Of grad school and imaginary French boyfriends

Behold, the following letter to Philip Galanes's advice column:

I am a graduate student in a competitive field. A fellow graduate student in my department posts constantly on Facebook about her worldwide travels, her French boyfriend, her flat in Copenhagen, her performances with the New York City Ballet and her modeling career. She has persuaded several hundreds of Facebook friends that these fictions are her real life, but we, her fellow graduate students, are increasingly annoyed by her blatant lies. We also worry for her that, as the years pass, she has yet to produce a single chapter of her dissertation. What do we do?

The obvious missing piece: how is the letter-writer so sure these are lies? Some grad students - if not as many as imagined - have family money, and all the Scandinavian real estate that might bring. Others really are models or ballet dancers. Life really is just that unfair (says this short and flexibility-challenged grad student).

And why exactly wouldn't some woman in grad school in the States (presumably) have a French boyfriend? Is that really so far outside the realm of possibility? Clearly this woman's mistake was in not making her imaginary significant-other Belgian. That, I've found, people seem to believe. Quite a ruse I've got going.

The only thing I can think of is, this letter-writer's classmate is posting from her (basement, inevitably) office, things like, 'Living it up here in Denmark with my made-up French boyfriend Pierre,' when you see her right there, eating some leftover quinoa salad or whatever out of the Tupperware she schlepped from home.

But I'm leaning towards these not being lies, and the letter-writer just being somewhat naive. Misrepresentation is probably (by which I mean definitely) the norm on Facebook, so much so that if you're viewing the myriad too-good-to-be-true postings with a certain amount of cynicism/skepticism, I'm not sure when it would even occur to you to fact-check the postings. That is, I could imagine wondering if the postings of a total stranger were made up, but those of someone you know in real life? Why would someone be living out an entirely made-up existence on social media and hanging onto their real-life circles in contacts?

The people who invent lives are indeed fascinating, but what inspired this post was something peculiar to the dynamic the letter expresses, something Galanes - a lawyer-turned-advice-columnist - seems to kind of get, but kind of not. The question here is actually quite unrelated to the lying: What's it to the letter-writer and their fellow graduate students how their classmate's dissertation's coming along? Writes Galanes:

We all feel jealous occasionally, but when we’re steamed by the fake accomplishments of others, it’s time to take a deep breath. If your colleague is not really a model/ballerina (with a killer apartment in Copenhagen) — and not writing her dissertation, to boot — she poses no threat to you. So, why does her wowing a few Facebook friends bother you so much? Won’t there simply be one competitor fewer in your self-described “competitive field” when job interviews roll around?

This is all sensible. Too sensible. It's the right answer, but it misses something about the culture of grad school, which is that the most competitive students are, paradoxically, the ones most bothered by the flakiness of their classmates. One would imagine that someone dead-set on an academic position (what I'd assume the end goal is here, given what the talk of dissertation chapters suggests about the sort of field it is) would be if anything relieved if the applicant pool shrinks. Yet that's often not the case.

Most of this, I think, is the 'treason' thing - this sense that we're all in it together, and that someone who's abandoned ship has, uh, abandoned ship.

But part of it is also the fear that someone who doesn't participate in the grad-student culture of panic - who doesn't seem all that frightened of professors or sufficiently monastic or who even knows - might secretly be doing plenty of work, and good work at that, and might swoop in at the last minute and steal what was rightfully that of those who were more grad-student-ish in their ways, who kept up with the office politics (as much as a grad student ever can), who seemed especially plugged-in, or who wore blazers, or who in one way or another projected dedication. (Meanwhile, the seemingly-blasé may just be exhibiting defense mechanisms, and may care a ton.)

Grad school in the humanities - which is so what that letter's about - involves a great deal of solitary work, so often enough, no one has any idea how strong any other student's work is. Students' only sense of how 'competitive' someone else in the program is will often come from an impression of who seems to take the whole thing most seriously. So the 'competitive' people, according to the grad students, will not always match up with the ones who have actually turned in chapters, published, that sort of thing. There will just be the people assumed to be serious, and then it will feel like a tremendous injustice when they're not the ones who get a job, or who win whichever internal competition. Not just to the serious students themselves, but to all students, whose sense of justice will have been violated.

And I say all of this as someone who's been, at various points in time, all across this spectrum. All of this is incredibly subjective - there's not necessarily a consensus about who's 'serious', but as much as there is one, it can vary across the ten trillion years of a humanities graduate program. Most grad students will probably, at one point or another, across the myriad internal competitions, usurp something from someone more 'serious', or feel kind of 'serious' yet wronged.

So back to the advice column. The letter-writer, I suspect, fears that this no doubt charming classmate will somehow manage to take all the jobs. More, I suspect, than they fear that said classmate will leave the field. I also wouldn't be shocked if the only one feeling so 'concerned' here is the letter-writer, and that the letter-writer is speaking on behalf of all the grad students, because that's just something grad students often do, the other grad students being, as a rule, too apathetic to protest.

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.

Dissertation Pasta-gate

So a visiting prof at NYU, at the intersection of business and psychology and so not someone I'd ever heard of, tweeted the following: "Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth". This tweet has caused the internet to explode. It's unclear to me whether he meant applicants to the University of New Mexico, where he's otherwise a professor, or to NYU, although it's a safe bet he wants slender grad students nationwide.

In any case, I join the chorus: what the what? What is this man even talking about? It's offensive, yes, "fat-shaming," sure, and no doubt upsetting to many heavier academics. It probably does necessitate a bit of a dig into dude's role in admitting students - are ones he OK'd especially svelte?

It's problematic, then, but it's also bizarre. What would one thing have to do with the other? It's not like writing a dissertation is some kind of athletic feat for which physical condition would be relevant, and then there could be some kind of conversation about whether or not it's fat-shaming to suggest that those who weigh 600-plus pounds are unlikely to win triathlons. (I'm so far from doing so myself that I don't have any idea how those who win them are built.) It's not like PhD students are some caste akin to supermodels, known for our ability to meet narrow aesthetic specifications. To write a dissertation is to sit on your couch in your pajamas. There's no particular size requirement for that.

Anyway, a NYMag commenter has the winning response:

Technically, he isn't fat-shaming. Being on the Atkins Diet on a grad student salary in NY requires not only willpower, but the ability to create a budget and possibly write grant applications so as to fund your steak and salmon-filet habit.

