The moralism of self-improvement: grad school edition

Just as crappy YA lit is defended on the grounds that reading anything is by definition better than not-reading, there emerges in discussions about the wisdom of going to grad school a similarly lopsided proposition: Grad school (specifically, the funded PhD program) is a choice, an investment of time and labor, with a highly uncertain outcome. Nonetheless, no matter what its outcome, there can be no justifiable grounds for regretting it. If you don't get an academic job afterwards, or a job that makes use of your PhD in any way, that's no reason to be upset. After all, you had the rare opportunity to spend several years in the uninhibited contemplation of ideas that interest you, and you ought to be grateful for that alone, regardless of where it gets you in worldly terms. The one exception to this seems to be cases of subsequent unpayable debt, which is legitimate ground for regret apparently only because it's a quantifiable loss. The sacrifice of time or opportunities to do other things is either insignificant (what's seven years if you live to 90?) or merely hypothetical (who knows if you would've had opportunities anyway?), and so negligible in the accounting of regret.

Sure, there is an ostensible purpose, a purported end to grad school, which is qualification for the professoriate or for some other employment requiring a PhD, but grad school apparently also offers the soul-expanding intrinsic benefits of study, learning, the pursuit of the beautiful and the true, living "the life of the mind"--and any negative impacts of the process had better be quite substantial if they can hope to outweigh the value we accord to these ineffable goods. And with this turn in the argument, the responsibility of grad programs for pumping out far more PhDs than they can employ effectively evaporates. Employment is no longer required or expected, since the process itself becomes the end.

And just as the process of grad school is soul-expanding, the jobs otherwise available to would-be grad students are in proportion soul-crushing. Down there in the "real world," people are driven by economic necessity to perform tasks that no thinking person would choose for himself, like answering phones and filling out spreadsheets. But up here, we are free to set our own tasks for ourselves, to pursue our interests, which are inspirations that bubble up from within us and drive us forward (or in circles, as the case may be), rather than have tasks imposed by others in the service of their interests. Considered in this light, we may the only people in the whole world aside from retired billionaires who are so free. And even billionaires are worse off in a way, because they're only free from the necessity to labor, but they're not necessarily self-motivated to pursue the highest good--self-improvement through education--like we are. To be rich but without elevated "passions"--such a pity.



I suspect that it's precisely because many academics largely can't defend the significance of the discrete things they study that they moralize about the virtues of the process of studying. Grad school is educational. Education is good for you, like eating carrots. Even if you get nothing tangible out of it, you are a better person for it. Or, more specifically, I am a better person. You are a cog in the real world machine, laboring at your dull job and paying taxes to fund my graduate stipend. I am self-fulfilled because I pursue the interests I myself have generated. I chase my own tail! You, on the other hand, are stuck chasing someone else's tail even though you have no desire to catch it. So why wouldn't you want to be me? The only thing you have to lose is money, but if you can qualify for some kind of funding, then you have absolutely nothing to lose.

The problem with this argument is that it's the argument for going to college and getting a liberal education, not for getting a PhD. College education is supposed to prepare you to improve yourself in all these edifying ways afterwards, not to become dependent on institutionalized education as the only setting where "the life of the mind" can be lived. Graduate education purports to be extremely narrow and technical, which we accept in light of its purpose to prepare professors, but when that fails, we rush to justify it in the broadest possible terms--it was self-improving. Once we do this though, we can no longer simultaneously justify the narrow, disciplinary training it actually offers since the point ought to be to study and learn whatever one wants, and not to be hemmed in by requirements like papers, dissertations, and teaching assignments. Or, if we want to claim that these requirements are actually useful for general intellectual growth, we ought to require them of college students as well. Moreover, how, if grad school is so self-improving, can we justify limiting access to graduate education so radically when the reason for it is the same as the reason for college education, which we encourage everyone over some threshold of cognitive capacity to pursue?

