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Grad School in the Humanities: The Smart Ones Left
Note: In general contours, this is a true account, but every name that could be changed has been to protect myself from the vindictive (with the exception of a street name).
Dave was on balance both better dressed and more serious in his demeanor than most of the PhD Students in the Department for German and Related Languages at Gigantic Midwestern Research I University. He usually wore khakis and button down Oxford pinpoints, looking quite professional, where most of the rest of us were in the rotation of jeans t-shirts that were either politically antagonistic (“Bush/Halliburton” or slightly later “End Mad Cowboy Disease”) or pop-culture derivatives (college-themed variations of Calvin and Hobbes or other already aging 1990’s pop culture references). I was the polo shirt guy, which put me closer to Dave on the sartorial scale than to the rest of our cohort. What really set him apart, though, was something he said one night after one of our monthly departmental guest lectures. The lecturer had a been a foreign language pedagogy expert from a well-known and then well-respected east-coast university who had achieved some notice in the AATG and MLA circles by reversing, almost single-handedly, the constant decline of enrollments in German that the field had seen since the end of the Cold War at her institution. German pop culture tie-ins! Student writing and creative arts portfolios in German! Internet chatrooms with StudentInnen in Karlsruhe! Our faculty and some of the older grad students, those a couple of years ahead of us, had eaten her Spiel up like fresh Apfeltaschen. Not Dave.
“Don’t let her slap rose-colored glasses on your face,” he said to me, Thilo, Katja and Wolf as we walked out the door. “The field is dying and she knows it. She achieved what she’s achieved temporarily. There’s no demand because we’ve killed the value in learning literature with theory and politics…”
“Aber genau das, genau die politische Dimension ist es, was Literatur des Studierens wert macht!”, Katja’s protest began, and would have continued for at least a half-eternity with plenty of references to “heteronormativity”, “institutional racism” and “patriarchy” and other such then-already-hackneyed Leftist bromides if Dave hadn’t interrupted. “Na, wirklich? Do you remember what the selling point for Swedish was here two years ago, when we saw that jump in enrollments? ‘Easier than Spanish’. That’s what the TAs put on the posters in big blue and gold letters on glossy paper. And pictures of the Swedish Chef and Ace of Base. It lasted precisely four semesters, one cycle of the foreign language requirement, and it was not repeated. We’re marketing to idiots, just like she is, only our idiots have figured out that they might actually need to speak Spanish when they graduate. We’ll continue to get our little trickle of culturally interested students who still think Nietzsche and Wagner are cool in a transgressive kind of way, but in five years, I doubt this department will be half the size it is now. The only reason we still even have a department is the foreign language requirement and if it goes, and it will, so do our jobs.”
There were a few murmurs of protest against this point from me (“German is still an economic powerhouse, making the language important in the business world”) and from Katja (“Aber, aber!! Lola Rennt! Auf weiter solche Erfolge in der Kultur dürfen wir hoffen!”, but after a few minutes silence took over until someone started a conversation about how much we hated the post-Mulder X-Files and we reached the Irish bar on Green Street two blocks from campus. Dave’s grim prognosis kept gnawing at me, though, and I eventually found an opportunity to ask him flat out: “Na, Klugscheißer, what are you still doing in this department, if you really think that the profession is doomed?”
He put down his beer, turned to meet my gaze and said, “Who said I’m staying? I’m transferring to Business School next year, starting an MBA. You see, Hart,” and he lowered his voice so that he and I could hear, but no one else, “you had it right, what you said back there. German plus commerce equals job security, equals not starving, not working as a carpet installer in the summers like Dr. Urbach does. But Germanic Studies, modern or medieval?! It’s a one-way ticket to adjunctdom for the rest of your professional life. Wise up. Get out. I am.”
I thought about his advice for days afterward, and came to the conclusion that he was wrong. Looking at the number of posting for positions fitting my profile on the MLA German jobs list, and those that fit the profiles of some of my friends in Department, I thought, “He’s being too pessimistic. There’s life in the field, yet. Demographics, geopolitics and the mind-numbing dullness of the theoryheads haven’t quite killed it yet.” I can stick it out and if I publish…
Or something reassuringly self-deceptive like that. I did complete the program, get my doctorate and even get visiting assistant professorships at respectable universities in Indiana, Illinois and Texas, and kept telling myself, “It will work!” Until it didn’t. The day came when I was sitting in my office in Austin, reflecting on the fact that the person who had had the office before me had quit, and was now working as an administrator somewhere else, after having poured ten years of her life into a position that never paid more than a low-end professional wage and never offered her security. And she was far, far from unique. Of the 60+ doctoral candidates I had known, friends and acquaintances alike, I knew at that time that only two had found those tenure-track positions we had all been so sure we would get. The rest had followed some variation of David’s strategy and had completed the degree only after combining it with some other field like medicine, engineering or banking. One was now working as a technical translator for Siemens, another was working for Chase Bank, yet another for a real estate company in Germany, and one had become an M.D., etc. The supply of us (PhDs in languages, literature and related fields) far outstripped the demand for our services. The profession was dying, even though there was the occasional success story that got touted in our professional literature, there were too few of them. I realized, years later than I should have, that it was too much effort for too little gain. There were easier ways to make a living- and a better living at that- with languages. And on top of that, Vrouwe and I had come too far to leave after just a couple of years. We would make our stand in Texas.