Indeed. What's grad school without pasta? Without bagels, ramen, or rice? And pizza! And free bread and cheese at receptions! Grad students who stopped eating carbs would stop eating, and stop dissertating as well.

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.

A school-anxiety daydream

The logistics of graduating - which I'm not even planning to do this spring, but one must plan ahead - are by far the most complicated aspect of graduate school thus far, including applying to graduate school. Some glitch, some typo, something with the margins, some problem I would never have anticipated is going to stand between me and a degree. Unlike Flavia, who "take[s] a geeky pleasure in reading through the copyedits and learning the right way to cite a particular kind of source," I enjoy the research (primary, secondary), the writing, the attributing... but footnote formatting, for me, is a necessary evil for getting one's point across. Or: I could see enjoying something along those lines as a copy-editor, if all that was needed was 'attention to detail,' and indeed have derived pleasure from professional interludes as a file clerk, bookshelver, cappuccino-frother, and yes, copy-editor, but if it's your own project and you're kind of sucked up in the 'creative' process, it can be a distraction.

Somehow, something will happen such that not only do I not get this degree, but the MA is retroactively retracted, as is the BA, as is the high school diploma. They're going to track down Mr. Bologna, the gym teacher who failed me (for lateness to his 8am class) for one marking period of gym, the beginning of second term senior year. (I then showed up so early the rest of the semester, and the rest is history.) And he's going to be like, you know what? Upon further consideration, Phoebe missed enough minutes of gym during those first few weeks that she really ought to have failed for the entire semester and not gotten the diploma, not gone on to college, and so on. The universe hereby takes it all back.

Why yes it is 3am, and I am indeed on the 9th floor of a certain Upper East Side girls' school, in a first-grade classroom. A friend of mine from fifth grade, the girl who really liked... was it Nirvana? Green Day? Smashing Pumpkins? Hugh Grant? - just stole my backpack, which contained both my laptop and my iPod but luckily not my phone because all of this is taking place now but not now. (This girl was super nice and frankly I had nothing worth stealing in my backpack, particularly not gadgets that had yet to be invented.) An anxiety dream come alive.

If nothing else, if nothing else comes of it, the three first paragraphs of my dissertation's introduction are, in my altogether unbiased opinion, spectacular.

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.

WWPD reads the news (on her phone, while half-asleep on NJ Transit)

Just because it's not on WWPD doesn't mean I'm not following it. I too am watching the Middle East fall apart, and am not sure whether the Zionist stance - my Zionist stance - is to support Israel in defending itself or to wonder, big-picture, whether the current situation helps or hurts the goal of a two-state plan. Knowledgable people I respect are saying very different things on this. (Ideological diversity, a change from the recent days of "X and two more friends 'like' Mitt Romney.") I have no answers, and have come to the conclusion that this tragic mess isn't going to be solved on this blog, or likely any.

And yes, of course, the Real Housewives of Tampa. Here I'll weigh in from two angles, one silly and one serious.

The silly:

-Following L'Affaire Petraeus from the perspective of a grad student: I especially like the Daily Mail approach - that Broadwell's real sin was being a crummy grad student, and having not (yet?) finished her PhD. This might be reassuring to those of us who run a 30 minute mile, never served in the military, have not raised two kids while a student, but who, at least, are kind of OK at grad school.

-That's the thing with 19th century dissertation topics, right? On the one hand, I'll never be on the "Daily Show" talking about my research. On the other, it is physically impossible for me to have an affair with any of my subjects.

The serious:

-The Dan Savage argument, which as far as I know he has yet to make, but others are making it, but anyway, is as follows: 37, 38 years of marriage and one indiscretion, big deal. That's a monogamous marriage succeeding. Monogamish, meanwhile, assumes one of two scenarios: a young, hot couple both of whom have seemingly infinite romantic possibilities, or an older straight couple where it can be safely assumed the woman is no longer interested in sex. But then there's "furious would be an understatement," whose crime, as far as we know, was being 59 years old and not taking reality-TV-star pains to hide it. Regardless of what was going on inside their marriage, it seems obvious, viscerally, that she's been wronged. This is also, I suppose, what I find off-putting about the periodically-floated marriage-as-renewable-contract idea. Isn't part of the appeal of the institution that one can feel relatively confident that one has tenure, as it were, in one's relationship? Not that it's 100% guaranteed to last, vows kept, but that there would have to be an awfully good reason for that not to happen?

Busybodies or gun control

-In light of the discussion below, it perhaps bears mentioning that the latest perpetrator-of-American-tragedy is 24, and so a child according to the new science of brain development. Or experiencing the onset of severe mental illness, which even the old brain science acknowledges can happen at that age. Or - and please, no more of this explanation - a burnt-out PhD student.

-As I know I'm not the first to point out (but can't link to Facebook posts), it's wrong to say that all that we can do at this point is mourn, or that it's somehow crass to try to think of the broader implications. It would seem that, for those of us who didn't know the victims, our concern is precisely how to prevent things like this from happening in the future. It's because we feel for the victims that we want to prevent massacres, but also because the tragedies in our own lives, should there be any, are not the Aurora one specifically that we can jump ahead from "how horrible" to "how do we prevent this?" relatively quickly. Maybe it's "politics" in a sense when different people have different ideas how to stop massacres, but not generally in the opportunistic, politics-as-sport sense.

-Every time something like this happens, we get the reports about how the killer, in his pre-killing days, was not the most extroverted, popular person of them all, how he wrote fiction that wasn't upbeat enough for his creative-writing teacher, etc. He had friends, but not many, which is oh so ominous. In this case, the description of the killer in his younger days, pre-psychotic-break-or-whatever-it-was, makes him sound like a scientist. I live in a community of scientists, and this is not a profession big on making small talk. And yet, a peaceful bunch. But we're meant to believe the problem here the existence, in our society, of people who don't greet neighbors with sufficient chipper enthusiasm, and not, you know, the readily-available access to guns.

-There's a cultural relativism discussion - or is it a regionalist one? a YPIS one? - that comes up whenever the topic turns to guns. The idea being that unless you grew up around Gun Culture (not hunting, but guns as theoretical self-defense should the government take a turn for the worse, should you be wronged one too many times), anything you say about gun control is evidence that your life is like the show "Friends," and you're fancy cityfolk using gun control as a pretext for being snooty. Organic kale, triple soy lattes, and gun control. (What gun lobby?)


