the minnesota review n.s. 50-51 (1999) Doctor OutsiderIt's a spring day in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Walking to my English department mailbox, I run into one of my friends, a graduate student who entered the PhD program earlier than I did but whose dissertation is not yet complete. We chat for a few minutes, and I half-guiltily mention my dissertation defense, which is only a week away. "That's great!" she say. "And so, what are your plans?" A polite way of asking if I've found a job in the late flurry of one-year posts and adjunct position listings. I shift my weight and launch what is, by now, a practiced speech. "Well, rather than stay here and do a lectureship next year, I'm going to try my luck in new media — you know, Internet stuff. I've been doing that on the side for the last few years and really like it, and I'm psyched to move to a big city again and try something new. And, well, if it doesn't work out, there's always another job list next fall." She puts a comforting hand on my shoulder and looks deep into my eyes. "Don't worry. You have to keep plugging away, but I know you'll find that academic job eventually!" And with one more reassuring shoulder pat, she is gone. I gaze after her in disbelief, and I feel another headache coming on. It's an extraordinary thing to discover that your voice is incomprehensible, particularly when the people who cannot hear you are the same people you credit with having taught you to modulate that voice into eloquence. But in the conversation I had that day with my friend, and in the larger conversation among the academic left about our job crisis, my perspective as a PhD trying to build a meaningful professional and intellectual life outside the academy has been consistently denied, denigrated, or ignored. In these reactions, I would argue, we can see the unexamined elitism and unwarranted defensiveness of the rhetoric opposed to alternative career training within the academy, and, I hope, in resisting both of these things, discover new forms of coalition-building and political action to roll back the debilitating structural shifts in American higher education over the last generation. Given that I'm going to spend much of this essay critiquing people with whom I'm generally in political sympathy, I want to take a moment to recount that sympathy in some detail. I belive that the casualization of academic labor is an unmitigatedly bad development both for the laborers themselves and for the wider society that needs the analytic, informed, and creative citizens that higher education at its best can produce, whether that society wants such thinkers or not. I wholeheartedly support unionization efforts by faculty and graduate students: indeed, I served for several years as a departmental steward for Michigan's Graduate Employees Organization and was part of the organizing committee for GEO's two-day walkout in 1996. And I think that the Graduate Student Caucus is a good idea and should, in a better world, have existed long before it actually did. Marc Bousquet, a former president of the GSC, has more than once claimed that activism gets people jobs. And it's true: I'm an activist, and I have a job, one that I hope is the first step in a long and satisfying career. This job is at a commercial web site, and not a college or university, so it's not what Bousquet had in mind, but I believe my activism got me here nonetheless [1]. In my career as an activist, before, during, and now after graduate school, I learned some important things. Never plan an action with people you're not sure you can trust. Be prepared. If at all possible, avoid plans that call for renting a helicopter. Perhaps most importantly, though, I learned self-confidence. The healthcare activists with whom I worked after college and before grad school taught me that any idea could be turned into reality if you had the right plan. Think that hanging a "What About AIDS?" banner from the Washington Monument during the 1992 election season is a good idea? Well, figure out what it would take, load up the car, and drive to DC to measure the windows at the top of the monument. If, in the end, the plan proves unfeasible (as this plan did), it won't be for lack of trying or thoughtful consideration on your part. I've come to believe that this sort of pragmatic optimism is a necessary condition for the success of any activist undertaking — one has to believe one can change the world and have a workable outline of how to do so. It was this same pragmatic optimism that led me to work outside my department during grad school as a way of keeping my professional options option (as well as a way to pay the bills), and that has helped me with the difficult transition to the non-academic working world. It is, I think, what my colleagues meant when some of them told me I was "brave" to be leaving. I don't think I'm particularly brave: it seems braver from where I sit to willingly face a professional life in which getting decent work at decent pay in a decent place to live is becoming a less and less likely proposition. I have nothing but respect and admiration for the people who love the profession so much that they'll work lousy academic jobs while fighting for better ones for themselves and their colleagues. But plenty of other graduate students have said to me, "I'd leave, but what else could I do?" I believe that if we want to build a better academy, we have to take those people's needs into account,as much as we need to take into account the graduate student who, in her fifth year of study, starts to realize that, for a variety of reasons, she just doesn't want to be an academic as much as she used to. And I believe that any voice, whether institutional or individual, that claims to speak for, or in solidarity with, graduate students facing today's proletarianized academic job market, ought to take the needs and desires of all graduate students, whether committed to the profession or less certain, into account. But so far, that accounting hasn't happened. Instead, we get proclamations like the one William Pennepacker, the GSC vice-president, made at the 1998 MLA convention dismissing