Ghost Buster: Ruminations on academics, the recession and other scary things

Why am I blogging at 1:00 am? Let me tell you why.

Just came back from a late night coffee with Chanbong and K aka Kultur-Vulture (a very appropriate name, I think). Given that we are three grad students who were drinking nothing stronger than black tea (on St. Patricks day no less)- I think it is highly commendable that we a) managed to stay out significantly late b) got drunk undergrad boys to spontaneously and only half-ironically dance/gyrate for us on the street (attesting to the the power of blasting Britney Spears' Circus) and c) combined the above activities with a meandering chat about literature, East Asian pop culture and Milan Kundera.

As we were heading back and I was innocently seat-dancing to Rihanna (yes it was an unabashedly pop kind of night) K happened to bring up the fact that he has seen two ghosts in his life- one while driving with his brother and the second in his apartment complex. Actually, be brought this up because we saw a white plastic bag drifting along the street in the darkness (in a decidedly non-American Beautyish way) and I remarked how freaky it looked. This prompted K to tell the story, backed up by some impressively visible goose bumps. Anyone that knows me knows that I do not react well to ghost stories while simultaneously being fascinated by them - particularly in the night. As usual, I was terrified and curious and now here I am unable to sleep, starting at every passing noise with all the lights in the house blazing.

So what turns out to be my distinct loss (sleep), turns into the blog's gain (posting at long last)...

In the spirit (no pun intended) of the night, I shall reflect on some truly scary things - like the recession, academia and how the link between the two is really, truly frightening.

Is it just me or was this spring break not like other spring breaks? Granted that in Syracuse the term 'Spring Break' always seems cruelly inappropriate when you're wading through inches of snow and fighting arctic winds. But this time a combination of factors made this the least spring breaky-spring break yet.

It was not meant to be this way. At the start of the week I had visions of multiple long and rambling posts on the blog, slow cooked meals which I could savor and put away for later, catching up on a few good films and reading at least a few great books. Hanging out with friends and sleeping in also ranked high on the agenda. As my previous post said it was all wonderful to start with but now that it's all over, I'm confronted with the realization that I cooked one dish only, hung out with friends only on the first day of the break, watched one bad movie and read one good book. I spent 4 days in school in my usual bay, staring at the computer screen.

But there was a particular sense of blah that pervaded this break. And I'm pretty sure a lot of it had to do with the recession.

Yes it has been around for a while (and the signs are all around us) but it's only in the last few weeks that I've realized how utterly and completely screwed we are. From conversations with faculty who grimace at the words 'job market' and shrug apologetically as they admit they will NEVER retire, to the nyt article that had us all reaching for a stiff drink/xanax - it's clear that not only are things going to be miserable generally, they're going to be particularly bad for those in the early stages of academic careers and fabulously horrible for those in the final years of our PhDs. Guess where I am?

My friends, it is time to worry when the advice of faculty that previously told you to 'get out of grad school fast' becomes 'stall as long as you can' and when they won't even cheer you up with such platitudes as 'you'll be fine'. Another sign of the times is the particular new inflections and tropes in the perennial 'why did I choose this' conversation that most grad students have had (with each other or with themselves). Previously the conversation went something like this:

Grad Student 1: " I'm stressed and poor and mildly sick... and I'm never going to finish this dissertation and my friends all have jobs and houses and kids. Why did I choose this again?"

Grad Student 2: "I know! It's so hard to get a good academic job- I don't want to be stuck teaching at some crappy college. I should have just stayed in (insert much better paying, private sector job that was deemed unsatisfying and soul killing). If only I had (insert road not taken)"

Grad Student 3: "Yeah, I totally understand. What was I thinking? But now it's too late to do anything else. I'm not even sure I can do anything else. But god, I'm poor and stressed and I'll never finish this dissertation...."

(and so it goes....until)

Grad Student 4: "Yes, it's really hard and maybe we're crazy but think about it- would you really be happy doing something else? Isn't this what you wanted to do?"

Grad Student 1: "Sigh...yes, you're right. I would go crazy sitting in meetings all day."

Grad Student 2: "Yes, that's true. And I do love teaching sometimes"

Grad Student 3: "No, I really do hate this. I'm leaving/ I want out. Bye"

You get the picture. We've all had this conversation at one time or the other- and if you're lucky, you're student no. 4 and you really love teaching or you love your work and despite all the uncertainty and stresses of academia- you really never feel as alive and happy as when you're in it.

But now the conversation has changed- sure, there's no longer too many friends to compare ourselves to. Everyone is vulnerable or constrained in this atmosphere. But now there is little room for debate and ambiguity,now the conversation goes:

Grad Student 1: "God this is so BAD. We're soo screwed - no one is going to retire, no one is hiring, no one has money, there are no postdocs, no jobs....just no no no"

Grad Student 2" " Of all the rotten luck in the world! I'll do anything - heck i'd be happy to teach 4 courses in some crappy college in the middle of no where. What's going to happen to us? "

Grad Student 3: "No idea. We've got to stall"

Grad Student 2: "For how long? And on what? And for what, in the end?"

