Really Bad Reasons To Go To Graduate School

Today I am going to do something that will probably upset some of you:  I'm going to appropriate an idea from what "LawProf" posted today.


He wrote about "bad reasons for going to law school."  Most of the reasons he gives, in one way or another, apply to going to graduate school in almost any field that's not STEM.  Unfortunately, they also seem to be the chief reasons why new or recent graduates go to grad or law school.


Here are some of the worst reasons to go to graduate school, especially in the humanities or non-quantitative social sciences, listed in no particular order:

• I can't get a job with my BA in English, History, Philosophy, Sociology, Political Science or fill-in-the-blank.

If you can't get a job with a bachelor's in one of those fields, what makes you think you're going to get one with a master's or PhD in it?  Today, with the Internet, there's no excuse for not knowing about what the dismal prospects are for people with advanced degrees in that field.

• My advisor says I'm the best student he's seen in years and that I could make "major contributions" to my field.

Well, guess what, sweetie.  Every adjunct instructor was told the same thing at some time or another in his or her academic career.  So, for that matter, have any number of baristas and waitresses.  Oh, yeah, I know a couple of cab drivers who were told the same thing.

• Well, I know there aren't a lot of jobs in the field.  But I only have to get one of them.

Believe it or not, a PhD student I met actually said that.  My dear, you also have a billion-to-one chance (or whatever it is) of winning the Lotto jackpot.  But you only have to win it once.

• And I'll be the one to get that job.

If you have such great powers of prediction, you should be picking stocks or something.

• At least I won't have to start paying off my undergraduate loans.

A tumor doesn't shrink when you leave it alone or ignore it.  It doesn't become easier to treat if you wait three, seven or ten years.  Think of a debt as a tumor.  I wish I had.

• They can never take your education away from you.

True enough.   But unused education tends to make people depressed and bitter.  Just think of all of those Ivy League housewives in the 1950's who self-medicated with alcohol and painkillers.  Or--take a look at almost any underemployed person you've ever met.  They make me think of what Caliban says to Prospero:  "You have given me language/And the profit on't is, I can curse."

• No one in my family/community has ever done it before.

And not one of them has six-figure debt, either, unless he or she is a compulsive gambler, philanderer or drug addict--or just monumentally stupid.  Plus, that person has more time for family, friends and almost anything else he or she cares about than you will if you go to graduate school and have to work multiple jobs to pay it off. 

On top of everything, they have, or will have, better pensions than you ever will if you go to graduate school--that is, if you get a pension.

• I want to make a difference in some young person's life.

There are plenty of other ways to do that.  If you really want to teach, why not teach in a public school system?  Even many religious and other private schools pay better, and offer better benefits, than colleges pay to all except the endowed professorships.  


Plus, you'll make far more of a difference by working with some young person before, rather than once, he or she goes to college.  I think about that every time I'm grading college students' papers and finding mistakes I learned not to make when I was in fourth grade.

If you want to "make a difference", here's an even better idea:  Get yourself a good job and do some volunteer work.  Then, at least, the people you try to help and the people who are helping you do it will be grateful to you.  That's more than can be said for all of those self-absorbed kids whose parents dumped them in college because they're unemployable and otherwise unmotivated.  Actually, it's also more than can be said for the parents, who think it's your job to give their kids good grades, no matter how little or how poor work they do.

• I am passionate about (Subject X) and want to devote my life to researching and writing about it.

Ah, we should all be so fortunate. If you go to graduate school, you probably won't get to decide on the topic of your thesis or dissertation:  It is likely to be shaped by the research interests of your professors.  Why do you think some of your professors specialized in things that you simply couldn't imagine anyone having any interest in?  

Also: If you are so passionate about a subject, why can't you research it yourself?  If it doesn't require special equipment or facilities, as most STEM subjects do, you don't need an institution that supports what you do.  Read, find other people who share similar interests, start a blog and write, write, write.  I say that if you can't write about it in a way that would interest your local bus driver or mail carrier, what's the point in doing it?

Part of the problem, as I've said in previous posts, is that the educational cartel teaches people to distrust themselves and to believe that they are incapable of independent thought.  It instills the fear of making mistakes and failing; there is nothing a person with more schooling than intelligence fears more than being embarrassed, which is to say, than suffering a blow to his or her ego. Don't worry, you'll get over it:  When they try to make you feel foolish, they're only showing how insecure they are themselves.  Don't let that get in the way of learning!

