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I FILED my dissertation in May 1999 at the University of California, Berkeley, after a graduate career of nine years. I stuck around at the end largely because I was still looking for a job. But I wasn't just spinning my wheels; I did all sorts of interesting things during my last few years of candidacy. I've spent three years on the academic job market, had a few interviews, and entertained one overseas job offer, which I turned down.
In many ways, I had an exceptionally good experience as a graduate student. I was well supported with fellowships and grants and honored with awards. I had varied and rewarding teaching experiences, as well as opportunities to examine and improve my teaching. My dissertation remained interesting to me until the end. It has seemed a great privilege to be paid to write a book on the topic of my choice. I've been lucky enough to have support from a remarkable writing group and an extraordinary mentor, Donald McQuade.
My point is that I come to the discussion of careers outside the academy for English PhDs without bitterness or regret about my years as a graduate student. Rather, I am entering this discussion with a sense of self-preservation and of wanting, at the age of thirty-two, to get on with my life.
When I sat down early in the fall of 1998 to update my CV for a third academic job search, I had a physical response: my heart started to pound, and I broke into a sweat. I got up, walked away from the computer, and admitted to myself how awful it was to enumerate my qualifications yet again with such narrow prospects of reward. Equally discouraging, even if I did end up getting a tenure-track appointment, my partner and I would almost certainly have to move somewhere we hadn't chosen to live. Nor would I get to choose among an array of institutions or negotiate substantially for what I wanted. Any job offer I got would most likely be the only job offer I got, and many other candidates would be lined up, anxious to accept it on pretty much any terms.
I considered my list of accomplishments, and I wanted to run screaming from the room. So when I went then to the career management workshop created through the efforts of Rose von Thater, Maresi Nerad, Steven Goldsmith, and others, it was with some sense of urgency.
What were, for me, the most valuable aspects of that workshop? First, there was the mere fact of sitting in the same room with others from the Berkeley English department and talking openly, as a group, about careers besides college teaching, breaking the taboo that reigns among many graduate students on this topic. I felt immediately less isolated, and it became very clear that we PhD students don't need to be isolated from one another in considering work outside the academy. (It seemed important that the workshop was held on neutral ground, in a building away from the English department, to make this discussion less daunting.) By talking about other kinds of work, we turned down the brightness of the holy aura surrounding academic work. We considered the possibility that other work can be rewarding in similar ways. The need to address this possibility means that workshops like these must be created specifically for graduate students in English and tailored to support the humanistic values that brought many of us to English departments in the first place.
Another valuable effect of the workshop was the shift from a paradigm of helplessness and narrowing options to a paradigm of autonomy and choice. So I might say not "I'm stuck in this terrible job market" but, rather, "I choose to try my chances here, even as I have these other, viable options." Or, whether because of the awful academic job market or not, I might say "I choose to go elsewhere."
One of the most important moments of the workshop was when the workshop leaders asked us to list the skills we've gained in graduate school that can be transferred to other contexts. This question and our abundant, sometimes surprising responses moved us from viewing graduate school as time out of the working world and recast it as valuable work experience. I wish I had had the chance to go to one of these workshops years earlier, to gain a greater sense of myself as an autonomous adult with useful skills and to stop feeling quite so trapped by circumstances beyond my control.
All these shifts in thinking have the potential not only to make graduate students feel better and to improve their lives in the long term but also to improve their work within English departments. If graduate students can leave behind a sense that they're traveling down a narrowing and increasingly crowded path with a precipice on either side and feel instead as though they are advancing across a field, with choices about which way to turn, they'll feel less desperate. They'll become more confident teachers and scholars, they'll write their dissertations faster, and they'll engage in the kind of competition that energizes people instead of devastating and paralyzing them.
The taboo on discussing work outside the academy is neither a plot by professors nor paranoia among graduate students. Two anecdotes illustrate the way too many of us are trapped in this narrow and exclusive thinking. In the fall of 1998, I led the English department's seminar on teaching for new graduate student instructors. After I went to the career management workshop, I described it to the students in the seminar (most in their third year of study) and asked how many would be interested in hearing talks by humanities PhDs teaching outside the academy or engaged in work somehow connected to education (yet outside college teaching). The group barely responded. Yet, after class, several students came to me individually and said, yes, hearing from such people would be very helpful, but they hesitated to say so during the seminar because they were afraid to appear as through they weren't confident about finding an academic job--or as though they weren't thoroughly committed to becoming professors.
I read recently in PMLA about the hostile response of the Graduate Student Caucus to Elaine Showalter's broaching the topic of careers outside the academy (319). I suspect that some of that hostility comes out of just such insecurity, as well as out of fear that all nonacademic work for PhDs is constituted by meaningless, low-level "McJobs." Surely it also expresses sheer anger about the state of the academic job market.
