Dispatch from Berkeley:

i'm an immigrant but an english major; or maybe i should write that i'm an english major because i'm an immigrant. english is my second language; learned it on the fly as i arrived in california at the age of 14 & began to adjust to the (brutal) climate of american high schools. out of the five languages i speak & write, i consider english to be the most beautiful.

i've been gobbling up piles of books since i was five or six. when i began reading in english, often revisiting works i originally experienced in my native tongue or french, that's when i knew w/ spine-tingling certainty that study of english language & literature is what i want to & can do best. i've worked hard to place myself in a financial & academic position where after obtaining my ba, i wouldn't have any problems pursuing a doctorate degree. but now, a semester & spare change away from graduation, i'm becoming increasingly certain that i'm in many ways incompatible w/ the bureaucracy, the institutional & institutionalized bias & pervasively & pervertly corrupt environment i'm about to head into.

i consulted w/ the professor who guided me through my initial ventures into critical theory as a freshman & sophomore. although a textbook example of an "academic progressive," the man is extremely honest & an excellent instructor to boot. his basic advice was, don't even. he said, if i'm honestly & consistently comitted to my current principles (political but also my traditional-humanist stance) chances are that i'll be ground to fine dust long before i have a chance to be roundly bitch-slapped by an examination comission that would deride my simplistic & critically uninformed take on the world in general & subject of my disertation in particular.

sooner or later, i'm going to have to make a practical decision. i don't want to be 40 & hating every minute of whatever it is i'm doing & getting getting paid for, but i can't afford to be 30 and out of a job because i refuse to pay proper homage to the proverbial altars of lacan, derrida & foucault.

we don't always get what we want in life, but we're supposed to get what we need--in my case, the opportunity to be heard, taken seriously & judged on the merits of my arguments. as things stand right now in humanities departments of the land, that opportunity doesn't really exist.

From my response:

Critical Mass is in part a record of my profound ambivalence about and anger at a discipline and a profession that I have given myself to totally and completely since I was twenty years old (I am now 35). I have lived it, and only it, for my entire adult life. For many years I lived it with absolute naivete and dangerous trust. Critical Mass is in large part a response to an extremely rude awakening I had several years ago, the details of which do not matter, but the outcome of which is a recognition that it is precisely the passion you express below that needs to be tempered with awareness. Disillusionment manifests itself in direct proportion to the intensity of prior faith. I'm not a malcontent, so much as I am someone seeking balance and answers, and, frankly, some kind of ethical means of reconciling what I now know about the structure of academe and the culture of the academic humanities with the very wonderful, beautiful things that come from living a life dedicated to reading, writing, and teaching about material one loves.

I never try to dissuade people from going to graduate school. Don't imagine that I would attempt that with you. What I do tell people--and what I have stated repeatedly on Critical Mass--is that it is crucial for people to make informed decisions. They need to know what the job market is like and what the political climate is; they need to know what they will have to be and do in order to have a hope of success. They should take a graduate course or two while still undergrads. They should not go in blind. I get a lot of mail from people in your position. I never tell them not to follow their heart. I do tell them to make sure they know what they are getting into. There are a *lot* of people who go to grad school not really knowing what to expect, and who wind up feeling massively betrayed. They may waste 6 or 7 years before they make up their minds to leave. By then their twenties are gone, they have no savings, and they have to start over again at something else. This is avoidable. Whatever you do, don't get taken in.

I do think you are right, that too many people go to grad school without feeling "called." You'll find a lot of people populating PhD programs who are looking for an extension of the undergraduate experience, a lot of people who are there for reasons of ego, others who are blatant asskissing careerists, others who are avoiding growing up and figuring out what they really want to do by convincing themselves that they are meant for academe. You'll also find plenty of neurosis and competitiveness and petty oneupmanship--even among those who feel "called." It can't be otherwise with the job market--and the consequent competition for professorial favor--being so tight. If you can find your way past all that, and you can find meaning of your own on your own in the work that you do, then you'll be okay.

What does this mean for people who want to enter the field? It means, above all, that they should understand that there is no agreement about what "the field" is, and that this is a sign of massive philosophical, ethical, and professional rudderlessness. That doesn't mean that a person can't get an awful lot out of devoting the better part of their twenties to intensive literary study (if that is indeed how they want to spend their doctoral years--many come to English to do something else). But it does mean that they should not expect to feel there what their friends in law school or med school feel--that they are entering a genuine discipline with genuine conventions and genuine, identifiable standards of expertise; that their training will, as a matter of consequence, be rewarded by stimulating, challenging work. It's hard to anticipate, or to explain, the psychic erosion that results from the creeping recognition that you are most definitely not devoting your best intellectual and moral energies to something definite, honorable, and real. The gruesome economic realities of the job market and the adjunct labor system only heighten the sense of imminent institutional betrayal and incipient self-loathing that defines the emotional landscape of far too many graduate students (and that then shapes the peculiarly forgetful and rationalizing mentalities of those who do manage to land tenure-track jobs and keep them).