That brings me to one more reason:

• If I don't do it, I'm a failure.

To whom?  Where is the failure in understanding that you need to change course and move in a different direction?  I'll tell you:  The failure is in not acting upon such a realization.  

If any of you think of other reasons, please post them!   


Also:  Check out what Professor William Pannapacker, a.k.a., Thomas H Benton, has written on the subject.

The Best Letter Of Recommendation I Ever Wrote

I've been told I write excellent letters of recommendation and reference.  On what basis, I'm not sure.  Do they like my prose style?  My wit and erudition? Or do my letters get people what they want?


Whatever the case, I think the best letter is one I wrote for someone I bumped into the other day.


Juanita was back in town for the funeral of a relative.  She was a student in a remedial class I taught nearly a decade ago.  Every one of us who taught her thought she was a "great kid;" however, we had our doubts that she'd make it through college.  She wasn't stupid, and she had a better work ethic than most students.  Some said she simply wasn't
"scholastic;" I was sure that her poor school performance was the result of dyslexia and possibly other learning disabilities, though I have no training in diagnosing them.  In any event, she seemed to understand what I said in class and was a surprisingly good writer.  Still, she performed disastrously on tests and was generally not a very good student.


I bumped into her in a diner just a couple of blocks from where I live. (Ironically, we were practically neighbors when she was my student!)  I knew that she'd gotten married and moved away. That was good for her because, even though she was not living in a hell-hole of a neighborhood, at the time I taught her, she had lived in no other place but the one in which she was born and raised.


She had just barely passed the course in which she was my student and the university competency exam that followed.  I was happy for her: If I recall correctly, it was the second or third time she took both.  A semester or two later, she left the university.  She continued to work as a cashier in a nearby supermarket, as she had done since she was in high school. 


About two years after she passed that class, she asked me to write a letter of recommendation for her.  She wasn't trying get readmitted to the university in which I taught her, and she wasn't trying to transfer to another college.  Instead, she had decided on a new direction:  She wanted to become a massage therapist.


Something told me that it was exactly the right thing for her.  She is a very sensitive and nurturing person; other students in the class and the college talked to her about their boyfriends and girlfriends, their abusive families and spouses and any number of other things that were on their minds.  They, and other people, said they felt "safe" with her; although I am not a religious person, I found myself thinking of her as a kind of "faith" healer.  To put it in more secular, though still un-scientific, terms, she is empathetic and intuitive.


I hadn't the first idea of what sort of qualities a school of massage therapy sought in its candidates for admission.  I did some research; still, I felt that in whatever I wrote, I would simply be "mouthing the words," so to speak.  But my own intuition--such as it is--told me that Juanita had found her "calling," or whatever you want to call it.


Plus, the school she wanted to attend is located in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York--about a five-hour drive from where she lived.  I thought it might be good for her to be in an environment where she knew no one and where, therefore, no one would have any preconceptions of her.  At the same time, it wouldn't be difficult for her to get back to her family, who are very close-knit, in case of an emergency.


I tried, to no avail, to find a copy of the letter I wrote for her.  And I don't remember what, exactly, I said in it, other than that she's a sensitive person who doesn't give up.  But I don't think I ever had more enthusiasm for writing a letter of recommendation for anyone else, not even the "best" students I've had.


I also don't think I was ever happier for any former student of mine than I was for her when she was accepted into that massage therapy school.  Of course, I would love to see other people share my love of writing, literature and the other arts and, if they are so inclined, to make their livings through them.  But, in spite of all the anger I sometimes feel over some of the experiences I've had, I want to see people happy and doing things that suit them without mortgaging the rest of their lives.  I don't think I've ever been more certain that any of those things happened as I was when Juanita got that acceptance letter. 


Well, all right, I'm just as certain of that now, having seen her again for the first time in several years.  Thankfully--for her, at any rate--she didn't buy into the notion that she had to spend more years in an academic institution to  be a successful  person with a fulfilling career and life.