alternative career paths: "We trained to be professors, not secretaries!" Setting aside for the moment the class anxiety that radiates off that proclamation, what's most striking to me is the paucity of imagination apparent in it: Pennepacker does not seem able to imagine that PhDs who step outside the academic fold might find employment anywhere other than the typing pool. Is it so astonishing to consider that people with the skills and intellectual acuity to complete a doctoral degree might actually thrive outside the academy, in a wide range of jobs? Pennepacker is not the only one with a limited range of vision; Cary Nelson, a longtime activist around job-crisis issues, has more than once cited as a symbol of all that is wrong with advocates of alternative-careerism a University of Arkansas professor who suggested that unemployed PhDs could enlist in the Army (par. 24). I'm not sure which I find more irritating; the Arkansas man who could only imagine sending his students off to another underpaying, heavily hierarchical, and often hermetic profession (albeit one far more heavily armed than most of academia), or the Illinois man who uses him as a straw man to demolish all those opposed to alternative careerism. Nelson has been a valuable and prolific voice arguing against academic business as usual. But although the proposals he made with Michael Bérubé in their 1994 Chronicle of Higher Education article did include alternative career counseling for PhD students, he now insists that "advocacy for alternative careers is without question the most cynical and self-interested solution anyone has offered to the job crisis" (par. 24). Let me pause here to point out that I never for a moment felt that the people who supported and encouraged my own decision to pursue an alternative career path did so for cynical or self-interested reasons; when a professor separated from his wife and child by a thousand miles and the vagaries of the job market sighs and says, "honestly, if I were your age, I'd get out too," the cynicism, if any, is directed at himself for having bought into a system he feels betrayed by. So why does Cary Nelson think so poorly of this professor and more vocal alternative-career advocates? He explains: Faculty members like the alternative career model for other people for several reasons; it holds the promise of sustaining large graduate programs, along with their faculty perks; it gets complaining graduate students out of their hair; it allows faculty to combine their contempt for commercial employment with a hidden conviction that PhDs who don't get academic jobs are not as good as those who do. (par. 26) The conflation here of support for alternative career training with the sustaining of large graduate programs is hardly necessary; one can easily imagine a graduate program that accepted only a handful of PhD students each year and still attempted to prepare them for careers both inside and outside the academy. But since many of alternative career training's most vocal advocates have made the obnoxious claim that we should continue to produce large numbers of PhDs to send more intellectuals into the "public domain," it's perhaps not entirely surprising that someone writing a polemic against alternative career training would not think through the necessity of that coupling. Another of Nelson's claims, however, is a bit more unexpected: while certainly many academics disdain the non-academic world entirely, alternative career training's most vocal advocate of late, former MLA president Elaine Showalter, is hardly contemptuous of commercial employment. Showalter's writings on the job crisis have often seemed to position grad school as the late twentieth-century equivalent to the "Grand Tour," a pleasant opportunity for young adults to become "cultured" before they enter the corporate workforce.[2] And in comments like "business is way beyond the academy in its respect for emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, team building and principled negotiation" (3), she betrays an utter naïveté about the actualities of the postmodern workplace that might almost be written off as the charming eccentricities of an unworldly scholar, had it not been backed by the institutional power of the MLA. But Nelson and his colleagues in the GSC seem no more knowledgeable about the non-academic world in their attempts to deny it than Showalter is in her uncritical embrace of it. Mark Kelley, the current president of the GSC, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement seems to base his dislike of the non-academic world entirely on a business writing course he once had to teach (3). And both Kelley and Nelson, like Pennepacker, have limited ideas about what a PhD might do outside the classroom, which in their cases manifests itself in what seems like a quasi-phobic reaction to the idea of PhDs becoming screenwriters. Both refer to Showalter's suggestion of screenwriting as a possible alternative career, and want no truck with it: as Kelley put it, "Screenwriting for PhDs? That is so frightening as to be almost comic" (1). But why is it frightening that PhDs might become screenwriters? Is it because their skills as cultural critics would be wasted if they became pop-culture producers? Is it because screenwriting as a profession carries so much less cultural capital than college-level teaching, even when that teaching is done under the most degraded and demeaning circumstances? Similarly, it's true that no one needs a PhD to become a screenwriter — or, for that matter, to become a new media producer. But why should having a PhD prevent one from seeking out those jobs? Nelson has argued that "a person who writes a dissertation has ever thereafter a certain model of intellectual devotion of in-depth study and devotion, as the only entirely appropriate and fulfulling way of coming to know anything well" (par. 22). Does Nelson mean to suggest that PhDs are therefore forever unsuited to non-academic careers? Although at the GSC's MLA panel in 1998, Nelson memorably exploded that the profession of literature "isn't a calling, it's a goddamn job!" the insistence with which he, Pennepacker, and Kelley