Around the time I started my Ph.D., I became obsessed with competitive reality television. Between taking notes on Coleridge and Althusser, I spent countless hours immersed in shows like Project Runway. I watched contestants undergo repeated cycles of self-doubt, panic, and rejection — all in the pursuit of a prestigious, creative vocation. My boyfriend at the time often watched the show over my shoulder and he noticed the parallels to grad school before I did. “If there were a Project Literary Criticism,” he’d ask, “what kind of contestant would you be?”
Over the years we fleshed out the pitch for this hideously unfilmable show. Contestants would be given, for example, a poem, a theoretical lens drawn from a bag, and one hour to write a conference paper. But although the challenges evolved, one thing remained the same across every imagined iteration of the show: We both agreed that I would be the type of reality-show villain who brags, “I’m not here to make friends.” Under the weight of a crushing academic job market, naked ruthlessness seemed like the best way to survive.
In a recent essay for Jacobin, Meagan Day explores the crippling psychological effects of neoliberal meritocracy. Drawing on a study by Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill, she explains that millennials suffer from an epidemic of perfectionism. Faced with a fickle labor market that grants financial stability only to the already wealthy, the exceptionally lucky, and the radically perfect, my generation fears that a poor LSAT score or a social-media slip-up will ruin them.
Under the weight of a crushing academic job market, naked ruthlessness seemed like the best way to survive.
Curran and Hill describe this phenomenon as “socially prescribed perfectionism.” Although we are accustomed to thinking of perfectionism as something we irrationally impose on ourselves, “socially prescribed perfectionism” refers to the impossibly stringent demands imposed by our peers and employers. Millennials are not wrong to think that perfection is now required of them, but the rationality of that belief does nothing to mitigate its disastrous psychological effects.
Looking back, my Ph.D. program was rife with “socially prescribed perfectionism.” From the start of graduate school, we knew that only a few of us (if that) would one day attain a tenure-track position. So it was hard not to take every small success and every minor error as an indicator of our future success or failure. Accordingly, the few close friendships I had in my first and second year were largely built around the ritual of transmuting our own anxieties into criticism of others. When another student had the courage to share ideas that were still being worked through, my friends and I would gather later and privately zero in on their mistakes.
Bent as I was on proving my worth, I had a couple of early successes (a spot on a committee, for instance). These seemed all-important, but the high of success did not last long before hostility caught up to me. Once, a fellow student called me into one of the windowless graduate-student offices we called “dissertation closets.” The student told me other students were upset that I had been chosen for a committee — that the choice did not seem fair. When the other student left, I stayed behind to cry in the dark office. I had finally received a shred of positive affirmation, and it cost me the esteem of my peers. I steeled myself with a mantra that had become familiar to me by then: “I’m not here to make friends anyway.”
In my third year of graduate school, I signed up to workshop a piece of writing in front of the entire departmental student body. In the days leading up to the presentation, I realized that my work would likely be subjected to the kind of intense judgment I had long been passing on others. Would my peers gather with their cliques later to thrash my research? Suddenly, I found myself hoping that my fellow students would be generous, understanding, and supportive. But I also knew that I had done as much as anyone to create a climate where it was reasonable to expect the opposite.
The night before my presentation was my dark night of the soul. I vowed to stop whispering and criticizing, to (genuinely!) view shortcomings as opportunities for improvement, to believe that everyone was, in their own way, doing work that was brilliant and interesting and good enough. Of course, I didn’t battle back my psychological demons overnight. But I set a goal to change, and, several years later, I have almost achieved it.
Day explains how “socially prescribed perfectionism” works: A culture of competitiveness leads to a “group climate of hostility, suspicion, and dismissiveness.” We increasingly hold our peers to impossible standards, and this, in turn, generates feelings of alienation and inadequacy. I found that as I began treating others more gently, I also had more confidence in my own abilities. I began reading the work of others in a spirit of generosity, and I opened myself up to collaboration and critique. I didn’t become a full-fledged Miss Congeniality, but at least I was no longer the villain of my imagined reality show.
My effort to cultivate stronger friendships in graduate school also radicalized my view of the job market. Previously, when faced with its inequities, I simply convinced myself that I would be the one to conquer it (like one of the great reality show anti-heroines, the drag phenom Alaska, I told myself that “the best revenge is just to do better”). Now I see a process that systematically engenders self-doubt in friends and peers who are infinitely deserving. For all the political theory I read in grad school, it was only friendship that made the concept of solidarity feel real.
With job postings in the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association dropping once again, friendship seems like a more reliable outcome of a humanities Ph.D. than a career in the professoriate. On some level, graduate students might as well elevate their cultivation of meaningful friendships over their cultivation of an intellectual persona. We will also need friendship if we hope to challenge the structural conditions that make the academy so unforgiving. In the face of an economic system that atomizes us and an academic job market that pits us directly against one another, friendship is a powerful ethical and political practice. In short: Let’s be here to make friends.
Katie Fitzpatrick is a visiting assistant professor of English at Muhlenberg College.
