Moot Thoughts & Musings

In short, a job.

I've been meaning to respond to "Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want" by John Guillory for some time. He lays out basically what I see as a trend in my generation of grad students (that is, the present one) towards the quest for the prize: the job. The altogether, very hard to obtain, if at all prize.

Among the determining influences on the course of professionalization in recent years has been the job market itself, which for some time now has been driving graduate students to “professionalize” very early, perhaps too early. The result is the penetration of graduate education by professional practices formerly confined to later phases of the career, the obvious examples being publication and the delivery of conference papers. This development has become so marked as to constitute a new professional domain, what I will call preprofessionalism. Graduate students are preprofessional not only because they are not yet professors, but also because their engagement in professional activity is premature, undertaken without any certainty that it will culminate in an appointment. The premise of graduate education as a course of study is undermined by the new domain of preprofessionalism, which looks more like a curious sort of on-the-job training. Students do everything that their teachers do—teach, deliver conference papers, publish—without the assurance that any of these activities will secure them a job.

He and others echo my complaint with preprofessional pressure in that it "inhibits students from developing long-term intellectual projects and thus propagates intellectual shallowness". And, at this point, the market demands this kind of preprofessional activity, leaving the grad student feeling inadequate, pressured, and stymied.

At least, those are my personal sentiments towards this phenomenon. I'm left with the feeling that I need to turn every term paper into something presentable/publishable. My research needs to be incredibly thorough, taking into account the whole orbit of research on a given topic.

A variety of responses derives from the preprofessional pressure. The first of which, I call Term Paper Angst. I find myself being overwhelmed with a simple term paper. I can't limit myself sufficiently to just write a 10-page paper. I feel like in order to write the paper, I have to become an expert on that whole area of research. No wonder I'm stymied! No wonder I have incompletes! No wonder I can only manage to get one paper out a semester!

Another response I call the Mountain of Stuff response. I'm left feeling inadequate, because one cannot become an expert in an area over one semester with one term paper. I feel like I've failed. It's really silly, I know. But usually what the term paper does is reveal a whole mountain range of stuff that bids me to scale it in order to have anything worthwhile to say...even for a 10-page term paper (N.B. thus, my term papers are rarely as few as the 10-page assignment). Even when just going through the reading assignments and their environs for a class, I look at that Mountain of Stuff and think "how can I fit it all into my head?" I have to engage with the professional world now! which means I have to know all this stuff now! This leads to irrational stresses, such as "oh no! I don't know every single one of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas!"

A third response could be the Foundering Ship response. When I came to grad school I had a pretty clear idea of an "area of specialization" to identify with--I still do, I guess--the music, history, and culture of fifteenth century, Francophone courts. Whenever you go to a conference or meet someone new, the question pops up "What's your area?" It seems silly, though, to keep trotting out this response based on the fact that I wrote my bachelor's thesis on such a topic and I am currently not engaged in any research thereunto. I'm just taking all these classes all the time (and learning a lot of valuable information!). In other words, I'm in graduate school doing what I came to grad school for. It's a little presumptuous to think that I do have an area of specialization, at least until I get to my dissertation. For me to say "15th c courts" I need to be actually participating at that professional orbit, but I'm not. It's not time to. But I give the response and go off brooding to myself "I don't HAVE an area of specialization. I'm taking classes!" Granted, some grad programs don't have extensive course work requirements, so students basically enroll in their programs in order to write their dissertation, so I guess they do have an area of specialization.

Anyway, back to Guillory's article, as he offers some insight into the bleakness of the market, providing a more tempered, contextualized perspective than merely the overproduction of PhDs. He is primarily responding to the discipline of literary studies, but points out that some scholarly endeavors become more politically "cool" and others get marginalized, which will, of course, result in the diminishing of jobs in the "uncool" realm. A discipline becomes "uncool" when it has "irrelevance to the socioeconomic conditions of our society."

(For the record, musicology is currently "uncool". You say the word "musicology" and you get blank stares--what's that? oh, what instrument do you play? :S --if you're still wondering what it is, basically defined, it is the study of music history and criticism.)

The response of the "uncool" discipline is to then try to become "cool", i.e. to try to gain social and political relevance wh. will then cause our society to value it, to invest in it, and to create more jobs in it. This "coolification" has repercussions throughout the university and inevitably will effect grad students. Guillory states, "Because graduate students suffer most from the consequences of the social marginality of the literary profession, their practice is subject to the greatest pressure to become both hyperprofessionalized and hyperpoliticized."

Guillory proceeds to give some context on the market crisis, couching it a basic historical understanding of the global unemployment crisis. He also talks about what is considered as measurable productivity in the academic market, number of articles published (are they then worthwhile or just numbers to chalk up to productivity?)? number of students taught? Concluding, he says, "What I call preprofessionalism is nothing other than the realm in which the profession's fantasies, both professional and political, are acted out. The kind of sociological analysis I have in mind will demand that we suspend some of our investments in specific agendas of professionalization and politicization in order to clarify what is merely phantasmic in those investments. The decline of the job market is a reality check, then, and perhaps an opportunity."

I had a chat once with my advisor about this whole preprofessionalism thing during a recent bout of Term Paper Angst. His advice was not to play. I don't have to give in and throw out there whatever mediocre conclusions I have based on a brief touch in a field for a term paper. It's obviously not ensuring a job out there. That's not say my advisor doesn't encourage to present presentable stuff in an appropriate context. But I think there is an extent where you just have to stop worrying about how much you're doing or not doing or how much you do or don't know and just let yourself be at your level. I'll continue to read and to grow. I'll continue to benefit and to learn.

Personally, my experience has been that when I'm with x-super-famous-scholar and I say "I don't know" their response hasn't been to recoil with shock and horror but rather to sit down for an hour and share what they've learned about the topic at hand. I don't know if this is normal or not or whether I just happen to bump into the nice people. But I think the larger community of scholars would rather have a junior colleague who admits his/her inexperience rather than one who pretends to have experience that he/she does not have.

So, in conclusion, preprofessionalism sucks.

In other news, I just got another paper accepted at a student conference... ;)