“In Valley and in Plain”: A Job Market Theodicy

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academia, Academics, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Humanities, job market, john milton, Paradise Lost, PhD, Slate, theodicy

A recent Slate article entitled “Thesis Hatement” has sparked some discussion on this blog. As its subtitle proclaims, the article argues that “getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor” and traces the inevitable experience of a newly minted literature Ph.D. Told that if she works hard enough, she will finally land a tenure-track job, she finds this was a lie. She is a mouse trapped in a Kafkaesque maze with no way out—and a hungry cat. (The author, Rebecca Schuman, just finished a dissertation on Kafka.) The theme is familiar across the humanities: it is irresponsible for institutions to continue credentialing people for a career that is no longer available to the vast majority of graduates. It is quixotic for the students to undertake such a program. Don’t do it, and—if you really are “humane”—don’t counsel your students to do it either. Equally familiar are the articles on the other side, which point to the enduring value of the liberal arts in a time of economic trial and call for renewed interest in studying (and funding) them lest we suffer profound long-term consequences as a culture. Already Slate has published a counterpoint, by NYU journalism professor Katie Roiphe, who holds up the literature PhD as useful in many ways besides ensuring a tenure-track job “in a pretty leafy college town.” Foremost among these, says Roiphe, is the development of “a nurturing faith in your private preoccupations, a creative desire that is detached from questions of what other people care about.”

Both articles are depressing, though Roiphe’s is unintentionally so. I suspect that Schuman may not find her increased “faith in her private preoccupations” worth the sacrifices in job security and dignity outlined in her piece—nor is it certain that her newly nurtured faith will withstand the buffeting of market pressures and the ignominy of adjunct work. I want to take another tack, to answer Schuman not only as a fellow student of literature, but also as a fellow “sufferer” on the academic job market, something Roiphe is not.  As a fellow literature student, I am interested more in the narrative backdrop to Schuman’s argument than in trotting out facts and figures and anecdotes to determine how dire the situation is, really, or where humanities PhDs might go if not to tenure-track jobs. As a fellow “sufferer,” I want to avoid whining, on one side, and on the other, an unfeeling dismissal of Schuman’s complaints. While many groups down the ages have suffered a great deal more than humanities PhDs since 2008, there is truth in Schuman’s lament that warrants our attention, both as people committed to liberal arts education, and as people called to respond to suffering with faith, hope, and love.

In this spirit I want to suggest that Schuman’s first mistake was in studying Kafka. There is a nihilism in the picture she paints that goes far beyond the drudgery of a job that just pays the bills. The mouse in the maze, she points out, “wasn’t going in the wrong direction so much as it was walking cat food the entire time. A graduate career is just like this, only worse.” She admits that this is a subjective take on the matter, that nobody outside of academia can understand our desperate need for tenure-track jobs. But a desperate need we have. We cut the same heartbreaking figure as a woman who has become attached to a cold man, sacrificing more and more to win his love, willfully ignoring signs of his indifference because the alternative has become too terrifying to contemplate. Psychologically the same forces are at work: having been lured in by early praise and displays of interest on the part of professors and graduate programs, we invest an increasing amount of heart, with the stakes eventually becoming so high that perspective and reason are lost. Schuman’s answer: don’t start down that road. Do something else.

But I wonder whether any commitment, any investment of heart in a calling or a person, is free from this liability. I wonder, too, how much of the blame for this suffering rests with the sufferer. In a romantic relationship, one person can lead the other on, and no doubt professors and administrators need to think carefully about the ethics of encouraging young people to pursue humanities PhDs and mounting PhD programs. But I am peculiarly qualified to scrutinize Schuman’s side of the story because I share her struggles: we began our graduate careers the same year, and next year looks bleak for both of us, career-wise. We also seem to think alike, because I too approach personal and political problems at the level of literary backdrop (or, if you like, metanarrative). She starts with Kafka; I want to explore a framework here that might offer a more hopeful alternative.

Whose Fault?

