This and That about Academics

Yesterday, I had a visit from Simon. Since I can't get around very easily these days--somebody has to drive me, get the wheelchair out, push me around, etc.--it's nice to have visitors instead.

Incidentally, Simon is in my "cohort." When I was visiting various graduate schools last Spring to decide which one I would attend, they all made a big deal about the "cohort." Basically, your cohort consists of other people who enter your Ph.D. program at the same time. Most of the universities talked about how they gave the same funding to all students so there was no competition among the grad students and they could instead help each other achieve greatness. But regardless of why they emphasized it, they talked about it a lot, like we would all be best friends, inseparable, bonded for life.

As a sidenote, I hate that word, cohort. I hate it because everybody used it everywhere I went, from coast to coast. It frustrated me because I wanted to see difference, not sameness, in the programs to which I had applied. I wanted to choose a place that was best for me--but if they were all alike, why did it matter where I should go?

I think I came to Stanford because it was the only place that didn't emphasize the word "cohort" over and over again during the visit.

As another side note, since coming to Stanford, I have realized that I will take a total of two classes with my "cohort." Then I will never see these people again until we are writing our disserations, at which point a few of us might choose to form disseration-writing groups to help each other sound alike by using "in" words, like "subaltern" or "teleology."

So. Simon came to visit. It was a lovely visit. Anyway, Simon and I talked a little bit about this graduate school experience. Like most people, Simon assured me that my desire to have a life outside of graduate school is, well, dramatically unrealistic. But I'm going to cling to my dream, no matter how many hours of sleep that dream deprives me of. By "having a life," I don't mean that I want to go out drinking and carousing around San Francisco four or five nights a week. I just want to keep my art alive: that is, I want to be able to write a couple hours a day without drowning in my other work.

We discussed the German system of tertiary education, which evidently works on a lottery system. You earn your Ph.D. and write a junior dissertation, and then you write a senior disseration, and once you've published 2 or 3 books, if you're really lucky, you'll be that one person out of two or three hundred who gets a full professorship. If you're not lucky--maybe because the person who was your advocate died--you find yourself 40, educated beyond unemployablity, and on the state dole. "The state is beginning to see that this system is not the most advantageous one for them," Simon said. So recently, the state insistuted a system of "junior professorships," in which a person could teach for three years, and then teach for another three years. But at the end of that six years, what did they find? They found that those "junior professors" still faced the same expectations and lottery that all other professors faced, only they hadn't had the time to write their senior dissertation or get books published, so they were--out of a job.

I'm not sure I like our system in the U.S. but the great thing about it is that there are non-academic jobs for folks with Ph.D.s.

First Week Back At Graduate School

The day after Christmas, while I was crossing a street in central El Paso, an F-150 truck took me out. I don't remember anything for about ten minutes previous to the accident but a witness told me that I broke the truck's headlight, tumbled up onto the hood, then flew forward 15-20 feet. "You looked like a ragdoll in the air," she said. The guy in the car kept going and by the time he stopped, she said, he had hit me again with his bumper and my head was under his wheel. I probably wouldn't be alive if he hadn't stopped, and it's not clear if he stopped only because two witnesses blocked him in with their cars, believing he was about to keep right on going.

I woke up in the ambulance, strapped to a board. I asked, "What happened?" and the paramedic explained, "You were hit by a truck." I said, "I think my leg is broken," and she said, "Yes, yes, it's OK, we're taking you to the hospital." "Has someone called my dad?" "Yes, your family is already there." OK.

I have never drunk myself into such a stupor that I don't remember things, nor have I ever used the kind of drugs that involve memory loss or provoke surreal experiences. But I think I now have a good idea of what doing so might be like the morning after.

This is about the time when I should probably insert that I am currently enrolled at Stanford for the first year of a Ph.D. program in History, African History to be precise. There were times during the fall quarter when I felt like I had been hit by a truck, intellectually speaking, but I never in my life dreamed I would have a conversation with my advisor that included joking about my Vicodin-enhanced study sessions over the assigned readings for the week.