Why I Didn't Pursue A PhD

The academic year has begun, or is about to begin, in most post-secondary institutions in the US.  And, in much of the southern part of this country, elementary, middle and high schools have already been in session for a couple of weeks; in New York, where I live, those schools will open immediately after Labor Day, two weeks from now.


So, I thought this might be a good time to talk about the schooling I didn't pursue, and some reasons why I made this choice.


When I'm asked whether or not I pursued a PhD, I usually say "no," mainly for the sake of convenience.  The truth is, I took two courses at that level and decided that I'd sooner slit my wrists than to have another piece cut from an innocent creature's hide or a majestic tree's trunk for another useless and overpriced degree for--for what, exactly, I couldn't say.


Nando, JD Painterguy and others have written many posts on how worthless their law and other advanced degrees turned out to be.  In sheer dollars-and-cents terms, pursuing most advanced degrees is a losing proposition.  The bloggers I've mentioned, and others, have discussed this at length; I have little to add to what they've said and most likely will continue to say.  However, you might be interested to hear about an exchange I had with a deputy chair in the department in which I'd been teaching.


DC:  You know, you really should continue and get that PhD.


Me:  Why?  


DC:  You need it to get a regular job.  (Note: She meant, of course, a regular faculty job.)


Me:  But, there are so few openings.  And, at my age, I have to think about discrimination.


DC:  Well, if you get your PhD, there are a lot of things you can do with it.


Me:  Like what?


(Long silence)


Me:  Tell me, what can I do with a PhD in English that I can't do now?

DC:  Well, you can always get work as an adjunct.


Me (just barely containing my exasperation):  That's what I did for years.  And that's what I'll be doing after this year.  (Note: I was in my second year of a two-year full-time position.)  So why should I spend seven to ten years of my life, and more money than I've ever seen or will see, so that I can do the same thing I've been doing?


DC (Clearly getting flustered):  I have a meeting to go to.  


What I didn't tell her, though, was that my reasons for not continuing toward a PhD weren't only about job prospects and finances.  In all honesty, the two courses I took were two of the least intellectually stimulating experiences I've ever had.  


Part of my dissatisfaction with those courses had to do with the reading material.  Note my use of that term.  That is what you read in PhD-level seminars in English:  reading material, not literature.  In fact, what nobody told me--and what I would have learned had I done some research--is that for studies in English (or Comparative Literature, for that matter) at that level, one doesn't read the actual works of literature.  So there's no Macbeth, no Divine Comedy, no Les Miserables.  Instead, in PhD studies that are ostensibly about those works and others, one reads essays and books in critical theory.  


While I have never fancied myself as a critic or theorist, I can see the value of those endeavors, when they're done in an intelligent, commensensical way and communicated clearly.   Paul Fussell, one of my undergraduate professors, did much to elucidate such works as The Waste Land  and other seminal literature of the twentieth century in The Great War and Modern Memory.  The man has read, and knows, as much as twenty average people and expresses his ideas in language so plain and concise that it's elegant.


The professors I had in my PhD courses seemed to think it was their job to ensure that nobody ever wrote like Fussell, or the writers he critiqued, ever again.   The writing in the assigned readings of those classes was the sort that would 
cause a freshman to flunk a basic composition class.  At the very least, I'd make any student who wrote that way re-write his or her papers to get rid of the verbosity and needless complication.


Now, as you've probably seen in this and other posts of mine, I'm not averse to the complex sentence.  However, I'm not a fan of complication.  Here's the difference:  the human body is complex because it needs to be in order to keep the human that occupies it alive.  On the other hand, we've all seen Rube Goldberg-type contraptions:  the ones that take the most convoluted route from A to B, for no good reason. They're examples of complication.


Perhaps I learned something in those two classes after all--namely,  why so much writing in areas like critical theory, and other things studied at the PhD level, is so convoluted.  


It has to do with the pressure of novelty:  In academia, you make your reputation by having a seemingly-new idea or "take" on something or another.  So you read Dream Songs from the perspective of disability studies or some such thing, and you come up with an idea that can be expressed in a couple of sentences, or maybe a couple of pages.  But, of course, in academia, that won't do.  You have to puff it up, first to essay, then to book, length.  


It's practically impossible to do anything like that without resorting to pointlessly complicated sentence structures and circular reasoning.  However, even those things aren't enough: A reasonably intelligent reader, whether or not he or she has ever read Dream Songs or has any idea of what disability studies is, won't have to read very far into your work to realize how lacking in substance it actually is.  So what's someone aspiring to the tenure track to do?


You guessed it:  The aspiring academic learns to fill his or her work with mumbo-jumbo.  "Accessibility" is a derisive term in academia, particularly in the humanities.  Imagine what the world would be like if computer makers had the same attitude about user-friendliness.  For one thing, you probably wouldn't be reading this post right now!


Some will claim the dense language and obscure terms are necessary to accurately communicate what they are trying to say.  I say that if some of the most important notions in the history of the human race--such as those in The Ten Commandments or The Bill of Rights--could be expressed in ordinary language, what reason does anybody have to write about the "performativity" of anything?  (Not having to see or hear that word is, for me, almost reason enough not to pursue a PhD!)  Shakespeare wrote all of his plays in the English people of his time actually spoke (only better); Emily Dickinson expressed some of the most enigmatic feelings people have in some of the plainest language you'll ever find in poetry.  


So, if academics want to dismiss me or anyone else for using language my mother (an extremely intelligent woman who has practically no formal education) can understand, let them.  At least my students understand me; they tell me as much, and I can see it in what at least some of them write.  And I'm writing things that, I hope, will be read far beyond the confines of the ivory tower.