Typically, I tell people not to go to grad school. That’s the advice I give, generally. And I do rather stridently. But when I do, I make it actual advice, by which I mean, it comes from a place of respect and a sincere desire to help. I don’t pretend to offer advice when I’m actually offering contempt and mockery. And I also recognize that the vast majority of PhDs are in fact in far better shape than the national average. They have an absurdly low unemployment rate of 2.5% and weekly earnings twice the national average. As with any statistics, there’s plenty of individual variance within there. But the data are unambiguous: the vast majority of PhDs end up fine. Many or most of them won’t end up as TT professors, and for many of them, that’ll be a disappointment. But in a country with such vast poverty, unemployment, and general economic hopelessness, PhDs are doing fine. My general advice stands: don’t go, unless you are merciless in your self-criticism, if you are mercenary in how you pursue particular fields and research interests, and if the program has a very high placement rate. My own program (not department), for instance, has a 100% TT hiring rate in the history of the program, a time-to-degree of 5.4 years, and better than 90% graduation rate for people who finish their preliminary exams. (Could I easily be one of the people left without a job, though? You betcha.)To assert that you are offering employment advice for PhDs, without considering data like this, is either deeply misguided or deeply dishonest.
There are smart and stupid ways to pursue graduate school. I laid out my version of the smart way here. But I certainly understand that I could end up on the outside looking in. And you know what? I’ll figure that out. As someone who has endured actual human hardship, I guess I just don’t see that kind of rejection as the pit of despair that Schuman does. My natural response to her talking about the spiritual death of not getting a TT job is to say, first, I think she needs to readjust her definition of suffering. And, second, what a terribly narrow, sad definition of the world, or of success.
Fishing nets dry in the early morning sunlight in a Macao harbor around 1931, the year photographer W. Robert Moore began his career at National Geographic.
Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic
The Medieval Latin word universitas has no reference to the scope of the curriculum of studies; it stands for the whole gathering, the whole body, of a particular class of persons, and indeed stands very near in meaning to the modern ‘union’ in the term 'trade union.’ It is all but synonymous, for legal purposes, with the Latin term collegium, and for social comparisons, with the old English word guild. The universitas was first of all the whole body either of the masters or of the students, and then very naturally came to mean their self-governing guild or society. The word did not gain its local or educational connotation till the last phase of the middle ages.
Dear Miss Kidd,Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but I’m sorry to have to say that on the basis of that one highly distinguishing quality alone I cannot make you an offer for the novel. The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace, that whatever drama and excitement the novel might have had is entirely dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the time, to be extraneous material. My thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. The manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is returned herewith.
Yours sincerely,
The Editor
21 June, 1968
James Sayers (1748-1823), The Comet, 18 February 1789. Etching and aquatint. Published by Thomas Cornell, London. Collection of Princeton University Library.
So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.This future is going to happen – and it is too late to debate. However, the problem is that Facebook is going to use all this data — not to improve our lives — but to target better marketing and advertising messages at us. Zuckerberg made no bones about the fact that Facebook will be pushing ads on Home.
All of which is to say that Kubrick, in his intellectual way, is offering us the experience of the mind breaking down, rather than telling a story about a mental breakdown. As such, if we are to keep our heads we have to surrender to the experience, for a time, but remember that, like Dick Halloran says to Danny about the nightmare visions he has, it’s just pictures. It isn’t real.But not everybody can keep their heads.