at this point - the professionalization of everything has included academia - but those three letters on a resume unfortunately don't announce 'smart person ready to meet challenges' as much as one might hope.

But let's say you want to avoid the grad-school stigma. Why not leave your schmancy degree of your resume? Here's why: Because doing so amounts to announcing that you were un- or underemployed for the past seven or so years. If grad school was your job - your source of income and what filled your days (and nights!) - what you have to do is convey to employers that the skills are transferrable. It probably - but what do I know? - helps to convey the extent to which grad school involves interacting with others. In an office, even. Otherwise, the fear will be: garret hermit seeks first-ever office employment.

Also! It might not be assumed that a former grad student would know the basics of using a computer. The tech-ier aspects of, yes, even humanities grad school (heavy use of Google Books and other, more obscure digital archives in multiple languages, combined with intense attention to detail; calculating grades in Excel; formatting the dissertation) aren't obvious to those on the outside, who will understandably assume that the entire endeavor involves using a paper notebook to take notes on crumbling old books. Point being, you have to spell this out.

Then there's the question of which jobs are plausible. Are you entry-level? Your first thought is bound to be that you're not, given your age (late 20s at the youngest) and given all the talk one hears of "alt-ac" - of alternate tracks for PhD-holders. But the reality is, you very well might be. Whether you're entry-level or not depends on the job, and whatever else you were doing during your PhD. (That people with PhDs are urged to consider unpaid internships may also help explain the appeal of adjuncting for a few thousand dollars.)

Oh! And! There's the not-insignificant matter of, you can't pursue a career in not-academia. You need not only to be willing to do something outside academia, but also some positive sense of what it is you'd like to do, even if it helps to be flexible. There needs to be a Plan B (or, ahem, co-Plan A), ideally one in place during grad school as well. Given the % of grad students actually getting tenure-track positions, a little career-counseling in that area, for those who don't arrive with Plans B-Z in store, might be welcome.

*Any discussing of adjuncting requires the two standard disclaimers: 1) Some people at some points in their lives want flexible part-time work, and 2) some non-tenure-track positions in the humanities (VAPs, postdocs) involve non-poverty wages and - while they add on years of uncertainty and geographic challenges for those with families - seem to look good on an academic CV, and can provide much-needed teaching experience. Also: some "adjuncting" is done during grad school, as (paid) training. Point being, there are sometimes very good reasons to be an adjunct.

On nearly failing Mr. Bologna's gym class

It didn't seem possible, but there it was: another email about a blink-and-you'd-miss-it formatting problem with my dissertation. Not something mentioned in the last round of edits, but maybe alluded to? Something about how I needed to fix the problems and do X, but phrased in such a way as it seemed likely that doing X was what would solve the problem. Maybe (definitely!) I ought to have phoned the office then, but I thought I'd made all the changes, or else obviously I'd have called to check. But anyway. Everything seems to be sorted out such that I don't need to make a special trip into the city just to deal with this, but that's not to say there wasn't a moment of panic when I saw the email pop up from the Office of Your Dissertation is Formatted Wrong.

This brings ABD to a new level. I can understand never really getting going with a project, or finding a job elsewhere and not seeing the point of getting the degree, or just generally something coming up between the qualifying exam and the defense. But if what stands between me and the doctorate is that two lines of the title page are incorrectly spaced, I think I'm a walking don't-go article.

In other news, my high school called to let me know that I did in fact fail Mr. Bologna's gym class, not just for one marking period, but for the whole year, thereby preventing me from starting college. My elementary school has land-line phoned me up to tell me that the remedial handwriting class I was in (which I was; this blog is basically a celebration of typing) hasn't ended. Whichever other anxiety-dream scenarios, those too, while we're at it.

Race and the two-fellowship purse

Already old news, but here goes: Oprah wanted to buy a bag the cost of approximately two years' worth of PhD student fellowship. (Something to think about, would-be graduate students.) Because the market values Oprah's contribution to the world more than that of those slogging away at dissertations, she could well afford that bag and then some. But Oprah was unable to buy the bag in question, because the woman assisting her in some Swiss shop decided that this woman surely couldn't afford it. "This woman" being, as we all (well, not all, it seems) know, among the few in the world who, no matter what it is, could well afford it.

And cue the obvious: $42,000 (I think? the figure seems to vary) is a lot of money for a handbag! (For one named after Jennifer friggin' Aniston, one might add.) And made out of crocodiles! Think of the crocodiles! (Are we supposed to think of the crocodiles? I hadn't been paying attention, given that I wasn't in the market for crocodile anything. I'm barely keeping up with which salmon is socially acceptable.) Such egotism mixed with U.S.-centrism - why must retail workers all the world over know who some American TV star is? And she's crying racism?

