Seven Years in Princeton, or: Why your preceptor is so bitter

In the catalog of Princeton archetypes, somewhere between the beer-stained Lacrosse jock and the caffeine-enhanced premed, lies the humanities graduate student. A familiar figure from literature precepts, the usual model is dressed from head to toe in black, red-eyed from a long night at the D-Bar, and hoarse from a few too many European cigarettes.

While he or she may hide it during class, the archetypal grad student is also perennially bitter. Is it the lopsided gender ratio at the Grad College? The fear that next year, he'll be ejected from the G.C. and forced to find off-campus housing? Does she regret turning down Morgan Stanley? Would she rather be earning ten times as much for her work? Sure, financial analysis isn't particularly stimulating. But neither is grading German 101 vocabulary quizzes.

Or maybe it's the prospect of spending another five-to-seven years grading vocabulary quizzes, with no real prospect of employment at the end.

While grad students are ideally finished in five years, some humanities students may take a decade or longer. The rationale, as I learned from a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering, is the need to publish: if one graduated after five years in the humanities, between classes, precepts, and other obligations, one probably could do little besides write a dissertation. A six-year, eight-year, or 10-year term affords one the opportunity to do more research, write more academic papers, perhaps even publish a book or two. Given the sorry state of the academic job market, such resume-padding isn't a just a plus. It's a necessity.

If your preceptor is bitter, perhaps she's been reading the classified ads. As a Wall Street Journal pundit observed during the Yale grad-student unionization crisis, doctoral programs across the country are cranking out far more humanities Ph.D.s than the market will bear: tenured faculty positions are rare as it is, and their occupants cannot be pushed into retirement.

One might be tempted to ascribe this surplus to faculty members' desire to give a Ph.D. to anyone interested and qualified. An educationalist might call this admirable. An economist would call this irresponsible. A cynic (as were some of the Yale organizers) would attribute it to a need for slave labor. With their high undergraduate enrollments, humanities departments require veritable armies of teaching assistants. Graduate students are ideally suited to be TAs: they're well-schooled in the material, usually still enthusiastic about it, and are often genuinely interested in pedagogy (after all, they want to be faculty someday). To humanities departments' further delight, they're indentured servants all but in name. They work for a pittance. They can't quit before they finish, or their years in school are wasted. And transferring elsewhere isn't exactly easy.

Graduate students in the sciences have a notable advantage over their nontechnical brethren: They have career possibilities outside academia. Faced with a stagnant academic market, they can turn to a burgeoning (albeit in a present lull) business sector. Engineers are absorbed into technical firms, while Wall Street laps up mathematicians and physicists.

But it is the rare nonacademic position that requires a doctorate in the humanities. Tenured slots being few and far between, many Ph.D.s have to decide between picking a job for which their degree is of little use, or of resuming grad-life as a poorly-paid postdoctoral fellow.

No wonder they're bitter.

What can be done to save the humanities graduate students? As supply vastly outstrips demand, one can either reduce the former or raise the latter.

Schools could seek to drive up faculty turnover, either by scaling back tenure programs and hiring more faculty for short terms, or by encouraging older faculty to retire to make room for new prospects. While tenure reform has its share of proponents, it remains politically explosive. It's unlikely that the Ph.D. surplus alone will be sufficient to move colleges to broach the matter.

Alternatively, Ph.D. programs could cut their admit rate, reducing the number of Ph.D.s, and use hired postdocs as TAs, in place of the grad students they didn't admit. This simultaneously broadens the Ph.D. job market and reduces the graduate-student glut. But it would involve turning away genuinely interested students for ephemeral gains: it just shifts the problem to the postdoctoral level. The average Comp. Lit. department probably cannot pay hired-gun TAs much more than it does doctoral candidates, so postdocs would find themselves in the same academic limbo as superannuated graduate students: endlessly grading papers and cranking out journal articles whilst searching for rare tenure-track positions.

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In truth, there may be no institutional solution. Ph.D. candidates have to take stock of their chances of landing a faculty position before they enroll. Graduate admissions departments must be frank about job prospects in the humanities. Otherwise, their charges will continue to find themselves marooned on the same island with the Midwest's steelworkers.

Joseph Barillari is a senior in the computer science department.