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Happily Programmed By the Ph.D. Cult

By  Meredith Clermont-Ferrand
November 10, 2000

It was in early October 1994 that I first noticed how much graduate school resembles a cult. Other Ph.D. candidates and I were marching in even rows toward a series of special priestesses who, from behind their grilles, doled out the substance that would preserve our souls. If we muttered the correct, self-abasing incantation, they gave us the salvation we needed, in a grotesque parody of the ritual of communion and confession.

It was called the financial-aid office.

In many ways, there is little difference between joining a cult and going to graduate school. In both cases, an institution takes your money, gives you an identity, tells you what to say, provides you with like-minded colleagues, requires you to perform a series of rituals that are celebrated only within your sect, confronts you with a hierarchy of guardians and interpreters of sacred texts, and determines your social class and your perspective on the world.

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It was in early October 1994 that I first noticed how much graduate school resembles a cult. Other Ph.D. candidates and I were marching in even rows toward a series of special priestesses who, from behind their grilles, doled out the substance that would preserve our souls. If we muttered the correct, self-abasing incantation, they gave us the salvation we needed, in a grotesque parody of the ritual of communion and confession.

It was called the financial-aid office.

In many ways, there is little difference between joining a cult and going to graduate school. In both cases, an institution takes your money, gives you an identity, tells you what to say, provides you with like-minded colleagues, requires you to perform a series of rituals that are celebrated only within your sect, confronts you with a hierarchy of guardians and interpreters of sacred texts, and determines your social class and your perspective on the world.

The process of applying to graduate school is a sort of initiation rite. You have to write a personal statement saying why you are worthy to become a member of the temple you have chosen. You must explain that the temple has sacred texts that you want to work with, and high priests who can direct your intellectual growth.

Another initiation ritual comes later in the process, when you apply for teaching assistantships to help pay for graduate school. A friend of mine, who had finished his Ph.D. so long before that he had helped Martin Luther edit his 95 theses, came with me when I searched for a T.A. position.

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The chairman of the program at Northeastern University in which I ended up earning a master’s degree promised me a job. In exchange for a tuition waiver and a small stipend, I would teach six classes a year and take seven or eight years to earn my degree. All I heard at that moment was that I would get paid a small fee to go to school, something I absolutely loved. Just like Marlowe’s Faustus, who signed his pact with Mephistopheles in exchange for more information, I craved a deeper, more-detailed education. Like Faustus, I signed away my life to a devil of my own choosing.

After the interview, when I told my friend about the commitment I had made, he said in horror, “No one works like that. You won’t survive.” Full of Faustian hubris, I reminded myself that he is from Eastern Europe. An easily overwhelmed, left-brained conservative, he went into sensory overload if the phone rang while he was brushing his teeth. I knew I had a greater capacity for multitasking than he did.

Seeing that he had not persuaded me of the error in my ways, he continued, “They aren’t educating you. They’re using you as a warm body in front of composition classes that the regular faculty members won’t take on.”

At the time, his suspicion of the academic power structure did not surprise me. He firmly believed that Stalinist hard-liners had placed a secret microphone in the typewriter he had taken with him when he fled from behind the Iron Curtain, and were still monitoring every key he punched.

Ignoring his words of wisdom and the anecdotal horror stories of other Ph.D. students, I gratefully accepted the position as a T.A. The priests of my graduate program dictated my schedule and even the words that I spoke. Any texts that ran counter to the established message were forbidden.

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Yet the surge of joy that I felt as I got up to teach, even though I taught at 8 a.m., was beyond price to me. I had held so many jobs, white- and blue-collar, where my first thought in the morning was to inventory my minor aches to create excuses to get out of work for that day. That no longer happened. Once in the Ph.D. cult, I got to speak of my favorite works of literature and ideas that engaged me profoundly.

As a cult member, I learned more than I had imagined was possible. And, as promised, the cult provided me with a like-minded community. The 30 or so other students, all overworked and overstressed, banded together into a unit that looked out for its own in a myriad of small and large ways.