If there’s one category into which every book I really love falls, that category would be “literary theodicy”: narrative texts that wrestle thoughtfully with the question of why things aren’t better. These run from the book of Job to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation.” Like an old Western, the literary theodicy builds to a face-off in which two main figures gird up their loins, so to speak, and say what has been on their minds the whole time. Unlike most Westerns, in literary theodicy, one of the two figures is God. Usually the argument is not philosophical, but—this is the “literary” part—arises from the story that has been building to that point: to understand why I am grieved, you had to be there and see how it happened. In the case of Job, God’s response is, effectively, “Exactly”: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” Works outside the biblical canon, constrained not to speak for God for fear of blasphemy,[1] typically focus on the other figure, the self. “Here’s my story,” they say. “Am I guilty?” The answer is typically a resounding “yes”: Adam and Eve are responsible for the loss of Eden; Ruby Turpin is a wart hog from hell. This is unusual. Stories are usually told for purposes of self-justification; these, by contrast, are works of critical self-examination, even self-condemnation. They call into question the motives and activities of the characters whose stories they tell—and often, by extension, of their authors. An example that springs to mind is The Brothers Karamazov, in which Fyodor Dostoevsky gives the loathsome Karamazov father his own first name. How might the self-examining narrative of a recent literature PhD read?

Let me make clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that humanities PhDs are responsible for our own grief because we should have known better than to study humanities, nor yet that some divine boom is being lowered on us because of our sin (an assumption of Job’s friends and not of the biblical narrator). Christians are convicted of guilt; establishing any clear relationship between particular offenses and particular suffering, though, is notoriously difficult. Here again narrative can shed light in ways philosophy can’t. In one of his stories, Garrison Keillor explores the question of guilt and suffering by inviting us into the mind of a man contemplating adultery. As this man, Jim Nordberg, waits for his romantic interest to pick him up and take him to Chicago, he reflects:

As I sat on the lawn looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they are no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families—my infidelity would somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth. If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard the intersection and someone’s child will be injured. A sixth grade teacher will think, “What the hell,” and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, “What the hell—I’m not going to give that sermon on the poor.” Somehow my adultery will cause the man in the grocery store to say, “To hell with the Health Department. This sausage was good yesterday—it certainly can’t be any worse today.”

“Far from being hidden,” Keillor concludes, “each sin is another crack in the world.”[2] And what is true of John Milton, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Flannery O’Connor, I find true of myself. Not that I’m a famous author; that I’m guilty too.

These are gloomy reflections for a narrative purporting to be hopeful, but it’s important to know where I stand before I assess my prospects for next year and beyond. Nor do I think that the reality of where I stand “goes without saying”: the point of liturgy is that this particular narrative never goes without saying. The story doesn’t make sense unless all the movements are there. But the liturgy doesn’t end with confession, and neither do these literary theodicies end with utter destruction. In fact, if Schuman’s piece were a true “Jeremiad” (her word), there would be lots of confession of sin and a ray of hope for the future. Jeremiah has much in common with the texts I’ve just been describing: the prophet squares off with God, and God responds convincingly that Israel is responsible for her own desolation. Jeremiah’s most searing question, though, comes after all this: “Hast thou utterly rejected Judah?” Everything hangs on that “utterly.” Many bloggers and analysts are already calling the current generation of humanities PhDs “lost.” Are we utterly lost?

Both Schuman and Roiphe’s accounts of the situation facing the humanities PhD miss the distance marked by “utterly.” Both conflate one chapter of the story with the whole story. Roiphe no less than Schuman assumes that fulfillment for me, now, is the intrinsic good toward which all our efforts tend: that gained, we have won; that lost, we have lost indeed. The climax of Roiphe’s optimistic argument is that you acquire in graduate school “a habit of intellectual isolation that is well, useful, bracing, that gives you strength and originality.” Presumably if you somehow come out of graduate school without this, or if it is beaten out of you by the job market, then Schuman’s maze still obtains. This is one way to understand the human condition, but it is not the only way.

In Medias Res

Books eleven and twelve of Paradise Lost always come as something of a surprise to first-time readers. Having plumbed the depths of hell and soared to the heights of heaven, having managed his ‘great argument’ of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace after casting an eye over the story of Satan’s failed rebellion, Milton takes us through hundreds of lines of reiterated biblical history in the form of a lesson sent to Adam through the archangel Michael. At first moving slowly through events recorded early in Genesis, Michael’s narrative picks up speed (and switches from visual to aural), covering not only the events leading up to Milton’s time but beyond, to the consummation of time itself. This move on Milton’s part has not been met with universal praise. C.S. Lewis, usually an ardent defender of the epic, famously called the archangel’s survey an “untransmuted lump of futurity,” and my students sometimes feel the same. It’s not that the two books are boring—it’s the catalogues of unfamiliar place names that are sometimes accused of that—they just seem somehow unnecessary for moving the plot along. In asking my students why, in light of this objection, Milton might have chosen to lump futurity onto the end of his epic, I sometimes zag over to The Lord of the Rings. “In Tolkien’s fiction,” I ask (now I have their full attention), “why does he call it ‘Middle Earth’?”

