I just saw that I wrote that was in a program in the late ‘90s that would have had me graduating in the early ‘90s. 😂 Not sure how that would work! Of course, I meant the early 2000s.
I was in a humanities PhD program on the east coast in the late 90s, which would have had me graduating in the early ‘90s. I ended up withdrawing for a number of reasons, chief of which was that I just couldn’t afford it—even with the tuition remission, the G.I. Bill and a risibly low stipend I was granted. To this day I have a moments where I tear up and regret my decision leave. Many of my closest friends are still in academia. But I hear similar stories from them about the nastiness of fellow scholars, and the jobbery and self-promotion involved in getting tenured at a university or private college. It seems as though the institutions are reaching a breaking point with the bloating of the bureaucratic side at the expense of the professors and TAs. When I withdrew in 98, my department was run out of a single room in what was called “The Hall of Graduate Studies” where the grad students (like me) actually lived and took our meals. Now that entire building is being used to house administrators and obscure functionaries. While admittedly an outsider to what is going on, I can’t help but shake the feeling after reading articles like yours that the overly-charged political and social climate we have been living in over the last decade or so, combined with the phenomenon of social media and that weird temporally-dilated event we call “COVID”, has contributed to a sidelining of highly-qualified and hardworking educators, and an exaltation of often mediocre but highly-acclaimed celebrity academics.
Daniel, I can't help but agree with your conclusions here. I think I would trace it to an increasing reliance on bureaucracy in the institutions of education. There's a tendency to reduce everything to a problem of "systems management." Along with that comes the simultaneous tendency to minimize the significance of things like human experience, relationships, and culture. It's all very mechanistic (I'm sure I've been perhaps overly influenced by Kafka with regard to these issues).
All that said, however, I do want to take a second to say that I very much lucked out with regards to my job. I work at a small college where a lot of these problems are minimal and we've somehow maintained enough emphasis on humanity that it's a rewarding place to work. I share that just to suggest that even in the ruins of this system, it's still possible to do meaningful work, and there is good work being done.
I mean I guess I should have provided an addendum where I note that I'm quite happy in my job. Although it has the benefit of being somewhat in the hinterlands of Academia with a capital A. We basically forego personal prestige for the virtue of the work we do.
‘it saddens me that an institution built to practice the humanities too often loses sight of its own distant humanity.’ 💥🥊🏅
Thanks for reading, Adrian, as always. Glad that line resonated with you.
Could never resist a bit of irony, Danny!
I just saw that I wrote that was in a program in the late ‘90s that would have had me graduating in the early ‘90s. 😂 Not sure how that would work! Of course, I meant the early 2000s.
I was in a humanities PhD program on the east coast in the late 90s, which would have had me graduating in the early ‘90s. I ended up withdrawing for a number of reasons, chief of which was that I just couldn’t afford it—even with the tuition remission, the G.I. Bill and a risibly low stipend I was granted. To this day I have a moments where I tear up and regret my decision leave. Many of my closest friends are still in academia. But I hear similar stories from them about the nastiness of fellow scholars, and the jobbery and self-promotion involved in getting tenured at a university or private college. It seems as though the institutions are reaching a breaking point with the bloating of the bureaucratic side at the expense of the professors and TAs. When I withdrew in 98, my department was run out of a single room in what was called “The Hall of Graduate Studies” where the grad students (like me) actually lived and took our meals. Now that entire building is being used to house administrators and obscure functionaries. While admittedly an outsider to what is going on, I can’t help but shake the feeling after reading articles like yours that the overly-charged political and social climate we have been living in over the last decade or so, combined with the phenomenon of social media and that weird temporally-dilated event we call “COVID”, has contributed to a sidelining of highly-qualified and hardworking educators, and an exaltation of often mediocre but highly-acclaimed celebrity academics.
Daniel, I can't help but agree with your conclusions here. I think I would trace it to an increasing reliance on bureaucracy in the institutions of education. There's a tendency to reduce everything to a problem of "systems management." Along with that comes the simultaneous tendency to minimize the significance of things like human experience, relationships, and culture. It's all very mechanistic (I'm sure I've been perhaps overly influenced by Kafka with regard to these issues).
All that said, however, I do want to take a second to say that I very much lucked out with regards to my job. I work at a small college where a lot of these problems are minimal and we've somehow maintained enough emphasis on humanity that it's a rewarding place to work. I share that just to suggest that even in the ruins of this system, it's still possible to do meaningful work, and there is good work being done.
Well you have definitely made me feel better about not trying to break into that world.
I mean I guess I should have provided an addendum where I note that I'm quite happy in my job. Although it has the benefit of being somewhat in the hinterlands of Academia with a capital A. We basically forego personal prestige for the virtue of the work we do.
I Liked this but really it should be Unlike, no?
I unlike it myself!