As difficult as the initiation rites for the Ph.D. program were, moving upward in the cult’s hierarchy increased the stakes and the challenges of the rituals. Just as a “made member” of the Mafia has to kill someone to fully belong, a “made Ph.D. student” has to analyze the life out of a text. That killing of a text by close reading is called the dissertation.

Most Ph.D. sects are quite adamant that only their manner of reading the sacred texts is acceptable. As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts, I studied under Peter Elbow, the highest high priest of composition studies. He had an iron grip on the English department.

Soon after joining the Massachusetts temple, I was given the opportunity to teach in Lithuania. My assignment was to demonstrate to Lithuanian secondary-school teachers how American professors taught writing. I naturally outlined Peter Elbow’s famous philosophy, which included forbidding students to lift their pens from the page before time was up, even if they had nothing further to say. The Lithuanian teachers told me that their old Soviet curriculum had been less structured and more flexible.

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Besides priests who brook no dissent, the Ph.D. cult includes priests who, like Jim Jones or Charles Manson, use their positions as bases for abuse. One professor I encountered reminded me of Bob Packwood. My naïve deference toward that high priest had some cartoonishly silly moments. More times than I would like to admit, he would extend his hand for a handshake and pull me in for a surprise kiss. And Elmer Fudd-like, I would fall for it.

The rite of passage from student to priestess of the Ph.D. cult was the most harrowing ritual of all. As disheartened as I sometimes was by my life within the cult, and by the increasing difficulty of the successive initiation rituals, the fear of being exiled from the cult drove me nearly crazy. I wanted to stick with the Mephistopheles I knew. I still believed in the bargain’s basic premise.

I spent 19 months searching for a job after I got my Ph.D. My therapist bought a summer house.

Although the job search discouraged me, my department always had low expectations for me, as a medievalist. I once found a revealing document in the copier. It was the placement coordinator’s assessment of why certain students had not gotten preliminary job interviews at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Marge is not American, Bart and Lisa speak poor English, Homer is overweight. Meredith is a medievalist.

I doubled my efforts the next year. Each job letter took me days to research, compose, and send. Behind some of the letters were hours of truth stretching. The lowest I ever sank was reading the online version of a local newspaper and, in my job letter, weaving a rainbow fabric of Reaganesque disinformation about the enjoyable hours I had spent at the college’s apple-butter festival. Yet I would not have invested the time if it had not worked. The college called me.

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Despite the difficulties of reaching the prestige of Ph.D. priesthood, I have experienced many more joys than sorrows. I have created works of which I am incredibly proud. I am gratified to spread the doctrine of my specialty. I have been asked questions that have shaken my world-view. I have touched old books that once belonged to kings, books so beautiful that they made me cry. I now have an academic job with a salary, but I also get paid in ways that have nothing to do with my checkbook.

Yet sometimes, I still think about the cultish characteristics of graduate school -- particularly when I am having a bad day. On those days, several lines from Tennyson’s Ulysses -- “I mete and dole/Unequal laws unto a savage race/That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me” -- run through my head like an antacid jingle.

Once when I thought of those lines from Tennyson, the source of my bad day was a group of freshman girls. They sat clustered together like new pink candies. Their uniform hairstyle, usually the shape of gilded parentheses, was telling. It symbolized their conviction that any thoughts they had for themselves were unimportant.

When I watch students like that attempt to perpetuate their learned helplessness, a dullness they have honed to razor sharpness on the whetstone of the patriarchy throughout their lives, I wonder why I didn’t become a snake handler. Why did I choose graduate school over the other cults that I could have joined?

My sense of humor answers that I live better than Squeaky Fromme. I am more easily insured than a snake handler. I get marginally more prestige (though considerably less awe) than a whirling dervish.

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The more serious side of me knows that I did it because I wanted to join something bigger than myself, because there was a body of doctrine that I wanted to propound to a larger audience.

And, at the most basic level, I still believe in the Ph.D. cult I chose to join all those years ago.

Meredith Clermont-Ferrand is an assistant professor of medieval literature at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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