A teacher I love once remarked that Dostoevsky writes “conscious of the stories he’s not telling because he’s telling this one.” Tolkien is that and more: he sets his stories in Middle Earth because they only makes sense if the characters (and the reader) live and move in the knowledge that there is a bigger story that started before they got there and will continue after they leave, in which their own peregrinations play a part. So too does Milton place his narrative of the Fall in the shadow of those last two books. Adam and Eve were made to understand that their story was preceded by mighty events in heaven, and they must also understand that they will be succeeded by epochs of human faithlessness and divine faithfulness. Books eleven and twelve extend this sense of “middleness” to the reader, in whatever age she lives: Adam and Eve’s story is our own story, and not in a metaphorical way. Like Adam and Eve, we see only in part, but we see enough to know that bigger things are afoot, that we have a destiny. This consciousness is characteristic of every epic since Virgil, but in the Christian epic—with its imputation of guilt to the hero (Dante’s Comedia begins with a culpably lost pilgrim)—it takes on peculiar poignancy.

There is a theological word for the failure to see the larger story, and that word is “despair.” It is the condition of those in Dante’s hell, the gates of which say lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate—“leave behind every hope, you who enter.” Earlier when I described the need for affirmation from the academy (in the form of a respectable job) as “desperate,” drawing an analogy to a forlorn lover, I was trying to be very precise. The word means, literally, “without hope.” What I want to point out here is that both Schuman’s negative account and Roiphe’s positive one are equally hopeless, in terms of a larger story that might invest their own with meaning. The backdrop to both accounts is very like the backdrop that C.S. Lewis identifies in epic before Virgil, in which, Lewis says,

no one event is really very much more important than another. No achievement can be permanent: today we kill and feast, tomorrow we are killed. An inch beneath the bright surface of Homer we find not melancholy but despair. ‘Hell’ was the word Goethe used for it. It is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. . . . [Homer’s] greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux.[3]

Many humanities PhDs have reason to be melancholic. But in the Christian story, darkness is a condition through which one passes, not an abiding reality so comprehensive that the pilgrim doesn’t think to question it. Bunyan’s Christian is tempted to wallow in the Slough of Despond, but called to recognize the Slough for what it is and move forward in faith.

Conclusions

My labor here has been to step back and see the Slough, to assess how my story might be important for reasons beyond self-affirming originality no less than prestige and tenure. Possibly the insights I can draw for my own peregrination in higher learning can be inferred easily enough from the literary reflections above—but for my own sake let me take stock.

(1) If any life in the academy—however exalted—must be located in a larger story in order to have purpose, then any life so located—however lowly, wandering and broken—has purpose. In this world there may remain a need to call for justice, to apologize, to crunch numbers and lobby for change, to educate people young and old about the importance of the liberal arts and those who teach them, but ultimately the worth of those teachers does not hang on whether the world listens. Following from this,

(2) I am responsible to work against the scale of values that sets tenure-track faculty above other members of the community, in both my thoughts and my actions. Many academic Jeremiads focus on violence suffered by contingent faculty because of a lack of attention given them, in Simone Weil’s sense. The fault for this rests not only, or even primarily, on the people who write their paychecks: it rests on all of us. Here again Tolkien is instructive, for he gives particular attention to hobbits, a species not usually thought worthy of attention.[4] Who are the hobbits in the story of the modern academy? A species that stands out in my mind besides the much-bewailed adjunct is the student. Adjuncts are now responsible for a large percentage of the face-to-face instruction received by students in the United States. In behaving as though adjuncts have lost in the game of life, we imply that students are worthless. There are few sights in the academy more heartbreaking than that of a contingent faculty member who has come to accept this view himself, whose students suffer the consequences. I need to remember that if I am a contingent faculty member, either for a season or for the rest of my life, I am doing work of infinite value in caring for the souls in front of me; and

(3) A teacher of humanities who does not understand (1) and (2) should not be teaching in the humanities. We likely pursued our PhDs because we believe that there are things more important than “success” in terms of money and prestige. It’s not wrong to want security, comfort, attention and respect, but neither we nor our students will get as much as we want in the way of these things—so I pray that, if I am going to experience dearth and difficulty, I can at least bear witness to the fact that there are resources to sustain people who lack “success.” In fact, my experience of dearth and difficulty may allow me to testify to hope in ways I could not do otherwise. I am not saying that this potential good justifies the suffering of everyone who has been trampled down in the dehumanizing of the academy; I am saying that, if I let it, my own suffering can be translated into good, both for myself and for my students.