It's an effective silencing technique, for sure, but it doesn't need to be. Because yes, it's necessary to consider - whether the issue is anti-circumcision, anti-veiling, or gun control, or anything else - that a do-gooder movement might be just a pretext for cultural domination. It also might not be that at all. Is it really "Blue"/"Fake" America's lust for hegemony that compels some of us to point out that even if the problem is illegal weapons (although not even, in this case), the presence of a great many legal weapons throws more onto the black market? There are certain issues where this kind of relativism ceases to convince, and they tend to be matters of life and death. Honor killings, for example. 

-The vast majority of gun-owners are upstanding, responsible people? I don't doubt it. But a society in which guns are around is one in which the evil-lunatic tiny-minority can inflict major damage. The point isn't that if a gun just happens to be available, any of us might snap at any time and go on a rampage. Most people with access to guns behave themselves. Rather, it's that there are a few out there who are so inclined, and there isn't any effective way of determining who they are ahead of time and keeping them - and them alone - away from weapons. 


-Since it would be nothing but cosmopolitan elitism to suggest that ordinary citizens not have access to weapons, we're left with the nebulous 'but what about mental health?' alternative. Most weird people don't commit murder, nor do most gun owners, so if guns are sacred, addressing weirdness is the only option. The problems are that a) not every killer even meets psychiatric/legal definitions of mental illness, and b) it's asking for a great deal of surveillance on behalf of non-experts, aka intrusion, aka busybody-ness, for everyone to be expected to be constantly on the lookout for unusual behavior, lest that unusual behavior indicate that someone is likely to make use of his Constitutional right to buy as many bullets as are sold on the Internet. The guy down the hall failed to deliver the desired, "Hey!"? Didn't seem interested in discussing last night's game? Warning signs! But I suppose it's cosmopolitan elitism to suggest that anyone has a right to be eccentric or socially awkward in peace.

A post that would be called "grass is greener" if today's date didn't give the wrong impression

Among my peers who started out in Teach for America or similar, law school is this immensely appealing road to higher pay and not so many rowdy 8th-graders. Those who dabbled in this and that as recent college grads will, one after the next, end up in those post-bac pre-med classes, much to the chagrin of those of us whose parents inevitably hear that so-and-so's kid is doing one of those post-bacs, and, you know, never too late... Lawyers and law students fight over jobs for which a JD isn't necessary, wallow in debt, dream of academia. Grad students and academics fantasize (we do! I swear!) about pairing walking sneakers and pantyhose and commuting into an office job. Office workers are all, of course, delighted with their lot in life. I know people fleeing to as well as from MFA programs. A friend of a friend evidently didn't make as much of a go of it as anticipated with pastry grad school.

What I'm saying is, for every peer I know who's been on a direct and exhilarating trajectory since college, there are maybe five hopping around from productive pursuit to productive pursuit, not lost in the sense of rising at 4pm in the proverbial parental basement, but stuck with something of a wandering eye when it comes to careers. It can't help that whichever path you're on, your friends and family will be emailing you dozens of articles about why your choice was a foolish one.

On that note, there's another article telling grad students that they've made a terrible life choice. Early on in the piece that, if you're a grad student or prospective, someone has probably already sent your way, Katy Waldman assures us, or her bosses at Slate, that even though this is her frame for the story, she's not really considering grad school. "In real life, of course, I have a job that I like and a professional future I’m pursuing avidly." Waldman's essay, inspired by an online forum about grad-school admissions I'd never heard of but that's evidently a big deal, is a quasi-personal essay, and not merely a general think piece with a Slate-y personal hook. It's about self-reassurance. Waldman, a journalist, is telling herself that her Plan B, namely grad school, isn't so great, after all.

I know this impulse well, perhaps because it seems she and I have mirror-image Plans A and B, and I do this periodically regarding career paths similar to hers. What if, I sometimes wonder, what if I hadn't had that stubborn aversion to unpaid internships, and used a few of those as a launching pad for seriously pursuing a career in journalism? What about air-conditioner repair? Cue the scene where George Constanza is sitting on the floor of Jerry's living room, having quit and been fired from the very same real-estate job, wondering whether he might have a career as a talk-show host, jockey, or projectionist. "Probably a union thing." Cue Elaine sniffing her pen, at her office job, asking herself, "Is it too late to go to law school?" Immortalized on "Seinfeld," and as old as time.

As is almost requisite in don't-go-to-grad-school articles, there's not much specificity in terms of what's meant by "grad school." MA, PhD, something else entirely? Which discipline? Funded or unfunded? Entered into with career plans in mind, or as a way for socialites to bide their time? But the imprecision kind of works, because Waldman admits that when she thinks about grad school, it's not about a particular field or program, but grad school as a way of life. Waldman is then shocked to learn that grad school is not an intellectual summer camp, but rather a step in the lives of many ambitious young adults, with all the cutthroat competitiveness that entails. Wharton, alas, is not a drum circle, nor is a slot at NYU Law offered to anyone who kind of identified with "Felicity." Or something?

I'm not entirely sure I follow Waldman's premise, which is that there was, in genuine historical fact, a Golden Age, during which grad school really was an escape from it all, when Harvard and Stanford or whatever had open admissions, and could be a permanent life choice in its own right, a lifelong alternative to regular employment. "Going to graduate school," Waldman informs us, "is no longer a way of opting out of the endless search for a better job, the best job, any job. It’s become an element of—a strategy to be deployed in—that search." This Golden Age, as best I can tell, was not 1990 or 1970, or indeed any period of time, but rather a conception of grad school, a fantasy of grad school, Waldman herself occasionally finds persuasive.

Waldman, it seems, confuses her own personal disillusionment with the idea of grad school with a real-life shift in the function of post-college education.

As the obsessive chronicle of yeses and noes reveals, the process of finding a masters or doctorate program carries with it a sense of desperation—one actually reminiscent of the job search. In this rat race, the ivory tower morphs from a reassuring backup plan into a source of social and existential terror via its mysterious admissions policies.

Why "actually"? Why are we surprised that prestigious grad programs would be difficult to get into, or that this would be a source of stress for applicants? How is this specific to These Tough Economic Times?

As I prepare to enter my seventh-and-final year of Dreyfus Affair Studies, contemplating what is even for graduates of top programs a bleak job market, I'm a ready audience for what-were-you-thinking pieces as you'll get. But this one doesn't have me convinced.

