The stay-at-home-mom's confession: she works.

When Flavia recently posted a letter from one of her readers, about running into a bunch of 40ish stay-at-home moms at an Ivy League college reunion, I expressed some skepticism about whether these women really didn't work for pay, or whether perhaps they did (from home?), but the letter-writer was rounding down whatever it was these women did to "housewife." Flavia assured me that the letter-writer wasn't making assumptions, so in this particular case, case closed.

That said, I do think I was justified in bringing up the possibility, because there's a huge amount of blurriness between what constitutes "stay-at-home" and what's just being the member of the couple with the less high-powered career. Which brings us to Ashley Nelson's article in The Nation, "Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Mom." The key to the piece lies in a small but important detail: Nelson wasn't a stay-at-home mom, but a freelance writer:

[...] I left my job, figuring I could freelance while the baby napped.

Rookie mistake.

I hired a sitter, but for a time my work took a back seat to life. We moved and, two years later, moved again so my husband could take a job overseas. A second daughter arrived. Then, shortly after, I found myself in a situation I never predicted: sitting across from a divorce lawyer who didn’t even bother writing down my annual freelance income. I had published well and often, but my compensation was less robust. It would barely have covered a month of her costs.

So. Was Nelson working? Was her primary identity "mom"? She goes back and forth on this within the course of this short paragraph. If she "published well and often," and I mean actually did do this, it sure sounds like she had (has! she's in The Nation!) a job. I mean, according to the NYU career office, "freelance writer" is a job. Also according to some but not all freelance writers. It's complicated. But let's say she were not a woman, but a man. Or not a man, but single. (I've heard tell that some freelance writers are unmarried women.) Was her income not enough to live on, or was it simply laughable in comparison to the overall budget of the family she happened to be a part of?

Nelson explains that this isn't just her story, but that of other women as well:

[E]very mother I know who scaled back or quit work to care for children feels a similar anxiety about what the decision has cost her. Like myself, most never felt they were relinquishing their “work selves” completely, just momentarily turning down the tap. Many do some work, but it feels supplemental and underpaid. The climb back into full-time employment seems monumental.

In other words, neither Nelson nor the women she's discussing were ever really housewives/SAHMs/what-have-you. They did work, but weren't properly compensated.

And thus the problem: couples have this bizarre tendency to want to live together, especially when there are kids. This means that even if staying put at a job and not moving anywhere for any man serves as insurance against possible future divorce, it also can, to a degree, kind of preempt the marriage-and-family to begin with. A nuclear family can function as a unit, or (especially if there are no kids) as two autonomous individuals for whom a divorce would be upsetting in the way it is when one has a falling-out with an old friend, or breaks up with a college sweetheart. The perfect household, where divorce would have no financial impact on either partner, yet where the couple managed to live as if a family, and one not so front-and-center aware at all times of the precariousness of all marriages, is hard to picture. The lucky few who have this seem especially keen on writing about it, which confuses matters, I suspect.

Ideally, none of the household-and-childcare who-does-what would be gendered, beyond the pregnancy-and-shortly-thereafter aspects of it. The reality, though, seems to be a lot of women who do work, but who have opted for a lower-paid version of their chosen profession, but one that allows for more geographic and/or childcare flexibility. Had this couple lasted, there might have been time enough for a "see-saw marriage." It might not have always been such a gendered worst-case-scenario.

This gets at something I couldn't quite pin down in my response (responses) to the (ever-more-compelling) conversation at Flavia's, and elsewhere as well, one that led me to various posts from a couple of years ago as well. The women having this conversation (posts, comments) are, it seems, women who studied the humanities. Many are now tenured professors. The conversation is about Important Careers, but tilts to being specifically about careers in academia, specifically non-STEM academia.

The issue with this, as it relates to the topic at hand (women's feminist duty to be ambitious), is that once one has opted for the humanities, without simultaneously opting for something more marketable (the double-major in air-conditioner repair), one has already quite severely risked opting out. One finds a small and probably ever-shrinking subset of humanities-types in high-powered positions that use those skills. Tenured professors, big-deal editors, and so forth. It exists, but a girl (as in, pre-college) whose main priority is financial independence is taking a big risk if she goes down that path. And that's new, really, because there was always law school. Now there isn't always law school.

So. While a woman who reaches the point of having a tenure-track position and then opts out has opted out, can the same be said of a woman who leaves after X years of adjuncting, or upon learning the odds? Because if by "elite women" we mean (among others) women with humanities PhDs or near-PhDs, well, a lot of the time, this leads straight to a career that's never more than a dream, for a man or a woman (although everyone's always wondering about the perma-adjuncting vs. TT gender breakdown), and while employment-outside-the-home is still likely, it won't necessarily be elite employment, a career.

And! Then there's the question of whether the mere fact of women's growing majority in a given field will in and of itself end up making that field more precarious, whether it will end up encouraging society to think the work in question is nonsense (while nevertheless still demanding the work in question). College students are still being taught, but why by adjuncts? Is it maybe because women are viewed as pushovers, secondary-job-havers, and that $500 per semester could purchase an awfully nice pin? Are freelance rates at all impacted by a sense that (for certain publications, at least) this is work done by housewives?

I could go on, but I have other humanitiesish tasks to contend with.

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.

Pin money

Just finished Emily Matchar's Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity. It's great, but first, a story about my tracking down the book. It was noonish on a weekday, and I arrived at the public library in jogging clothes. That was because I'd jogged to the library.

