Thesis Hatement

Who wouldn?t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired? Such is the enviable life of the tenured college literature professor, and all you have to do to get it is earn a Ph.D. So perhaps you, literature lover, are considering pursuing this path.

Well, what if I told you that by ?five hours? I mean ?80 hours,? and by ?summers off? I mean ?two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning?? What if you?ll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you?ll mostly be using made-up words like ?deterritorialization? and ?Othering??because, as Ron Rosenbaum pointed out recently, the ?dusty seminar rooms? of academia have the chief aim of theorizing every great book to death? And I can?t even tell you what kind of ass you have to kiss these days to get tenure?largely because, like most professors, I?m not on the tenure track, so I don?t know.

Don?t do it. Just don?t. I deeply regret going to graduate school, but not, Ron Rosenbaum, because my doctorate ruined books and made me obnoxious. (Granted, maybe it did: My dissertation involved subjecting the work of Franz Kafka to first-order logic.) No, I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct. After four years of trying, I?ve finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job?and if you go to graduate school, neither will you.

You might think your circumstances will be different. So did I. There?s a little fable from Kafka, appropriately called ?A Little Fable,? that speaks to why this was very stupid:

"Alas," said the mouse, "the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I?m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run."

"But you?ve only got to run the other way," said the cat, and ate it.

The mouse wasn?t going in the wrong direction so much as it was walking cat food the entire time. A graduate career is just like this, only worse, because ?A Little Fable? lasts three sentences and is made up, while graduate school lasts at least six years and will ruin your life in a very real way. But, as in the fable, this ruin is predestined, and completely unrelated to how ?right? you do things.

Other well-meaning academics have already attempted to warn you, the best-known screed in this subgenre being William Pannapacker?s ?Graduate School in the Humanities? Just Don?t Go.?* But this convinced no one. It certainly didn?t convince me! Why? Because Pannapacker is a tenured professor. He pulled it off, so why can?t you? After all, someone has to get these jobs.

Well, someone also has to not die from small-cell lung cancer to give the disease its 6 percent survival rate, but would you smoke four packs a day with the specific intention of being in that 6 percent? No, because that?s stupid. Well, tenure-track positions in my field have about 150 applicants each. Multiply that 0.6 percent chance of getting any given job by the 10 or so appropriate positions in the entire world, and you have about that same 6 percent chance of ?success.? If you wouldn?t bet your life on such ludicrous odds, then why would you bet your livelihood?

Don?t misunderstand me. There is unquantifiable intellectual reward from the exploration of scholarly problems and the expansion of every discipline?yes, even the literary ones, and even if that means doing bat-shit analysis like using the rule of ?false elimination? to determine that Josef K. is simultaneously guilty and not guilty in The Trial. But there is one sort of reward you will never get: monetary compensation from a stable, non-penurious position at a decent university.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=a4756895b1770ec904425e3c7ef61d35

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