Please discuss

13 Responses to “Please discuss”

1. remy
   March 10th, 2010 @ 5:42 am

   Hi mel,

   there’s been a fair bit of discussion about this at Adam Kotsko’s blog:

   http://itself.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-life-of-the-mind/

   and here at Roland Boer’s blog:
   http://stalinsmoustache.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/what-is-to-be-done-on-universities-and-the-intellectual-life/

   it is reasonably depressing, but also brutally honest.

2. ben
   March 10th, 2010 @ 9:44 am

   In lieu of a coherent comment, here are some off the cuf tweets I made about the article a few weeks ago:

   “Really didn’t need to wake up this morning and read another article on how grad school in the humanities is a big lie.”

   “I agree that things are terrible and we need to militant, collective and imaginative political organising to tackle them…”

   “But at the same time, it’s as if some of our higher ed diagnosticians have never seen exploitation or precarity before.”

   “I don’t disagree, but there’s something about the surprise associated w/ such diagnoses that smacks of privileged expectations.”

   “The *same* shock also manifests itself in the recent tendency towards ridiculously over-literal careerism in humanities & SS.”

   “We need rhetorical alternatives to “teh sky is falling on my dead poets society” or “be a sleazy douchebag”.”

   “On reflection, perhaps this same type of shock is also responsible for “ZOMG Facebook = Auschwitz!”"

3. ben
   March 10th, 2010 @ 9:46 am

   Also: “Exorbitant desires are essential to the radical political imagination, but are different from internalising aristocratic naïveté.”

4. Lyn
   March 10th, 2010 @ 10:24 am

   All of this dawned on me last year, halfway through my Phd. The only reason I haven’t quit is my not tertiary educated family’s pride, which I know is going to take a battering anyway when I end up working in Target.

5. glen
   March 10th, 2010 @ 2:52 pm

   The question of expectations is an important one. I want to flip Ben’s point though.

   The real myth is one about academia being the lowest rung of the ruling class. Maybe culturally, during a specific period, this was true, but not in neoliberal late-capitalist economies. Maybe it has just been my experience, and the experience of some of those around me, but PhDs are not privileged or valued for having a PhD.

6. ben
   March 10th, 2010 @ 3:07 pm

   Well, there’s definitely is a contradiction between mythology and reality, sure. That’s kind of the point.

7. ben
   March 10th, 2010 @ 3:17 pm

   Sorry Glen, didn’t mean to be flip. My point is that we can’t simply point to the current function of PhDs under neoliberalism. Zombie neo-archaisms abound. When I was an undergrand living through the Dawkins reforms, there was a lot of idiotic noise from social democratic activists about defending the sacred humaniies sandstone and whatnot, as if that had anything to do with resisting what was actually going on.

8. ana australiana
   March 10th, 2010 @ 3:18 pm

   I say live a life of the mind regardless! Which makes escape to the City of Ladies always possible xx

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_City_of_Ladies

9. ana australiana
   March 10th, 2010 @ 3:23 pm

   I mean, “_we_ live a life of the mind regardless.” Perhaps my mind needs some more time in the City of Ladies.

10. Agnes
    March 10th, 2010 @ 4:04 pm

    Back in January, I briefly commented on the ‘just don’t go’ mindset on Macquarie’s learning and teaching blog under the title ‘Dissuading young scholars’:
    http://www.mq.edu.au/ltc/blog/?p=1077

    Thanks for the link to this article, Mel, I’ll need to follow up my first response – my optimism is taking a pummeling.

11. remy
    March 11th, 2010 @ 5:55 am

    maybe we should all revolt like the Taiping Rebellion. then they’ll know not to mess with dejected scholars.

12. MC
    March 11th, 2010 @ 7:20 am

    @ben The things I miss on Twitter hiatus! It’s very nice of you to retweet here

    It’s funny, and maybe relevant, that yesterday I bumped in to our new Dean at the end of the day. He asked how the conference went last year, as we hadn’t seen each other for a while…

    We got to talking about things the Faculty can do to improve postgraduate training (this is one of his particular passions). So there could be an opportunity to do something at a local level, and I have a few ideas on the boil about what cross-institutional initiatives might work.

    BUT the funny part of the story is that I was saying “now you are moving up the echelons surely you are in a position to do something about this” etc etc. And he replied with a story from someone he had spoken to that very day. This person had said that he intends to stay at Sydney until he is 85 – and there is nothing anyone can do about it. At Sydney at least, part of the problem in getting new blood into the system is getting the very senior (I mean already retired!) people to recognise their position. There are layers upon layers of entitlement to be rolled back, and often the worst kind is simply unfathomable to those of us who have only known the university in its recent form.

13. Lawson
    March 15th, 2010 @ 12:00 am

    As someone who is most likely to embark on a PhD next year and thus is facing all these issues quite acutely, I wonder what you think of an assessment one of my lecturers made, esp. considering MC’s comment – he reckons that the next five to ten years will be a boon for new PhDs because a bunch of boomers will retire at the top, and thus everyone below shifts up, apparently opening a big gap for entry-level academic roles. Thoughts?

    Regardless, I think whether this happens it’s only a bandaid on what’s clearly a much larger structural problem, with little solution in sight.

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