After looking around for the book and not finding it where I thought it would be, I went to the information desk. I explained that I was looking for a book called "Homeward Bound," and the woman at the desk asked me if it was a children's book. And I realized that there was no possible explanation for my disheveled state, for the noon-on-a-weekday situation, other than children. (Except: dissertation. There is now a chapter eight. I tell ya...)

Anyhow, I said no, non-fiction. A grown-up book.

The woman helping me entered this into the system, and then said, or more like asked, "Why women are embracing the new domesticity?" And I all of a sudden thought, damn, this seems more personal than I'd realized.

******

Homeward Bound... left me with a lot to think about. Are women who earn less than their husbands dabblers who earn pin money? Am I that woman, and if so, why am I not better-accessorized? That even female journalists at the top of their profession can feel that way is not so reassuring.

Anyway, it's not often that I read a non-fiction book and think, my goodness, I agree with nearly all of this. Part of it is, as I've mentioned, that all the while, as I was critiquing the food movement, Matchar, though coming at the question from a different perspective, was arriving at many of the same conclusions. She's interested in the people who practice DIY extremism, whereas I'm more interested in consumers-as-researchers (the quest to buy the right stuff), and in the false impression perpetuated in certain articles that everyone college-educated is a DIY extremist. She's looking at the people who take this stuff dead-seriously; I'm more taking note of those who... let themselves flow with the greenwashing. The 'I try to avoid parabens, but because that's cool, who the hell knows what a paraben is' set. The 'I shop at J.Crew, not Old Navy, because I'm against fast fashion' contingent.

In other words, I'm interested both in the rising expectation that everyone's turning their shopping into a research project and the more blatant class-signaling variety. Not sure which is more common, though - my impression that the latter is more common than the grinding-of-one's-own-flour could just relate to where I live, or my tendency to read fashion blogs and not homemaking ones, or who knows.

Where Matchar's book is most especially spot-on:

-Yes, 100 times yes, the food movement ignores that women abandoned home cooking for a reason. Also 100 times yes, the calls for more cooking-at-home not only sometimes outright blame feminism for the decline of home cooking, but also - more universally - fail to properly acknowledge that asking "Americans" or "parents" to cook more is effectively asking women, mothers especially, to do so, because that's who ends up being held responsible if junior's living off Junior's.

-Yes, 1,000 times yes, the answer is an improvement in food quality on the whole - ingredients as well as convenience foods - and not an ever-greater list of demands on parents-i.e.-moms. (A personal request: the new-and-improved fast food shall be catered by Dos Toros.) The obsession with what individuals do in terms of feeding their family organic, etc., comes at the cost of movements to improve what all families are feeding their kids. She looks at this more as, individual families need to think of the greater good, whereas I see it more as, we have this movement promoting that (often consumerist but sometimes DIY) approach. But either way, yes, the idea that improving how "we" eat should be entirely about individual families making choices is a problem.

-This relates to the Sheryl Sandberg "don't leave before you leave" idea, and no, I have not yet read "Lean In." Perhaps when I jog back to return this most recent round of library books, that will be available. Anyway, according to Matchar, a lot of women see something noble and independent about rejecting the rat race, corporate America, etc. But, as Matchar wisely points out, their stay-at-home butter-churning enterprises are all being funded by their husbands' real-world jobs. Matchar, though, makes sure to point out that this isn't entirely about women choosing to be un- or underemployed, and is in part a case of, these are women having trouble finding work, who latch on to an ideology that says your baby has to latch on until it's college-age precisely because it gives them a sense of purpose. This, in turn, puts them in a still-worse employment position than they'd have been in had they stuck it out.

-On that note, I like that she's very clear, at the end of the book, about the specific social class going all homesteader. That as much as we all want to shout that these women's privilege is showing (they are, after all, being supported by their husbands, in an era when having a husband at all is a marker of fancy-class status) these are not the hyper-elites. These are women who don't have fabulous career options. Neither do their husbands, of course, but the men are still going to work.

Agreeing, adding:

-It seems to me like the underlying problem - the thing that gets women of this elite-but-not-Sandberg class into this bind where they're stuck choosing between perma-adjuncting, freelancing, and the stay-at-home chicken-coop mom option - starts far, far earlier than the point at which a husband or child enters the picture. Women are majoring in different fields, taking different paths, applying for less for-profit-ish post-college jobs.

More women might be going to college, but if they're not entering with the expectation that once out, they'll need to support a family, that impacts their outlook. Second-wave feminism, as much as it's been absorbed, has been absorbed as, you need to be able to support yourself. And women will get to a place where they can support themselves, or at least their 22-year-old selves who don't have all that many expenses.

So it's not that women are abandoning potential careers in order to be housewives. Often, they were never in a position to have such a career in the first place. But it kind of seems as if they were, because they have been to college. They are privileged. Except that when it comes down to it, when there are bills to pay, not so much. As I've said before, and as I will say again, knowing what kale is will not pay your rent.

Why do we keep missing this? In part because there is one small subset of women - and men - who can major in Medieval Tapestry Studies and be readily employable upon graduation. That would be the graduates of... either a certain number of elite colleges (some people I've discussed this with think UChicago counts, others are skeptical, and my personal experience is mixed) or really just Harvard. These are the people writing opt-out-analysis, and, often enough (although not in Matchar's case) this is whom opt-out-analysis articles are written about. And we're constantly hearing about how there are on the one hand privileged women, and on the other, underprivileged ones. When in fact, there is this one superwoman caste (the Sandbergs, the Chuas, the Slaughters), and then this other caste of women who are on paper not that different, but whose degrees in Basketweaving from Obscure College aren't quite the same.

