20131108.0621

A few days ago, my lovely wife emailed me a link to the Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow's New York Times article, published on 1 November 2013 and revised on 3 November, "The Repurposed Ph.D."  In it, Tuhus-Dubrow reports that an increasing number of people who trained as academics are leaving the traditional academic workforce (which is itself substantially undermined, with most of the work of teaching carried out by contingent academic labor).  Some are transitioning to other careers within academic institutions, such as library and curatorial work.  Others are transitioning to work outside the academy that is similar to academia, working in programs that call for many of the skills developed during graduate study.  Still others are abandoning academic work and work like it altogether, even going so far as to strive to prevent other people from entering into it.  Even so, Tuhus-Dubrow offers some indication that those with terminal degrees can find satisfying, worthwhile work to do, even if it is outside the tenure track.

How much indication is offered, though, is questionable.  As is understandable for a New York Times piece, Tuhus-Dubrow's article focuses on New York City.  In such a place, there is potentially the kind of work that she outlines, work that takes the kind of expertise and focus that I have yet to see develop outside of the academy or the type of monastic community from which Western academia proceeds.  But that does not mean that people are willing to hire the terminally degreed for such jobs, as I found out in my own recent job hunt (discussion begins here, I think).  Indeed, as a result of that experience, I have little sympathy for the Capitanio quoted by Tuhus-Dubrow; if he thinks sending out 60 applications in three years is "kind of desperate," what, then, must I call my having sent out some 70, to the academy and to "real" jobs, in a few months?  And I got interviews at perhaps three institutions (and a job, yes, but still a contingent one).

As my wife and I have both looked for jobs in the past few months, we have encountered a number of employers who have rejected us because we have advanced degrees in humanistic study.  Outside the academy in a number of places, a doctorate in English is not usually the kind of thing employers want to see; rather than bespeaking attention to detail, focused discipline, a careful attention to the beauty and accuracy of language, and an abiding understanding of the people who create that language, the degree is seen as a waste of time, a frivolity, an avoidance of thing that matter, a disconnection from "real life," a predilection away from "wholesome" values, and, perhaps, a hyper-exaggeration of primary and secondary school English teaching (I never thought I'd get so much use out of Zawacki).  Advanced degrees in some other humanities fields--linguistics, for example--are met with confusion.  And even when those of us who have such things work (using the argumentative skills our degrees demand of us and, in the case of those whose degrees are about writing, those in specific language) to present ourselves and our credentials in ways that suit the working world, we are rejected.  Never mind being able to dash out several hundred words of researched, well-written, and relatively polished prose in under an hour; never mind being able to type close to 80 wpm while generating the content, or ten-keying at several thousand strokes an hour; never mind being able to glance at a document or webpage and understand in that glance what audience is intended and what the composer thinks about that audience; never mind that these are the very things asked for in the job description.  None of that matters; the degree is the wrong one (even though no degree is mentioned in the job listing).

It is something I have remarked upon relatively recently and earlier, that those of us who have sought the kind of education scholars in the humanities have find themselves made Other.  And it is a choice that we make, going into it.  I have to wonder, then, if the post-ac people Tuhus-Dubrow mentions do not have the right idea...