(4) Ultimately, that good can’t be held back by my circumstances. I want to end by turning once more to the end of Paradise Lost, to the moment when Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden. This thwarting of well-laid plans comes with ignominy, uncertainty, and difficulty of the direst sort. But Michael offers Adam these words, which follow us in our story too, at whatever stage in our lives and careers:

Yet doubt not but in valley, and in plain
God is, as here; and will be found alike
Present; and of his presence many a sign
Still following thee, still compassing thee round
With goodness and paternal love, his face
Express, and of his steps the track divine.

---

[1] An exception is William Paul Young’s The Shack, on which see Katherine Jeffrey’s review in the January 2010 issue of Books and Culture.

[2] Quoted in Ralph Wood, Contending for the Faith, pp. 151-52.

[3] A Preface to Paradise Lost, pp. 29-30.

[4] I’m grateful to Churl for this observation.

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Prophetic Awkwardness, The Common Riddle, and the Justification of the Academy

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academia, Academics, C.S. Lewis, Christ, Christian, Common good, God, Logres, PhD, Prophecy, Prophetic Critique, Socrates, That Hideous Strength, University

Chinglican is probably right in his response to my prior post; more or less, he took the conversation in the direction I alluded to and then left open when I said that these matters require a broader discussion of ends and means. And much of what he laid out is probably a good reason for doing academics. As he said of my research, it is most certainly not apolitical. And probably being prophetic and caring about the common good is a good idea. Indeed, had I been pressed, this probably would have been something of the direction I might have taken the conversation myself, and probably the way that many Christians would take the conversation. So why didn’t I do that in the first place?

To tell the truth, it is because I have to a certain degree become allergic to words and phrases like “the common good” and “prophetic critique.” What is meant at the root of them is surely important. But nowadays it seems like everyone and their dog is making “prophetic critiques” right, left, and centre; and I often feel that some who talk about the “common good” really mean something else, perhaps something more common than good. Put another way, Chinglican situates the university as a body independent of various institutions that can potentially abuse power, and therefore as a legitimate critic. The problem I have though is conceiving of a university context that is in fact independent; it is not after all as if the university structure hovers above the socioeconomic and religious reality like some worldly version of the church triumphant (as understood by Protestants), nor are those who run the university beyond the temptation of twisting power manipulatively. Universities may be watchmen, but who watches the watchmen?

So how would I put the matter differently? First off, I would say that, if we are using terms like “prophetic” and “common good,” the task for Christians (and any other well meaning people for that matter) is not simply to put them out there as justifications for the academy, but rather to live in such a way that they emerge from their quotation marks – that is, such that they actually become plausible options for believing in. Yes, it is true that my generation is cynical – indeed, very cynical – but I think it is a mistake to simply blame this on a fully deliberate choice or a pervasive nihilism. These things may indeed be there, but at the very bottom of cynicism is generally an experience of deep betrayal – indeed, I would suggest that, far from being the least hopeful of people, those who are cynical about things embody a very deep hope that has been crushed. Conversely, pragmatists are not those who are particularly optimistic about the world, but rather those not optimistic enough – they cannot be bothered to take a moment and mourn for what might have been. To talk plausibly about the “common good” and “prophetic critique” we will, I think, need to live in such a way that even the most cynical – to the degree that this cynicism is symptomatic and not chosen – can begin to believe that these words might have meaning.

Secondly, I suppose I would make a distinction between my vocation as an academic and what we might call the bodied effects of this – i. e. the job I have etc. A helpful way of looking at it perhaps is what C. S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength describes as the struggle between Logres and Britain that goes on throughout society. Here, we have not so much an independent body evaluating the behavior of other parts of society as much as we have a loose collective of people working – certainly for the common good – but in a very bodied, disparate, cross vocational, and often frustrating way. Indeed, in this book, the real prophetic critique and interest in the common good comes out of Logres, but the company most likely to use terms like these (and speak of independent knowledge) are their opponents – indeed, they have managed to produce a head independent of a body and other earthly props. This distinction allows me to both agree with Chinglican and what I said prior – I am not wedded to the academy, per se – but it may be the arena where I enact the thing that is in fact undeniably part of who I am, my vocation. The company of Logres exists regardless of where each member works.

So, given my pessimism about these words and phrases, what would I talk about instead of prophetic critique and the common good? I would talk about prophetic awkwardness and the common riddle. With regard to the former, it seems to me that the two greatest instances of what we might call “the prophetic voice” – Christ and Socrates – hardly garnered the kind of favor and “cool points” we think of when we think of radical and prophetic people. When you encounter a prophet, he or she may not make you feel like an oh-so-good-radical doing oh-so-good things for an oh-so-messed up world. Rather, encountering a prophet might make you distinctly uncomfortable. It may even make you feel murderous.