So I think Matchar gets us part of the way there, in pointing out that this is sort of a lower-rung upper-middle-class concern. But we need to go further, acknowledging that not all women - or all men! - are going to go to name-brand schools, but also changing the mindset of women who are entering college, or even earlier, and making it clear to them that they, just like their male classmates at Obscure, will need to earn something more than pin money one day. 

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.

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.

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.'

Shakespeare won't pay the bills

Dear Prudence today includes a back-and-forth between Prudie and a would-be grad student. Skim or for all I care do an explication de texte of the following:

Q. Corporate Career or Art Career?: I am in my mid-20s. I have been accepted in an extremely competitive theatre arts program in the U.K., 3,000 miles from my hometown, and had plans to start my MFA this coming fall. While it will cost me a lot, in both time and expense, I feel that it is a great opportunity and am excited to begin my future education. However, I had my yearly performance review with my boss last Friday and he has told me that he sees great potential for me within our company and wants to put me on the fast-track to management. We are not talking about managing a TCBY here. In a couple of years, I would be making about triple what I am currently making now. My dilemma is this: Do I stay, start a business career, and make more money, or do I go to grad school to pursue my artistic dreams but have no guarantee of being able to get a job in that field after graduation? I don't want to throw away a good opportunity, but it looks like I'm going to have to do so either way. My husband has said that he supports my decision either way and will follow me if I leave the States, which is awesome.

A: First of all, there is nothing wrong with managing a yogurt store . Lots of thriving careers have started that way. Second, I'm probably the wrong person to ask since every day I am grateful that my teenage daughter expresses no desire for a career in the performing arts. Of course, there's always the chance you could be the next Helen Mirren, and I'm wrong to tell you to stick with your job. More likely, you will spend tons of money on your MFA and then work at a yogurt shop while you're hoping for your big break. I think a career in business can be full of excitement and creativity. If you can see it that way, then stay. But if you will spend every minute wishing you were in England being a star, then go.

Q.RE: Corporate Career or Art Career?: Thanks for the advice. Actually, I'm not the acting type; the degree that I would be getting would be in Shakespeare Theory, so my plan was to get a job in secondary education teaching Shakespeare to undergrads. I'll definitely have to think about it some more, but it's nice to know that there are people out there who won't judge me for "selling out" if I do end up going the corporate route.

A: How about if, with all your big corporate earnings, you get a season subscription to your local Shakespeare theater. Or you fly to London once a year to take in as many plays as possible. Trading in a thriving career to take on a lot of debt in the hopes that you can teach Shakespeare to uninterested teenagers sounds like a recipe for feeling all your tomorrows creep in this petty pace from day to day.

First, the narcissistic, the personal, the least racy over-share ever: The letter reminded me of something I hadn't thought of in years - that right before learning I'd gotten into my dream grad program, I had the possibility of getting a more interesting and better-paid job at the same organization where I already worked. Before I found out how great of a possibility that was, I confessed to my plans for the fall, which put me definitively out of the running. I suppose my situation's not quite comparable to that of the letter-writer, if only because I made more last year as a grad student than my salary was at the real-world office job I had in my between-college-and-grad-school year. The market has told me where my skills are more valued, which turned out to be, of all things, studying French.

Now the more general. What's confusing is that it's virtually impossible to know, from the information provided, what, exactly, the letter-writer is choosing between. She (assuming a husband-haver to be, in most cases, a woman, although in the field in question this is perhaps a stupid assumption) wants a job in "secondary education teaching Shakespeare to undergrads." Isn't "secondary" high school? In the U.K., it apparently begins at 11. Does the letter-writer want to teach middle school, high school, or college?

Whichever it is, how is an MFA the relevant degree for teaching English at any level? And - and forgive me if this is something specific to MFA degrees - are there really degrees in "Shakespeare," as in, in the works of just one author, or degrees that promise jobs teaching that which one finds most interesting, defined so narrowly? The grad program is, according to the letter-writer, "extremely competitive," but it doesn't seem as though she knows what the program even is - or maybe she does but doesn't want to give away too many details to a public forum? She ends up coming across as the stereotype of a prospective grad student, who loves some ridiculously mainstream subject, who doesn't realize it's been done to death, and who refuses to contemplate the practical consequences of life choices. In other words, if "she" is neither she nor he but the creation of the advice columnist, I wouldn't be surprised.

Meanwhile,  the other option - big bizness - looks a bit hazy. Her boss "sees great potential" for her and "wants to put [her] on the fast-track to management." If she opts for that route, she "would be making about triple what [she is] currently making now." (Emphasis mine.) None of this seems to be in writing. The boss could lose his own job, or could be dangling the prospect of big bucks in front of a reliable but not amazing employee, with the hopes that she won't quit. She has not, at any rate, been offered a job that pays three times what she currently makes.

Finally, there's this: "My husband has said that he supports my decision either way and will follow me if I leave the States, which is awesome." Is this husband himself a freelance Shakespearean or a corporate hot-shot? This is the difference between Art meaning starving in an alley (or serving frozen yogurt) and Art meaning maybe the kids can't switch to private school till high school.

