Posted on 04/05/2013 6:57:46 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
It probably a lot easier than you think- Just tell them everythign you read is about the evils of captitalism and you’re a shoe-in
They like “fellow travelers”
While studying for my Masters degree in technical communication (English), our graduate professors constantly harped about their jobs. They consistently told us that if we wanted to pursue a Ph.D. that we should consider the unglamorous life of a college professor where summers are unpaid, tenure is difficult to get, and asskissing is the only way to get ahead.
I had no desire to go any further in my education. Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy in the respective discipline. Doctor, in this sense, means “teacher,” and I had no desire teaching mushbrained 20-somethings how unfair the real world really is.
Spend some time in a real job, and then come back to us, Chickie. Start with a fish cannery or a dairy farm.
Scholarship isn’t a real job?
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.
Today, kids are taught Toni Morrison novels. It’s why I refuse to go back and get a Masters degree.
During my years in the scribbling profession, I considered going for the Masters program in Journalism but left the industry instead.
Glad I did.
Morrison’s 1970s novels are quite good.
Not to mention the huge chunks of time it takes to read, correct, and grade written work.
If you gotta teach, much better to choose a discipline that lends itself to multiple choice.
So you’d rather Morrison’s novels be taught at college level rather than Lord Byron or Wordsworth? You can read Morrison on summer vacation in high school. (If those kids can still read, which I doubt.)
They wouldn’t be taught in the same class anyway. Morrison is Modern American Lit. and so forth.
It's actually "shoo-in," as "all I had to do was say shoo and the cows walked right into the barn."
You’d be surprised. I have a BA, a graduate certificate in Professional Writing, and an MA in English, and I found most of my work was graded less on content and more on meeting the guidelines required by the professor or committee. They really just parse the works for keywords or phrases that meet their criteria and go from there.
I spent years editing student papers, and I could go through a 5,000 word essay in less than 10 minutes if I knew what elements were being graded by the rubric. I often didn’t care about the subject matter, just that the criteria were met.
Yup. The liberal arts are being systematically destroyed. Don’t ask me why but I was at the Yale Club in NYC two nights ago and forced to listen to the most asinine, politically-correct drivel from the mouth of a senior girl-Yalie. Her mind was complete mush - but her self-esteem and vanity?! Perfectly in place.
My point is that she shouldn’t be taught at all at college level.
Should modern Lit be taught at all? It’s obviously difficult to determine what’s worthwhile without the benefit of historical hindsight. What sort of waiting period should there be? 50 years? I’ve heard 100 once and find it amusing that T.S. Eliot would just be eligible.
The only ‘real’ jobs primarily involve physical labor?
Of course, I did it for ego, rather than money.
And it's in metallurgical engineering rather than the humanities.
And I'm not on tenure track, or even employed in any capacity by a university.
But I never wanted to be, the PhD has paid off for me financially anyway. And it was a HUGE boost to the ego. Plus it got me through my middle-age crisis without resorting to women twenty years younger, thus no doubt keeping my marriage intact. So I am quite satisfied.
I still had to put up with a lot of BS from my professors, but at least they didn't make me study any.
Can you please go back to weeping over the death of Roger Ebert and leave me alone?
The least useful of all criteria is that of the race/gender of the author, followed closely by politically correct views.
Unfortunately, those are the two most important criteria presently used to determine "important" modern writers.
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