meanderings

[ursula]

For an aspiring academic I tend to be rather lukewarm to my friends' grad school ambitions; that's partly because I spend a lot of time reading articles like this one, but the greater influence is probably my mother, who left Johns Hopkins a good chunk of her way toward a Ph.D. in intellectual history (seventeenth-century religion), having realized that, though she was good at it, she didn't care quite enough.

She called me today, and reminisced: "When I got to Hopkins there were ten comparative-literature students to every intellectual history student, and I was in an odd position. Most people were like you: they'd gone through the American system and were jumping straight from M.A. to Ph.D. I was ahead of them, having done a three-year European M.Phil.; but I didn't know how to be an elitist American, only an elitist European intellectual. And this was a department which Derrida had just left, and they had learned all their terms from him. It was like that game-- what do you call it, Stratego? The one where you're trying to take over the world, but the pieces are all hidden. Everyone knew the values of all the counters-- they could tell you that three of these meant one of that-- but they'd forgotten what the words meant. And I'd blunder in and ask, and they wouldn't be able to tell me. Obviously they'd all thought very hard about these things, eight or ten years ago, and worked out the values of all the counters, but they'd forgotten. You could see it was embarrassing."

My mother also informed me that my sister's transfer application to Lewis & Clark has succeeded, which is exciting. I'm still hoping she'll go to Eugene Lang, though, since given Lang's influence on Swarthmore, it would be a Cosmic Expression of Sisterhood. (My sister and I look very different and sound like the same person on the phone. This is probably symbolic; but then one can only have a non-metaphorically-charged conversation in our family by talking to my father about machinery, as you may have observed from the above transcript.)

And finally, my grandmother (in whose honor I use the White Queen-Sheep icon) is taking Zoloft, which is bringing her closer to the real world, and has been nominated for what my mother calls "little old lady of the year" for the Portland Rose Festival. My grandmother will be very polite about it all, and secretly rather sarcastic.

***

In non-familial news, I have a new pair of boots. I bought them at REI, which is like a glossy-magazine hyper-Seattle taken solid form, and makes me want to resurrect the Johnny Wu story and write more imitation Gibson.

Comments

[sildra.livejournal.com]

My grandmother will be very polite about it all, and secretly rather sarcastic.

Wow, that sounds just like my grandmother.

[ursula]

I suspect our grandmothers aren't all that alike really-- mine is vague as an immediate self-protection mechanism-- but then polite sarcasm may have been the order of their day . . .

[reasie.livejournal.com]

I am completely enamored of your mother's observations about her American Grad School experience.

It's funny- how different you are in words than in person, Ursula. I've learned a lot more about you from livejournal than I did in our brief acquaintance. Just... thought I'd mention that.

Hurrah for the intellectual elite!

[ursula]

Eep, yeah, uh, still working on that outgoing thing . . . But it's been good getting to know you, too :)

[rebeccapaul.livejournal.com]

There's an interesting rebuttal to this written by someone who is both a Swat alum and another RA at the Fed:
http://www.optimizationprime.com/archives/000063.html

Of course, I have a very different view of grad school from people in the humanities, since science and social science programs sometimes pay much more. But I do agree that you have to be pretty interested in what you're doing to make it through, even if you are making enough money to live on while you do it.

[ursula]

I think the rebuttal misses the point of the article: the problem isn't just that humanities Ph.D.s don't make enough money, it's that they have a very difficult time finding jobs doing what they've supposedly been trained to do, that is, be full-time humanities professors. Someone who has taken several different adjunct positions in order to make ends meet may not have the energy or the resources to do the research that he presumably loves & has made sacrifices for, and won't have the freedom that tenure supposedly provides to take risks in his writing *or* his teaching. In other words, being interested in what you're doing isn't necessarily enough to let you do it.

[jakemainstreet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this dilemma has been on my mind a lot recently. I am certain that my interest in religion, intellectual history, and history in general is strong enough for me to keep studying. In fact it's hard to imagine a life without studying those things. What I'm not so certain about is that I could survive the politics and the pressures of higher ed. Once I got that cushy teaching job, I'd be fine; I think I would be good at teaching. But I don't want getting there to turn me bitter and cynical. That would be like tearing out my heart, my Swarthmore experience has been so great.

Where did your mom get her M.Phil, and in what?

It's funny, I was talking yesterday with some of the Religion professors about setting up a small masters program at Swarthmore, sort of as an extension of the Honors program, where an Honors student could stay on an extra year or so and get a graduate degree (it would ideally only be available to Swat undergrads). The idea would be that since (in the opinion of these Religion profs) the seminar experience here (at least in Religion) is actually better than in most graduate programs, students may as well get the most from it. We decided it would have to be an M.Phil that was awarded, not just a plain M.A., to give it that extra bit of cachet.

It probably wouldn't work for most departments here; seminars are already too crowded and professors too busy. But in my dreams, perhaps...

[loveschak.livejournal.com]

Masters students used to be quite a bit more common at Swat than they are now. I don't know whether you're one of the people who's worked at Alumni Records, but if you go back 40-50 years, you start seeing a number of M.A.'s in the files there. Trivia point: Old Man Clothier got both an honorary masters and doctorate from Swat, the only person to do such a thing.

[rebeccapaul.livejournal.com]

One of the things many people told me in my grad school search was to ask about placements -- where graduates went afterward. (I admit, no one suggested that I find out if they were adjuncts...) Maybe that isn't common, but it seems like a good idea -- that way, humanities Ph.D.'s (or anyone else) know what they're in for.

[ursula]

From the Warburg Institute at the University of London; her dissertation was on the Book of Job in seventeenth-century sermons.

[ursula]

A prudent suggestion-- but I'd guess the choice is obvious for most people anyway, due to funding, reputation, multiple-body problems, etc.

[aelfgyfu.livejournal.com]

Hehe, this is so my life. The things is, some of us plan for the annoying contingency of being adjunct faculty. Maybe it is the fine arts in my background which trains me to consider *how* I can do what I love even if it is really not practical. Or possibly that I went back to college planning on pursuing a career that I already knew would be nearly impossible. I have pretty much decided that I need to get my MFA along with my Ph.D. in Art History so that I can have a better chance at teaching in a combined department or get more adjunct faculty positions... Yes, being a starving artist is a horrible fall-back career plan, I know... I would say that the key to success in these ventures is having a husband who is a software engineer. :-)

[ursula]

UW has an OK MFA program, right? ;)

Though that only matters if you're not in North Carolina next year.