One thing I’ve heard over the years (most recently from several people replying to my last post) is that graduate work has a way of pulling you out of your existing peer network and making your life feel very deferred or de-synchronized.

This is even more the case if you find yourself leaving academia, either voluntarily or involuntarily. At least within an academic institution, you will find people with similarly deferred life developments; leave it, and you discover yourself out of sync with both those within, and those without. (Thinking about parenthood in one’s 30s or 40s is just one example – your academic cohort are usually non-parents and often single – while other couples starting families tend to be much younger; the ones with similar age references have children in college.)

On the matter of being geographically flexible – the weird side effect of this is that being resigned to being at the mercies of the vagaries of the academic market when it comes to (re)locating, is that you become stunted in the skills and attitudes involved in actually choosing where to live. (My spouse and I – both now unemployed academics – are confronting the weirdness of not only having to choose a target region or city for our move, but also the lack of an existing housing network or workplace to focus our attentions on. It used to be, you got the job, you found something near the college you could afford, and that was that. This lack of structure is more than a bit daunting.)

Re: disciplinarity and whether to support it or not… one thing I’ve noted about the people that I admire who do interdisciplinary work is that they almost always have a strong grounding in at least one specific discipline, and, if able to manage it, more than one. But it is rare that they are dabblers across the board. Having done a fair amount of interdisciplinary dabbling myself, I’ve come to believe that a lot that makes such boundary crossing appealing is the way that work within disciplinary boundaries develops its own logic, its own assumptions, its own best practices (as well as the knowledge base it develops). Even when I’m analyzing literature, I’m viewing it through the eyes of a historian, and engaging with the ways that literature has different working assumptions (even something as small as the idea that context matters can be a great chasm). Short version: I think you can’t appreciate the transgressive potential of interdisciplinary work unless you know, in your gut, what it is you are transgressing – and to have that foundation, I think you need training in disciplinary thinking. Now, I wouldn’t say this means one should go get one PhD and lumber on from there, or try to get multiple PhDs under one’s belt – I’d advise getting several masters’ degrees instead – but neither do I think one should be entirely project driven, either. They’re called disciplines for a reason, as you know, and I think that the experience of developing a particular flavor of intellectual rigor makes one better appreciate where others in other fields are coming from, and that their perspectives are not arbitrary but coming out of a particular scholarly discourse or habitus. This isn’t to say there are not risks of being a stealth interdisciplinarian studying within a particular discipline, but I would think that a student truly interested in cross-discipline thinking wouldn’t be discouraged so easily.

It’s funny; all my mentors told me to emphasize in my job letters that I could teach–nay, would love to teach!–these lower-division courses, but now that I’m here I’ve been told my efforts are more needed at the upper-division and graduate levels, and that even though I want to teach intro courses, I shouldn’t expect to be able to do so after this fall. My teaching load this year (my second) is 2-1, and it will likely stay that way for a while, and my tenure mentoring committee is insisting I teach women’s and public history rather than surveys.

As a survivor of a Ph.D. in cultural studies, I second what you have to say about interdisciplinarity. The academic job market was really bad for me–five years and one interview for a “traditional” tenure-track job–which thank goodness resulted in a job offer in a very open-minded history department.

I think if people had told me ten years ago how profoundly difficult it is to get a t-t job, I would still have thought my chances were good–not because I’m arrogant but because I’ve always been a high achiever in academic settings. Of course, that’s the case with most people in grad school, and I didn’t really understand that going in. (Naïveté ahoy!)

I also like the challenge of living in places unlike the beach-adjacent, urban one where I grew up. However, if someone had sat me down and said, “Hey, your only t-t job offer is going to be 1,000 miles away from where everyone else in your family lives, and you’re going to start that job the year your first niece is born, your favorite grandmother is dying, your son is at an age where he could really understand the value of local extended family, and your parents are starting to show signs of aging,” I might have made a different choice of career.