They Predicted The Past And We Followed

It's often said that generals are always fighting the previous war.  That's not so much a slur on the competence of the generals as it is on the difficulty of anticipating change and the near-impossibility of foreseeing what Thomas Kuhn called "paradigm shifts."


That, and not Gallic pusillanimity, was the reason why Hitler's troops occupied most of France as quickly as they did: French military strategists were still fighting wars of attrition while the German forces were running the Blitzkreig, a method of fighting that had not been seen before.  (It also didn't help the French that France was still primarily an agricultural country while Germany was arguably the most technologically advanced country in the world at the time.)


Now, you may be wondering where I'm going with this discussion, given that I'm not a military historian or strategist. Well, I think the phenomenon I've described is also a pretty fair description, if I do say so myself, of the chief problem with so many academic studies.  They predict things that don't come to pass, and make projections that, in time, seem wildly off-base because they assume that people, institutions and phenomena will act as they have always acted, or at least operate as they had been in recent history.  Really, it's not so different from the sort of reasoning that caused people to pay wildly inflated prices for houses:  The value of those houses had increased for as long as anyone could remember, so almost nobody expected the kind of market we have now.


The mentality that helped to make the housing/real estate bubble circa 2003 to 2007 isn't so different from that of William Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa in 1989.  That year included the publication of their Prospects For Faculty in The Arts and Sciences:  A Study of Factors Affecting Demand and Supply, 1987-2012.


That book probably had as much influence as any other on people like me who were entering or considering graduate school two decades ago.  I don't think the Bowen and Sosa's study is the only reason why anyone decided to pursue "the life of the mind," or any such thing.  Rather, it was one--though, arguably, the most important--factor that swayed people like me who had been scared out of applying to graduate schools by the grim employment prospects.  In fact, I did not start my graduate studies until eleven years after completing my bachelor's degree.  Granted, when I finished my undergraduate degree at 21, I wanted to do anything but go for more schooling, at least for a few years.  However, I also heard the horror stories about PhDs working as adjuncts (if they were lucky) or stocking shelves and (rightly, as it turned out) feared that the same fate would befall me if I pursued an advanced degree.


The Bowen-Sosa report famously predicted mass vacancies among college and university faculties, even in the humanities, as a whole generation of professors reached retirement age and the student population grew.  Ironically, those mass retirements would come, in part because of people like me and my peers who were scared out of going to graduate school:  As a result of the collapse in the hiring of faculty members (particularly in the humanities) around 1970, there was a "lost generation" of professors who wouldn't be available to replace the ones who were among the last hired.  


In other words, Bowen and Sosa thought they were describing a "Perfect Storm" (The eponymous film came out around that time!) for academic hiring.  It's hard to fault them for coming to such a conclusion, especially because they had no way of predicting other developments that would shape the job market for professors and so much else in higher education.


The most significant of those developments was a fundamental change in the way institutions of higher education were run.  Although it could have been argued that too much of what was being done in colleges and universities had no apparent purpose outside scholarly communities, at least some schools could honestly have said that their missions included intellectual and cultural enrichment as well as developing able leaders and researchers.  Ranking systems like the ones published by US News and World Report hardly existed, which meant that the goals and aspirations of higher education institutions were mainly qualitative rather than quantitative.  In other words, what professors published mattered as much as how much of it they published, and what students learned mattered as much as how many of them were in a classroom.


It's hard to say exactly when all of that changed.  But it's probably fair to say that the changes were taking place, however slowly and subtly, at the time Bowen and Sosa published their report.  What those changes meant, in short, was that educational institutions were being run, not by the educators, but by professional classes of administrators.  While there has been virtually no growth in the number of tenured profs or tenure-track positions during the past 40 years, the number of administrators has quadrupled. 


Among those administrators are accountants, business managers, lawyers and others whose interests and priorities are in direct conflict with the values the old profs represented.  Even if the Presidents, Provosts and Academic Deans are still coming from the ranks of scholars, they know that in order to keep their jobs or move on to bigger and better things, they must align their priorities with those of the administrative professionals.


