Thesis Hatement

slate ^ | 4/5/2013 | y Rebecca Schuman

[Borges]

Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor.

Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired? Such is the enviable life of the tenured college literature professor, and all you have to do to get it is earn a Ph.D. So perhaps you, literature lover, are considering pursuing this path.

Well, what if I told you that by “five hours” I mean “80 hours,” and by “summers off” I mean “two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning”? What if you’ll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you’ll mostly be using made-up words like “deterritorialization” and “Othering”—because, as Ron Rosenbaum pointed out recently, the “dusty seminar rooms” of academia have the chief aim of theorizing every great book to death? And I can’t even tell you what kind of ass you have to kiss these days to get tenure—largely because, like most professors, I’m not on the tenure track, so I don’t know.

[KosmicKitty]

And if you want tenure, you have to publish at lest one paper per year. All while you are advising students, teaching classes, and doing the research for said paper.

And grants - you better be good at bringing in that grant money - at least in my discipline.

KK <— who is writing her first grant, ugh!

[Borges]

You’re posting on a message board. If you don’t want to back up your statements I don’t know what to tell you.

[TheOldLady]

Click a Fist!!       Thank you, Mr. Laz A. Mataz

Don’t fight with the little fellow!
He would win, you know…

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[miss marmelstein]

Can you please back up one of your statements on another thread that Roger Ebert was...um...to paraphrase: “A humanistic Renaissance man”?! I almost lost my breakfast.

[BenLurkin]

I'm glad I bailed early on my goal of securing a tenured position as a professor of Anthropology.

That's right. I'm not a quitter, I'm not a loser. I'm....I'm ...an early bailer. Yeah that's it. Early bailer.

[onedoug]

I sometimes like to imagine myself a physicist, ensconced away in academia, surfacing just long enough now and then to publish my latest experimental results.

Then I remember that in conference or at lectures, groups of physicists don’t often smell as well as they should.

I know. I’m an earth scientist studying the means of tectonics. We all live on these rock structures....

[robowombat]

This is what the great Gilbert Highet spent decades doing a Columbia. He was one of the intellectual casualties of the 1968 Columbia U putsch. His teaching and research files representing decades of work were trashed.

[Fiji Hill]

Sadly, there was a time when being a professor of English literature meant hours of teaching in the classroom, explaining very difficult poetry and prose to immature students. One of my professors is still one of my heroes. She taught me all about the English Romantic poets and their symbolisms and meanings.

I had a professor like that for world literature and another for German literature, Fortunately, this was before literature professors discovered Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, deconstructionism, "critical race theory," etc.

[pabianice]

"...But with academia, you don’t need to put yourself through five to 10 years of the hardest work you will ever do, followed by four years (and counting) of rejection and dejection, simply to conclude that the experience was ill-advised. When it comes to graduate school, you should just chuck the ladder before you try to climb it. You’ve only got to run the other way."

"Hardest work you'll ever do." LOL! This guy hasn't a clue. If reading books is the hardest work you'll ever do, you have no right expecting a job anywhere. Are Lit PhD's losers or are losers drawn to Lit careers?

[Borges]

They don’t just read. Do you think scholarship is for losers?

[Revolting cat!]

Would you or anyone know about her if she weren’t the color of brown?

[Fiji Hill]

I took a course in modern German literature when I was a sophomore. Some of the stuff was off-the-wall, such as The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat... by Peter Weiss (1968), but it also included works by critically acclaimed writers such as Franz Kafka, Friedrich Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Max Frisch and Thomas Mann.

[Borges]

Who’s to say. She has certainly benefited from it combined with her subject matter. I don’t think she’s nearly as good as her reputation but still quite good at her best (in the 1970s).

[Borges]

But all the same, not nearly as good as Zora Neale Hurston who was left out of serious study for a long time mainly because of her conservative politics.

[Fiji Hill]

This is what the great Gilbert Highet spent decades doing a Columbia. He was one of the intellectual casualties of the 1968 Columbia U putsch. His teaching and research files representing decades of work were trashed.

Gilbert Highet's book The Art of Teaching (New York: Knopf, 1950) is one of my favorite books. I was unaware that he was a victim of that barbarian mob.

[Revolting cat!]

Some people seem to have a Ph.D in Philistinism.

[Borges]

Nabokov referred to a Ph.D as Department of Philistines.

[blueunicorn6]

“Scholarship isn’t a real job?”

I’m curious. Please explain how it is “a real job”.

[Borges]

Please explain how it isn’t. Thomas Sowell doesn’t have a job? Someone who provides new research/insight into a given subject matter via long hours spent scouring and researching hundreds of sources isn’t working?

[Revolting cat!]

As I said, Ph.D in Philistinism.