First Semester Reflections

I apologize in advance: this is a rather lengthy post which is generally a sure indication that it contains a rant. This is, in fact, the case.

The future of the liberal arts is, to say the least, tenuous. There are many folks out there with many different theories as to why this is and what has caused the current state of fragility. Most people say some valuable things, but no one really presents a comprehensive solution. There are the tenured dinosaurs in English, foreign language, and History departments who, secure in their positions, feel free to pontificate about the liberal arts having no need to justify their existence. There are the fresh PhDs being pumped out of our nation’s universities at an astounding rate who run smack dab into a job market more crowded than a Mexican soccer game, with most grateful to find low-paying adjunct teaching jobs which pay roughly the equivalent of janitorial work minus the health benefits. And there are students like me, who enter graduate programs in liberal arts by the drove every year, who are compelled to face rather bleak post-graduation employment prospects. Most of us will turn to law school or teach high school, if we can find a job in that other overcrowded market.

I am not going to answer here the question as to why the liberal arts exist. That is outside the scope of a blog post. I have sympathies on both sides: I think the liberal arts are essential to an understanding of humanity, but I also sympathize with the state legislatures forced to decide where to cut money and who naturally turn their eyes to a budget-sucker in the state colleges that has largely forsaken the teaching of undergraduates and are, for the most part, more concerned with the publishing requirements for tenure than inspiring the next generation of men and women to be more fully human. In other words, the liberal arts are quite necessary, but are terrible at arguing for (and showing) their functional value in society.

Perhaps I will get a chance to talk about all of this in greater length at a further time, but I have just completed my first semester of graduate school and am here to render my highly biased verdict on the past four months. Most of you know that I came into a graduate program in English in a non-traditional manner, having received my Bachelor degree in Finance. Therefore, I always imagined I would start at a disadvantage. Many of my fellow students not only majored in English as undergraduates but have spent time teaching since. They are more broadly read than I am, have written more papers, and, in general, have spent more time thinking, talking, and writing about literature. However, I never really felt ill-prepared once the semester progressed. This is not to say there are not people smarter than me in the program; there most certainly are talented folks around, but, on the whole, I am not the class idiot, which is nice.

I took one class where all we did was read and study Charles Dickens. This was wonderful. I do not imagine I would ever choose to read six of Dickens’ novels in any other context, so it was nice to have compulsion in that direction. My professor loved Dickens and wasn’t afraid to confront his prejudices and faults, though she was never unfair and snobbish (as we tend to be when looking back on our forebears).

Another class I took was an undergraduate level class that was intended to fill in some gaps in my reading (mercifully I only had to take one of these classes. Others I know of have had to take three or four.). This class was easy and enjoyable; I was graded like an undergraduate, which was nice, and my professor is the graduate advisor and a ridiculously intelligent man. I am taking another class with him next semester and am very much looking forward to it.

My third class was the Introduction to Graduate Studies course that is mandatory for every student in the graduate program. After taking this class I have decided that in order to be compelled to pursue a doctoral program in Literature God would have to rend the clouds and speak to me out of them, commanding me to go for the PhD. In other words, this class persuaded me that the liberal arts are surely on shaky ground and, furthermore, that I would rather manage accounts at a plumbing wholesaler than try to survive in this world as it currently exists.

The crowning assignment for this course was a 10-12 page paper on any piece of literature we chose (sounds alright at this point). However, this isn’t your undergraduate research paper (which is fine and expected in a graduate program), and the scope of the assignment was to find a critical conversation (scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals) and engage in, and further, this conversation. So, to put this in non-academic terms: I, a first semester graduate student, was supposed to pick a work of literature most likely combed over by academics who had completed PhD dissertational work on this specific author, find a flaw in their argument, exploit that flaw, and thereby contribute something “new” to the “conversation.” I will be the first to admit my arrogance, but this even smacked me as presumptuous.

And this is the future of the English field. Everything worthwhile that can be said about Shakespeare has been said in the previous 400 years, but you have to find something new to say so it can get published in a journal and you can keep your job. This has led to so much grasping for the new thing in scholarship that academics have ghettoized themselves into a world where the only people who are qualified to read the articles written are other people with PhDs in the same narrow field or people in a related field with a high tolerance for boredom and an abounding love for contrived five-syllable words.

This rant began well-intentioned and with a narrow enough scope, though I have gotten way off topic. I chose a poem for my paper called “Goblin Market” by a Victorian-era female poet, Christina Rossetti. I will attach a link to the paper in case anyone is interested, but I continually found myself being forced not to say something really good, but only something new.

I am glad it was a hard paper to write. Indeed, I anticipated that graduate school would be hard and looked forward to the challenge. The difficulty is not what bothered me this semester. The narrowness is what bothered me. In a field as broad and important to humanity as Literature, I am forced to focus on minutiae rather than anything broadly humanistic (and I haven’t even touched on the abundance of critical theories stacking up on top of each other and clamoring for control). To me this is tragic. It is such a miniscule percentage of the population that has the luxury of participating in what I am so fortunate to have a crack at and it feels like we have to waste a good chunk of it on ephemeral matters. I engage with Literature at all for what it says about the eternal. But in today’s academy there is no place for such broad thinking. Until you get tenure, anyways.

Update: Here is the link to my term paper, if anyone is interested. Still no grade so I can't really tell you how good it may be (or not, for that matter).