Every so often, some online outlet of punditry decides to do a tell-all on academia. Yes, I know what you’re thinking… is this where the real gossip is these days? Maybe yes, maybe no. My experience so far leads me to lean towards the latter.
Such articles tend to start doing the rounds on academics’ Facebook pages and Twitters. So it was probably only a matter of time before the Economist decided to get in on the game. What would their illuminating contributions be to this budding strain of journalism? What, there’s a dearth of jobs? A huge debt can be accumulated in paying for the privilege of accessing a stunningly bad labour market? PhD students are the ideal employees because they sign up willingly for the chance to be exploited?
As it turns out, you can learn all that and more of what you probably already know! OK, so there’s not much new in “The Disposable Academic” – unless you’re an outsider to the feedback loop of depressing articles about the state of academia that is one of the many unadvertised benefits of going to grad school in the Web 2.0 era. Anyway, if you aren’t used to reading this stuff, it’s worth keeping in mind that just about none of the claims it makes are exactly surprising.
But for some reason I couldn’t resist writing about it. Some choice lines, in order, with commentary beneath:
…there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things.
Notice how quickly ”problems” shift from plural to singular: the PhD student, the benighted and misguided person who so foolishly decides to enter this hopeless institution. Then, we learn of “an oversupply of PhDs.” There is no consideration that perhaps there’s an “undersupply” of universities. That every year, public universities are pressured by governments to take in more students. That access to public funding is increasingly tied to admission numbers. That those faculty who do have jobs are increasingly overburdened because conservative administrators prefer to hire others like themselves, or else professional fundraisers that promote ephemeral “research excellence” and other boondoggles like fancy new facilities, instead of actually hiring enough qualified teachers to keep class sizes reasonable. End rant.
[A]rmies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs boost universities’, and therefore countries’, research capacity. Yet that is not always a good thing. Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste when fashions change. The post-Sputnik era drove the rapid growth in PhD physicists that came to an abrupt halt as the Vietnam war drained the science budget.
PhDs need to learn to see into the future. Don’t forget, we have “brilliant, well-trained minds;” clearly with the right training, we could predict that a government would be stupid enough to conduct a long, unwinnable and costly war like it did Vietnam. Actually, given the wars the US is currently in, maybe you don’t need to be a mind-reader to predict that that will happen. What is their point again? Well, most importantly, everyone else in every other labour market is clearly invulnerable to the same geopolitical idiocy-driven budget cuts and/or technological advancement-induced obsolescence that lead to industries’ rise and fall. For real. I read about it in the Economist.
…the rise of PhD teachers’ unions reflects the breakdown of an implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay now for a good academic job later. Student teachers in public universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison formed unions as early as the 1960s, but the pace of unionisation has increased recently. Unions are now spreading to private universities; though Yale and Cornell, where university administrators and some faculty argue that PhD students who teach are not workers but apprentices, have resisted union drives. In 2002 New York University was the first private university to recognise a PhD teachers’ union, but stopped negotiating with it three years later.
What does this even mean? Unions are on the rise… scary! Or is it? You sort of knew that the Economist would get around to blaming unions at some point, but honestly, I’m disappointed by their lack of conviction here. Certainly, there is mention that some Ivy League administrators that academic workers are apprentices, who should be thankful for the munificence bestowed upon them by their velvet-cloaked superiors, who allow them to work for them. This idea is offensive in that disarmingly old-fashioned way that epithets like “pom” are, in that it’s the kind of thing you might expect some doddery old relative to come out with, but doesn’t really seem quite fitting for your out-and-out racist. I mean, really, “apprentice?” Maybe we should start forming “guilds” too? Or else we could all be like Oxbridge and wear robes all the time… Maybe some outlets of the conventional monetarist wisdom are getting the sense that Milton Friedman’s wearing no clothes these days. OK, atrocious mental image aside, I’m surprised the article doesn’t go ahead and explain why that’s bad for the business of education. Ugh, the “business of education” – now there’s a detestable phrase if I ever wrote one.
