Grafton's Review of Menand

A couple of days ago, I pointed to Tony Grafton's review of Louis Menand's new book. However, my reference was too brief; Grafton's piece really needs attention.

Grafton writes that Menand is completely right about the problems with academia, but faults him for his bloodlessness. Menand does not truly capture the abuses that happen in graduate school and post-graduate school and how many smart, creative people are chewed up in the system. Grafton writes,

The humanities need reform because their traditions are confining and their job market is a catastrophe, but reform cannot mean surrender, or dilution. It means finding out how to do what the scientists have already done: how to combine the rigor of tradition with experiment and innovation--but without replacing hordes of underpaid adjuncts with hordes of underpaid post-docs, as the scientists have. More generally, it means finding creative ways to make life instructively hard, for a few years, for the broadest range of talented people of all sorts and conditions whom we can educate and then employ productively and decently. What makes reform urgent is the passion, the erudition, and the intelligence of those whom the academy is now failing--the sheer destruction of talent and love and energy, of the traditions of deep learning, over which we humanists are presiding. The masters of the next generation are still knocking on our doors, but most of them find themselves too busy speeding down the freeway to their next campus, grading stacks of papers, and worrying about their debts to learn as they wish to learn and as we need them to learn. They are missing from Menand’s cool, lucid, and limited book, as they are from so much of what is thought and written about us humanists in these bad days.

Grafton, an avid reader of academic blogs, describes the problems so eloquently that I found myself licking old wounds last night.

As happy as I am in my new post-academic stage of life, I still have to be very careful to not go to "the bad place" where I beat myself up for wasting twenty years in academia, for the zeroes on my social security statement, for the student loans bills that still arrive ten years after graduation, for the publications that I wrote but don't have my name on them, for all sorts of past injustices.

The morning run will improve things.

Comments

[Laura/Geekymom]

I've spent a few months living in the "bad place" as I've been writing about those early hopeful years of academia. The Talking Heads song applies, "How did I get here?" I also just compared my social security statement to my husband's. He has a couple of zero years, too, from staying at home with the kid while I worked a corporate job. I am happier than ever in my current state, but every once in a while, I feel like I should do more with all that education and experience. I remind myself that it's given me opportunities that I might not have had otherwise, not the least of which is ending up with Mr. Geeky. Not everything we do has to pay off. Think of the many businesses that fail and the people who continue to start them, learning from the past. But I know, sometimes you want to pick at the scab. :)

[Doug]

Geeky Laura, as long as you're not quoting TH with "My God! What have I done?" you're probably ok.