The Graduate School Blues

I am only interested in facts that feed an interest which is total, directed to the universe and to life as an existing whole; and it is my intuition of the nature of that wholeness, my desire to hold it within my mind as a coherent conception, which drives me on to the discovery of facts and their reconciliation in a philosophy of life.—Sir Herbert Read, “The Adamantine Sickle” (1962).

To many observers, academic graduate education in America makes sense primarily as an initiation ritual, which inflicts scars upon a young man before it certifies him as mature enough to face the professional world. As a teaching institution, it generally offers considerably less education than the prospective scholar or teacher received as an undergraduate. As a professional school, it tends to discourage many of its most promising candidates at the same time that it fails to fulfill the increasing demand for qualified teachers. Intellectually, graduate school operates in the face of an increasingly common suspicion that its practices do the mind more harm than good, as well as the embarrassing fact that many of the most admired scholars, particularly in the humanities, do not have doctorates at all. As a human experience, it is so needlessly stultifying and painful, even for the most successful, that I suspect that miserable memories of graduate school may be the “shared awareness” of the intellectual generation under thirty. Not only does nearly everyone involved take the situation more cynically than seriously but a dislike for graduate school is nearly all but unanimous. The professors would prefer to lecture undergraduates, whom they rightly regard as possessing livelier minds, while the graduate students themselves nostalgically remember undergraduate pleasures.

RK

About the Author

Richard Kostelanetz

Featured Tags

I am only interested in facts that feed an interest which is total, directed to the universe and to life as an existing whole; and it is my intuition of the nature of that wholeness, my desire to hold it within my mind as a coherent conception, which drives me on to the discovery of facts and their reconciliation in a philosophy of life.—Sir Herbert Read, “The Adamantine Sickle” (1962).

To many observers, academic graduate education in America makes sense primarily as an initiation ritual, which inflicts scars upon a young man before it certifies him as mature enough to face the professional world. As a teaching institution, it generally offers considerably less education than the prospective scholar or teacher received as an undergraduate. As a professional school, it tends to discourage many of its most promising candidates at the same time that it fails to fulfill the increasing demand for qualified teachers. Intellectually, graduate school operates in the face of an increasingly common suspicion that its practices do the mind more harm than good, as well as the embarrassing fact that many of the most admired scholars, particularly in the humanities, do not have doctorates at all. As a human experience, it is so needlessly stultifying and painful, even for the most successful, that I suspect that miserable memories of graduate school may be the “shared awareness” of the intellectual generation under thirty. Not only does nearly everyone involved take the situation more cynically than seriously but a dislike for graduate school is nearly all but unanimous. The professors would prefer to lecture undergraduates, whom they rightly regard as possessing livelier minds, while the graduate students themselves nostalgically remember undergraduate pleasures.