Yet I'd have to agree with her assessment of racism. In a sense, the fact that Oprah is so advantaged in every other way, the fact that this is such beyond-first-world-problems territory, allows us to isolate racism as the root of what's going on.

Let me explain: Being ignored in a snooty store isn't about racism - it's something all of us who don't come across as fabulously wealthy (a category that includes virtually all Americans abroad, including the very rich - our high-end-casual world of $90 yoga pants doesn't really translate) experience. It's likely that being overweight reads as being too poor to buy anything in the place, depending the locale, and that this impacts experiences even in accessories stores, i.e. where sizes stocked isn't applicable. But being thin and pale, while it might lead to never having a free seat next to you on public transportation, isn't enough to get attention in many stores. Trust me on this.

But being preemptively suspected of shoplifting, now that is absolutely racism. And that's what it sounds like happened here. Why wouldn't someone be shown a particular bag? Fear of theft. Upscale stores correctly assess that I won't buy anything, but don't trail me, either. If we're to frame this in privilege terms, white privilege isn't being fawned all over in Zurich handbag emporiums. It's not being presumed a thief.

It's not unlike the where-are-the-black-models question. One might well point to the complete unfairness inherent in who qualifies for the job of "high-fashion model" to begin with. Whereas in any other job, simply having certain physical attributes either wouldn't be enough or (far more often) would be something your employer shouldn't be considering in the first place, with modeling, that's the essential. There is no inalienable right to be a runway model, any more than to owning some kind of endangered-material handbag named after Rachel from "Friends." But what does it say if you have the bizarre and arbitrary qualifications, but can't get hired for one reason only, and that's because you're black?

On changing the culture

Because the thread was getting unwieldy, I'm going to address Miss Self-Important's question, "[W]hat could grad programs concretely do to acknowledge the fact of non-academic employment?," in a post of its own. (In my initial response to her, I came up with a weak 'they could change the culture', but now I'm on my second coffee of the day.)

What they could do, at meetings for admitted students and at the beginning of grad school itself - perhaps even in materials sent out to prospective applicants - is offer up the facts about what those in the program do on the other end. How many have tenure-track jobs, and how does that compare to other departments. How many have jobs. What those jobs are, and whether they in any way relate to the training (or the credential). With, fine, whichever allowances for the fact that a certain number of people end up being stay-at-home parents, and that includes people with MBAs.

It wouldn't have to be some kind of tragic thing that would send everyone screaming in the other direction. It couldn't be, because otherwise programs wouldn't go in for it, but it also wouldn't need to be. Obviously lots of people do go to grad school knowing the odds of TT employment, and do so because they have a Plan B (or different Plan A) in mind. This is largely information people can - but often don't - seek out and get on their own. What this would bring would be transparency. It wouldn't be a dark secret that some graduates found meaningful work, but not as professors, or altogether outside academia.

What I remember of that period, though, was a great deal of attention paid to the fellowships themselves, some to opportunities to do research abroad, that sort of thing, but next to nothing about the other side. The moment of disillusion for me came when I looked up where someone who'd done a dissertation on a topic closely related to mine at one of the Euphemistic universities had ended up. And the answer seemed to be: unemployed. Was it nervous-breakdown-flameout unemployed? I couldn't tell, and thus didn't know how concerned to be. This is where transparency would be most appreciated.

Your don't-go of the evening

Because what's a day without at least three bleak articles about academia, grad-student-Facebook-land has now brought me to this piece about the difficulties of getting a PhD and job in the humanities without outside support. UChicago doctoral candidate David Mihalyfy writes:

Spousal income, a parent-owned condo, a trust fund – no matter which, these necessities increasingly make a humanities Ph.D. less of a career path and more of a leisure pursuit for those with financial stability from elsewhere, even for students at top institutions.

It's one of the rare trustafarian exposés that remembers that sometimes - strange as it may seem - 30-year-olds (40-year-olds) are married. That the invisible extra source of income of someone ancient might be a spouse, and not mom and dad. Far too often, articles about the broke and humanitiesish suggest that it's this upper-middle-class thing to support one's kids financially until said kids themselves reach retirement age. And, eh, I don't think it's quite gotten to that point.

Further, similarly scattered thoughts below:

-Is marriage to someone who earns more than a grad student does privilege in the same way as having rich parents? I mean, it's pretty equally unearned advantage, or at least irrelevant advantage, but it doesn't necessarily indicate that "Despite rare exceptions, our humanities professors will come from wealthier backgrounds." I mean, a grad student whose spouse is a plumber or schoolteacher is at an advantage. It hardly needs to be Wall Street.