In other words, the variables are many, of which few indeed are available to Prudie and her readers. Why am I pointing this out? Because this is how every single discussion of grad school plays out. (Enjoy the latest installment if you have yet to do so.) We get a whole lot of generalizations - programs that pay livable stipends are conflated with ones that cost a fortune. Elite programs where simply having the name of a particular university on a CV is a plus are mixed up with ones where everyone will express shock that Obscure U even has a program in Obscure Studies. Medieval Studies gets conflated with Chemical Engineering. The Grad Student eats ramen and wears black turtlenecks, wakes up at 3pm and speaks in jargon.

At the same time, all alternatives to PhD programs are viewed as one and the same - the Great, Unnamed Stable Career, which might not sound like much, but which is what anyone sensible would have done. The GUSC promises 100% job safety till retirement, and has immediate openings for any recent college grad willing to forgo the chance to study poetry. Unemployment what? No, no, every grad student has turned down a theoretical GUSC. Because the woman considering grad school who wrote in to Prudence has such a GUSCy GUSC lined up, I offer the possibility that she is, in fact, a fictional creation. But I study literature, I see fiction everywhere.

"Metropolitan" marvels

Yes, it is hil-arious that some people do work in coffee shops. Some people, ahem, do work and don't (just) check Facebook, do get paychecks for the work they do, but don't have offices, or have offices that they share with 100 other grad students and those grad students' own students. Some people's apartments contain such things as couches and beds, not to mention televisions and different shades of nail polish. Different skirts bought in different thrift shops over the years that could be tried on with different pairs of ballet flats. Old New Yorkers and Vogues begging for another glance. Some of us can resist the temptation most of the time, but will occasionally need a chance of pace.

The library, you ask? The NYU one, unless it's summer, is continuously packed - taking the train to a library where I'll have to spend 45 minutes just  looking for a seat isn't a great option. The neighborhood one, meanwhile, makes no claims of being anything other than a day-care center. The wheels on the bus, they have a way of going round and round, round and round. I like that it's a casual enough place that I can bring coffee without fear of getting yelled at (no BNF, the BPC NYPL), but lullabies and dissertations - unless it's your own child that needs to get to sleep - don't mix. I still tend to choose that over the nearest coffee shop - both because that coffee shop is too dark for reading books in, and because $3.25 for an iced coffee is a bit steep for a non-foam-containing caffeinated beverage. But sometimes, coffee shops win out.

Anyway, shout-out to Aaron Tugendhaft - knowing someone mentioned in the article kept me reading till the end, which is about right for a section that serves as a local paper within a national one. And there's apparently such a thing as a "freelance astrophysicist." Intriguing!

There'd better be some such thing as a freelance French Studiesist, the way things are going. I should consider myself lucky that I even have work to do in coffee shops. (Actually, I do consider myself lucky, not just for the ability to pay rent, but I get to write about French Jews. It's awesome.) Aside from my entirely subjective reaction - but I study French, I don't want French departments to disappear - some thoughts.

Note the picture accompanying the article. Who takes French? Women. If there was ever a subject boys were turned off to, French would be it. French is pretty much the subject that plays to female students' strengths, is out-of-reach for many male students, and that can be cited as an example of how anything women dominate is probably frivolous, anyway - where there's French, there are fashion poodles. Without any admissions-tweaking by gender, schools can eliminate foreign languages, French especially, and even things out. I can't imagine that's played no role in this.

Finally, I'd like to take this opportunity to discuss the heights of achievement possible with an undergrad degree in French under one's belt: my friend and former "Situer Sartre" classmate Lauren Shockey, who's now a food writer for the Village Voice. Since she's having the most fabulous career of anyone I went to college with, I'm going to have to count this as a victory for French.

Here we go again

This round brought to us by Patricia Cohen, in the NYT's Education Life section: "Law students get a diploma in three years. Medical students receive an M.D. in four. But for graduate students in the humanities, it takes, on average, more than nine years to complete a degree. What some of those Ph.D. recipients may not realize is that they could spend another nine years, or more, looking for a tenure-track teaching job at a college or university — without ever finding one."

This, right here, is the problem with all these articles about the futility of getting a doctoral degree in the humanities. Do we imagine that the morbidly obese chainsmoker simply doesn't know that his lifestyle's unhealthy? As in, we, the humanities doctoral students, we know. That one could perhaps locate one of us living under a rock, convinced that he will graduate from Obscure University in three years and then get handed tenure at Harvard along with a 3,000-square-foot wood-paneled office and a team of beautiful and brilliant acolytes of his preferred gender, does not merit this "What some [...] may not realize..." nonsense. We know!

What we don't know is a) how much it matters if we're in a good program and committed to getting out in well under 9.3 years and at well under age 35, and b) what someone with our particular skills/strengths ought to be doing if not pursuing a Ph.D. in what we're passionate about.

"You know you're not in high finance, considering second-hand underpants."*

I'm not sure if I'm ABD now, or if this status only comes after defending the dissertation proposal, but in any case I've been a humanities ABD, if I am one, for just over a week. Still, it's never too soon to read a scary tale about 20th-year grad students and the general bad life choice that is going to humanities grad school. Why the D bit is the most problematic confuses me - isn't the dissertation why people want to be in grad school in the first place? Or is it just that, life-cycle-wise, it so often coincides with interruptions?

Anyway, in the spirit of the tag to this post, the myths in the linked article, and my own repeating-myself-probably response to them.

Myth 1: The humanities grad student chose humanities grad school over a more lucrative option.