An acquaintance of mine, also a recent PhD, decided some time ago that she no longer wants academic work. She recently applied for a job reviewing screenplays at a major animation studio. It would be her dream job. She has a lifelong interest in cartoons and has taught courses about them. She would get to analyze and criticize texts for a living. She would influence the making of movies that will in turn influence millions of children, and she would be very highly paid--an important point, because she has astronomical student loans to pay off. With an assistant professor's salary, this friend would have to live very small--to live like a graduate student--for many years. Even if she wanted to hang in there and continue looking for a tenure-track position, there's no way she could afford to work as a part-time lecturer in the meantime. Living through the several years now so often required between the PhD and a tenure-track job relies on a level of privilege or a freedom from financial obligation, or at least on a tolerance for extended penury, that not everyone can muster.
Her pursuit of nonacademic career opportunities has been met with sympathy--as in "I'm sorry it has come to this." I'm certain that this sympathy has been meant with complete benevolence; it could in some circumstances even be the most appropriate response. Yet, however well-meant, such sympathy has also conveyed to her a distinct sense that pursuing a nonacademic career is a fall-back stratagem in defeat. Especially under current employment conditions, we all--graduate students and faculty members alike--must rethink the assumption that makes it seem so reasonable to belittle aspirations like my colleague's: the assumption that for someone who has earned a PhD in English, any work outside the academy will be a step down and that, therefore, enthusiasm about such work must be a brave mask hiding disappointment.
It may seem extraordinary, when doctoral study in English is so much an apprenticeship to professorhood, to suggest that PhD students and faculty members address other career possibilities. I know how gratifying it is when an undergraduate talks about wanting to pursue literary studies, and I can only imagine how wrenching it must be for a faculty mentor to see a gifted graduate student choose to leave the academy.
But the reality of the job market makes these extraordinary times. For some, it is a real emergency. I know several peers who have clinical crises of anxiety rooted in the academic job market. One administrator in our department jokes to PhD candidates that if no teaching appointment in the department is available at the moment, one will surely open up at the last minute because of a nervous breakdown. I think the last thing I or others in similar circumstances want is sympathy; instead, we want to find ways to get on with our lives and do rewarding work for salaries that do justice to our qualifications.
A lot of people I know wonder what I am going to do next to make a living. Recently, I have taught two junior seminars in the Berkeley English department. It has been a pleasure, and it has proved a buffer zone while I consider my next moves. But I don't plan to remain a temporary, part-time, and low-paid instructor for long. There's a line from E. E. Cummings that has gone through my mind several times during my graduate career, and I repeat it here without bitterness or accusation: "there is some s. I will not eat" (244). That line snagged in my brain long before I encountered Stanley Fish's suggestion that academics "like to eat shit" (278). Maybe so--but I like to think I know when to stop.
I have also become involved in another kind of work, thanks to Donald McQuade. Two years ago, he and two other faculty members secured a grant from the NEH to run summer institutes for American instructors at secondary and postsecondary levels--a program of discussion and curricular innovation conducted on an equal basis among teachers. He hired me to help run the program and also invited me to participate. I am writing an essay for a book-length collection that will come out of this series of institutes. And as I have worked on this project, I've become more and more interested in literacy education, broadly conceived.
In the spring of 1999, I wrote a grant proposal to continue the group's work, and we were funded by the office of the president of the University of California for the 1999-2000 academic year. I currently coordinate this pedagogical research project, and I expect that we will secure more funding in the future. Meanwhile, I am also working on several new projects as a freelance grant writer. For example, I have recently written a grant proposal for a leftist, youth-oriented Internet project about cultural and economic globalization: challenging, meaningful work that draws on the best parts of my experience as a graduate student.
My partner has a great job with a software company in San Francisco, and we both love living in the Bay Area. We've been wanting to buy our own home for several years, and we're sick of wondering year by year whether we will soon move away. This coming year, it may or may not be worth it to move for an academic job. At this point, it would take a really good job to move us.
Believe it or not, as I look realistically at my choices, my situation looks increasingly like an opportunity to stand back, think hard about what I love most to do, and create something really good for myself. I don't mean to be overly sunny about any of this. What I mean is to emphasize that it is both possible and urgent for people in English departments to change how they think about future work for graduate students.
The author is Lecturer in English and coordinator of a pedagogical research project at the University of California, Berkeley, and a freelance grant writer. A version of this paper was presented at the 1999 ADE Summer Seminar West hosted by Montana State University, Bozeman, and the University of Montana in Polson, Montana.
Cummings, E. E. "i sing of Olaf glad and big." Poems, 1923-1954. New York: Harcourt, 1954. 244.
Fish, Stanley. "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos." There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. 273-79.
Showalter, Elaine. "Presidential Address 1998: Regeneration." PMLA 114 (1998): 318-28.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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