My Love/Hate Relationship with Academia

Why are graduate students such a fucked up bunch of people? Personally, I think we're drawn to the academic system (Love me? Please tell me I'm good enough, smart enough, and can write like Butler or Derrida! Validate me, damn it!) because we're a bunch of scared children who want to please our parents, advisors, professors, but also want to rip out the hearts of other graduate students (who are just like us!) because they annoy the shit out of us.

Before I started grad school I heard horror stories of students who would use razor blades to cut out articles from journals or re-shelved library books in places where students would never find them (ostensibly, so that no other students could have access to them). Yeah, right. I'm sure that shit goes on at Ivy League schools, but here at State U we're too busy juggling the supposed "half time" teaching assistantship and the nine credit hours we have to complete every semester while learning the ropes. I had envisioned grad school as this one big classroom where we all learned "stuff" (coming from a metropolitan urban non-residential campus I had no idea what that "stuff" would be) and talked about it. Yeah, right.

For those of you contemplating grad school, let me offer some advice: only pursue this if you are independently wealthy OR you don't give a damn about being deep in debt for the rest of your life (I am not kidding about this one - it's really the only way to survive). I have loved grad school as a process of learning and teaching, but I'll tell you - it's fucked with my head. I'm sure I was pretty screwed up before I got here, but now that I'm on the verge of finishing up and getting out - well, suffice it to say that I am *royally* fucked up now. Thank goodness for better living through cheap university subsidized chemistry - anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medications, anti-ADD medications have all made their way into my medicine cabinet as a means of helping me get through "just one more day."

You know what's really fucked up about grad school? It's that we all BUY it. We buy the crap that tells us we can be the next the next great chemist/biologist/literary theorist. We buy the fact that we should want these stupid crappy tenure track jobs that are becoming fewer and fewer each year (thanks to those of us who glut the market and make adjuncting the wave of the future). We buy the fact that we should value what the univeristy values - working long hours for shitty pay and the ephemeral promise of a sabbatical or a corner office or a graduate seminar. We buy it because they sell it. We buy it because we're told that it's the brass ring. We buy it because we're so fucking deep in debt that we cease to have choices in the matter - or at least we *think* we do.

When I came into grad school I can remember saying "Theory is for those who can't teach" with such conviction. I believed that those folks who spent their lives trying to unravel the mysteries of "performativity" or "authenticity" were so far up their own asses that they couldn't see the forrest for the trees. I spent a large portion of my time prepping for teaching, and was smug about the fact that my students "loved my class." You gotta love those first year idealists.

Now that I'm close to finishing, I'm not so sure I care about the hallowed halls of the ivory tower institutions. In fact, I know I don't give a shit about them. I've watched some of my friends take jobs that they didn't particularly want in locations that they loathed, just to say they had a job. They work for universities whose missions are appaling in their consumerist approach (students are 'clients' and professors are expected to do whatever they can to give the clients their money's worth so that mom and dad won't call up the provost or president and complain that Amanda or Christopher aren't getting along in the system, and that their $40,000 will be going somewhere else next year).

And what am I going to do? Hell, I don't know. Maybe I'll adjunct for awhile. Perhaps I'll work on becoming a licensed secondary education instructor and head to the inner city, and maybe I'll just say "Screw it" and go back to waiting tables - but this time I'll make those bastards call me Doctor!