Many students say they are pursuing their subject out of love, and that education is an end in itself. Some give little thought to where the qualification might lead. In one study of British PhD graduates, about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go on being a student, or put off job hunting. Nearly half of engineering students admitted to this. Scientists can easily get stipends, and therefore drift into doing a PhD. But there are penalties, as well as benefits, to staying at university. Workers with “surplus schooling”—more education than a job requires—are likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs.
PhD students are bad for not wanting to join the real world and get a job. Because the real world looks like so much fun right now. Clearly it’s so difficult to understand for a magazine like the Economist – named for the kind folks whose breathtakingly brilliant advice has nothing to do, or so they’d have you believe, with how bleak that real world looks right now – that they have to turn to psychology to understand why anyone would want to be in such an institution.
The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned. The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records.
A refreshing dose of honesty. And there’s more to come.
The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned. The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records.
A PhD in theoretical ecology is writing for the Economist. It’s tempting to read bitterness here. But make of that admission what you will – at least it’s honest. And hey, I bet writing for the Economist’s a pretty good gig – hook me up! Aren’t I one of those hard-luck PhDs? I promise that I won’t be “less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs.” On second glance, that sentence reads oddly like the inverse of that painfully obvious interlude off OK Computer, “Fitter Happier.” I love you Radiohead, but sometimes a bit of restraint would be tasteful. Now that I look at it though, the fan Youtube video for the song is worth a view. The animation’s a bit XKCD-ish.
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In a way, I feel bad about this post. Shameful though some may see this admission, coming from me of all people, but I kind of like the Economist. I don’t read it much anymore, but I started reading it at about the age of 12. It was one of the reasons I got interested in politics, not to mention my particular obsession with political geography that some of my readers who’ve known me long enough will remember. No matter which camp you sit in politically (OK, OK, “camp’s” not my finest metaphor), its breadth of geopolitical coverage is still impressive. It’s a Tory magazine, yes, but pretty Red Tory, generally speaking, and at least they’re up front about it most of the time. Given the conservatism of nearly every establishment media outlet these days, it’s sometimes refreshing to read a magazine that still seems to remember what the word used to mean in the days of Edmund Burke. Before the Glenn Becks of the world arrived and ruined the right’s party…
But I should also say a word or two about what I think of the idea of doing a PhD. Don’t hold me to this – it’s no statement of intent, or even anything approaching that. But I certainly don’t know any grad students who don’t wonder frequently (OK, daily) if they made the right decision in staying in school. As the article itself says, “the drawbacks… are well known.” Suffice it to say, everyone in a grad program quickly learns the conventional critique of the university, and many of us probably agree with many of the arguments. To be fair to the article, it does make some of these points. It does address the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself, but I have to admit that although I sometimes have my sympathies with that argument, I am also well aware of how stunningly naïve and privileged it can often be. But the article’s mostly about the economics of the PhD.
But I want to think a bit more about the title of this article: “The Disposable Academic.” Can we reduce a person to their job anymore? Certainly, there’s a side of me that wants to say that those statistics about all the job-switching we’re going to do in our lifetimes means the sheer time that it takes to become a PhD-certified “academic” poses a bit of a problem. But let’s ask a question about the other word in that title – “disposable.” Is it good that we almost reflexively conceive of jobs this way these days? I can understand the restlessness people have felt or feel at being in the same job for life. I want to try not to be nostalgic here about the (frequently fictional) solidity of the past. But how often do we really think hard about the fact that losing a job just plain sucks? And that what makes it suck is that it often has longterm, material costs, no matter how much bogus rhetoric there is about crisis as opportunity, and despite all the other Up in the Air-like truisms that get trotted out.