Marketable skills

Recently, at a beyond-academia event aimed at preemptively-despairing grad students who very much still want to be profs, I learned that one alternative possibility for a humanities PhD is: unpaid intern. Fair enough, I suppose, that if you're changing careers - which is what it means to go any route other than the academic job market - you'd need to start at the bottom. But the bottom used to be paid. Nothing wrong with administrative work at a for-profit business, if it's compensated. Our program is compensated. I didn't get the sense that there was much enthusiasm among the advanced-degree-holders present for taking an unpaid internship at 30-give-or-take, which, to her credit, the woman making this suggestion preemptively acknowledged.

Anyway, while I've had a fairly set Plan A (and B, C...) for some time now, I agreed with the general principle that it never hurts to see what's out there. So I figured out, after however many years, how to access my college's alumni career services network. Once properly logged in, I put in "French" as a search term,  what with that being one of my theoretically marketable skills. Among the first entries to appear: "Fry Cook."

Quote of the day

I’m inferring that you and your wife would prefer, and understand better, an arugula-eating son toiling on a doctorate in comparative literature. However, it could be that at the end of that son’s labors, you’d wish he’d spent less time analyzing Love's Labour’s Lost and more time getting some skills that resulted in a paycheck.

-Prudie.

The Kimmelman Center

It's not every day NYU grad students get sneered at in the paper of record, but Michael Kimmelman has a go at it, complaining about, of all things, "iPod-engrossed graduate students" taking up precious space in Greenwich Village. Poor Michael Kimmelman! I never realized that listening to music or a podcast while shuffling between the library, department, and classroom buildings  (and don't forget the taco place!) while in the process of getting a PhD was so aesthetically off-putting to those with delicate sensibilities. I ought to be more careful. What would be much better than a doctoral candidate is a park, in which Michael Kimmelman and his folksy Village roots can celebrate their true ownership of the 'hood. I mean, why stop there? Why not a right of return for anyone whose ancestors hung around with Edith Wharton back in the day?

Kimmelman, who evidently went to graduate school in euphemistic Boston, and in the pre-iPod age, is simply better than us peons. When he was a grad student, his mere presence inspired epic poetry.

But this type of argument isn't new, just the anti-grad-student insult. The Village person's anti-NYU argument (to be distinguished from the various grad-student-quasi-union and other internal clashes with the administration) seems to be essentially that Village residents - a few lucky beneficiaries of rent control, plus those in finance who are the few who can afford the area at market rates - are these quaint, quirky individuals, whose charming, "Friends"-esque existence suffers when kids whose crimes are being young and more creative-seeming than Ivy-serious, at least to outside observers, do such things as walk down the street in their presence.

And it's all a bit nuts. If the popular image of NYU is a wealthy, spoiled undergrad, the reality is plenty of undergrads on scholarship or from wealthy families but not the least bit entitled, along with a whole bunch of grad students, staff, and professors, who are simply... working, middle-class-give-or-take adults, doing our small part to keep something of a middle class in New York. Whatever you think of NYU-the-institution, it seems a mistake to pick on those affiliated with it. NYU is too many things to really sum it up. Almost everyone I know in New York, friends from childhood up through college, ended up with some or another connection to the university. It's a million things to seemingly a million different people. The only reason to dislike the NYU 'community'-such-as-it-is is that we're not buying $30 million townhouses, or, for the most part, of the class that spends its time protesting travesties involving pretty neighborhoods getting muddied up by the presence of non-financiers.

"[S]he could not even get a job that did not pay"

Articles advising college seniors and recent grads not to go to humanities grad school lose me when, if they present alternatives at all (and they never present concrete alternatives - it's always that one might have instead found 'a job'), they offer up some fairytale existence in which unemployment exists only among PhDs, and in which the literarily-oriented 22-year-old could up and reverse a long series of decisions and inclinations and become the sort of person who had double-majored in engineering and air-conditioner repair. In other words, my beef with the genre isn't that humanities grad school in fact leads directly to tenure-track bliss, but rather that the alternatives for the people who are considering humanities grad school are, by the time they reach that point, kinda limited.

Behold, the alternatives. 

Of boys, men, and know-it-alls

Nick Troester writes: "Not sure I'm on board with the Mindy Kaling-written contention that spending one's 20s in grad school (if male) makes one a boy and not a man."

As this combined two of my interests - like every woman of my demographics, whatever they are, I'm signed up for the Mindy Kaling fan club, and, well, grad school - I had to see what Kaling had to say. And I don't think what Kaling means - although Nick may have meant this tongue-in-cheek - is that men who plan on going into academia and are thus in doctoral programs for much of their 20s are "boys." I mean, it almost sounds as if the yoga hotties were discussing James Franco, in which case whether we're calling him a boy, a man, or a dining room table, I'm not sure what the problem is.

But the "boy" thing rings true. And it's a stage most young men grow out of, but because the shift occurs for some at 19, others at 40, there's no telling initially what some 25-year-old man will be like in that regard. I suppose what it comes down to, even if Kaling insists that this isn't what it's about, is that some men are prepared to get married in the not-so-distant future, others not. This becomes an issue for women around 30, as Kaling would not be the first to tell the audience reading Glamour, a magazine I still think of as the one that indirectly sent Estelle Costanza to the hospital.

I remember in college that there were some guys who thought the way to a woman's heart was through borrowing a friend-of-a-friend's car and paying for two at an upscale French restaurant, others whose preferred attempt at seduction was overanalyzing everything to do with a possible relationship, with what relationships mean, in some under-furnished and messy dorm-like apartment. The latter seemed preferable to many of us at 19 - eschewing convention! building something amazing that defies the bounds of something so bourgeois as a "relationship"! - but at 30, especially if dude is also 30, I can't imagine this would have the same charm.

No doubt because the essay is in a women's mag, Kaling can't state the obvious, which is that the reason she was dating "boys" until recently - the reason women our age tend to go through a "boys" phase - is that women are, for those years, "girls" in just the same sense: not interested in settling down yet, not ready to commit to a man or much of anything. But society asks us to believe that girls/women all along, from the lead-up to junior prom on, want men who are prepared to commit, on account of all hetero-wired ladies being born wanting not guys but babies-and-rings. When in fact, there's maybe this five-minute window of time when women want commitment that men are not offering, but a far longer window during which women are expected to want Serious, but are actually just fine with three-month this-defies-labels relationships.