What that has meant, of course, is cutting costs and maximizing revenues wherever possible.  That is the reason why when professors retire, their positions are eliminated along with the low-enrollment specialty courses and seminars they taught.  If new faculty are hired, they are likely to be adjuncts who make a fraction of what the profs made and who are as likely as not to receive health insurance or other benefits.  And sometimes experienced adjuncts aren't rehired after their experience lifts their hourly pay rate beyond a certain level.  (I am almost entirely sure that is what happened to me on one occasion when I wasn't rehired.)  


Bowen and Sosa, having known only the academic world in which they'd been trained, could not have anticipated the corportization of universities, much less the proliferation of for-profit and online schools, that we have witnessed since their study was published.  They probably would not be able to recognize the colleges they attended.

Is That What They Teach At Harvard Law School?

On days like this, I wonder why I came back from Prague.


As you probably know by know, Troy Davis has been executed in the state of Georgia.


You may have heard about some of the most troubling facts about the case:  There was no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime.  The victim, police officer Mark Mac Phail, was shot to death while off-duty.  In his final statement, Troy not only denied his guilt; he even denied owning a gun.


Perhaps most troubling of all is the fact that seven of the nine witnesses who helped to convict Davis have retracted or recanted their testimony.  What I don't understand is why the judge was willing to believe their testimony, but never took the recantations and retractions into account.   I mean, I can understand why MacPhail's widow and family wanted to see Davis executed:  Grief so often swells into vengeance, as we saw just after 9/11.  But the judge had no such excuse.


And shame on President Obama for having a spokesperson say that it was "not appropriate" for the President to weigh in on specific cases.


Is that what they teach at Harvard Law School? 


At least Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia had the cojones to say, in essence, that even if Davis could prove his innocence, it wouldn't have been reason enough to bar his execution.  While it's the sort of thing that even members of the Star Chamber could never have dreamed of, at least Scalia's dissent has a perverse sort of integrity to it.   The man is completely faithful to the law and judicial process and if an innocent man is killed in the process, well, that's the price one has to pay sometimes. 


Is that what they teach at Harvard Law School?


I find myself thinking of what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said after the atomic bombs were detonated in Japan:  He called them the triumph of technique over reason.  It led to the slaughter of innocents, and yesterday it led to the execution of a man who, from the available evidence and testimony, wasn't guilty.  I hope only that Troy Davis finds the peace and justice that was denied him while he was here.

The Far Right Gets It

In one sense, the problem of students becoming indentured servants because of their loans is like many other problems:  As it becomes more widespread, support or at least understanding grows for those who are affected.  People begin to understand how their families and communities are affected by the fact that so many graduates can't get jobs and act accordingly, much as people begin to understand and care about cancer or HIV/AIDS when they realize those things affect their siblings, parents, spouses and children.  


Until recently, most of the support for returning bankruptcy protections to student loan debt, and for other measures that would address students' and recent graduates' loan indebtedness and lack of available jobs, came from the political left and center-left.  For the most part, the right (including most Congressional Republicans) have not supported measures such as loan forgiveness or restoring bankruptcy protections to student loan debt.   




Interestingly, the problems I've mentioned are being discussed in far-right circles.  As an example, take a look at this brief posting by one Mac Slavo on SHTF Plan.  The blog is the province of survivalists, gold bugs and others who see the imminent collapse of pretty much everything.  Mr. Slavo accurately calls the current situation what it is:  the bursting of yet another economic bubble.  From what he says, the consequences of mass defaults could be even more far-reaching than what happened in the wake of the mortgage crisis.  


Slavo, to his credit, points out that the "real" unemployment rate among Americans is about one and a half times the rate reported by government agencies, and the unemployment levels are even higher for many kinds of graduates.  It is, in his word, "catastrophic" for students who have graduated from for-profit schools.  They have the worst job prospects and, as often as not,the largest loans to pay off.  

Keeping Them Dazed And Confused

Last semester, in an extremely favorable evaluation, a senior prof wrote this about me:  "She is so good at making connections, and helping students make connections of their own."


That prof is earnest and serious about his work.  Even before the glowing review, I liked him.  :-)  And I still do.  However, there is something about his statement that, the more I think about it, the more it disturbs me.


I don't mean that he did anything wrong or unfair.  Rather, it indicates something I find very disturbing, and that bothers me even more as I teach this semester.


