March 6 - 13, 1 9 9 7
[Dead-end Degrees]

The great PhD scam

Part 4

by Jordan Ellenberg

Much of each day's activity centers on the 747 panel talks. The speakers are usually job-seekers or resume-building junior faculty, with the occasional big name like Harvard's Marjorie Garber pitching in. The panels I visit aren't thrilling; the talks seem repetitive and the audience inattentive. It reminds me of being in a college class that meets right before lunch. A graduate student explains it to me this way: compressing an hour lecture into a 20-minute lecture is very hard. Stretching a five-minute insight into a 20-minute lecture is very easy.

Jonathan Yardley notwithstanding, identity politics don't dominate; there's lots of Shakespeare happening, not so much Toni Morrison. Science is very big: panels are convening on "Poetry and Computers: Digital Poetics" and "Virtual Worlds with Real People" and "Millennium or Apocalypse? The Golem and Other Jewish Science Fiction." You get the feeling that the scholars here are a little envious of the scientists, with their uncontested authority to speak on their own subjects. (There's no Yardley chiding the chemists.) That authority has been a sore point ever since 1995, when Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, successfully placed a hoax article in the literary-theory journal Social Text. Bad PR by Social Text's editors, with the aid of some sensational reporting, turned the low-grade scandal into a major embarrassment for the humanities. It's no wonder so many of the scholars are shy of me. Three different people ask me if I'm writing "the usual hatchet job."

On the third day of the conference, the Forum on the Job Market and the Future of the Profession draws about half as many people as the mock interview to a room twice as big. Cary Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana and author of the forthcoming Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, delivers a crowd-pleasing stump speech attacking the MLA's response to the job crisis, quoting less-than-fervent statements on the matter by several MLA officials. Nelson has a big voice, and a thickety, Old Testament beard, which he makes the most of; his remonstrations sound straight from a peevish God. With their timidity and unwillingness to offend tenured faculty, Nelson declares, "[MLA leaders] have aided and abetted the crisis . . . the disaster they normalized. They have moved on to the wistful contemplation of their graduate students -- alas, poor Yorick, he hath not a job." Nelson's own prescription is a "Twelve-Step Program for Academia," including such strong medicine as unionization of graduate students, shutting down "marginal" PhD programs, and a push toward retirement for faculty of a certain age.

He's particularly hard on Elaine Showalter, a professor at Princeton and second vice-president of the MLA, who has argued more than once against what she calls "'60s tactics" in academic activism. "Showalter believes," Nelson says cuttingly, "that a graduate education in the humanities is . . . broadening." The implication is clear: for Showalter and the MLA, a PhD is just another part of rich kids' social initiation into the world of rich adults, like a Grand Tour, or tennis lessons.

As soon as he's done, Showalter, a small, sturdy woman with a schoolteacher's hairdo and a silver sun brooch, shoots up from the crowd, her hand extending upward and a pen extending from her hand.

"The solutions are not going to be an issue of exploitative, seductive, cruel princes of the MLA against a kind of plebiscite," she says. But for much of the crowd, that seems to be exactly the issue involved. The question period turns out to be more of a cri de coeur period, as audience members stand and testify to what everyone already knows: that the dire future has already arrived, and that no one seems to be doing much about it. There's a broad feeling that the MLA represents the tenured professors, not the graduate students who make up a third of its membership, certainly not the part-timers. A woman who's been an adjunct in New Jersey for 20 years stands up: "We are accountable for what we eat, what we wear, what we say, and what we teach." I've never before seen someone so mad as to actually tremble. Suddenly a mystery novel I'd read just before coming, Murder at the MLA, makes a lot more sense. "People who are taking money and pretending to teach [graduate students] that there will be positions are accountable." ("It's not fair," Phyllis Franklin says later, looking beleaguered. "In point of fact . . . we have been making every kind of effort to help those people. There's one thing the MLA can't do, and that's make jobs.")

As for Elaine Showalter, she really does think a graduate education is broadening, and she's not apologetic about it. A PhD in English, she tells me, allows you "to write your first book under someone's supervision"; it makes you a better journalist, a better high-school teacher, a better White House communications director, and so on. So there aren't too many people being trained; there's just too limited a perception of what they're being trained for. "Cutting down," she says, "is the least interesting, least imaginative, least effective solution."

But graduate students tend to resent the suggestion that they should be satisfied with work outside the academy. "We didn't go through this for seven years to work for Motorola," one speaker says. A graduate student from Columbia: "Name one job this prepares you for other than scholar and teacher. It hurts you, because you're overeducated, and they wonder why you failed at your last career. There are lots of other jobs, but I could have done them seven years ago with a BA." Another graduate student told me that when he found out last year he was going to be a father, he sent out dozens of job applications in the industry he'd left to go back to school. One company sent a sympathetic letter but no offer. The others told him his PhD made him overqualified. Now he's at the MLA, on the market for an academic job. "The fact is," he tells me, "this is the only plank I can afford to walk."

So why do people still enter doctoral programs? Nelson, in Manifesto, makes the crucial point that "the job market's blunt message . . . will not in any way mean [to undergraduates] what it means to graduate students whose careers are cut off in mid- stream . . . . To undergraduates the message will instead be partly symbolic, vaguely invoking disaster or impossibility, and partly incomprehensible." Here's the reason so many graduate students feel as if they hadn't been warned just how bad the situation was. As Nelson puts it, graduate students "acquire an identity they did not have at the outset." The undergraduate who hears the bad news reasons that if she can't get an academic job she'll do something else, and signs up. The person who, six years later, becomes part of the bad news may no longer be able to do anything else.

I asked a lot of graduate students what they would tell someone who was deciding whether to enter a doctoral program. Every one said the same thing: "Don't do it unless you love it."

The problem is that it doesn't seem possible to love it, the way they mean, without doing it.

Part 5

Jordan Ellenberg is a writer living in Somerville.