Because this is what's implied whenever anyone points out the low pay typical of grad school. But who's to say Mr. Poetics had a choice between management consulting, launching a successful company, and poetry, and somehow chose poetry? More likely, Mr. Poetics would have found himself graduating from college into a tough job market and, if lucky enough to find a position, working some unexciting, poorly-paid job that perhaps didn't even require a college diploma. (Mr. Poetics may have chosen a prestigious English program over Starbucks.) Now, if Mr. Poetics happened to graduate from Stanford with a dual major in silliness and math, fine, he had choices. But if he's just your regular old A student from wherever without any highly lucrative potential, getting paid to study poetry, even if the pay isn't fantastic, is not the worst idea ever. Would we prefer him 'finding himself' at a mediocre law school, then finding himself in debt?

Myth 2: Humanities grad school "virtually disqualifie[s]" you from doing anything else with your life.

Disqualification should be distinguished from non-qualification. That is, a humanities degree, grad or undergrad, does not qualify you to work as a plumber, engineer, barber, banker... But nor does it prevent you from picking anything up once you're done. If you start at 21 and finish at 45, then yes, it's more difficult, but there are always the options of a) not taking decades to get your degree, and b) leaving if it looks like it'll take decades. Plus, unless I'm missing something, I was under the impression that a PhD, even if it doesn't lead to a desired teaching job at a college, can help, not hurt, with getting one at a high school. If this does not strike you as tragedy of tragedies, then yes, you have backup. If you think a PhD, any PhD, guarantees tenure, a wood-paneled office, and busty-brilliant student acolytes out of a dated novel, good luck, but no one I know who is in fact a grad student thinks like this. Even the most ambitious grad students have Plan Bs, or at least reasonable expectations regarding Plan A. As for those Plan Bs, there are no doubt certain jobs for which you'd want to play down a PhD, but conflating it with something akin to a criminal record seems excessive.

Myth 3: Humanities grad school is an echo chamber of 'postmodern' this, 'Foucault' that, and of no relevance to conservatives, sensible people.

Not quite, as I've babbled about before. Much that goes on in academia sounds lefty, ridiculous, or both to those who never bothered to find out what it is. If you're already set on rolling your eyes every time "gender" is mentioned, you are not a serious conservative critic of the academy, you're just a knee-jerk people-pleaser who knows insulting the ivory tower ups your populist credentials.

*Song lyric from Flight of the Conchords

In theory

The latest installment in Your Humanities Degree Means Nothing falls into the category of things I'd rather not deal with, like studies telling you that everything seemingly innocuous in your life (the occasional steak! that one glass of wine!) will give you cancer. Plus, Rita already addressed the key points.

Mark Edmundson's take-down of the "readings" method of teaching literature courses, however, this I find interesting. What are readings? Explains Edmundson: "By a reading, I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary — Marx's, Freud's, Foucault's, Derrida's, or whoever's — to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art."

Edmundson would be pleased: somehow I managed to get a BA in French Literature from a reputable college without once being asked to read a book through the lens of someone else. The Chicago Way, as I understood it, was to read each book, whether by Marx or Foucault, Flaubert or Proust, through your own lens. Meaning, it's not that we weren't introduced to critics, we just weren't told to mimic them in our own thinking, but instead to read them as we would read the authors themselves. (Or maybe the readings approach was the norm in all the French classes I didn't take? Of those, there weren't many...)

The only time it occurred to me that the 'what do you make of the book' method might cause problems was when I took a class where I was the only undergrad. The whole way through, it seemed as though there was some different language everyone else had been taught, above and beyond French, that I had not been let in on. I figured grad school orientation was a great big bang-you-over-the-head with 'This is Derrida and what you're to say when his name is mentioned.' I wrote a paper, I remember, in which I misspelled Lukacs, throughout. ('Lou Koch.' Just kidding. I hope?) The part of the paper where I read and wrote about Zola novels went OK, I guess, but the Language of Grad School remained a mystery. Since at that time I had no intention of going to grad school in French, I was not overly concerned.

Then, hello. Apparently at other schools, people are taught these matters as undergrads, and there is an assumption once you get to grad school that you Know. I'd learned heaps at Chicago, but the Names remained a mystery; I've been piecing them together, through classes and outside attempts, ever since.

Still, I like the Chicago approach, that just because a book is Great doesn't mean an 19-year-old can't read it and say something intelligent about it, or at least learn how to do so for next time. The readings approach is, for someone just starting college, potentially intimidating, since what you're essentially looking at when you read the Great Critics is what a Hum or Soc paper would look like if written by a god. Who needs that?

And, along those lines, I think Edmundson makes some great points.* However, he couldn't make those points were he not himself versed in the Language. Case in point:

"Thus Blake, admirable as he may be, needs to be read with skepticism; he requires a corrective, and the name of that corrective is Karl Marx. Just so, the corrective could be called Jacques Derrida (who would illuminate Blake the logocentrist); Foucault (who would demonstrate Blake's immersion in and implicit endorsement of an imprisoning society); Kristeva (who would be attuned to Blake's imperfections on the score of gender politics), and so on down the line."

Is the answer, then, to raise a generation of literature scholars who haven't a clue what the sentences above are getting at? Is Edmundson advocating that literature scholars not have the skills necessary to say what a Marxist view of Novel X? If the switch he suggests were to take place, how would there ever be any kind of conversation among scholars? If we ignore what's been written about books, why would anyone, then, write about books under the new regime?

Theory, as I understand it, is basically a lesson in humility, saying to the collective That Guy of humanities students that, 'Yes, genius, someone has thought of that before you, that, plus so many other things you'd never think of in a million years.' Then again, on this matter, I haven't a clue.