And what I mean by “the common riddle” is something like what Augustine means when he talks about the restlessness in our hearts. There is a tendency for people to approach the so-called common good in the so-called common square with ready-made solutions – we have seen the common problem and we have the common fix. But I would suggest that if we do not have some degree of uncertainty or tentativeness in our minds regarding this fix, it is probably in fact not one – it is rather a way of papering over problems we don’t want to see. What Augustine knew is that our hearts our restless until they find rest in God. And this means that restlessness and problems, rather than something to be covered over, are something to be pursued. I worry that too many people, in pursuit of the so-called common good, sacrifice common mystery, which is in fact this restlessness. And the irony of course is that in fact the only way to get a truly common good – a good for both city of God and city of man – is by following this restlessness to its proper end.

 

Academic Love and the Critical Space of Academia

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academia, Avery Dulles, Constantinianism, crisis, critique, fieldwork, governance, Jesuit, John Henry Newman, Judith Butler, medievalism, orientalism, PhD, public good, public sphere, radical, research

I want to write a quick response to Churl’s post yesterday on love in academia.  Like Churl, I too am a doctoral student. Like all doctoral students, my topic is fairly narrow: I study how Chinese Christians engage the public sphere. Like most topics, its narrowness is fairly expansive, encompassing fields I thought I’d never study.

Churl thinks that, unlike other people who seem to be doing more public service than him, academic work comes down to love. This is in the face of a shrinking academic job market, where tenure track jobs seem to be disappearing. Responding to only the latest apocalyptic statements in the higher education journalistic buzz, Churl argues that his job is to love his research subjects, to listen to them, and to stay in this metaphorical marriage though it really is doing him very little economic good.

I admit that I love my Chinese Christians too, more than they will ever know. I’d like to think that I listen to them closely. But God forbid, I hope I’m not married to them, or else my shifting postdoctoral research will be framed as a divorce. Moreover, as I once told my wife, “You are my love, not academia. That’s because while you love me back, academia will never love me back.”

Why do I stay, then?

To answer that question, we need to go back to what academia was originally for. John Henry Newman argues in The Idea of a University that the purpose of the university is to teach universal knowledge, including theology. I think Newman takes this a little bit too far, admittedly, to the point where he thinks that universities do not primarily produce research, but rather function as teaching centres. In his McGinley lectures on the relationship of church and state, Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ, has a more convincing answer. For Dulles, university theology is a gift to the Church because it isn’t produced under ecclesial governance, per se. As much as Stanley Hauerwas fulminates against the powers of the state over modern academia, neither is it governed by the state (or at least it’s not supposed to be). Teach-ins at the University of California, Berkeley, particularly by professors like Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown, have also railed against a market takeover of the university with attempts to privatize the institution, which means that the market isn’t supposed to govern academia either. Instead, the university, while cognizant of the competing governing structures of church, state, and market, is supposed to govern itself as an independent space producing knowledge that is critical of each of these structures. Pace Newman, the university is supposed to teach universal knowledge, and pace Dulles, the university is supposed to produce universal knowledge, and all this not for knowledge’s sake, but to contribute that knowledge to a critique of where knowledge gets bent by governing structures to legitimize their claims to power.

That the university doesn’t actually operate that way right now is not cause for cynicism; it is cause for thoughtful public action. This isn’t the first crisis of the university–imagine, for example, if you told the student strikers of the 1960s, faculty operating under totalitarian regimes, or even Galileo himself that they weren’t going through a crisis of the university–and it is not going to be the last crisis. The university is arguably always in crisis because its critical independent space of contested, contingent, and challenging knowledges isn’t always conducive to the governing power of church, state, and market. Because of this, the powers will always try to co-opt the university. Oftentimes, the university allows itself to be co-opted. But this isn’t a case to be cynical about the university; it’s a call to liberate it. To the extent that we can’t liberate it from within, we might need to take jobs outside of the university, but this doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in academia anymore. It’s that we will fight for its liberation from other vantage points because the existence of that critical independent space is crucial for the public good. After all, it makes sure that neither church nor state nor market has total domination over our knowledge production, but that their powers are relativized by constant independent, prophetic critique. (This, by the way, is why democracies must publicly fund universities. To the extent that they do not, their democracies themselves fall into crisis. To the extent that democracies fund projects only based on their supposed “relevance,” they undercut the university’s ability to produce the truly critical knowledges that make a democratic relativization of power work.)

