You’re holding office hours, waiting for students to come in and ask questions about the midterm or complain about their grades, when a student in an earlier class walks in. When you had her in class a few semesters ago, she was great: bright, inquisitive, alive to the material, and full of interesting things to say. And now she is coming to you for advice about going to graduate school. What do you say?
Should I Go to Grad School? 41 Answers
to an Impossible Question
Edited by Jessica Loudis, Bosko Blagojevic, John Arthur Peetz, and Allison Rodman (Bloomsbury USA)
I always feel conflicted. On the one hand, I’m proud of students like this. Proud of their desire and intellectual ambition, and proud of myself and my colleagues, that we somehow did our jobs and kindled something that made reading, writing, and learning seem to them like an appealing way to spend a life. On the other hand, I inevitably feel a creeping apprehension. Should I open the lid on the disastrous state of the profession and explain the stunted opportunities, the bizarre politics, the years of infantilizing apprenticeship, the real possibility of failure and regret? Or should I preserve them in their innocence and enthusiasm? I lean toward the latter option; our job as educators is to open possibilities, not close them. But it isn’t easy; sins of omission are still sins.
Fortunately, there’s now an easy solution to this dilemma. You can just give them a book, thanks to a sprightly new collection of essays, Should I Go to Grad School? It assays a range of opinions on the title question, from those who went to graduate school, those who dropped out, and those who avoided it altogether. And with 41 essays the variety of opinions and approaches on view is vast enough to be a bit dizzying.
David Velasco holds a séance with Avital Ronell. David Levine exorcises his father’s ghost. Terry Castle grouses about the recruitment process. Simon Critchley wonders why we’re all so conformist and servile. John Quijada invents a language and travels through the looking glass at an academic life unlived. Duncan Watts invents a new field of study before getting his Ph.D. Ron Rosenbaum unburies a hatchet from the Shakespeare wars. Eben Klemm creates new cocktail aesthetics. Ben Nugent lives the life of a 19th-century Russian landowner while his classmates get gout. Dale Stephens, barely over 20, reports from the unschooled, college-avoiding, libertarian future.
Many essays begin with an engaging personal anecdote, only to veer abruptly into hectoring advice. The advice is always the same: Don’t go into debt to get a humanities degree. Bourdieu is invoked repeatedly. Some name-drop. Some kvetch. Some kvell. Stephen Burt dispenses wisdom, choose-your-own-adventure-style. Namwali Serpell rewrites Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. James Franco makes not trying look easy. Rhonda Lieberman warns that academe eats its young. Nikil Saval says to take the money and run.
Grad school involves a brush against something big and exciting and strange, whether a quality of inquiry, a way of being political, or the seduction of an idea.
You learn things. New York has opportunities you can’t get anywhere else. The art world is different—really different. Connections matter, as does having a plan. A lot of the advice is negative, some of it is pragmatic, and a small percentage is ebullient. After a while, the whole thing starts to feel like one of those Scared Straight seminars where ex-cons show off their tattoos and talk about how rough prison is, except that in this case no one can agree what prison is for and some of them want to tell you how to succeed at crime.
The two answers to the question of what graduate school accomplishes that crop up most often have to do with socialization and gaining a language. Both seem to signal that professionalization in the academy goes beyond the acquisition of specific skills—and maybe that’s not a bad thing. Peter Coviello is especially forceful on this: “Contrary to what I was told, I was struck to find that these difficult conceptual languages did not cancel my delighted captivation by professionalizing it … idiolect, I came to know, is not the opposite of ardor.”
Still, this prospect strikes me as fairly bleak. There must be a point outside the acquisition of jargon, and I think there is. It is an ineffable something—an excess—and it constitutes the secret scandal of humanities grad school. Reading Should I Go to Grad School? I was surprised at how reticent many of the authors who did go to grad school are about why they went, especially given how open they are about everything else. People go on a whim, or to get a promotion. Again and again the decision is invoked in terms of escape: as a way out of a dismal job, a blocked career, a stifling hometown. It’s the last resort for the person who is “generally artistic and literary,” but not a writer or an artist.
But this is only part of the story. In my experience people go to grad school for all of those reasons (every single one of the above applies to me), but there is something else. Usually it’s something that happened earlier in their lives and that involved a brush against something big and exciting and strange, whether it was a kind of art, a quality of inquiry, a way of being political, or the seduction of an idea. Often it’s a vision of community: a momentary utopia that exists for a couple of weeks in a studio or seminar room before flying away on the breeze. It’s a high and, however fleeting, people are willing to spend their whole lives chasing it.
I’m tempted to detail my own brushes with what Dave Hickey called “a totally nonredemptive but vaguely exciting experience,” but instead I’ll borrow someone else’s. A 1937 Edmund Wilson essay called “Mr. More and the Mithraic Bull” captures that high exactly. It opens on a Saturday, in a parlor, at an informal seminar convened by Christian Gauss, a Princeton dean, on the topic of the ancient religion of Mithraism. The conversation that unfolds drifts from the Council of Chalcedon to Christian humanism to James Joyce and Proust. Gauss defends Baudelaire; his interlocutor, Paul More, critiques T.S. Eliot. Everyone is extremely learned and committed to their particular aesthetic values.
Many years later More dies, and Wilson remembers the two men: Gauss, with his subtle mind and range of imaginative sympathy, and More, “with his lifelong consecration to that great world of culture and thought which he had made so more real to others but which he could never quite rejoin himself.” Wilson goes back in memory to that day when for a couple of hours it seems as if something very big was about to be settled in that little room. He ends in an art museum with Gauss, standing on tiptoe to get a glimpse of a mythological bull, and recalls a feeling of “amazement and exaltation.” Then he rushes off to the university library to write a letter to The New York Times about their sneering dismissal of Joyce.
Have you ever been overwhelmed by something and then immediately felt the need to have an argument? If so, you might be headed to grad school. But should you? You probably already know. Just make sure to take something with you. And look before you leap.