By that point in my career, I had already done the occasional translation and some freelance writing to supplement our income, so the transition to starting my own agency was easy enough. The first year out I did use a lead-finder but after establishing a solid group of clients, it became superfluous. Since then I have made a better living and been freed from the often tense, sometimes (even then) hostile environment of an increasingly politicized language studies department and the only regret I have in the decision is not having made it earlier. Dave was right and the smart ones left.
Published in Education
I’m glad things worked out for you. I support the Liberal Arts, but they are a luxury and not for everyone. The strange environment in the Academy is unique. They sell degrees, even if there is no market for them. You found your market! But the cushy chair has eluded you. I made a similar decision years ago. I was accepted into a PhD English Lit. program at U. Chicago. Seeing the talented associate professors struggle with heavy workloads, pressure to publish and tenure more dependent on death or retirement than talent, I tossed Chicago for an MBA.
When I was auditing the Early English Lit course last year, the prof made a point of playing up how students that took humanities courses and majored in, say, English Lit would be well prepared for life after college. Why, one the department’s graduates parlayed his English degree into a well-paying and fulfilling job!
I didn’t push back on this, but it kinda smacked of whistling past the graveyard. Now I love English, and I feel the humanities and general are important. A liberal arts education has its place, but it’s been seriously overplayed, and with the leftist domination of the humanities, it’s really harmed students at the expense of their tenure.
I’m in a dying humanities field too (dying because of foolish, short-sighted trends in the field that have made political, diplomatic, and military history nearly extinct). I used language training as my backup for post-grad school. I figured if I learned to speak, read and write Chinese on the way to my degree, I’d pretty much always be employable – and I was actually two steps into the application process for open source intelligence analysis for the CIA when I landed a tenure-track job, almost by chance.
The smart ones left or had a very workable backup plan that did not involve adjuncting or stringing together visiting posts forever; in my experience, most of the ones who stayed were more lucky than anything else.
Katja sounds like a piece of work. Or, Katja sounds normal. Or, Katja is, at least in this academic context, both.
It may be smart to leave such a field but I don’t think it’s dumb to stay. It’s only dumb if expectations are unreasonable. Rather than try to appeal to popular culture, or in some way win a popularity contest – efforts which plainly don’t work, not for very long anyway – the more abstruse disciplines may as well accept that they are just not for everybody. Perhaps they should pointedly advertise that. The biggest and best reason for you to study them is because you want to.
Sad, but true.
When taught correctly, the humanities can be an incredible way to pass down our cultural heritage and teach students how to think and communicate well both verbally and in writing. Such skills actually have real-world applications.
When the humanities morphs into “this is how English literature proves how racist, sexist, and imperialist we are,” “this is how philosophy proves how racist, sexist, and imperialist we are,” and “the study of history proves how racist, sexist, and imperialist we are” it loses its market value, and frankly every other objective value you can think of.
At one point I was thinking of pursuing a PhD in Japanese History. Thank gawd a trusted professor pointed out just how tight the job market would be. Now if only I’d followed her advice before enrolling in law school…
As my husband always says, Honestly, we professors only need to produce one PhD graduate, our replacement. All the rest are surplus as far as the education establishment is concerned.
We haven’t replaced the last two professors who retired in our department. I think it’s more like “every three professors need produce only two history Ph.D.s” – and shrinking.
To Martel’s, Doug Kimball’s, and Belt’s points about the value of liberal education, I’d like to repeat a comment from a post I made on the subject.
Graduate-level research in the Humanities is not for everybody and, as Hartmann points out, supply far exceeds demand. But knowledge of history, literature, the arts, etc–what it means to be human–is for everyone. Where and how should we acquire that knowledge?
Understood as acquiring the fundamental ability of knowing how to think and reason well, shouldn’t liberal education be available to as broad a population as possible? As for young people, if we accept that college is largely about preparing individuals for work, can their broader intellectual training, along with a serious introduction to the humanities, happen at the same time?
Yes, and it used to be that it was done by high school at least as much as is done with a bachelor’s today. Too many educators and not enough teachers.