Now, it certainly doesn't say anything good about a career path if you need a decade of outside support to get started. It doesn't seem like the way to get the best candidates for anything. It's still wildly unfair. But if the concern is social mobility into academia, and the socioeconomic class of resulting humanities profs, spousal support would be less of an issue.

-In order to succeed on the academic job market, what you need on your CV are fellowships. Grants. Scholarships. Awards. These things tend to come with money. Needing money - being someone for whom $500, say, isn't just a night on the town - is an awfully big motivator to shoot for these, or at least I found it to be. If something is your job, you may well be more likely to treat it as one. Those who approach grad school as dabblers (no matter the source of outside income) and don't apply for extra (or any) funding may well have more time to publish, but they may have gaps in other key areas.

-Being married/partnered as a grad student isn't necessarily a career advantage. It does seem to up the odds that one will have kids. And as great a thing as marriage to a high-powered hot-shot (or anyone with a job, really) can be in terms of allowing some - like a woman mentioned in the piece - to avoid grueling perma-adjuncting, often enough, a spouse with a decent salary isn't going to want to move to Outer Mongolia (selected due to its current non-existence; no offense intended to Mongolians generally, nor to the Mongolian family who used to be my neighbors in particular) with you when that's the place that has the only tenure-track job in Medieval Tapestry Studies.

Nor will the grad-student spouse necessarily think Outer Mongolia and a far lower family income (and what about when Outer Mongolia deems you unworthy of tenure?) beats not-Outer-Mongolia and high school teaching/non-profit work/library work/from-scratch housespousery/retraining-in-air-conditioner-repair/there's-always-law-school. Don't let anyone stand between you and your dreams! But god forbid you should have found a partner before age 35, and that that person should also have dreams, and that that person's dreams pay more and in a better location. The best you - a purely theoretical you - can hope for is that in the course of grad school, you realize your dream may not have been Professor of Medieval Tapestry Studies after all.

(There isn't a two-body problem, generally, when parents or a trust fund are the source of whichever cushion. Although I don't think the first of the helicoptered generation is old enough yet for grad school.)

-Did you think I was going to let this go without a gender angle? No such luck. It seems possible that being partnered helps men but not women. While - given, if nothing else, the fact that men tend to earn more than women - women with husbands (because most couples are opposite-sex) may have a better shot at avoiding garret starvation, women may also have more trouble than men when it comes to getting a spouse to move wherever a job happens to be. A single man, meanwhile, will lack whichever Stable Adult With Family aura that apparently benefits married men - and not married women - on the job market, academic or otherwise.

The plight of the not-so-recent college grad

On a recent "Fresh Air," Greta Gerwig told Terry Gross that after college,

There's a grace period where being a mess is charming and interesting, and then I think when you hit around 27 it stops being charming and interesting, and it starts being kind of pathological, and you have to find a new way of life. Otherwise, you're going to be in a place where the rest of your peers have been moving on, and you're stuck.

I was listening to this on a run earlier, and it was like, whoa, I'd better write this down. But then NPR's website saved me the trouble.

Anyway, this strikes me as not only spot-on, but also relevant to two topics familiar to WWPD's three readers. The first is the case against graduate school (defined, for our purposes, as PhD programs in non-STEM fields). When you start, assuming you go soon after college, you will feel more together than many of your peers, or certainly not less. Sure, there will be the ones who went straight into finance or consulting, but then there will be many others who are more or less floundering. And you'll be thinking, huh, I'm 24, I have health insurance and not via my parents, I'm paid to read books, dammit!

And then a year will pass. And another one. And then at a certain point you're the friend lagging behind. All of a sudden, Facebook (where, needless to say, no one is announcing unemployment or underemployment), which has become your principal source for what your cohort is up to, now that you're not actively in touch with most of your non-grad-school friends (although you will rekindle friendships with those who've also gone your route)... all of a sudden, Facebook is telling you that everyone you knew growing up now has a real job, maybe a house, and you? When exactly are you getting that degree we've been hearing about for the past 500 years?

The other reason the quote stuck with me was nothing to do with grad school in particular. Rather, it was that the moment Gerwig describes is, for women, the window of opportunity. The point at which your friends and family switch from telling you not to get distracted by boys, to asking you when you'll find yourself a man. Gerwig doesn't describe it as such - she describes it as the moment when many of your friends start settling down. But it amounts to the same.