To drive the point home that the university is an independent space that produces critical knowledge, let me suggest that Churl is himself deeply invested in this task. Referencing his studies in Old English, Churl often suggests that people think that his work is irrelevant to contemporary conversations. I beg to differ. Perhaps this is because I have spoken a lot with Churl, but in my understanding, one of Churl’s biggest pet peeves is something called medievalism. Just as racism is when you make stereotyping remarks that are often (but not always) derogatory about a race–and ditto for orientalism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, etc.–medievalism, as far as I can understand from Churl, is when you do that sort of thing to medievals. It’s when you call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages, or when you use the word medieval to mean backward and retrogressive, or when you posit that everyone who ever lived between the third and sixteenth centuries thought, lived, and acted the same way. Just like racism, sexism, orientalism, heterosexism, ageism, etc., medievalism is a modern construct, designed to legitimize modern power structures, underwrite policies ostensibly designed as egalitarian reversals of the Dark Ages, and undercut any appeal to tradition (despite the fact that anyone who has ever done an academic literature, legal, scientific, policy, etc. review is doing tradition).

So yes, of course, Churl loves his Old English research subjects by listening to them. But that love is not apolitical. By listening deeply to his Old English research subjects, Churl is challenging how our contemporary society is thoroughly underwritten by medievalism. Making that challenge in turn is a critical contribution of independent knowledge that not only isn’t governed by church, state, and market, but challenges some of the legs on which they stand. In other words, Churl is saying that medievalism is not a valid justification for any policy, political statement, public discourse, or poetic output. He knows better. It’s because his knowledge was produced in the independent critical space of the university.

I imagine, then and finally, that some readers of A Christian Thing may be aghast that I have lumped the church in with state and market governance. As Christians who believe in the holy catholic church and the communion of saints, wouldn’t we love nothing more than to be governed by the church? Yes, if only the ‘church’ were simply equivalent to the communion of saints at all times and in all places. With some degree of consensus, scholars of the late medieval period, especially those aligned with the theological school of radical orthodoxy, argue that the church began to consolidate its power as a bureaucratic institution, centralizing its hierarchy as a chain of top-down organizational command. To some extent, the rise of universities were a response to this new power consolidation, producing knowledges that were independent of this church governance and often in tension with it.

In other words, I’m suggesting that just as many have noted that monasteries were established as independent critical spaces after the advent of Constantinianism, universities became independent critical spaces after the church’s bureaucratic consolidation of power. Universities thus engage with these structures by producing truth independent of these systems of governance so that truth can’t be bent by power. Instead, scholars speak unvarnished truth to power. To the extent that the university has become complicit with the powers, then, we must work both within and without the university to return it to its prophetic character.

In short, it’s because we believe in the public good of prophetic critique that we are economically stupid enough to be doctoral students.

Why I Am a Doctoral Student: A Response to the Slate’s Thesis Hatement and Thesis Defense

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academia, Academics, Anglo-Saxon, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctorate, Facebook, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Donne, PhD, Slate, Thesis Defense, Thesis Hatement, Tolkien

According to the recent Slate article “trending” among academics on Facebook, we should resist the temptation of getting a PhD in literature. This for the reason that the job market for graduates is terrible. As a literature scholar who is quasi on the market myself, I have experienced enough of this, and I will no doubt experience much more. In response to this, another Slate article suggests that there are particular skills one gets from a Ph.D, even if one doesn’t get an academic job. But in my opinion, this response is in places a little one-sided; it kind of makes the lifestyle of the graduate student sound like that of a poor bohemian activist. You may not end up an academic for the rest of your life. But the skills you learn can be applied in a variety of professions. And you might as well enjoy “that brief, blissful time cultivating your Idea.” Or, as the article concludes, “The inefficient path has its joys and largesse.”

The interesting thing about both articles is that both seem to gauge the worth of a Doctorate by what it does for one’s self. They are in many ways self-focused, cost-benefit analyses, one concluding that the price is too steep, and the other concluding that, all things considered, the price is as reasonable as many other life choices. But here’s the question I have. What if you are not one of those students who thinks they are going to change the world? What if you are writing your dissertation knowing that there is a good chance that the most people will care about it is a few months before your defense, and that because it is part of their academic duty? What if what you say won’t change the world, even when all your peers are going around (allegedly) doing life altering things for {insert favorite special minority here}. What if it is fairly clear that you will probably not get a job in your field, and if you do you are lucky? And let’s raise the stakes. What if the work you are doing does not come easily? What if it is painstaking and mind-breaking, hardly the kind of romanticized flight of fancy that people imagine when they think of someone doing a degree in something as “useless” as literature. What if, to make matters worse, you have moderate levels of OCD and depression that complicate these things. The second article defending the PhD begins to look a little too romantic. And the other more pessimistic article begins to look like the only option – the only option, that is, if one factors out love.