Oh, oh, and furthermore: there's the whole dynamic wherein the "boy" explains to the "woman" that he just wants to be free, play it by ear, whereas she's obviously looking for a "man." When she is not, in fact, looking for a "man," but is herself still a "girl." There are a lot of young men out there assuming, incorrectly, that the young women they're dating are on this forum

But one part of Kaling's essay really, really announced why it is that she gets to write for a living. She describes a guy she dated (a "man" not a "boy," but she's explaining why he was nevertheless not ideal) as "a comedy writer who was a smidgen more accomplished than I but who talked about everything with the tone of 'you’ve got a lot to learn, kid.'" As the kids say: this.

Women, listen to me: have we not all met, if not necessarily dated, this man? Have we not all dealt with men who are by all accounts less accomplished, who know less about the topic at hand, but who take that tone? This, I remember, is why it was so difficult to get women to write for the op-ed section of the college paper - there were simply too many male college students who began sentences with that all-knowing, "Well, you see, here's how it is...," and too few female ones doing the same. These 19-year-old boys/men/whatever had totally figured out the war in Iraq. Somehow this, and not the tired-if-described-in-a-clever-way-by-a-clever-writer man-child issue, seems the real question for young women today, at least those whose sexual orientation demands they deal romantically with men.

For its own sake

Part I

Well this collection of "grad-student" responses to Pannapacker was a lot weaker than I'd have hoped, and not just because Slate didn't opt to feature Miss Self-Important and my posts and our comments. We have instead:

-One letter from an assistant prof who kinda-sorta effortlessly ended up with that job, and who finds it endlessly humorous (there are several mentions of laughter) that anyone considering grad school might be concerned about the job market. Yes, how hilarious for those who enter knowing what a PhD is supposed to be for and then don't get a job. I mean, this letter is kind of about class - the writer is, I suppose, making a point about underdog status when mentioning having not known the word "doctorate," and maybe laughing at the children of privilege who know perfectly well what a doctorate is, yet don't get one or if they do, don't make anything of it. Maybe? Is this too generous a reading? In any case, the message is, this one person woke up one day with this awesome position, so what's the problem?

-One letter from someone ABD but already an assistant prof (some "grad student response," Slate), who thinks that it's morally questionable, or something, to abandon a sinking ship. Oh, here's the mushiness MSI described (and, I now see, confirmation): "[G]raduate study was like getting fitted with a second nervous system—I feel that much more acutely alive and responsive to the world." I'll unpack this in soon...

-One letter that is, I think, about how it's useful to have a PhD if you want to teach at a private secondary school, by someone who has two MAs, and who seems to confuse private-school teaching with community service.

-Finally! A letter from a current PhD student, a "single mother of two young children" who's all about learning for learning's sake, and isn't afraid of romanticizing the humanities. Hmm.

-Last but not least, a letter that actually makes some good points - about how grad school can compare favorably with other options - by the grad-student blogger Flavia pointed us to.

All told, it's not surprising that Pannapacker's response is basically to say that he has not budged from his original position. Not surprising, that is, because no one Slate has chosen to ask has thought to as Pannapacker what he meant by "graduate school." And because Slate couldn't bother to stick with responses from people who haven't already won the game. So once again, some in the comments think it always means a decade's worth of tuition/debt. Once again, we're stuck in a mushy realm of whether or not Pannapacker is offending the delicate sensibilities of grad students who are too sensitive to have their life choices questioned. Which is really not where I, for one, would like the discussion to go. (I'm thinking of writing up my own guide to this genre, which will be titled, "How not to tell young people not to go to graduate school," because otherwise this will just be post after post of the same, each time one of these things appears.)

Part II, ideas below still in progress...

All of this is bringing me back to Paul Gowder's excellent point at MSI's: "Opportunity to think about interesting stuff =/= opportunity to get paid to think about interesting stuff, even if only in the form of grad school stipends." MSI herself (correct me if I'm wrong) seems to see the difference between being funded or not as relatively minor, because time's invested either way. But I think there's a massive difference, in practical as well as symbolic terms, between "airy ideals" and "airy ideals" plus an income, even if abandoning those ideals may have meant a higher income. I'd think this even if there were no difference come job-market time between the chances of funded students and those neck-deep in debt. It's like what I've been saying since forever about unpaid internships - setting aside the ways that unpaid time-consuming undertaken by adults end up disproportionately benefiting the rich and well-connected, there's the fact that whether you need it to feed your family, to buy your own beer, or not at all, it means something specific to be given money in exchange for your work. It means both that what you're doing is about more than your own self-betterment (even if you learn and mature, perhaps even enjoy yourself, on the job), and that you have been assessed as an adult (even if you're technically 12 and babysitting) and someone has decided that your time is a good investment.

This is why it doesn't much interest me how delightful a learning experience is 'for its own sake' if it comes at a life stage when all full-time, productive endeavors (with such exceptions as: philanthropy by billionaires, stay-at-home parenting, and graduate programs that lead with near-certainty to high-paid employment/go with having a high-paid job in the summers during) come with a paycheck. What I don't want to see happen, but what I fear is happening, is for grad school to become (or return to?) a path celebrated by its followers for its self-improvement potential, as so great in and of itself that nothing practical about it should matter. I mean, it's fine if it is for some, and if those students fund the rest. But those of us in it for a professional credential - even if we also had better enjoy it regardless of what the job market looks like on the other end - should not get too excited about eschewing material needs in favor of 'enriching' experiences. I don't want doctoral programs to become yet another arena in which it's considered crude or beside the point to fuss about rent and food money - something only sustained by rent and food money coming from somewhere else, namely parents or, in the case of older students, a wealthy spouse. Even paths not chosen for the money need to come with some. If we lose sight of such things as the need for compensation during, and (if to a lesser extent, because virtually no job guarantees security 5-8 years down the line) serious consideration of employment possibilities after, if we veer too far into grad school's worth as a mind-expander, we get problems. Different ones than if we veer too far the other way and only look at pay during and placement after, but problems all the same.

Why are we here?

First off, this seems relevant. Now for the rest...

