I got some interesting mail in response to yesterday's post about academic fakery and endemic insecurity. It was about evenly divided between anguished acknowledgement of the degradation of the humanities and cynical acceptance of that degradation as an inevitable and manipulable situation.

From a representative cynic, who is enrolled in an English Ph.D. program:

A friend and I, both English Graduate students at a state university, will habitually duck into empty STAFF lounges in hused conversation--huddle near an open window in the Writing Workshop, letting our sentiments harmlessly hurdle outwards. "How's hoop hopping going?" we ask one another, she looking over my shoulder, I looking over hers. We shrug back and forth and shimmy our hips in
a hula motion.

Back in the cooridors, in the sight-lines of those future authors of reccommendation letters, we wear the skins of Go-Getters. We are peppy, blithe. Head over heals in love with our career path. Fists clenched with ready-to-serve cliches.

Forced smiles hurt my face though. It gets stuck in this permasmile. Can't bring myself to stop smiling. What if the repeat button gets stuck, and I end up living out my life technocolorized reruns; sure circumstance makes its generational mark, but its the same old ball game, same old hula-hoop.

[...]

I would find it a very unhealhy proposition to believe that I was doing some good, accomplishing something more than egoism and a not-so-bad way to earn bread. Rather, at some point, I had to decide to have no shame about the game I was playing. I have to do things all the time that seem to do noone, especially myself, any good. We all do. Some of us might grimace at such things, but certainly arent stupid enough to complain.

We all wish for graduate school to be a comfortable and encouraging environment, but as long as the professors we work with evaluate us, write our letters of recommendations, we will treat them something other than human, extoling them in our minds one way or another for our own futures sake. If it were merely a matter of education, we could perhaps find an environment best suited to learning. But its about Jobs and Careers. Money. Food. Really, it is. Some of us are so jaded, so on the verge of driving an SUV through a supermarket, that if this doesnt work out, we don't work out.

So I play the game. Hula. Take my lumps. Smile and smile. Give talks, read papers, in mostly empty conference rooms, circling the compliments I've recieved just a few weeks before. Am I earning? Is it worth it? Shrug. The Myth of Tenure sounds nice--and then maybe I won't have to cover myself with closed eyes and I can be absolutely honest with someone who asks me what's the point.

For balance, here's an excerpt from a 2001 English Ph.D. who is now an adjunct lecturer:

I have been teaching at [Prominent Private University] for the last two years, and I have been able to see the effects of this relativism on the undergraduates here. They are genuinely bewildered about what, if anything, counts as knowledge. One example that stands out for me: I taught a ìTopics in Theory and Criticismî course this last quarter. The usual approach to such a course here is to pick a flavor (Marx/Marxism, Queer/Gender, New Historicism/Foucault, Cultural Studies/Raymond Williams, etc. etc. etc.), read a series of that flavorís theoretical/critical texts, and then read a more traditionally literary text or two through the lens of the chosen flavor. It seems more than a bit template-driven. I tried to do something differentóthough hardly groundbreakingówith my course: take an historical trip beginning with Plato and working through the various paths that begin there and have ended up here (in the various flavors). I had to adapt the course on the fly, because I was supposed to be teaching a flavors course of my own, so I created a Classical vs. Renaissance theory course into which I snuck all kinds of other stuff ìoff-syllabus.î I thought the class was going miserablyóit was sometimes quite difficult to get students to talk about the material we were coveringóand I was sure that the approach I was trying was failing. On the last day of class, I got an ovation (thereís something thatís never happened before).

I didnít understand what was going on until a few days later. Several students came to see me during office hours to tell me that they had never taken a course quite like this one before. What they had expected was a template-driven, ìhereís how we apply ****ist theory to textsî approach, because that is how all of their classes are taught in the English department here. I still have a little trouble believing this, but according to my students, this course was the first time they had been asked to analyze the intellectual and/or historical bases of the critics themselves. They had gone into an English major thinking that it was going to be something about literary knowledge, aesthetics perhaps, maybe even history and social context, but none of the ones who spoke with me had been prepared for what you describe as the framework of ìdeconstructing race and gender, critiquing the concept of subjectivity, and theorizing culture.î Not a single one of these students had ever read a piece of ìtheoryî or ìcriticismî earlier than the 1960s (with the exception of one who had been asked to read a short excerpt from Marx). They simply had never been asked to do anything other than ìimitate without understandingî (to paraphrase your post).

Some of these students will enter PhD programs next year. [PPU] is quite fond, in fact, of taking people straight from a BA into its own PhD program (I was an exception to the general trend). The just barely-post undergraduate students who come here are then immediately put through an Introduction to Graduate Study class that is essentially no different from the template-driven ìflavorî courses I describe above (my own here was Marx and Marxism). It is painfully obvious to me now that such students are simply not prepared to do much of anything but accept what they are given (or reject it without knowing exactly why or how, or even what the myriad alternatives are). Graduate ìeducationî in a humanities discipline like English seems to be primarily about indoctrination and self-replication. By the time these students are ABD, knowing Foucault backwards and forwards while knowing almost nothing at all about Nietzsche or Plato (not to mention Shakespeare or any number of other ìcanonicalî figures) is not at all uncommon in my experience. Grandiose maneuvers without any background for themóthatís the graduate (and undergraduate) ìeducationî I have come to know.

UPDATE: Here's another story, from a comment posted at Dale Keiger's site:

Erin's commentary resonated with me as well.

I went through a graduate creative writing program, then switched into the Ph.D. literature program at the same university. One thing we creative writing students had noticed right away (and commented upon) was that the literature students were unhappy -- really, really unhappy.

My first two classes in the lit program, and I understood. The first I took a required survey course on critical theory. We were on Foucault by week four, and spent the next three weeks on Foucault.

Meanwhile, the professor teaching a survey course in drama decided that brain chemistry was really the important topic, and ended up spending his time talking about how emotions are generated in monkeys by their facial expressions. Fine: Could we turn to Moliere now?

As Erin touched upon, there is an expectation of a progression -- mastering the material of language and literature, then criticism, then critical theory. What had been cut out of the program was the learning of language and literature to make room for more and more critical theory.

Years later, I worked as a writer in a publishing house and interviewed and hired a few Ph.D.s who had given up hope on an academic career. Many of them were not as well-read (in terms of lit) as your average newspaperman, and no more versed in classical rhetoric and poetry as your average educated person.