* However, here's where I'm not on board with Edmundson: He writes that someone who reads literature "sees that there are other ways of looking at the world and other ways of being in the world than the ones that she's inherited from her family and culture." Why is leaving one's culture of origin seen as the only true way to be 'converted' via literature? I ask because French literature turned me into a raving Zionist.

Majorly demanding

Paul Gowder mentions "the fact that econ is more demanding than, say, an English major, and econ majors know it, encouraging the kind of intellectual arrogance displayed by this type of person." Having never taken an English or economics class past high school, I can't speak to the difficulty of those particular courses of study, but his "[...], say, [...]" allows me to* infer that, as a former French major who took some but not heaps of college math, I have authoritah on the matter.

Strictly speaking, yes, anyone literate in a given language can read a book and write something about it. Whereas once numbers are involved, different people hit that wall where everything stops making sense at different levels. (Honors Calculus, Week 2, oh the memories.) But in terms of what's actually looked for in a humanities class, there too, different people hit that wall at different levels. If you've hit such a wall, it might well feel like your classmate's paper got an A because he's better at BS-ing, that there's no objective difference between what you handed in and what he did, but it could also be that he had an interesting take on Huis Clos and you didn't. It could be that you didn't hit any sort of wall, and are in fact an under-appreciated critic of Sartre, and the grading really was subjective, but that's the case far less often than students tend to think.

Also: if some college majors are more demanding than others, it's not necessarily that one field is inherently easier than the other, but that, for structural reasons, certain fields have 'weed-out' classes, whereas others are more self-selecting. With French, at least, if you were uncomfortable reading novels and writing papers in that language, you didn't pick that major; consequently the average grade in a French literature class might well have been higher than in an econ or pre-med class.

Then again, I don't at all understand what my boyfriend works on (astro-something), and he understands perfectly well what I work on. So who knows. But I'm more inclined to think means he's sharper than I am than that the humanities on the whole are for the relatively slow-witted.

* Typo fixed! No, French-majoring did not knock English out of my brain entirely.

First World as problem

It turns out that the brilliant idea I had to study nineteenth century French Jews is both futile and immoral. This fits well with this week's theme on WWPD: guilt, or the Humorless Age. (An unappetizing-looking recipe for kale soup is now #8 on the NYT most-emailed list, down from spot #1.)

So. Peter Singer - who, disclaimer, has obviously written more and about more than will be covered in this blog post - argues that "we should give a lower priority to areas of study that have no obvious connection with world poverty or with, say, climate change or avoiding war or, indeed, with any similarly large and pressing problem." This means, he writes, that subjects like "Italian Renaissance art" - presumably this goes for representations of Jews in French novels - need to be shelved as subjects in academia, since "we live in a world in which 27,000 children die every day from preventable causes," and these endeavors do not solve the problem.

On the one hand, I already feel guilty about bad-mouthing seasonal, leafy vegetables, so why not add on a bit more guilt? On the other, I'm not quite ready to agree that the humanities are the root of all evil. So, possible counterarguments:

-Is a lack of Western funds the main obstacle to solving the world's problems? Some would disagree. I don't know enough about the topic to weigh in, but it seems worth looking into.

-Of the offending fields, Singer specifically singles out "art, languages, history, mathematics, or philosophy." Are humanities students (along with mathematicians) the ones who need to be redirected, more than those studying business, PR, or sports management, not to mention all the sciences not directly or even indirectly intended to save the children? What skills does he imagine the expert in Renaissance art has that would be especially useful in solving world poverty, such that he must switch majors? (Or, dare I ask, is Singer's plan that humanities students, whose skills are perhaps not transferable, simply lose funding or not go to college in the first place, and instead get envelope-stuffing-level jobs in do-gooder fields?)

-People come about solving problems through all kinds of ways. Had Singer never studied philosophy and read the Great Books, he might not have become an advocate for solving the world's Great Problems. Restricting learning to a few disciplines, and redirecting those fields entirely towards humanitarian crises, will alienate all but the most naturally do-gooder students, anyone whose curiosity lies elsewhere when they are 18 and deciding what subjects might interest them. All kinds of students who would not have thought about Great Problems might come to think about them from studying all kinds of subjects. (Studying French literature turned me into a Zionist, so who knows what education will do!)

-For Singer, luxury refers not just to $1,000 handbags and $200,000 cars, but also to buying a bottle of water (Key Food seltzer, say) when tap water would have done just fine. Yet - and on this point, all credit goes to Jo - if we all dropped everything and gave all the money we spend on "luxuries" to charity, the US economy would collapse more than is already the case. This would make it awfully difficult for the manager of the local Key Food to save starving children in Africa, what with his having lost his own job, what with no one buying more food than necessary for subsistence.

Singer almost addresses this argument when he writes, "Living luxuriously, it is said, provides employment, and so wealth trickles down, helping the poor more effectively than aid does. But the rich in industrialized nations buy virtually nothing that is made by the very poor." Again, if he defines as a luxury every purchase beyond gruel and sack-cloth, it's hard to imagine how Singer thinks first-world economies would still have enough money to give after about five minutes under his plan. It's not that buying a cappuccino benefits the very poor through trickle-down economics because the world's poorest necessarily work in coffee production. It's that if no one in the States bought anything, ever, how would we have anything to give? Is 'first world' some essential quality, one that would persist even if all incentives to earn money disappeared? Perhaps not.

