My post on how important it is to tell aspiring graduate students the truth about grad school and academe, and about how I often find that I am the only one among my colleagues that is telling prospective professors the truth, drew a wonderfully apt comment from reader John Mosier:

My experience in being honest with undergrads about English graduate school is like yours in that everyone else seems to be intent on nurturing them to the point of absolute idiocy. The facts of the matter seem irrelevant. I used to think this was the result of either nurture or denial, but then I thought about it. Look at it this way.Ý

Speaking objectively the situation is entirely to the advantage of those who already have tenured slots, as it perpetuates a sort of plantation system: our adjunct faculty are wildly overqualified, and also desperate--they're probably better teachers than our permanent faculty. And given the apparently endless supply of them the situation isn't likely to change.Ý

The current system provides the "owners" of the plantation (the English deprtment, and I'm sure you can see all the other parallels) with an endless supply of cheap labor. Administrators love the 'cheap' part, and the faculty love the 'slave' part--not like those uppity assistant professors who might actually rock the boat. Like an old fashioned fraternity with a permanent pledge class. And the 'best" part of it is the slaves seem to think they're actually pretty well off, not much chance of a revolt from that quarter.Ý

If you start working out the details, it's truly frightening.

So OF COURSE the profession is encouraging students to go on to graduate school, and particularly the amiable and docile ones. As Stalin used to say, 'it's no accident.'

Along those lines, reader Fred R. sends in this marvelous quote from a 1999 interview with UC Berkeley English professor emeritus Frederick Crews:

What's happened in the humanities is a general assault on the idea of the empirical, the very idea of the rational, which is now associated with such social evils as racism, patriarchy, and so forth. And in the vacuum that is created by this denigration of the empirical, nothing is left but cliquishness, nothing is left but power. And this can all be put very concretely in terms of tenure decisions. A person submits a body of work for evaluation so that he or she can be retained for the rest of the career or fired. On what basis is this work to be evaluated? Well, if there isn't a critical mass of tenured people who believe in the empirical attitude, then the work can only be evaluated according to whom it pleases, whose interests it pleases. And then it's a question of what clique you
belong to and what kinds of fashionable references you're willing to make. And I must say that in my thirty-six years of teaching at Berkeley, I saw a changing of the guard in this direction that was very disturbing to me.