This logic makes going to grad school the best choice that anyone with a brain could ever make. It's a wonder these programs aren't even more competitive than they are, since only philistines and the cognitively-impaired should ever pass up the zero-liability self-enhancement opportunities they offer. Your cognitive impairments are at least not your own fault. But if you would simply prefer to make money by working than become a better person by learning for a few more years, something is clearly wrong with your moral compass. Who cares if you don't want to be a college teacher or do research for the rest of your life? Surely you have some kind of interest that could be satisfied by further study. If you value the right things, then surely you value learning for learning's sake, and that--even if nothing else--is what grad school offers. There will always be time later (when you don't get a tenure-track job) to re-join the real world and take up the burden of office drudgery by getting a job you were equally qualified for when you had only a BA.

Now, ok, this is an exaggeration of the sentiments expressed at Phoebe's blog. But I'm not sure that it's a misinterpretation of their assumptions. In particular, it's the selective deployment of both economic and romantic justifications that results in this kind of moralism. This mindset assumes both that the initial impetus for going to grad school is the lack of "intellectually fulfilling" jobs paying enough to feed you (the job market sucks!), but that, once you're actually in grad school, the economic motivation simply melts away and you value only learning for learning's sake. But love of learning for learning's sake in principle never ends, and yet, inexplicably, grad school does end. If no academic job materializes afterwards, however, you ought not to take this as a catastrophic foreclosure of your ability to continue pursuing your "passions," but rather, resign yourself to the intellectually inferior workaday grind you went to grad school to escape. But how can that be a reasonable expectation of someone who has just spent years learning to care only for intellectual fulfillment rather than economic reward? If PhD programs have no purpose aside from self-betterment, there is little logic behind their ending in five or seven years. They ought to be infinite.

I’m not denying that education's benefit is largely intangible, that to demand proportional financial returns on it is in some sense perverse. Education can be soul-expanding and mind-liberating and whatnot. Some educations, at least. But which ones? Does this include graduate education? We claim yes, but can't say why. The problem here is that that when this argument is used in self-defense, it's not really about what kind of education really is self-improving, but about how what I personally am doing is not a waste of time, contrary to all appearances. This is where we start to argue like YA lit authors who claim that, because some books are good, all reading must be good. When we don't know any longer in what way even the best books are good, we turn to claiming that they’re good for you.

To avoid this proposed monopoly of academia on all serious thought, I'm for holding grad programs to their original limited purpose: to train professors. If they can't deliver on this, they fail. If you don’t want to be a professor, don’t go. College can teach you to think and all that, but once that's done, you need no further institutional training. Assuming your undergrad education was successful, you should now know how to read and think on your own, without the imprimatur of a university. This, however, is not a profession, or a specialized thing you do at settled times for "self-improvement." Liberal education makes liberally educated people, not people who specialize in liberal education work, rather than business or consulting or law. Once we start positing all kind of indeterminate ends like intellectual fulfillment for grad school and conflating these ends with the purpose of all education in order to cut our losses, we are in even bigger trouble. There is no final satisfaction for something like intellectual fulfillment. If intellectual fulfillment is made into a full-time job, and the highest intellectual fulfillment is conflated with institutions of higher education, then every right-thinking person ought to aim for a life in academia, and any other job is a mark of moral and intellectual failure--you loved learning, but weren't smart enough for the best positions and need more learning (consider a JD/PhD, an MD/PhD, or a second PhD), or worse, you didn't love learning enough.

The life of the mind and all these other airy ideals are great. I am for them. I am just not for tying them to any institution or giving universities a monopoly on them. There is enough pressure on universities to host the entire world's life of the mind as it is, and universities are themselves imperialistically turning everything into an academic discipline (as anyone who has seen subway ads for implausible MA degrees knows)--young people (the pool of would-be grad students) should resist these incursions into cultural life, and figure out how to be thoughtful and serious on their own, without having to submit term papers about it. Sometimes you can live the life of the mind in universities, but very often, professors and grad students are less inspired than the editorial staff of a magazine that actually has something to say, or even just a group of friends who have really good conversations with one another after work. If we tip the balance so that universities become the only refuge for serious thought, we are probably doomed. So I’d suggest we start worrying when we find ourselves claiming that highly specialized acquisition of non-transferrable skills for seven years that issues in an abysmal rate of subsequent employment is an undertaking that can’t possibly have any drawbacks.