Faculty in humanities disciplines (including history) really struggle with the question of what to do when our strongest students tell us they want to go on for doctoral study.
I’ve been known for my skeptical advice about pursuing a doctorate for more than two decades, and that wasn’t even focused on the job market or the conditions of labor in academia, which are the real issues at this point. And yet, as many of my former students who have gone on to do doctoral work know, once I run through my usual warnings and my strenuous counsel to at least wait a few years after graduating to apply, that I’m still encouraging to the students who are determined to pursue a doctorate if I think they’re prepared and motivated.
The state of academic employment and the general indifference of much of the leadership of higher education to that issue weighs more and more heavily on me every time I offer advice and encouragement, or write a letter of recommendation. I understand that nothing looks particularly certain as far as long-term prospects go, and that for students who have felt strongly drawn to their academic studies and have excelled at disciplinary research it doesn’t seem as if there’s anything else out there calling to them. Many of the common alternatives that I once brought up with humanities-focused students seem just as precarious (journalism, for example).
There’s also the deep problem that most faculty only succeed at affecting around the edges that graduate work in most humanities disciplines and fields draws upon and reproduces existing formations of cultural and social capital. Most motivated students considering doctoral work, whatever their class background, are aware of the issue and often have effective strategies for critique and reconceptualization. I’m not worried about them undertaking doctoral study—but I am conscious that a lot of the other obvious working lives that are centrally defined by their relationship to the humanities—working in the arts, in film, in publishing, in architecture or design, in museums, in intellectual property law, in cultural policy-making—are mostly by their nature careers that require a lot of serendipity but also a fair amount of networking and ability to read implicit or unspoken social cues.
I’ll still help students who are determined to become professors after they listen to my concerns and warnings, and I’ll be ecstatic when any of my students find a way to connect their working lives and their affinity for the humanities in some other fashion. But I think what I’d like most is for all of my students—indeed, all the students at my institution and institutions like it—to become champions of the arts, of literature and publishing, of philosophy, of history, of cultural anthropology, of all the ways we know and practice the humanities inside and outside of academia.
I want all of them to graduate believing that a good society, a happy society, a successful society, cherishes beauty for its own sake, not just because somebody’s making a buck off of it. That such a society embraces difficult conversations and complicated truths, that it believes in looking into the past with a clear eye and a troubled heart. Defining “the humanities” is a wretched exercise, but there is something of a “you know it when you see it” dimension to it. It’s there in a good meal, a great film, a good book. It’s in a song, a painting, a well-told story. It’s in historical scholarship and in anthropological study, it’s in philosophy and critical theory, it’s in religious studies and theology.
I’m sympathetic to the argument made by Chad Wellmon and Paul Reiser in their recent book Permanent Crisis that saying the humanities are in a crisis is a long-standing structural feature of humanistic thought and practice—and as I’ve noted elsewhere, at least one reason to bring that point up in public conversation is just to interrupt the “petitionary pity party” that often erupts among humanist faculty when they are gathered together in grievance. But here I am in the same emotional and intellectual space, because we don’t merely gather in grievance but in grief.
Grief that what we value does seem so unvalued by the dominant standards of our moment and yet apparently is a powerful menace to far-right conservatives looking for a target to mobilize around. It’s hard not to feel a bit at sea when ostensibly liberal leaders inside and outside of higher education struggle to find a good word to say about the humanities that doesn’t amount to “you can make money with them too!” and “we need well-rounded engineers and doctors” at the same time that political leaders on the right argue that the humanities and history are among their deadliest enemies as they lead the charge to forbid public institutions to talk about or showcase art, culture and history.
I think that leaves a lot of people who really do value what lies inside the domain of the humanities a bit at sea when public institutions are under attack for having anything to do with the humanities or when leaders who worship austerity as if it were the new avatar of Mammon signal that they regard the humanities as an improvident luxury unless they have been properly monetized. So for at least some of our students who might think that a doctorate is the way to maintain their affinities and connections and engagement with humanistic work or humanistic practice, I think my fondest wish is that they would go on to work outside the academy but retain the ferocity and intensity of that early devotion in their lives as citizens. Because to some extent, we’re seeing that the academy is not a very powerful place to stand to fight for them: universities are controlled either by legislative fiat or by boards that are increasingly made up of financial professionals, universities are increasingly cut off from public culture by a variety of forces, and faculty are mostly in a precarious situation due to the casualization of academic labor. Which brings us around again to the main reason not to go to graduate school, but with an additional twist for the aspiring humanist: because being a professor, unfortunately, is not a strong place to stand for love or money if you’re engaged with humanistic study and practice.
Word, Tim. I also encourage students to stand for what they love in their educations—but rarely to enter the professoriate. Our careers are no longer attainable, I fear, for most PhD students, and for that I also grieve.