There is a great discussion on Baraita about the emotional erosions of graduate school, with comments speculating on both why deep, even debilitating feelings of insecurity are endemic to the grad school experience (at least in the humanities) and on what can be done to make grad school more positive, constructive, and empowering (I hate that word but it's the right one to use here).

Some say it has to do with the low status of the humanities within the academy and beyond. Some say it's a function of growing up, or of being challenged intellectually. Some say it's a gendered thing, some say it's universal. One poignantly points out that it may well have much to do with the enforced infantilization of grad school, that not being allowed to lead, or even to undertake real responsibility, during one's twenties can result in the belief that one is terminally inadequate.

To these theories I would add one additional point: the feelings of insecurity, and the suspicion/creeping conviction that one is a fraud, are on some level very reasonable and accurate reactions to have to the academic humanities. Certainly a lack of mentoring, lack of community, lack of funding, lack of respect, and so on contribute to these feelings--the academy is a very abusive place. But certainly, too, the awareness that there really are a lot of frauds working in these disciplines contributes to the worry that one may oneself be one of them. We can all name professors, colleagues, even friends who are faking it--who don't know their stuff, who can't write a grammatical sentence, who don't even know that they don't know their stuff or can't write a grammatical sentence.

Some of us have covered for the frauds in our midst (doing their research, doing their grading, doing the committee work they won't do, teaching the classes they won't or can't teach, writing much kinder book reviews for them than we should). Some of us have just looked the other way--we don't help the frauds along, but we don't insist that they be accountable, either. Rarely are the frauds outed for what they are--and this is because we are implicated in the fakery ourselves. From day one of graduate school, we have to pose and posture. We have to talk a certain talk and walk a certain walk, and we have to do it in the full awareness that we are pretending to be something that by definition we are not.

Getting socialized as academics happens at the same time that we are supposed to learn what we need to know to become academics--so we are imitating long before we are truly doing, trying to pass for something we all know we cannot possibly be yet, and feeling dirty and doubtful about it from day one. In English, for example, there is no real notion of starting slowly and progressing rationally, of first acquiring deep knowledge of language and literature, of then developing a strong understanding of literary criticism (historical, theoretical, methodological), of then beginning to make one's own informed contributions to the field. Instead, one begins by learning grandiose maneuvers: first year graduate students may not know their Shakespeare, they may not be able to read Middle English, they may not be able to tell a ballad from an ode or explain what makes a novel a novel, but instead of spending their time filling in these gaps, they are taught to devote themselves to such woefully banal and impossibly vague activities as deconstructing race and gender, critiquing the concept of subjectivity, and theorizing culture.

It's ridiculous, it's widespread, and it means that for many of us there is no real moment of apprenticeship, no acknowledged period of quiet, patient, guided study. Instead, "learning" becomes synonymous with imitating what we don't understand, imitating in turn gets confused with knowing, and passing becomes a way of life. This is one reason, I think, why there is so much pretension in the academic humanities, and why the pretentiousness so often takes the form of speaking in unintelligible tongues: jargon is a protective shield in a culture where the intellectual not only knows not what he thinks, but does not want to know this about himself.

Add to this the corrosive relativism of the humanities--which means in practice that no one can agree on what the disciplines are and on what constitutes expertise in any of them--and you've got a situation ripe for feelings of self-doubt. It's not just that one man's fraud is another man's brilliant voice, but also that the lessons about writing, researching, reading and thinking that one professor teaches are the very lessons other professors are teaching against. There is no there there in the academic humanities, and in a very real sense, we are all faking it. We feel like frauds because we really are frauds. In a professional culture as relativistic as ours is, we literally cannot be anything else.

My own feeling is that much of what I describe above is the more or less inevitable result of attempting to professionalize a type of activity--"the life of the mind," for lack of a better phrase--that simply is not amenable to professionalization. Because of this, I'm not sure the answer is to work on making the system of graduate education more comfortable--though the blatant abuses of that system should certainly be corrected. More on this as thoughts arise.