While the Recent College Grad is very much a thing (and thanks to "Girls," all the more so), the not-so-recent college grad is also a type in its own right, and a more poignant/pathetic one. When one is still young, but only relative to those who are older. Which, sure, could also be said of 10-year-olds. But what I'm describing - what Gerwig and her colleague/director/boyfriend Noah Baumbach seem to have made a movie about - is the first point at which one has fully exited youth.

And I couldn't help but think about how Gerwig, who's evidently less than a week apart from me in age, is in a relationship with Baumbach, who's 43. Not in terms of anything about Gerwig or Baumbach in particular, but in terms of not-so-recent-college-grad-ness among women more generally. In the "Fresh Air" interview, much is made of how young Gerwig is. And, while I acknowledge that 29 is not elderly, I don't feel all that young. 29 is firmly madame territory. 30 is imminent. While 20 is young, '30 is young' is the kind of thing those who are 30 or thereabouts say to reassure themselves/one another, or that the 40-plus say when being jaded. 29 is only young if being constantly juxtaposed to 43.

So I do kind of suspect that the appeal of being the younger woman is greater at 27-plus than when one is a bit younger, but still definitely an adult. So it's not that there aren't available same-age men, or that those men are all chasing after (let alone snagging!) women who've just that evening turned 18. Nor is it that something miraculous happens to men in their 40s, that they become suddenly better-looking than in their mid-late 20s. (And indeed, I'm really not talking about Gerwig and Baumbach in particular, because he's a famous movie director, which, needless to say, most 43-year-old men are not. That, and one can never say what makes any individual couple tick.) Nor is it necessarily about women this age (alas, my age) wanting to settle down, and not finding men their own age interested in doing so. If anything, it seems more likely that a woman wanting to stay in carefree 'girlfriend' mode is going to match up well with a man who's seeking out a younger woman because the 'younger woman' represents not settling down.

Of lost time

I know you are under the impression that a PhD that focuses on the themes of inter(text)uality in medieval basket-weaving would be a surefire route to a high-paid career with 1950s-breadwinner-style job security. I know, it's a common misconception. And the only way you'd possibly learn the truth is that every so often, a wise adult issues a Don't-Go, warning the likes of you that grad school is a terrible mistake.

The mark of a Don't-Go is that it will be phrased as a question: should you go to grad school? But the moment this has been asked, the answer has been given, and apologies for the passive voice. The most fun Don't-Goes try to reach the widest audience possible by refusing to differentiate between MA and PhD; humanities, social sciences and sciences; funded and not; elite U or not. This is to confuse you, such that when you're admitted to a joint PhD program in all quantitative disciplines, with a joint appointment at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, you can turn it down, because it's only sensible to do so.

Ron Rosenbaum, the latest author of a Don't-Go, limits himself to literature grad school, which, if you were considering/are currently in literature grad school, will cause you to read the thing, and the comments, and let's be honest, it's not like you're needed desperately at the office. What gives Rosenbaum his authority is that he himself went. To Yale. For one year. In 1969.

That Rosenbaum then had a successful career in journalism either a) gives us hope or b) tells us that in 1969, that was a viable career path, or c) makes us wonder if maybe having been a literature grad student at Yale (where he also did his undergrad) gave him an edge. Which is often the missing piece, as with the Harvard college drop-out legends. A place can lend you caché even if it doesn't grant you a degree. A commenter though, put it best:

I love you, Rosenbaum, but here's what I'm hearing: if I can manage to get myself into undergraduate school at Yale University in the middle of last century, I will have a good shot at getting a good job in the field of journalism, which (since it's midcentury) still has many years of plenty ahead of it? Well then, my mind is made up!

The classic problem with the Don't-Go is that we learn not to go to grad school, but are presented with no viable answer to what someone who ends up in or considering literature grad school might do instead. Rosenbaum's alternative sounds all kinds of appealing, but ignores the state of journalism today, as well as the logistics, namely the ten trillion unpaid internships one is now expected to have completed prior to the low-paid work with which Rosenbaum was able to enter the field. He seems to have caught onto the fact that academia is no longer a sure thing, but that's about it. He's mostly interested in the undisputed tendency of literature grad school to turn lovers of books into Perez-Hilton-addled burn-outs, if only from time to time. But I promise, enjoyment of literature comes back eventually. Just don't expect much of it in the lead-up to or week after your qualifying exam.

Anyway, I have nothing against the Don't-Go concept, but I want to see one that tells college seniors and recent grads to rewind the clock and pay more attention in high school math classes, to bond with teachers of something other than creative writing, to do whatever it is one does that leads to being a consultant, banker, air-conditioner-repairperson. Give us something we can work with.