Miss Self-Important still thinks grad school in the humanities or social sciences is a questionable life decision. (More on the topic here, both in response to an earlier post here.) As I mentioned in graphomaniacal comments on her blog - comments so endless that Blogger was all, we're not even going to post these, although thanks to MSI, they've been retrieved - I disagree rather strongly with her categorization of my anti-anti-grad-school stance. Speaking just for myself (although I'm not quite convinced my commenters would disagree with me on this), I don't think it's especially noble, a calling, an exercise in self-exploration, a brave anti-materialist stand against the workaday world, etc., to go to grad school. I don't see it as a question of passion vs. sucking it up and facing the grunt work inherent in working for others. I don't see it as selling out to leave or never enter academia in favor of more lucrative work possibilities. I don't see it as choosing the touchy-feely over the practical.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if MSI has heard these notions elsewhere, because yes, they're out there. Indeed, if I belabor the point, it's because I've long argued against this popular conception of grad school, one that only ends in misery - when the college senior who was fated to be an Esteemed Professor doesn't get into grad school, or when the still-more-confident grad-student version of the same can't land a permanent position but isn't willing to consider any other line of work. Grad students with these romantic notions are precisely the ones who are least blasé about job prospects after graduation.

Rather, my argument was and is that for many if not most college seniors/recent grads with good offers from good programs, grad school is the practical alternative. The go-don't-go debate ought to be straightforward enough: it's subjective. It depends what offers you have from grad schools, and what options you have otherwise, and whether - to the best of your knowledge prior to teaching college students, if not prior to teaching at all - you think you want to be a professor. It depends on your mindset - whether your job while filling out apps is Starbucks or a professional track in which you'd have a future. But all these variables make for a pretty weak polemic, which is why these articles, needing to take a firm (and contrarian) stand, warn away anyone interested.

The problem with the uh-oh-grad-school genre is that it conflates, conflates, conflates. Top programs with bottom-rung, funded and debt-producing, MA and PhD. These articles/posts also tend to conflate the question of whether it's a bad idea for the prospective grad student to go that route, and whether it's a bad idea for grad school as it currently exists to continue without extensive reform. They tend to address an audience (conservatives, contrarians, and burnt-out academics) already convinced that academia's in shambles, so precision's not given much weight. But precision would be fabulous.

The complicated question is the big-picture one, about the state of grad-school-as-it-currently-exists. There are the issues we know about, namely: 1) more grad students than tenure-track positions, perma-adjuncting replacing traditional faculties, 2) the imminent kaput-ness of the humanities in general and certain subjects (ahem, as we say in French) in particular, and 3) the expectation of infinite geographic mobility, which is just a subset of 4) the expectation that everyone is "head of household" i.e. a 1950s husband aka (if female, which often enough these days humanities grad students are) single and childless until at least 35. There are also the broader, more philosophical questions about the enterprise, such as MSI's, about whether the "life of the mind" ought to be equated with academia, that one of her commenters brings up - should a PhD even be necessary to teach? - and questions of political homogeneity.

Then there are the problems that haven't already been the subject of a thousand much-forwarded higher-ed articles, but that do impact both individual grad students and the university. These are really the behind-the-scenes version of those listed above, problems that impact even those who most belong in grad school. Specifically, there's the issue of transparency. It's possible to have items 1-4 drilled into you and still not know just how dire your own situation is or is not. If you're the universally-acknowledged best in your field at Yale, you can kinda-sorta relax, but there's a lot of... for lack of a better term, upper-middle ground, basically everyone who has funding, is in a good program, has every reason to believe they're in good standing, but is not top student at Yale. Those of us in that situation can guess but fundamentally have no idea whether we're in professional programs aimed at tenure-track jobs, or whether we're simply being paid to do something interesting for 5-6 years. We don't know until we know.

Moving beyond the question of the sad little grad students themselves, there's the issue of, what's the institution for? In programs that don't demand much teaching, in fields without much research-assistance needed, it's unlikely that students are being exploited for their labor. But if schools are paying (low-to-lowish) salaries to students who for the most part aren't going on to be profs, many of whom have entered at one and the same time claiming (and meaning!) that their plan is to be a prof and thinking of that outcome as something like winning the lottery, what's the point?

Part of the confusion, I think, comes from the extent to which the programs themselves are ambiguous about their missions. Is the point of grad school a) to let trust-fund kids or older folks who don't need an income dabble; b) to provide a paid-if-not-much haven for "that-guy" recent college grads who want to devote themselves to Big Questions and not get out of bed before noon, who think job-jobs are too stifling but who do not have an artistic talent to cultivate instead; or c) to train the next generation of profs, plus, via spillover, a handful of professionals in associated fields in and out of academia?

My sense of this, as someone who knows a good number of grad students in various fields, at various universities, is that fields and individual programs evolve, and that some that were once for dabblers and torn-blazer-aficionados have in recent years begun presenting themselves as professional-training environments. Or vice versa. And I don't think - although I've been pretty lucky in this regard - that profs themselves are necessarily sure who their students are, or what they're there for, whether they're in finishing school or training to be the next generation of academics. Maybe in the windowless room where the cabal that runs The American University meets, there's some clarity about what grad school is, but it can sometimes seem as if no one's entirely sure. All of this creates an atmosphere of confusion, in which there's a fine line between what's "driven" and what's entitled/unrealistic when it comes to professional aspirations at the other end.

One way to reform this would be to create somewhat more explicit tracks, according to different reasons for being in grad school in the first place, then allowing individuals to switch track if need be. Dabblers should know who they are (which I fear sounds pejorative, which isn't how I mean it - maybe a better word would be learning-for-learning's-sake-but-deeper-than-adult-ed? but is there a one-word description of that?) and should fund the professional-training end of things, either in MA programs or doctoral ones for which they pay (that is, until the time may come when they have professional aspirations their departments support). Big-Questions sorts who are not independently wealthy need either to take out loans for an MA and get it out of their system, or to join the pre-prof grad-school track, which does mean accepting that academia is not an escape from networking, showering, or office politics. Finally, those who could plausibly - and want to - become profs, and who are ostensibly on a pre-professional, funded track, should not be conflated with dabblers or Big-Questioners. They should not be expected to have money saved up for a program that's ostensibly paying them, nor should they be expected to be martyrs to the "life of the mind," to suffer for something that's neither charity nor art. To work hard, yes, but with pay and health insurance.

Ultimately, this would probably still leave some discrepancy between the number of even professional-track students and tenure-track jobs, but not to the extent that this exists today between all-grad-school-as-one and those slots. It wouldn't solve the two-body problem. It wouldn't silence those who think research in the humanities is some kind of oxymoron. But it would make it a bit more straightforward what grad school is for.

