This started out as email, but then I thought, given the job market, maybe I should make it a note.
On January 30, 2009, Thomas Benton, in an article called "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go" in the Chronicle of Higher Educationsaid that, among the bad reasons that students go on to graduate students in the humanities is that:
They received high grades and a lot of praise from their professors, and they are not finding similar encouragement outside of an academic environment. They want to return to a context in which they feel validated.
That may be true of the students with whom Benton works; I wouldn't know. It may be a sort of self-selection process, but that doesn’t describe the sort of students with whom I tend to work. On the contrary, they can find academia very not validating--these are people who could go to law school and do quite well (and they know it) and yet they choose to remain in academia. And sometimes they find it kind of grinding on the soul.
There are moments when there are crises of faith, and I think the job market has created more than the normal share. The problem that students seem to have, I think, is that they worry that they chose academia over something like law school because being an attorney seemed to be a career that would be both selfish and unfulfilling. It might be personally satisfying insofar as the pay is good, but the hours are long, and the work just seems to be cog-in-a-wheel kind of thing--helping corporations be corporations or something.
Yet, if graduate school is just an evasion of the "real" world (as Benton suggests), or a place one goes for personal validation, it's simply a stupider version of the attorney tradeoff--it's narcissistic, and the pay isn't even very good. If you're going to sell your soul and engage in pointless work, you at least ought to get a good price, right? And it's when students start thinking that way that they get a crisis of faith. When I thought someone was having a crisis of faith, I tried to describe why I think what we do matters (a previous note), but it's funny that it was entirely why our teaching matters. I said, in a nutshell, "We teach citizens that issues can be talked through and should be thought through, that difference is a virtue, and that divided we stand."
But, high school teachers do that, too, so why write a dissertation? Why publish? So, for what it's worth, I thought maybe describing the crisis of faith I had in graduate school might be helpful, especially since I've since come to two other stances regarding scholarship anyway.
In graduate school, I decided that there were, basically, three tiers of really productive scholars. The first tier is made up of people who constitute the primaries, really--people like Arendt, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas. The second tier is made up of people who interpret those folks (people like Benhabib, Culler, Eagleton). The third tier relies on the second tier in order to apply the arguments of the first to something--politics, literature, pedagogy. In graduate school I figured that, if I was lucky, and was firing on all cylinders, and held it at full throttle, I could run a good race, maybe, in the third tier. I still think that's true.
So, I said to various people, who the fuck needs another third tier scholar? And my answer at that point was: no one. But, I was a good teacher of undergrads, and a lame teacher of high school students. Hence, the answer was also: I would do enough scholarship to enable me to teach. I still think that's a perfectly fine answer, even though it's no longer my motivation. It's the "I love having dogs, and it means I have to pick up poop" approach to scholarship.
But, at some point, I got really interested in the questions my scholarship pursued, so I shifted to the second answer that third tier scholarship matters. My trying to figure out answer to various questions--why do some people like seeing themselves as voices in the wilderness, why are some people so recalcitrant about admitting error, why are some people terrified of complexity--made me a better teacher. So, I started doing scholarship because I was interested in what answers I could find in the research, and because I thought it helped me teach. And it does.
And then something funny started happening. I started meeting people who said that my scholarship helped them in their teaching and scholarship (Hi, Craig!). Granted, chances are that they're just really smart, and they read something smart into my work, but I'm fine with that. The point is that I stopped seeing my scholarship in really isolated (and profoundly narcissistic) ways. I'm not a scholar; I'm one of a bunch of people doing a certain kind of work--trying to think through American approaches to public argumentation, and trying to make it better. The militaristic way (since academia is given to militaristic metaphors) is that I'm a hoplite holding up my shield. The better metaphor, taken from Phaedrus is that scholarship--everyone's scholarship--is a seed thrown over the wall, and you hope someone comes along and waters it. So, I throw a seed, and I try to water the seeds I see.
Anyway, this is all a long way of saying that a dissertation won't change the world, but it might be a part of a life that can help change the world. I hope.
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