Last year Abebooks.com asked its customers to vote for the most depressing books ever written, and Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy’s novel about a young man who dreams of becoming a scholar, came in third. It was judged to be more depressing than books about genocidal and nuclear holocausts (Night. by Elie Wiesel, and On the Beach, by Nevil Shute), but less depressing than The Bell Jar.
Alienation from academe might not be the saddest story ever told, but for aspiring scholars on the job market this year, it sometimes seems that way.
Graduate students in my top-ranked Ivy League department have been almost universally unsuccessful on the academic job market this year. About a dozen of us have sought tenure-track or other postdoctoral positions, but so far, only one of us has been offered a job. As far as I know, this is the worst year in our department since records have been kept, and a lost generation of us are trying to figure out what it all means.
On an individual level, what happens to each of us will probably be varying versions of “not that bad.” Perhaps only a few of us will end up as professors, but most of the rest of us will probably find other ways to make it to the middle class—eventually. Collectively, though, our grand narrative seems to be a grim mix of Jude the Obscure meets Paradise Lost. We were scholars once, and now we’re invisible stone-smashers in the shadow of the spires.
As I contemplate my impending (and I hope temporary) exile from academe after I defend my dissertation this spring, I can’t help being reminded of my youth as a bitter working-class autodidact. I spent a lot of time taking buses to destinations of higher learning (usually my local state university), where I would wander in awe, sometimes passing as a student and feeling thrilled when I got away with it and flames of shame when I was caught out. I never lied; I just let strangers assume I was college material, to console myself for the fact that no admissions committees had yet invited me in. It was a painful kind of consolation. One spring, after my second round of rejections from various colleges, I struck up a conversation about literature with a nice young man in a bookstore; when he asked me what college I went to, I couldn’t answer and had to run away.
But to quote the all-purpose wisdom of a professor in my department who was the job-market adviser: “You are not the crying child on the playground anymore. You are the adult.” It’s strange to return to outsider circumstances more than a decade later and think about more-mature ways of living that reality.
Bitterness may be motivational for adolescents, but it’s utterly unsustainable for adults. Sometimes I look around at my brave beloved comrades in obscurity and I can see them carefully choosing not to be bitter. I can see the courage in their faces, and it encourages me more than anything else. I have faith that every time we rejoice with those few who are successful on the market, every time we resist schadenfreude toward those who are not, and every time we are generous even when our own bank accounts are low, we are improving the world.
As with other lost and unrequited loves, my philosophy about love for academe is that if the love is constitutive of who you are, then to try to force yourself to stop loving is self-destructive and hopeless, and it’s transparently pathetic to complain about the sourness of the grapes you were a glutton for all those years.
I’m giving myself free rein to hate “the market,” but I will never trash talk the memory of graduate school: the way it feels to get caught up in conversation, the way students surprise and delight you, the way an adviser’s kind comments melt you like chocolate, the way your name looks in print, the way brilliant people can sum up a seminar in a sentence. In the words of Ira Gershwin and the voice of Fred Astaire, “No, they can’t take that away from me.”
My lost generation can’t really talk freely about our academic love story, which will always be one of the most important of our lives. Often we can’t talk to our advisers, because they tend to believe that “the market has always been tough, and the best people always get jobs.”
We can’t talk with our fellow students who found jobs, because they have their own deep stresses that they shouldn’t feel obliged to feel grateful for, and they can’t help us.
And we can’t talk with our friends who don’t have jobs, because we always want to tell a happy story about them, which we can’t believe for ourselves, or tell a sad story about ourselves, which we refuse to extrapolate to them. That creates these halting oblique allusions and silences, except for every so often when someone quietly comes out and says, “I just wish there was something else I wanted to do.”
The truth is, there are lots of other things that we want to do. There are certainly many beautiful forms of writing, teaching, and intellectual community in the world. But sadly, none of them are enhanced by academic exile, and exile will always make its mark on us wherever we are. Love and tact will have to get us through. I’m praying for more of both.
What to do with unfulfilled desire is one of the great religious and academic questions. What might it mean to write about literature without a ticking tenure clock? To teach for love and minimum wage? To walk around in public as a “independent scholar,” steadfastly meeting people’s eyes and maybe even giving crazy gratuitous conference papers fizzing with pointless joy?
For many of us, graduate school was about painfully learning to bear constant evaluation from professors and peers; now this evaluation (at least in the form of search committees) has moved on for the moment, but we are still here, and we love reading, writing, and teaching as much as we ever did. No one is going to stop us from doing that work, even if we’re not paid for it.
For the next few years, I’m going to try to do good work on the academic periphery without resenting the center. Although I have begun to pursue another vocational path full time, I will continue to participate in academic culture as much as I can, working on articles and on my book, teaching part time, going to conferences, and applying for any jobs and fellowships that may remain.
I’ll be a church lady of academe, rapturously discussing and living by the sermons and sacraments performed by others, contributing to the community for its own sake, and motivated by my amateur passion. I’m not claiming to speak for anyone else here (the “we” throughout is meant to indicate solidarity, not presumption). And my redemptive attempts are not meant to be prescriptive, or even convincing. Jude the Obscure is still a sad story. But I’m going to try to be happy in it.