Much of this is, I think, already in place, but so unstated that people (like at least one Pannapacker's commenter) whose package was in all likelihood intended either for someone who has too much money to care about a stipend, or who wants so much to be A Scholar that they'll take what they can get, nevertheless think of themselves as on a pre-professional track, because after all, they're grad students, and isn't "grad school" the topic at hand?

"A doctorate in English that probably took you 10 years to earn is something you will need to hide like a prison term while you pay off about $40,000 to $100,000 in loans."

The latest don't-go-to-grad-school entry, from William Pannapacker (via Jacob Levy), claims to be about reforming higher ed, not convincing undergrads that grad school is a mistake, but is nevertheless a straightforward-enough addition to that genre (as well as a good source of links to the rest of the genre in recent years, including more by Pannapacker). And much of this latest one makes sense. Stats about placement should be a much more transparent element of the process. And it should be more openly acknowledged that not every grad student - not even every well-funded one in a top program - can, will, or should end up a prof (unless they radically reduce the size of departments). Job-market guidance needs to be informed by this, by the fact that many students will and by all accounts should take a library/research/secondary-ed/administration/etc. job in a town where they want to be, perhaps where they have a spouse and kids, rather than move across the country or abroad to be an adjunct, and should consider uprooting their families only for a permanent position. So items 3, 4, and 5, yes, yes, and (1,000x) yes.

Item 2 seems reasonable enough, but ignores the fact that only academics themselves care about the job description and rank of undergrads' instructors. The eternal fallacy of employees imagining that those they serve both know and care about the inner workings of the organization. Sure, "[p]rospective undergraduates and their parents should be able to choose institutions on the basis of who is actually doing the teaching," but even if they were able to do so, they'd still want to go to the most name-brand school and/or the one offering the best aid package. If this ended up factoring into rankings, great, but what would be the impetus for that shift? "If parents come to know how their children are being shortchanged — at such great expense — they might support reforms aimed at reallocating resources toward teaching." Yet aside from profs and grad students, oh and maybe some conservative critics of academia who've run out of on-campus orgasm workshops to complain about, no one cares who's teaching undergraduates. Certainly not undergraduates themselves - and speaking as a former undergraduate, most of my best college instructors were of the 12th-year-grad-student-adjunct variety. (It's not that kids, as one Slate commenter claims, aren't there to learn - it's that college students who are there at least in part for that reason - and no shame in also wanting to be employable later in life - don't necessarily find that someone with 20-plus years as Expert can teach better than someone well-prepared and engaging but less-established.) And not the parents, either, who, unless massively wealthy, are just concerned that their kid makes a choice they can afford, has a decent time, and will get a job at the other end.

Item 1... makes sense insofar as it wouldn't hurt for there to be more centralization if that meant more transparency, but I had to check that I'd read right when I got to the part about the outcome for humanities grad students being "an unconscionable waste of talent (comparable to allowing 90 percent of neurosurgeons to work as bartenders)." I'm all about the Humanities Anti-Defamation League, but no, being able to make sense of Proust is not the same as the ability to do brain surgery. Nor, as far as I'm concerned, is the ability to do complex math problems brain surgery, if the math is not in any way applied, and I think the humanities are mocked in ways that other equally-impractical but more gendered-masculine pursuits are not. But brain surgery? No. But I guess Pannapacker has a history of overdramatizing the issue - in an earlier such piece he himself links to, he explains, "You can't assume any partnership will withstand the strains of entry into the academic life." Gosh, how foolish of any of us grad students to get married!

It's Item 6 - the classic 'don't go to grad school, you talented, fresh-faced youth' - I find least persuasive. At a time when it's tough out there for even those with practical-sounding lines of work to earn a living, should a college senior who majored in Comp Lit, who was never going to make it as an engineering major in the first place, who has a five-year offer of funding and health insurance and will have to teach a couple of the years, yes, but may well turn out to like teaching, something worth figuring out, after all, if you're going to be a prof, and who's also going to be paid, if not much, enough, to read books and write papers on a topic of his choice, should this senior turn that down in favor of the "real world"? And if so, do tell, which industry that would be happy to have him has he rejected in pursuit of the frivolous life of the mind?

Grad school probably is a worse bet than, say, inventing Facebook, but how does it compare with being one of 800 applicants for an admin assistant position that if you even get it in all likelihood pays not much more than what grad school does, with far less flexibility in terms of work hours, and with required purchase of business attire? I mean, my goodness, Emily Yoffe's article, and then her interview on NPR... It seems the way to get employed after a gap is to take people out for coffee or a meal all the time and pay - not just for yourself, so as not to be a burden - but the whole bill. This, apparently, constitutes "networking." How is it sustainable? Depressing, at any rate. And law school, fine, is a good choice if a top-10 school wants you and you want to be a lawyer, but otherwise? Between those two requirements - the ability to get in and the interest in/ability to thrive at a big law firm (because if we're talking a law job that pays $30k...) - that no doubt leaves many who have respectable offers from doctoral programs, but who wouldn't be well-advised to go the law-school route. Journalism, publishing, need I say more?

Point being, if by "grad school in the humanities," what's meant is a multiyear contract with a livable wage and health insurance, not to mention the added bonus of an interesting new peer group to hang out with (plus maybe even a future spouse), Pannapacker never makes clear what the preferable alternative is to that. Such programs exist, and sometimes those in them effectively could not be employed more effectively without redoing all previous life choices, inclinations, and talents, i.e. without rewriting their life stories and becoming engineers.

Of course, these articles never specify - Pannapacker mentions 10 years to degree plus massive debt, but does not say anything about the difference between that situation and programs much shorter and better-funded. The equivalent genre re: law school generally distinguishes between the few who should go and the majority who go but should not. Pannapacker says that you should only go if you're independently wealthy or the child of an Ivy League president, which suggests he doesn't think any programs are worth the bother... but describes a worst-case-scenario admission package.

No one's entirely clear what's being discussed. So you get people commenting about MA and PhD programs, about how it's better to get a doctorate in the sciences because at least those programs are funded (!), about how some "funded" program barely covered the tuition (!!), ignoring that funding ideally also covers tuition. If once, just once, one of these articles would spell out a) which routes are being discussed, and b) what alternatives are out there, in the job market that actually exists, not merely for The Young Person, but for the sort of people who are considering becoming fully-funded humanities grad students. If the answer is that it's dumb to major in anything impractical in the first place, so be it, but then that needs to be stated, and the change would need to occur well before a college senior is comparing his offer from Yale with one from Starbucks.

