The (Academic) Job System and the Economy, Stupid; Or, Should a Friend Let a Friend Get a Ph.D.?

Abstract

or he does, will there be life after graduate school? While the first part of my title is deliberately inflated to dramatize the daunting complexity of the issues surrounding the academic job market and its current discontents, the nitty-gritty question at the heart of the present career crisis in higher education is in my subtitle, drawn from an anecdote with which a member of the Modern Language Association's (MLA) new Committee on Professional Employment si; mul aneously amused and distressed us at our first meeting in I New York this spring. i As the committee's chair, I had asked members to identify j themselves and briefly outline their perspectives on our common i concerns. I'm here, began George Levine, a professor of English I and sometime department chair at Rutgers, because not long ago I I saw a car parked on my street with a bumper sticker that said, j 'Friends Don't Let Friends Go to Graduate School.' j Though everyone's laughter was edged with a shared bitterness, j we h d brought significantly different histories to our communal j sense of bleak comedy, for we're a sizable committee whose eigh! teen members represent a range of academic interests: some are ; from four-year liberal arts campuses, some from research universii ties, some from community colleges; several are graduate stu; dents; several are part-timers; some teach foreign languages and j litera ures, some English literature, some composition; a few are j in temporary positions; others are or have been department adI ministrators. Yet despite our differences, we're linked by mutual j unease about the future of our profession, about our own profesSandraM. Gilbert, currently president of the Modern Language Associa-