Shortly after defending my dissertation, my parents, quite unexpectedly, sent me a DVD of the 1983 film Educating Rita. It turned out to be a brilliant gift, helping me hone my feelings about what I had gained and lost in the long road to my Ph.D.
The movie also helped me articulate my reservations about the regime of professionalization that is currently gripping many graduate programs, as chronicled in a recent column by Leonard Cassuto.
The film stars Julie Walters as Rita, a working-class hairdresser hungry for a university education, and Michael Caine as Frank, an embittered ex-poet who, aided by a powerful cocktail of snark, self-loathing, and Scotch, has settled apathetically into a role as a professor of literature.
Rita and Frank — brought together by Britain’s innovative, adult-education Open University — are, at first, an unlikely duo. While the hairdresser is self-confident and effusive, the professor is snide and reserved. Nevertheless, the two quickly take a shine to each other. Frank admires Rita’s earnestness, her enthusiasm, her originality of thought — so unlike the polished bores in his courses, who rattle off predictable assessments of William Blake. And Rita likes the fact that Frank sees potential in her. Shortly after their first encounter, then, Frank agrees to serve as Rita’s tutor as she pursues a bachelor’s in English — and with it, the promise of self-discovery.
What follows is an expert portrayal of the ways in which education both expands and narrows the mind. As Rita eagerly digests her readings, Frank grows increasingly uncomfortable with the process. Rita, he sees, has become a broadminded humanist who can rattle off quotes by Chekhov and Wilde. But she also has become the kind of disciplined, predictable dullard who can pass university examinations.
Their relationship reaches its nadir when Rita — having cast off her flamboyant working-class threads in favor of a tweedier style — has the audacity to praise Frank’s poetry, which is, by his own estimation, utterly without substance and feeling. Deluded by the critical apparatus her education has provided, the educated Rita misses what the uneducated Rita would have plainly seen: that “this clever, pyrotechnical pile of self-conscious allusion,” as Frank pithily concludes, “is worthless, talentless shit.”
The scene, as anyone who has finished an intensive period of education can imagine, hit close to home. Reflecting on my years of graduation education, I wondered if I, too, had become an educated Rita: a person whose critical apparatus was as much a hindrance as a help. I would, of course, be flattering myself to pretend that, at any time in my life — either before or after graduate education — I possessed the kind of native creativity evinced by Rita early in the film.
But I am forced to conclude that whatever creativity I once possessed has been diminished by the process of formal learning. Not long ago I was speaking with a talented student of my own and was dazzled by his ability to make leaps between the contents of his courses and his own varied reading. For him, Alexander the Great and Alexandre Dumas, econometrics and everyday life, existed in the same plane. They spoke to each other and informed each other. I was wowed by the excitement and movement of his thought. But I was also dismayed — because I, too, used to think like that, and it hurt to reflect that I could do so no more.
Some of this intellectual narrowing is, of course, simply endemic to the academic enterprise. Disciplines, as Michel Foucault and others have pointed out, are just that: not merely areas of inquiry but coercive modes of thinking and structuring how their adherents approach the world. They offer critical insights, yes, but they also include extensive blind spots.
The problems of disciplinarity, however, have only been exacerbated by the drive toward professionalization — that ever-intensifying effort to mold the motley ranks of wide-eyed, first-year M.A. students into the uniform image of purposeful, predictable, career-oriented Ph.D. candidates, largely in the hope that they will be attractive to academic hiring committees even in a dismal tenure-track market.
Now, some degree of professionalization has been welcome. When I arrived in graduate school, my colleagues were free-spirited and creative, yes, but the culture of the program was hard-partying and unfocused. Students meandered through the dissertation process. There was little emphasis on meeting one’s personal or professional goals in a timely fashion. And preparation for the hard realities of postgraduate employment, either within or without academe, hovered between lax and nonexistent.
In all of those areas, the regime of professionalization has wrought impressive and positive changes. It has lifted the level of discourse in the department; bred a more rigorous work ethic among students; and left graduates better equipped for jobs in academe, alt-ac, post-ac, and beyond.
Throughout my time in graduate school, however, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. An age of neckties and formal footwear has descended upon my former program. Departmental administrators actively discourage extracurricular intellectual exploration, constructive failure, and the kind of leisure activities that are widely associated with creativity.
Meanwhile, the whole program now seems to be characterized by an unhealthy respect for both administrative and disciplinary authority. Gone, it seems, is a willingness to wander and fail or a sense of humor about the smallness of even the biggest scholars.
Nor is my former program alone. In humanities graduate programs throughout the country, the ideal of the creative professor is being replaced by the productivity-minded professional. The artist is being supplanted by the engineer, the risk-taker by the risk-averse.
In making that substitution, humanities departments have lost sight of the trust with which they are invested: to serve, along with a large community of artists and intellectuals, as the repository of society’s imagination. Fulfilling that trust means taking risks. Not just the risks that we take by entering a profession in which the likelihood of academic employment is extraordinarily low, but those that come with thinking and acting in ways that may prove “useless” and even “stupid.”
To lay all of these charges solely at the door of professionalization-obsessed administrators would, of course, be unfair. Whatever their excesses, they’re responding to pressures from above or from outside the institution, as well as to the structural features of a grim academic job market. And while professionalization is unlikely to do much about programs’ academic placement rate — given that nearly all graduate programs are embracing the tenets of professionalization at roughly the same rate — they may, at least, help make graduates more marketable outside academe. Indeed, the academic employment crisis might become far more bearable if humanities Ph.D.s were seen by the world at large as desirable employees rather than dreamers and flakes.
Still, we should consider the cost at which professionalization has come. Are we sacrificing creativity for corporate-driven conformity, and mistaking output for art? Too many graduate programs, I fear, are doing just that — confusing the appearance of professionalism for the substance of intellect.
Instead, programs should strive for a healthier balance, encouraging students to acquire the poise, discipline, and accomplishments that will help them land on their feet after graduation, while allowing them to retain some of the dreamier qualities that led them to the intellectual life in the first place.
In practical terms, that means not merely tolerating but encouraging activities that run afoul of the efficient, no-nonsense ethos of professionalization. It means making space for friendship and daydreams, activism and travel, side projects and music, fiction and dancing, and perhaps even that bugbear of productivity, video games — all of the things that promise to preserve our humanity as humanists and incubate insight during our hours away from the grind.