Yesterday, in one of my classes, a student whined, "Why do we have to read Hamlet? Why do they make us read The Great Gatsby?"  As I've done in similar situations, I tossed the question to the class.  "Why should you read Hamlet or The Great Gatsby?"


Not surprisingly, the room fell so silent I could hear my students breathe.  Finally, one student's hand rose as if it were on a puppeteer's string.  


"B-b-because they're classics?"


I glanced at the young woman who gave the answer.  Her face reflected the fear of a kid who wants to give the "right" answer so as not to be humiliated or abused by some hateful teacher or alcoholic parent.  Naturally, I could feel nothing but pity, which is never a good sign for me or the person I pity.  


I asked, as gently as I could, what it means when something is a "classic."  I could just as well have asked her, or anyone else in her class, how to prepare for a jousting tournament.


I relate this story, not to indict her or anyone else in the class, but to show what that the prof who evaluated me last semester was making, intentionally or not, an even greater indictment of the educational system than I ever could have made.


From the day a kid sets foot in school, he or she is blizzarded or bombarded with innumerable bits of information and pieces of doctrine, or some arcane rule or another.  The kid is forced to memorize and regurgitate all of it, as often as not in the context of a test or quiz.  By the time the kid gets a grade, the factoid is--as often as not, rightly--forgotten.  Or what the student retains is some quote or fragment divorced from even a scholastic context, much less anything that happens in the real world.  Those statements that echo in the student's mind, and which he or she echoes to his or her next teacher or professor, thus have no more meaning than a conversation in a language one doesn't understand.


Imagine how baffled you would be if someone were to say "ken ka kem" to you and you don't understand Ya'pik.  Imagine how confused and frustrated you would be if someone kept on repeating that phrase.  Sooner or later, you'd be able to say it, too.  But you might not have any more idea of what it means than you did before you heard it.  


What I've described in the preceding paragraph is a pretty fair approximation of what goes on in schools at all levels.  By the time I get them, they're confused.  Some people don't take well to confusion; some get angry and lash out.  Others become experts at "acing" exams and assignments.  They might forget whatever is on the exam they day after they take it.  (I've done that myself.)  A few such students are both skilled and cynical enough to "ace" their assignments, knowing full well that doing so will have absolutely no bearing on their lives after school.   


But most just muddle along, doing what they're told without any idea as to why they should.  Sometimes I think that's exactly what the military-industrial-financial plutocracy wants.  After all, who can better serve their interests than someone who shoots and doesn't ask questions?

For Father Mychal Judge

I thought about not posting today, given that it is the tenth anniversary of what has come to be known as "9/11."  But I realize that if there is a way of "recovering from, " or "overcoming," such a day, it is by going about one's life.  Also, as I did not lose any loved ones that day (though I was living less than three miles downwind from the Towers), anything I say about that day is, at best, superfluous.


However, I do want to say at least a word of remembrance for Father Mychal Judge, the New York City Fire Department chaplain who is considered to be  the first casualty of that day.  He died from debris that fell on him as he was administering the last rites to a dying victim of the attacks.  Although I am not religious (I go to church only for weddings and funerals, and to hear music or look at art.), I laud Father Judge for his commitment to the vows he took upon entering the priesthood.  


Would that members of the educational/banking cartel had such integrity!

Who's Telling Whom About Self-Esteem?

Last night I was talking with a part-time secretary in one of the colleges in which I teach.  As it happens, she is also a student in the college.  


She expressed her incredulity over the fact that I am not a full-timer, let alone tenured.  "From everything I've heard, you're a wonderful teacher," she said.  "And you're an excellent writer."


I explained that I don't have a PhD and that, at this point in my life, there's little reason to get one because it's not likely to get me so much as an interview for a full-time job.  For one thing, most search committees would actually hold my lengthy experience as an adjunct against me.  Even more to the point, age discrimination--something no  search committe member will admit to, at least not publicly--would virtually ensure that I would not be seriously considered for most tenure-track jobs.  There are a variety of other factors that would doom my candidacy for any full-time position, but the two I've mentioned are enough that I no longer entertain the possibility of even getting called in for an interview.


"You shouldn't be so hard on yourself," she cooed.  "You have to think positive, believe in yourself."


"Listen," I demanded.  "I'm old enough to be your mother and, let's just say I've seen a few things you haven't.  I'd love to be more hopeful, but one has to face facts."


