fieldnoise

I was recently catching up on two blogs by Iowa humanities alums, and it was interesting to see that they had each waded into the whole “Should you go to grad school?” debate, with David Morris taking the side of pro, and Lauren Whitehead taking con. As a current grad student (and one who has recently had a degree of success/luck), it’s a question I’m invested in, but when I thought about it for a week or so, and considered my recent responses to two friends who were addressing the question themselves, I came to a simple conclusion: I don’t care.

Obviously, the title of this post is pure Google bait, but I mean it: I don’t care if you go to grad school. For some people it’s the absolute right choice, because they’ve done the work, asked around, and have maintained both realistic expectations and a deep passion for what they hope to investigate. To them, I say best of luck and prepare for debt. Others approach grad school on a lark, with passing interest, with a sense that it might help their job prospects someday. To those people, I say stay the hell out.

But when I say I don’t care if you go to grad school, it’s not a case of those two choices (which, of course, are the only two) canceling each other out in specific instances. I mean that on a deeper, more general level (the level of “should ‘you’ go to grad school”) I truly don’t care. And my reason is simple: all of the people I’ve gravitated toward while in graduate school—as friends, colleagues, and collaborators—didn’t define themselves or allow themselves to be defined by the trope of the “the grad student.” To resist that, they either implicitly or explicitly rejected the notion of higher education as some kind of “calling,” and instead chose to see it for what it was (or perhaps should be): a tool to help (re)shape and (re)imagine the ideas, people, and places that they care about. And it’s only one tool of many. Is it a good tool for you? Maybe. But probably not.

If you think higher education and/or teaching is your life’s true work, then you’re doomed to 5-10+ years of serious disappointment and bitterness. But when you stop romanticizing self-loathing, and stop worrying about whether or not all of your “good deeds” will pay off “in the end” (on graduation day, with a tenure-track job, perhaps?), then you can actually start getting things done. What kinds of things? Almost anything—including truly original and exciting academic work. But the structure of grad school also allows you to engage, seriously, with things that are supplementary, tangential, or even wholly unrelated to your fields. Some of the best—indeed my favorite—grad students are activists, artists, and tinkerers. People with big, crazy ideas on a whole range of topics. People who run small literary presses, DJ nights, and marathons. People who raise families. People who work to redefine “the family.” These people are grad students. But if they weren’t grad students, they would be working just as hard somewhere else, probably on something similar. And when they stop being grad students, they’ll be good at that too, whatever the hell “that” is.

If you’re a current or former grad student, I know what you might be thinking: 1) It’s not that fucking simple, and 2) I don’t have the time. On point 1 you are absolutely right. I know, first hand, that this not entirely a matter of personal choice, even though up to here I’ve framed it that way. I’m keenly aware of the serious structural flaws with the economics of the current university, the problem of debt, the near-nonexistent job prospects for graduate students, and the intense amount of mental and emotional labor that goes into grad school. There is no way around that. But on point 2 you are dead wrong. One of the ways that this (often brutal, dehumanizing) system exerts its power, perhaps the most insidious way, is by convincing graduate students that they cannot, indeed should not, have a life outside of the University/TA/grad student system.

But you can. Believe it. Because if you don’t, you can and will start to really, deeply believe that grad school takes up all of your time. This is precisely one of the things that happened to Lauren, whose articulations of the reasons why she quit grad school are recommended reading for anyone considering going in the first place. In one post, she writes:

Quitting is thrilling. Think of the books you will read. The marathon you never ran? Check. Think of the creative projects that have lay dormant that you can now take up: finish that half-knitted shawl, start that podcast, join that improv group.

In a way, she’s absolutely right, but that’s exactly the problem: to be a better, more well-rounded human, and an active, engaged member of the community where your graduate school is located, you have to be a “bad” grad student. Because you absolutely can do all of those things while in grad school. You just have to be willing to say “no” inside a system that doesn’t take no for an answer. You have to be willing to take a longer time to get your degree, which in some programs potentially means losing funding and being ostracized from your department. In my experience, these risks are worth it. Your mileage may vary. It may have already.

So, when thinking about your future (whomever ‘you’ are out there), I would suggest first figuring out what tools you need—as in actually, truly need—to help you get where you think you want to go. One of those tools might be grad school, but again, it’s probably not. And either way, I still won’t care.