Admittedly, my response thus far has been pretty predictable. Conservative establishment magazine says grad school is bad. Grad student clinging to hope and raisons d’être by a thread retorts that said magazine makes unfair and conservative arguments, with generous caveats that indicate unplumbable depths of self-deprecation. Rinse, repeat.
So here’s a bit of a curveball. A friend posted this rather meme-worthy article which explains that Colin Firth commissioned a study about whether brain chemistry could predict a person’s political preference. I should emphasize that it hasn’t been published (as the Internet is famously over-generous to the inherent contingency of single studies, not to say studies that haven’t even finished being peer reviewed). But of course it’s pleasing to think that the basic motivations of conservatism, of which fear (of the unknown, of losing hold of the familiar), speak to brain chemistry. It explains why reasonable arguments rarely win over fulminators of the right. Why every single episode of Rachel Maddow where a conservative actually consents to be interviewed by her is so depressingly predictable.
But the recourse to brain chemistry, in the face of reasoned argument being shouted down by opposition, seems fishy to me. It’s not just that scientists can apparently be commissioned by celebrities (it’s actually somewhat heartening to know that if ethics mean little to corporatized science, at least capitalism keeps working reliably for everyone). Nor is it Colin’s depressing understanding of what it is to be left – I mean, the Lib Dems, Colin? Certainly there’s been a massive “loss of values” in Labour, but I can’t be alone in being unpersuaded Nick Clegg ever promised much more in that way.
No, what bugs me is brain chemistry as the recourse of choice to prove a point that isn’t easily won on other terms. The further neuroscience advances, the more this will happen. It’s not hard to imagine what nightmarish kinds of scenarios to which the indiscriminate deployment of even current technology could lead, in what Kathryn Schulz calls our “Brave Neuro World.” What immediately concerns me, though, are the ethical questions that are closer to our everyday experience in terms of unfiltered neuroscientific means of interpreting human behaviour. Accepting that someone’s brain simply makes them incurable or incapable (who, I wonder, gets to decide what the standard of capability is?) suggests the impossibility of their redemption. I use a term with such religious connotations advisedly – after all, what I’m trying to diagnose here is a loss of faith in people.
I began by mentioning how that ideologically-loaded logic of disposability we see in the Economist article is pretty commonplace. What’s worrisome, though, is the proximity of this to the second logic, where we dispense with argument in favour of neuroscience as a means of explaining away our irreconcileable differences (of opinion). Don’t both these viewpoints assume the same lack of human potential? If we are conceived of similarly valueless, how can they be worth fighting for, or against, as the case may be?
There are a number of directions I could go from this crossroads of the disposable and the neurally normative. But we were talking about PhDs originally, so… what does it mean to be told to that we’re disposable? Does it mean that our minds are forever altered by our “surplus schooling,” that we’re destined to be discontent if we don’t get the job we all ostensibly want? Well, probably yes, to be frank.
But the Economist’s mistake is conceiving of discontent as something always to be avoided. In a way, critical work actually has something to do with the fine-tuning of that discontent. Sometimes that kind of examination can lead you to lose sight of the bigger picture – usually when that happens is when the “ivory tower” perception turns to reality. And, too, sometimes it can be beside the point – literary scholars can over-indulge in hermeneutics.
But if it’s done right, can’t that fine-tuning help you decide which cause of your unhappiness to do something about? Doesn’t that speak to a more redemptive view of what a PhD might have to offer? Learning to refuse to let one off the hook, and expect better of them? While this is an important element of academic work, it’s equally important to temper that inclination with humility – intellectual arrogance is often the consequence of putting too much stock in this approach. I realize this line of reasoning isn’t the sole reason people go into academia. Nor is it the only way to take on this designation of disposability.
Wow, that turned out to be a bit more of a statement of intent than I thought it would. As always, my ideas seem to change with the writing. By the way, why would “pom” be on my mind, you might have wondered idly? Let’s just say that the Australians’ take on the English, or better, their rather wonderful inability to do so, has been on my mind lately.