I was not prepared for her facial reaction:  She had that same condescending look senior professors have when you present them with almost anything outside of what their "frame of reference"--at least that's what they'd call it in anyone else.  It's the same look that parents have when kids understand things adults didn't want them to know, at least not yet.


I was about to say something self-defensive, but then I realized that this secretary was merely reflecting what she's absorbed from her superiors and her surroundings.  And I understood something else that, were I younger, would have utterly infuriated me: She is actually benefiting more from the system than I ever have:  She is making more money and has better benefits--including a retirement plan, which I don't have.  And she doesn't have to pay for the classes she's taking.  If I were to take those same classes, I would have to pay the same tuition and fees as any other student.


So, by the time she said what she said next, I was seeing her entirely differently from how I'd seen her just a few minutes earlier.  Still, I was not prepared to hear her say what she said next.  "Well, you should separate getting a PhD from getting a job.  You should get a PhD for your own sense of satisfaction."

I could no longer contain myself.  "I don't need degrees, certificates, prizes or any other recognition from anyone else to have a sense of myself," I intoned.  "And I certainly don't need approval from people who have no idea of what the world really is."


By that time, she looked like a kid who'd been beat up by a parent who was having a bad day.  "I'm sorry...I didn't mean anything by it..I was just trying to..."


"Look, I wasn't being malicious in anything I said.  And I have no reason to be angry at you in particular.  But, please, open up your eyes."


"What should I see?"


"That they're not doing you any favors.  Just because they're paying you a decent salary, giving you good benefits and letting you take classes for free, that doesn't mean they're doing you any favors."


"I never expected this of you..."


"Well, that's the point:  I have a sense of myself.  I am angry about some of the things that have been done to me, and rueful over what I've done out of ignorance and blindness.  But I have no reason to project those things onto you, or anyone else.  Part of my sense of myself is that I have learned from the experiences I've had."


A long silence.  "What do you think I should do?" she wondered.


"I'm not going to tell you whether or not to take classes, or what career paths you should follow.  I am pretty useless for such advice, quite honestly.  But whatever you do, don't let them use you.  People in this business--and remember, that's exactly what higher education is, a business--will use you for their purposes and throw you away just as quickly, and with as little compunction, as people who have power in any other business.  Realize that the bones they throw you have been picked from your own body."


She then excused herself:  "I have work to do."  And no doubt she did, and does.  And so do I.

BUtterfield 8 and the Higher Education Bubble

We all know that too much of what passes for literary criticism and scholarship is, at best, solipsistic and self-serving:  It does little more than to re-enforce its practitioners' sense of their own superiority and helps them to get tenure someplace.


And I find most book reviews, at least the ones published in the mainstream media or even in allegedly cerebral venues like The New York Review of Books, to be didactic, tedious or simply long-winded verbosity from folks who show, if unwittingly, that schooling bears as much relation to education or intelligence as Latin American studies does to the Salvadorean day laborers I pass on my way to work--or, as Nando, JD Painterguy and others might say, as law school does to the practice of law.


However, I often enjoy reading about people's experience of reading or re-reading a classic work of fiction, poetry, drama or other genre of literature.  People who write such accounts of their encounters with a literary work (or film, painting or other creative work) sometimes cause me to consider or re-consider something I may not have thought about in a while, if ever.


Such was the case with Ron Rosenbaum's Slate article about BUtterfield 8.  His account deals with the book.  As he very wisely points out, the eponymous movie that won Elizabeth Taylor an Oscar actually has only superficial relationships with the novel.  (That's still better than either film I've seen about The Great Gatsby!)  For one thing, the movie is apparently set in the 1950's and clearly has a post-war feel to it, while the novel, published in 1935, is set in 1931:  the very moment at which the stock market crash of 1929 tipped into a catastrophic decade-long worldwide depression.  


Rosenbaum expresses the opinion that we are at a similar moment right now.  Although the recession "officially" ended nearly two years ago, anyone who's had to look for a job or tried to sell a house outside a few metro areas knows that the economy still hasn't "recovered" from the crash of 2008-2009.  Policy-makers and media pundits say that we are about to drop into the second trough of a "double-dip recession;" only a few--who are branded as extremists and alarmists--are willing to admit that "double-dip" is double-speak for another "d" word.