By this I do not mean some sentimental attachment to things; and I am certainly not saying we need to study these things to save our country, or our generation, or Western civilization, or oppressed minorities, or whatever else wants saving. Some of these things are beyond saving; some have become not worth saving; and some should be left to the choices they have made, free will being what it is. In some cases, where saving needs to be done, it may not be our discipline or the academy entire that is the solution. I am not even here talking about self-love, unless in terms of the way that a Doctorate disabuses us of our pretensions about how much we matter. No, what I am talking about is that thing that at bottom that cannot be explained, the thing that draws us to care for certain things and people at the cost of great sacrifice over against the jeers and laughs of the rest of the world.

Of course, both of the articles I draw attention to are in some ways grounded in a kind of love. At their worst they may be grounded in selfish ambition, at their best, perhaps a love of humanity and progress, a sense that we can actually contribute something to the world around us, and that a Ph.D. may or may not further this. Neither author seems set against sacrifice – each just wants it to be pointed in the right direction. But neither explains the love. Neither explains why we feel the need to care for modern humanity, or progress, or success, or any of those things. They are cited as categorical goods, but I’m not sure what scale is being used to determine this.

Having said this, I am not in any way claiming that I will replace these unexplained assumptions with anything terribly clear. But knowing that they are unexplained assumptions does level the playing field a little. The modern person will make sacrifices and take pains to succeed in a system he or she does not know how to justify. And the doctoral student studying obscure works does something very similar. The real question, of course, is about the end and purpose of life, something we postmoderns are far too fashionably cynical to engage seriously. And for my money (or lack of it!), whatever the results, I guess that the reason I have done a Ph.D. is for love – not so much the “I feel in love with a poem and got all swoony” kind of love, but the John Donne “Batter my heart” kind of love, the love that costs. If my relationship with literature were a marriage of convenience, I would have walked away long ago.

At bottom it is very hard to explain. Why do I feel the need to love dead Old English people by listening carefully to them, trying to hear what they are saying and not what I want them to say? Why does it bother me when they are misrepresented and caricatured? Why have I been drawn to love a particular tract of the universe carved out by Anglo-Saxon sages and so unfashionable in an age that has lost its appreciation of wisdom? I know and I don’t know. There are myriad reasons, too many to count, in some ways. But there is also the mystery. This is something I have been given to do. No one promised that one would be able to justify the ways of one’s vocation.

Does this mean that I think that what I am doing will have no effect or implication for modern thought? Of course not. But it does give me a reason to keep going whether or not I see effects or implications. Some things that we think important will eventually be shown to be empty. And some things we think empty will eventually be shown to be important. And it is hard to tell at the moment which are which. Part of the problem is that I cannot make promises about how “revolutionary” my work will be. If I am doing proper research, I do not know how it will come out, and so I cannot say how it will affect the world.

Perhaps the best way to sum up how I feel about these things is to turn to J. R. R. Tolkien, a paradoxical figure because he had a degree as useless as mine and has probably done a good deal more for the modern world than most practically minded people. This, though, is not why I appeal to him, but rather because I like his model of love for little things that don’t matter. In his most popular work, Lord of the Rings, this is seen in Gandalf’s interest in Hobbits, the creatures so insignificant that they are generally not mentioned in the broader histories, and are certainly not the interest of those who care about things that matter, like Saruman. But Tolkien also explores such love in one of his lesser known but one of my favorite works, “Leaf by Niggle.” The story is basically about two neighbors who get on each other’s nerves and potter away at their respective interests; Parish like gardening, and Niggle, the main character, is a painter. The story is about how both characters end up in purgatory/heaven and learn to appreciate each other. Both of their earthly interests are seen to have been an anticipation and longing for a heavenly reality. But what I find most interesting is the fate of Niggle’s art at the end of the story. Though the love he shows in his painting is in fact good and perhaps even part of salvation, his painting is only mediocre, and its fate is to be destroyed except for a small piece that ends up as a misunderstood curiosity on a museum wall. His love mattered in a way that could not be gauged on this side of the world – much like the love one might put into the subject of one’s doctorate. I am not of course claiming that doing a Ph.D. is the only way to practice this kind of love, but it is one way, and a way that is simply not being acknowledged in the ongoing debates over the worth of higher education.

