Earlier this week, an English professor at a liberal arts college in the midwest pseudonymously published an excellent and cutting piece entitled, "So You Want to Go to Grad School?" in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It's the sort of article that feels like long-awaited and much-welcome ventriloquism: what this individual has to say about both the corruption of graduate education and the dishonesty of the faculty who fail to inform prospective graduate students about the realities of the academic job market and tenure system echoes many of the endless dialogues and internal monologues I've had over the years. In short, his argument is that the only reasonable and ethical way to respond to the starry-eyed student who is considering grad school is to be brutally frank and honest about the distinctly non-romantic, often non-livable life that is the reality they have to look forward to: to tell them about how they are not likely to find a tenure-track job, for example, and to be straight with them about things like the exploitative labor structure of academe and about the way the petty politics of careerism frequently displace and even destroy the pleasure--not to mention integrity--of scholarship and teaching.

It's a subject that hits close to home for me (it's no accident, I think, that the author of this piece is an assistant professor of English, where the job market is especially bad, and where the failure to grapple openly and constructively with this fact is particularly heinous). I could have benefitted from such honesty myself once upon a time, and it's honesty I freely give now. But each time I tell a prospective grad student in English the truth about the life he or she is contemplating, I discover a disappointing parallel truth: that I am usually the only one of the prospective's many teachers who has levelled with him or her. One recognizes, in these moments, that telling the truth discredits one in the student's eyes--it's much easier, after all, to dismiss your teacher's unpleasant message as the erroneous commentary of a malcontent than it is to believe either that everyone else has lied to you, or to surrender your vision of yourself as a uniquely gifted budding scholar who simply will not be affected by the same market pressures as everyone else.

The essay hit a nerve with a lot of people--Invisible Adjunct picked the piece up a few days ago, and the comments section has swollen to more than one hundred posts. They are of unusually high quality, and well worth a look as well.

UPDATE: John Sutherland has written a devastating piece for the Guardian on the overproduction of Ph.D.s. He makes the crucial point that is so often not made in discussions of the disparity between the number of Ph.D.s annually produced and the number of tenure-track jobs annually available: that the vast majority of these Ph.D.s are not making, nor will ever make, substantial original contributions to knowledge. The answer is not to find more jobs for more Ph.D.s, as activists so often have it, but to vastly constrict the number of people who embark on this career path, and to train those people far better--far more intensely and thoroughly--than graduate students are currently trained.