I actually read BUtterfield 8 even before I knew about the movie.  When I was a junior or senior in high school, if I remember correctly, I went to see a great-uncle in California. He was an avid reader until his eyesight started to fail him; his bookshelves spanned half a century of classic and long-forgotten novels and volumes on history, politics, economics and business.  For some reason, I picked up John O'Hara's novel and was hooked:  I read it long after my uncle, father and brother had fallen asleep and finished it during a drive to Universal Studios the following day. 


Even then, I couldn't help but to think that it was a kind of dystopian sequel (not that I would have used such terminology in those days!) to The Great Gatsby.  And, though I would never admit this to the teacher who assigned Fitzgerald's most famous work (I wouldn't even admit it to myself!), I preferred O'Hara's novel.  In part, it had to do with O'Hara's style which, let's face it, is catchy, if not addictive.  Back then, I thought Fitzgerald's descriptions could be a bit long-winded.  Plus, having a teacher spend two whole class periods discussing the significance of the green light Gatsby sees could ruin the book for just about anybody.


In BUtterfield 8, Gloria Wandrous, a "damaged flapper" in Rosenbaum's description, wakes up in a stranger's Park Avenue apartment.  Her dress is torn down the middle and the apartment's owner is off to meet his wife and family, who are returning from Hyannisport.  Having nothing suitable to wear, she "borrows" the wife's mink coat and, wearing little else, leaves the apartment.


Through the novel, the apartment's owner--Winston Liggett, who is from out of town and, although very wealthy, not quite a blue-blood--pursues Gloria and she is trying to escape from the effects of the very sexuality that draws Ligget to her.


As Rosenbaum and others have pointed out, the novel shows how the old boundaries of class and behavior were dissolving out of fear and desperation.  Liggett wants the certainties of the world that allowed him to live as he did; Gloria is trapped by those very certainties.  In the end, she falls or throws herself from the deck of a steamer and is crushed in the blade of its paddle-wheel.


Some of the parallels between what we see in the novel and today's news are obvious.  Liggett wants the party to continue, if you will, and is seduced by the very thing that destroys Gloria.  She, for her part, clung to the only capital she had--in her case, the erotic kind--for too long and is ultimately destroyed by it.  


Now, at the risk of becoming one of those profs or teachers who beats a detail to death by turning it into a "symbol," I want to say something about the mink coat Gloria appropriates.  To go onto the street without getting arrested or attacked, she had to cover herself.  But what, exactly, is she covering?  And why, of all things, with a mink coat?


I like to think that she, on some level, was concealing the fact that her allure was fading, even if it was still strong enough to draw a man like Liggett.  And, even though she ostensibly had to cover herself up to get out of that apartment, in wearing that mink coat--with almost nothing underneath it--she made herself alluring, during the last days of her life, to a number of people.  And that very allure is, in the end, her undoing.


I now find myself thinking of that mink coat as being like a "bubble" in the economy.   Just when it looks like the economy as we know it is going to die, some "bubble" floats it for a few more years.  The most recent one, of course, involved finance and real estate.  Before that, we had the "dot.com" bubble and, before that, others in real estate and finance, as well as in such things as military spending.  In fact, just about every period of prosperity the United States has experienced since the Great Depression can be said to have been  inspired and expanded by one bubble or another.  And each of those bubbles has led us into another recession, each one deeper than the previous one, that ended only when another bubble began to inflate.


What most people who attended, or sent their kids to, college since World War II (I include myself when I was younger!) didn't realize is that their expectation of the sorts of jobs, careers and lives they would have as a result of their educations were, in part, inflated by those very bubbles.    The Post-War "prosperity" was largely a result of spending on the military, interstate highways and other government programs at a time when, really, the United States was the last country standing, if you will.  (The years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall were similar in that respect.)  The Korean, Vietnam and Gulf Wars were all like drugs to an addict, as were the "booms" in real estate and financial services--not to mention the one in higher education.


So...The next time you see a new law, journalism or other graduate program opening up, or an undergraduate institution starting a program in some other dying field, you might want to think about that mink coat Gloria took from Mrs. Liggett's closet.