Ditto if someone had shown me a spreadsheet of the economic opportunity costs. I love what I do, but the financial end of it has dealt more than one painful blow to my own little family.

The characteristics you describe of your best “public intellectual” students are, I think, the ones that have always led to students from elite small liberal arts colleges being overrepresented in graduate programs. Obviously, I don’t know how many of your favorite quirky students have had their enthusiasm and ingenuity crushed by grad school experiences, but my perspective from the time I taught in a second tier graduate program is that pushing at disciplinary boundaries and moving into new fields was very positively correlated with success in the job market.

I do strongly endorse two of your points here: 1) only go to grad school if you get financial support from the program and 2) you have to be prepared to move just about anywhere — there are lots of colleges in the middle of nowhere, though many employ only a handful of historians.

You may be interested in the 100 reasons NOT to go to graduate school:
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/

Both this and your last post contain some great advice. I wish I’d heard it before starting my graduate program. With that, another thought: Some (like me) enter, or seek entry, into their program of choice after a lot of thought. At this point, contrary advice feels, well, simply contrarian. If the advice is not delivered in a manner that exudes empathy, the listener is apt to view the giver’s advice as obstructionist. With that, I wonder if it shouldn’t be a requirement that for every humanities graduate program to require a one-year waiting period before entry. And that period would contain two mandatory meetings—spaced adequately apart. The first meeting should hold forth advice like what you’ve presented here, and given by a faculty member known for her/his ability to empathize. And then the second meeting, as required but held 6-months later, would require a test on that advice plus an essay explaining the supplicant’s intentions.

After these two steps—then and only then, with time for “cooling and consideration” given—the student could be given an interview to enter the program.

And another thought: Every first semester, or two semesters, in a graduate humanities program should be probational. No one—ever—should be given direct admissions into a PhD program without first having a mandatory probationary period.

I know all of this is utopian in the American higher education scene, where revenues are driven more and more by tuition and enrollment. But the humanities are too important to be held to regular market rules. Plus, all of this is a kind of Elizabeth Warren-inspired consumer protection program for supplicant graduate students.

– Tim Lacy

(At the same time, of course, a prospective graduate student wants to have in their arsenal the ability to come across as the kind of person who will only be happy at an elite research institution. But students should know that it is risky actually to be that person.)

Many are unclear on what the range of possibilities is – they generalize from what their instructors do, or rather appear to do, since a lot of what we do is not visible in the classroom. It needs to be explained.

As you note, relationships are a problem. In particular, any student who believes that s/he has already met the person that they’re going to marry, really needs to understand how much s/he going to be asking of the other person. And even if they haven’t met someone: students need to be told about how efficient a matchmaker grad school is, and how effective an engine of divorce the subsequent trajectory of an academic career is.

I worry about this a lot, because I’m one of the lucky ones – I met my wife in graduate school, but she has a job at the same institution as I do. I worry that my students may not always grasp how lucky that makes me, and how many people I know who were not so lucky.

On the other hand, I’m less worried about students having their particular intellectual quirks brutally crushed. This isn’t just because I’m much more favorable towards disciplinary traditions.

It’s also because I have quite the opposite criticism of American graduate education, that it’s not sufficiently open to the possibility that a person may not yet quite know what they want to do. The “apply to X because it’s a good place to do Y” principle is fairly dubious. There’s something wrong if, after several years of focused study in a discipline, a person not interested in aspects of it that they hadn’t realized interested them – aspects that they didn’t know existed – when they were 21. Certainly, no-one should be too sure at that age that they know for a fact the sort of intellectual work that they want to be doing for the rest of their lives.

Early specialization makes some sense in the British and Irish system, but an American student has (a) had a more or less general undergraduate education and (b) is going to spend years on coursework before they get near to writing their dissertation. There are possibilities there that the current variant of the American model doesn’t exploit as fully as it might. There are obvious reasons why things are the way they are, but I’m not sure that it’s intellectually healthy, and I’d like to see a little pushback against it.