-Finally, Singer's fundamental argument - that charity must come first, because who, if faced with a starving child, would hand over their extra cash to fund a wing of a museum - tugs at the heartstrings, but ignores a good part of why the rich want to see improved conditions for the poor. If by 'life' what was meant was simply basic nourishment and an end to preventable death, it's fair to say that excitement about life all around - and not just in the first world - would deteriorate. Is it more important for Person A to have a shot at life than for Person B to enjoy an opera or an Apatow? Put like that, it seems simple, but much of what motivates charity work is the sense that one is lucky to live as one does (thus 'First World Problems') - once even the littlest luxuries are banished, that sense is likely to be greatly diminished.

But it isn't even just about luxuries in the sense of lattes, movies, and such. If I understand the argument correctly, devoting one's life or donations to any cause outside of Singer's list of core issues means acting immorally. So if you spend your days trying to end racism, fighting to legalize same-sex marriage, or anything else one might call a 'do-gooder' job, but that does not feed the children, it's as good as pedicures and flat-screens. The well-meaning ladies who provided 655 comments to a Jezebel post entitled "How Do We Solve The Plus-Sized Clothing Crisis?" - sample sentence from post: "While Gap often stocks up to size 20, is the brand still relevant (is there anything you'd want to buy)?" - might, according to the Singer line of thought, want to rethink their understanding of the word "crisis." P.S.: what's wrong with the Gap? Is that not where the young people shop? I plead ignorance.

So, long story short, let the self-flagellation begin.

Things that are not rocket science UPDATED

Today's one of those maybe-I-should-sign-up-for-a-job-advertised-on-the-subway days. (Once I get my license, $12/hr car-parking, here I come!) Not much helping. (Second link via Belle.)

So, two thoughts re: grad school vs. law school, the subject of the second post. My authoritah, having never been a law student, is of course nil, but anyway...

1) If you're interested in both, fair enough, but there are clearly better and worse orders of doing things. If you first go to law school, then owe tons, then before paying it all back head to a PhD program... I'm not even quite sure how that would work. Whereas if you go to grad school and, at the end of the tunnel, there are no jobs, tragedy of tragedies, you enter law school-- still without grad-school debt-- at 28 rather than 22. Again, if you were interested in both to start with. Which, anecdotal evidence tells me, is not that unusual.

2) Belle's suggestion of a double-major with something practical makes sense for the brilliant all around, but not everyone who's an A student in humanities can pull so much as a C in the hard sciences. (No comment.) Is this because word people are not always number people, or because literature classes are objectively easier than physics classes? Either way, the point is that taking on as a major a subject outside your areas of strength will kill your GPA, and thus your chances of going to a top law school, which would have otherwise been your best option for a lucrative career.

************

Grades! I know, those of us who teach undergrads are supposed to hate grade-grubbing, but how can you, when you know their futures largely depend on the numbers and letters you affix to their assignments? That they care about grades means not that they are entitled brats, but that they are aware of the precariousness of their futures. Jacob Levy has a good defense of the undergrads. Although Levy's post does seem to describe a theoretical undergrad who was the star student at a mediocre high school and is put in his place during his first semester at an Ivy or similar, and who can reasonably be assumed both exceptionally intelligent and hard-working, most of what he writes strikes me as true of the situation generally. (Again, having never taught at a non-selective school, my authoritah here as well=nil.)

Still, I'm left with a question: Levy quotes a professor (one who, as Levy points out, had the strange idea of complaining about his students to the New York Times) as saying "Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before," and argues that this complaint is understandable, coming from an 18-year-old who really hasn't been that challenged before. Understandable, yes, but what are you supposed to do, as a teacher, in that situation, that will not further rile the student who's come to complain? A grumpy 'life isn't fair' speech won't do, and unless you're grading a math problem set, subjectivity comes into play, so a methodical adding up of points will not convince a student of the justice of his grade. Explaining what it takes to, say, write a stronger essay is probably the way to go, but such advice, given more or less in passing, might not work either, and might make grading seem altogether arbitrary, when, alas, it's not. So, thoughts?

UPDATE

Jezebel also responds to the NYT-TNR-grades debacle. Their post is reasonable, so this update is about an anti-undergrad comment that begins, "I taught my way through grad school," and appears to mean teaching undergrads. Huh? If you are a grad student, you do not 'teach your way' through your program. You are a TA, or an adjunct, or whatever your school calls it. Should TA's earn $500,000 a year for their efforts? I'm game, but regardless, the teaching is part of your professional training. One waitresses/brick-lays/lifeguards/strips/babysits one's way through school, because these are jobs that do not have direct relevance to your degree. It's a matter of terminology, but also of the heights to which the Jezebel-commentariat-as-proletariat trope seems to have risen.

Fluff 'n stuff

Does the market value of frivolity make life easier for female than male journalists or, more broadly (sorry) women than men? Is lady-journalism best understood as fluff, or as a form no less worthy than current-controversy op-eds?

There seem to be two things operating at once. One, as Elizabeth is right to point out (via Amber), being a woman makes it easier to fail, because women have more options in terms of opting out of the workforce, but also because when a woman is inept, it can be seen as neutral or even add to her charm, whereas few men advertise their inadequacies of any kind. (Are there 25-year-old American men who still don't know how to drive? No doubt, but they would be less likely to be open about it.)

(But are women weaker, or is weakness not condemned as strongly in women? It's like the question of whether women are more social, or whether there's just so much pressure on women to be friendly and people-people that even girls with Aspergers find their way in the world of cliques.)