all stress the deirability of an academic job over any non-academic job belies his disavowal of the vocational model. Nelson, as much as any unnamed "faculty member" he writes about, seems to have a "hidden conviction that PhDs who don't get academic jobs are not as good as those who do." And although I've cited them throughout this article as exemplars of the academic left's attitude toward alternative careers, Nelson, Pennepacker, and Kelley are not alone in their attitude, as the story of the conversation with which I began this essay should serve to point out. Because graduate school requires such an intense dedication to complete, because in college towns the only intellectual life is often that provided by the college itself, because so many academics have chosen to have as little contact with the non-academic world as they can, there is a prevailing sense that leaving academia means entering the Void. As a result there can be tremendous psychic anxiety for people even considering leaving academic life. "One [PhD who has recently left the profession] describes academia as a cross between the military and the priesthood, saying leaving was like being deprogrammed from a cult" (Cornwell, "Nice Work"; see also Newhouse). My other friends who were leaving, or thinking about leaving, academia and I could often, in my last year or two of graduate school, be found having what I came to call "detox sessions," where we would simply rehearse to one another the psychic assaults academic life can make on one grown dissafected with it, and reassure one another that leaving didn't make one bad, or stupid, or a failure. I don't know what would have happened to me, for all my alleged bravery, had I not had that support network, and the depth of my gratitude to those friends is part of what makes me angry when I see people who claim to speak on behalf of "graduate students" as a class adding to the pressures to stay in academia. I would not say that the GSC ought to give up its activism to improve academic life; on the contrary, I think it should and must continue. But I would also stress that to denigrate the career choices that may lead new PhDs and graduate students out of the academy makes a mockery of any claim to support all graduate students and weakens the GSC politically. I'll close with another story, one that may suggest what the GSC and the academic left in general might gain from ceasing to disavow the possibility of alternative career training for PhD students. Last summer, when I was doing my first round of non-academic job interviews, I met with a new-media recruiter, or "headhunter." We sat in a small white room in her firm's downtown office, an office desk between us, and she explained that her firm rarely received requests from people with as little corporate work experience as I had, and that as a result I could probably find work far more quickly on my own. "But," she continued, "even if we as a firm can't help you, I personally wnat to help you in any way I can, because I've been there myself." Her PhD, it turned out, was in German literature. After an hour's talk about academia and leaving it, I walked out of her office with a list of suggestions, tips, and ideas that proved invaluable to me as I looked for work. I repeated the story of that meeting to anyone who would listen, because it inspired and amused me, but as I repeated it I began to think more about the possibilities inherent in that scene. Networking opportunities. PhDs talking honestly to graduate students about the positive and negative aspects of non-academic life, and perhaps alerting them to career possibilities they'd never considered. Maintaining a community of intellectuals with a loyalty to the work being done today in academia, and an understanding in their bones of how bad the economic "restructuring" of higher education is for us all. Don't misunderstand me; I don't think that we should continue to churn out large numbers of PhDs when hteire aren't jobs for them, nor do I think at alternative career training can or should be a panacea for academia's ills. But I think that if PhDs who do follow an alternative career path can do so without feeling like the academy has turned its back on them, then they are less likely to feel embittered about the profession of literature after they leave it, and that if the GSC and groups like it reached out to those people, they could form a powerful link between the academic left and the non-academic world and work together to fight the corporatization of university life. A pragmatic optimist would tell you that there's no point in alienating a natural ally, and any battle to roll back the damage done to american higher education over the last twenty years needs all the allies it can get. Notes:[1] For example, according to Bousquet: "Let me be clear about this. If you're a graduate student, I'm saying that becoming an activist today will help you get a job in your interview tomorrow" (par. 2). On the other hand, it's my sense of the GEO leaders I knew at Michigan, a significant percentage, perhaps as many as half, have in fact left academia, often for other activist work. [2] I owe this analogy, and heartfelt apologies for filching it, to my friend Ian Munro. Works Cited:Bousquet, Marc. "Foreword: The Institution as False Horizon." Workplace 1:1 http://www.workplace-gsc.com/features1/bousquet.html Cornwell, Tim. "Nice Work, if You Can Get It." Times Higher Education Supplement 18 Dec. 1998, MLA Spec. Sec.:1 Kelley, Mark. "Ph.D.s Derailed on the Tenure Track." Times Higher Education Supplement 18 Dec. 1998, MLA Spec. Sec.:3 Nelson, Cary. "What Hath English Wrought: The Corporate University's Fast Food Discipline." Workplace 1:1 http://www.workplace-gsc.com/features1/nelson.html Nelson, Cary and Michael Bérubé. "Graduate Education is Losing Its Moral Base." Chronicle of Higher Education 23 Mar 1994: B1-B3. Newhouse, Margaret. "Deprogramming from the Academic Cult." Chronicle of Higher Education 9 April 1999. http://chronicle.com/jobs/v45/i32/4532beyond.htm Showalter, Elaine. "Nice Work and We Can Get It." MLA Newsletter Winter 1998: 3-4.
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