A PhD Hermeneutic for a Few Pop Songs

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academia, Academics, Alice Walker, America Magazine, Asian American, Backstreet Boys, Basil Moreau, Chinese, Christianity Today, Congregation of Holy Cross, Disney, Don't Stop Believing, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Francis Xavier, Fun, funny, Glee, hermeneutic, humor, James Martin, Jesuit, Journey, joy, Karl Rahner, Little Mermaid, One Direction, PhD, pop, Some Nights, St. Andre Bessette, Vatican II, womanist theology

Today is St. Francis Xavier Day, and in the spirit of engaging “the world” as the Jesuits still do, say, at The Jesuit Post and at America Magazine, I’d like to share a PhD hermeneutic for some pop music I’ve got stuck in my head.

I first learned the word “hermeneutic” from a freshman theology teacher at the Holy Cross Catholic high school I attended. We called him “Papa Bear.”

On the first day of class, he wrote the word HERMENEUTICS on the board. He asked us what it meant. Somebody shouted out, “J the C!” {See, he had mentioned that the right answer to every question in Catholic theology boiled down to ______ the ________. We filled in the blanks while playing hangman, and after a long time, we came up with “J the C,” which stood for “Jesus the Christ,” which only goes to commend Papa Bear for imparting the Christocentricity of Vatican II to us.)

Anyhow, “J the C” may have been the right answer for a Christocentric hermeneutic, but it certainly did not answer the question of what hermeneutics was. When all of us were finally stumped, he told us that it meant something along the lines of the interpretation of texts. (We were fed Gadamer early.) He then added, “When you go home to your family dinners tonight, stand up and tell your proud mom and dad, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m a hermeneutician.” I was one of two kids who did that. My theologically educated father said, “Get outta here.”

More years at that Catholic school would lead to further training in hermeneutics, including by a feminist theologian who taught us Genesis, Ruth, and Esther alongside Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. (She never told us that if we were using Walker, this should technically have been called womanist theology.) Imagine how tickled I was to find that the evangelical Christianity Today blog for women was called Her.meneutics.

The Congregation of Holy Cross has a lot of similar things to the Jesuits, not least with Blessed Basil Moreau‘s ultramontane sensibilities, i.e. he was loyal to the See of Rome over movements to form a national church in France, which echoes all sorts of ultramontane stuff in The Spiritual Exercises that progressive Jesuits, experimenting Protestants, and all other Rahner fans who use them conveniently ignore. It was also an order that was conceived as a family of priests, monks, and nuns who opened schools for kids who were too poor to go to school in the wake of the French Revolution and ended up starting (no joke) American universities like the University of Notre Dame. It’s fitting that our first saint was thus St. André Bessette, an illiterate monk/healer/”miracle man” who was the doorkeeper for the longest time for Montréal’s redux of the Congregation of Holy Cross, which ended up being built into St. Joseph’s Oratory.

I owe my knowledge of the meaning of the word hermeneutics to the Congregation of Holy Cross.

So on this St. Francis Xavier Day, in celebration of the worldliness of the Jesuits, in gratitude to the Congregation of Holy Cross for teaching me hermeneutics, and with a nod to the work of Fr. Jim Martin, SJ, in Between Heaven and Mirth, I’d like to share with you some of my hermeneutics for a few pop songs.

I’ve been listening to these songs at various stages of working on my PhD. I’d like to apply a PhD hermeneutic to them, insofar as this will be an exercise of interpreting the songs in light of my PhD experience. (We call this positionality.) It is, in short, pop songs through the hermeneutic of the PhD.

PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Here goes:

1. Comprehensive Exams: “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid

But who cares, no big deal…I want more [books]…

Alternatively, after three months of hibernation: I wanna be where the people are, I wanna see, wanna see them dancin’, walkin’ around on those–whaddya call ’em?–oh, “feet”…

Katy Perry’s thrown in there because when you’re in the midst of an all-day exam and midnight is approaching: …let’s go all the way tonight, no regrets…

2. Research Prospectus: “What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction

Differentiating antecedents for the you‘s, the first two for the committee, the third for the topic: If only you saw what I could see, you’d understand why I want you so desperately…

3. After many months of fieldwork: “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey

Remembering ethnographic minutiae: Hold on to that feeling.

4. Thesis Writing: “Some Nights” by Fun.

I still see your ghost [the previous argument’s]; oh, Lord, I still don’t know what I stand for…

5. TA Marking/Grading: “I Want It That Way” by The Backstreet Boys

Most frequent comment: Tell me why.

Yes, Mom, Dad, I am still a hermeneutician.

[CUE BOND THEME]