Vows, the Gary Shteyngart version

-I totally know the Vows couple! OK, not the couple, but I very much remember that cashier from Blue Apron, largely because she was once part of a chamber music group playing outside the store, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of the place, which is, there is no doubt, the most pretentious food store in the entire world. (A pretentious food store has classical music playing inside. One with live classical music out front thus takes the organic-or-preferably-flown-in-from-France cake.) A gourmet shop, in Park Slope, for people too rich for the Co-op (I once overheard a conversation among well-heeled-looking 50-somethings about their "three houses"), or, ahem, grad students who had written rants about the Co-op on their blog and on Gothamist, had been written up angrily in the Co-op's newspaper, and as such could not join even once living so nearby, as in directly around the corner, it was kind of idiotic not to. Blue Apron also has (or had, when I lived across the street from it, in a kind of disastrous apartment where carbon monoxide was considered a kind of eh situation the landlord might ignore - people, do not live in central Park Slope) a fantastic cheese selection, Baked brownies, lox, croissants on the weekends... just enough to make gilded/suffocating atmosphere of the place worth dealing with. I complained about it when it was there, then, in Battery Park City, where the options are Gristedes or Gristedes, I came to miss it terribly.

That aside aside, from a Grad-Student Anti-Defamation League perspective, nothing like a story of someone entering a doctoral program and leaving after a few weeks to become a barista, ultimately finding fulfillment working at a coffee bar in Grand Central Station. And from a literary perspective, if I didn't know that the bride was a real person, I'd think the whole thing was a story by Gary Shteyngart.

-"Happily Divorced" is such a disappointment. As a Fran Drescher admirer, I'm kind of crushed. The show consists of exactly one joke - the main character's ex-husband, being gay, likes moisturizer, musical theater, and the color pink, OMG! - repeated ad nauseum in slightly different incarnations each time. One would think, in this post-"Will and Grace" age, we'd be past the idea that "gay" = liking "gay" things, and would have arrived at "gay" = attracted to members of the same sex. But there's no evidence of this character, who has left his wife because he now likes men, being even remotely interested in men. In "fuchsia," yes, in designing clothes, yes, but XY-chromosomed individuals, no. And if this basic premise weren't offensive enough, there's a cringe-inducing minor character, a Latino servant who occasionally interacts with "Miss Fran" and "Mr. Peter," whose presence on the show is so dated, so how is this even possible, that the ex-couple's black female sidekick friend (played by Tichina Arnold, who was/is the best thing about "Everybody Hates Chris") seems like a semi-developed character, even if this character, too, is offensive-cliché central. And, if anyone Jewish reading this wants to be offended as a Jew, there's the fact that we have, as with "Grace," the premise that a straight, attractive Jewish woman's natural companion is a gay man.

But even for the impossible-to-offend, the problem with the show is that there's nothing there. It's not believable that the costars were ever a married couple, that the ex-husband's dealing with suddenly coming out as gay after 18 years of marriage to a woman, that the ex-wife's dealing with the result of this, that either of them are doing anything more than reciting a script they've niftily memorized on what is clearly the set of "The New Adventures of the Old Christine," a similar show that is, alas, a great work of art compared with this one. And the premise is based on Fran Drescher's real life, co-created by the newishly-out ex-husband Peter! How is it so off? Mostly though, the show just feels empty, because the non-plot of Nanny Fine's husband being gay isn't rescued by any sub-plots. The other characters (see above) have no stories of their own. Fran's parents on the show are in the Generic Jewish Parents model, but with so little nuance - like when a black family on a TV show is played by actors with no resemblance to one another aside from all being, according to U.S. definitions, black - that they seem to come from a totally different world than the Fran alter-ego. The mother should be lecturing in Jewish Studies somewhere, i.e. is not the mother of Nanny Fine. Where's Sylvia? And Yetta? I miss Yetta.

-Ombré, round two, has happened, thanks to readily available and inexpensive adolescent-angst hair products in Heidelberg. Basically the same as the first attempt, except the tips fade not to orange but to blond - not platinum, because my hair doesn't do that, but light enough that the pink ought to show up just right. However, because I was, against my request, sold the weaker bleach, by the time it had done its thing I was too sick of having hair goop in that I'm going to have to save the pinkification for another day. I mean, I get that they're trying to be helpful, but obviously if your plan is to rebleach just the tips of your hair, you're not losing sleep over whether the hair-color you use is going to give you split ends. Obviously, if I decide to/need to look conservative, a haircut will be in order.

Quote of the day

Majoring in literature or art history rather than economics or biology, never mind hotel management or marketing, suggests a certain privileged indifference to material concerns (even when this rests on actual indifference instead of piles of money). And if you’ve gone into serious debt by attending college, afterward you’ll have noted that it’s the do-gooding NGO or the progressive magazine that expects you to take an unpaid internship, and the publishing house or academic department that offers you a pittance.

From n+1, via Arts & Letters Daily.

Agreed, but not sure I'd have kept that last bit in parentheses. Anecdotal evidence time here for a change, but when I think of those who went into higher-paid professions versus humanities grad school, there's some social-mobility-via-biology-major, but frequently enough, bankers are children of bankers, lawyers children of doctors, grad students children of academics. Do the impractical-sounding majors attract socialites? At the undergrad level, some, sure, but there's also reproduction of a high-cultural-capital, low-economic-capital caste to consider. There are so so many grad students whose parents are not only professors, but professors in the same field - one encounters this phenomenon far more often than 'I never have to work a day in my life, so I figured I'd get a PhD in French.'

Something for everyone

For Britta: The gray sweater for a medium-sized child fisherman has arrived. I tried it on, and while my boyfriend's response was a glance that says, so this is what it means to have an American girlfriend, I'm quite pleased.

For Amber, Isabel Archer: I promise more free-association on abs and the too-brilliant-to-bathe set will come soon.

For anyone with doubts about the chicness of grad students: One of my classmates is profiled on Fashionista.

For anyone who reads this blog for the celebrity sightings: Last night I was sitting across from Stockard Channing at a Japanese restaurant in Tribeca.  Not one of them fancy schmancy ones, either, which was what made this all the more surprising. Since I was dining with two ferners, I had to be excited about seeing Rizzo all by myself.