The other is that 'failure' is defined as feminine behavior. Staying home to raise kids, fussing about shoes and makeup, interest in social and domestic (as in, abortion and the US, not dinner parties and Windex) issues over foreign and economic policy, willingness to admit one might be wrong in a blogospheric argument (starting sentences with 'I think' and ending them with 'but I don't know really', as opposed to the 'you're wrong, you idiot' approach taken by oh, one or two male blog commenters, or blog-commenters presenting themselves as such)... all of these things are defined as negative in part, at least, because they are associated with the ladies. Even moving beyond obvious examples of fluff (like the amusing one Elizabeth gives: "5 Ways to Get Beach Hair"), the female and the silly are often defined as one and the same.

It's not clear to me (to use a female sentence-starter) how to get around this. One could say buying one's children binders is just as important and worthy as rocket science, that shoe-bloggery as crucial to our society as bloggy analysis of constitutional law. It's clear enough where the drawbacks there lie. Another possibility: women could decide to live without men. The problems with that, too, are self-evident.

Some ways out of this puzzle:

-We could remember that time wasted is time wasted. Looking for just the right new pair of shoes or watching the game, these are both time-wasters. Sure, great shoes can help further a career (but a couple pairs would do), and watching sports can mean socializing and thus networking (but can also mean beers and sitting on the couch alone). The point need not be that female time-wasters are actually productive activities, just that girly-nonsense is no more nonsensical than the male equivalent.

-There is excellent writing on fluff, and dreadful writing on Serious Issues. Think Proust on disappointment in love versus an American college sophomore's op-ed in the school paper about how to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all. The comment Amber links to about how brilliant law students write about law, whereas lesser minds deal with "clothes, recipes and literature," is so off, I don't know where to begin. Clearly a link to Zappos is not Supreme Court-level analysis of the US Constitution, but I can't say I understand throwing out there as though it's established fact the notion that writing about literature is what one does when one is too dense to write about law. In fact, I bet I could round up some folks who'd argue the opposite. The law student writing exclusively about something other than law should be held guilty only of having chosen the wrong field.

-Sometimes fluff is just fluff. But other times, an undertaking thought silly when done by women comes to be considered Important when men take an interest, or vice versa. Food beyond haute cuisine, for instance, was thought fluff (not to be confused with Fluff, mmm) until men entered the picture. Or the humanities, once a serious endeavor, now the object of mockery, now that women are over-represented among those whose job is to read a book and write a paper about it. No doubt there are male and female ways of writing about literature, food, or anything else. We seem to equate 'serious' with 'male,' allowing that some men will write fluff and some women seriousness, but that these will be the exceptions.

Is it navel-gazing if others gazed first?

I'm being discussed, which is bizarre enough in itself that I'll respond.

First, indeed, those who comment here tend to disagree with me, which certainly does have something to do with my being at once pro-Israel (and thus, to many online and off, a default Republican) and socially liberal (and thus anti-Palin, and thus to many a default Democrat). This combination of views was--and is!--far from unusual among those of my demographic (i.e. New York Jews), but is seen as inconsistent in contemporary politics. I seem like I might be drawn to either side, thus the anti-Zionist comments to any post on Israel, and the pro-Republican comments to posts on the upcoming elections. So it is.

As for those who comment and feel they've been treated unfairly, what can I say? Responding to these disagreements (some of which are substantive, others of which could be addressed if the commenter simply read the post before responding, still others of which seem to demand that I cite supporting evidence for what are only meant to be off-the-cuff remarks) can get tiring. My job (which is not this blog) is also largely about constructing arguments and having them critiqued. If my responses here at times seem abrupt, it might be because I found a comment troll-ish, but it might also be because I'm overwhelmed by the even more demanding world of 19th century French Jews, not to mention the world in which I indeed do my best to respond to criticism with research and nuance. But another thing to keep in mind is that to be female and young and writing about things other than shoes and clothes and boys is to attract a certain... tone. This is true online and off. Before the phrase 'gender card' appears, let's just say I can't imagine anyone wishing to 'help' Matthew Yglesias or Andrew Sullivan with his blogging. Those who are male and/or older will expect that someone younger and female will be not so confident in her views; responding with confidence means one is defensive, but the other option is basically losing each battle. And again, the optimal third option--responding with a researched, sufficiently-nuanced answer--is rarely doable.

I can't remember when I've pointed this out most clearly, but I know I've mentioned it before, but alas, it seems I need to spell it out: I know that being right-wing for Park Slope or for academia is not necessarily to be right-wing under other circumstances. And I know, as well as anyone else who follows American politics, that Giuliani and Bloomberg are considered not 'real' conservatives by many elsewhere in this country. For several reasons, I do have a bit more experience with the beyond-New-York America (and I don't mean New Jersey) than your typical native New Yorker, but I've never claimed to be anyone other than who I am. I've left for long enough to know how different New York really is. I point this out not to be defensive, but to defend myself from what I believe is an unfair accusation, namely that I think my experience of American politics is representative. How could I think such a thing? I live in Park Slope, where organic arugula sprouts from the crevices between the stones of each brownstone.

What I object to is this wave of discussing New York and academia (my two homes at the moment) as not merely unrepresentative of the rest of the country, but as foreign entities that should have no voice in American politics. That's what gets to me, not so much in blog-comments as in the national discourse on the whole, at least as much of it as I have access to in my unrepresentative grad-student hovel.