For the last three years, I’ve been trying to find my way into an academic job. That’s what I’m trained for. I go through phases where I start to give up that idea and try to sort out what other options are out there. Life is nothing but surprises, so who knows what’s in store. Just yesterday, someone at my church suggested possibilities for teaching overseas.
In any case, I’ve been trying to find my way into a career, trying to balance the things I need to do to continue the gamble of an academic career (which at this point will still involve mostly unpaid work – trying to get articles submitted to academic journals, getting a book contract for my dissertation, which I would then spend a few years revising) with what I need to do keep a roof over my head (take any work I can find). I keep looking for teaching options, but some days I run out of hope.
Still, no matter how frustrated I get with the situation I’m in now. I have no regrets about the choice I made to pursue a Ph.D. It’s not a “what if” hanging over my head.
Still, what pains me more than anything is that my advice to anyone about grad school, especially in the humanities, is don’t do it. It is simply is not affordable. I have one friend in particular who is much smarter than I am, who always finds the core issue of what I’m thinking about with ease and rapidity, whose mind has a reach that would meet its full potential in the process of thinking through the demands of the philosophy degree he’d like.
That potential has been cut short.
It’s that friend in particular who motivates me to keep trying to figure out where we can play offense when it comes to bringing the idea that education and knowledge are intrinsically valuable, and not just a means to a paycheck, or a bigger paycheck.
I don’t have the answer to that question. I can barely keep up with the defensive end of the game. I’m also fully aware that as global warming intensifies, the resources to expand higher education will shrink. For right now, though, the question is not a lack of resources, but the hoarding of resources by the 1%, and the addiction to putting resources into military spending in order not to look weak.
But it seems to me that the beginning of the answer to that question is to think about why I don’t regret putting myself $150K in debt for a degree that I have a 50% chance of putting to the use it’s ostensibly for.
I don’t regret it because I had an idea I needed to give birth to. That gnawed at me and wouldn’t let me give up. I know I would have spent the rest of my life wondering “what if” had I not gone that route.
I don’t regret it because my life testifies to an act of faith that knowledge is not reducible to its monetary value, but has a worth that has nothing to do with how much I paid for it. Whatever sacrifices I keep making down the line, the “I” that is making those sacrifices is one that made a commitment to throwing an idea as far as it would go.
I don’t regret it because it still represents the best chance I have of being able to throw another idea as far as it will go at some point down the line.
I don’t regret it because I have experienced first hand the kind of conversation I want to pursue for the rest of my life; I know it is possible.
Let me be clear – formal education is not the only way to get an education. There is plenty of brilliance to be found in street smarts, life experience, working hard, raising a family, etc. I struggle with the conflict between the elitist aspects of higher education, the guild structure of the professional associations, on the one hand, and my desire for an egalitarian society, on the other. But at the same time, what I did get from higher education that I wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere – that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
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