Grad Student 4: "Yes, it's really hard and maybe we're crazy but think about it- would you really be happy doing something else? Isn't this what you wanted to do?" (Voice weakly peters out...)

Deafening silence and sighs...

But it's not all bad. Let me say how much I enjoyed chatting with Chanbong and K (up until the ghost stories). There was a moment when we were sitting in the little bubble tea place and K was talking animatedly about why the Chinese are so enamored with Foucault that I thought... 'This is why I love my friends.' I'm heartened by such chats and such friends in a world and a mileu where reading and being literate in the broad sense of the term is seen as a waste of time.

So it got me thinking yet again- can one be truly literate without a vast canvas and array of interests? Or am I being naive and unfocused, to my detriment? So many successful people in academia are remarkably disciplined about how they use not just their time but also their brain space- they hardly extend themselves outside their area of research and their work. And this is the model prescribed to grad students too. On the other hand, so many of the people I admire in public life are conversant and engaged with things beyond what they do. They're interested in the human condition as it is manifested in different things- art, music, books, people, activism. I wonder often if this is a luxury you have to 'earn'- maybe after tenure or when you've done the hard slog. If so, are people like me just fundamentally misfits in the structure and rewards system of (American) academia? It's a question I've thought about often and one that I am beginning to hear more and more in the way my friends question the norms of graduate school and academic life. In the past few weeks I've heard more and more the following types of questions : Is it worth it to constantly feel stressed and competitive? Why is that the normative reasons that drive many of us to come to graduate school get taken over so quickly with the drive to succeed, compete and 'produce'? Why are those things defined the way they are? Is it worth it to not do the things you love- whether it is yoga or spending time with family or writing- in order to achieve some abstract and increasingly more uncertain reward in the future? How can we meaningfully live within these dominant norms and still be fulfilled in some deeper sense? Is asking these questions itself pointless?

I'm not sure I know how I feel about these questions. I think the balance between who you are with who you want to be is a tough one to reconcile and manage but I'm trying to internalize the value in trying not to be someone I can't be. Confused? So am I.

On Samuel Huntington (1927- 2008)

In my world there is no figure that people love to hate more than Samuel Huntington, who passed away earlier this week. Much of this is targeted at Huntington's last few works, most notably 'The Clash of Civilizations' and 'Who are We'. The common charges are that Huntington is a (perhaps 'the') neo-conservative, is a shoddy academic because he makes grand, sweeping arguments without the requisite research, that he is anti-Islam and anti-multi-ethnic societies and has that agenda for US foreign policy, that he is arrogant etc.

What this translates into in classes is an all too easy dismissal of Huntington even before one has the chance to talk about the work at hand. A snigger here, a snarky comment there and we're done with our 'discussion'. I have rarely seen a group of otherwise argumentative and opinionated people fall into such complete agreement than when it's time to bash Huntington. I predict that in the weeks after we all come back to school, there will be much of the same reaction.

While there are some substantial reasons for some of this derision, the quality of it has always troubled me. At the very real risk of alienating or annoying professors and peers, I and a few of my peers have tried to address this in class only to be met by a unified response of incredulity and half-joking accusations at being secretly conservative! And I don't even really agree with the man on his core hypotheses.

Don't get me wrong- Huntington was too influential, powerful and successful to need defending. His work was at its best powerful and insightful and at all times enormously provocative and designed to spark debate and dissent, which by all accounts he enjoyed. Secondly, I agree that some of the arguments about the flaws in his research are valid and his conclusions, while provocative, can be troubling for those who see themselves as fundamentally liberal. So this is not a blanket statement to rescue a scholar who needs no rescuing. Instead this post is to make two observations on Huntington's legacy:

First, I think (and this is not very social-sciency of me) that Huntington's role as a public intellectual far supersedes his role as an academic political scientist or a social scientist. To those of my interlocutors who point to the flaws in his 'research design' or 'case selection' and bemoan the lack of theoretical or literature review, I can only say that that was not Huntington's aim in his later work. His early work has all of that and those are still powerful and important works in political science. But the later work, for which he is most often criticized, was all about larger ideas. Surely we can agree as constructivists that there is a core place for and a power of large ideas in the world?The charge that Huntington cannot account for Case A or Case B ignores that he is often pointing his finger at, in a prescient way, large, complex and abstract forces and phenomena in society. The role of holding up those larger patterns, and even shaping the contours of the debate on huge issues such as identity, religion and violence or immigration is a pivotal one. And it is different from the important work of 'normal science', to twist that term.

Secondly, many criticize Huntington's influence on guiding the shaping of contemporary U.S. foreign policy, specially in the post 9/11 period. The argument is that Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations' idea predisposed a certain (misguided) interpretation of those events and strengthened the idea that this was a religious struggle rather than one over concrete political conflicts. This is a huge and un-resolvable debate in many ways and I'm not sure that we can easily separate the domain of the religious from the political in any of the conflicts Huntington was talking about; but at a very minimum shouldn't his influence on U.S.policy mean that we should engage with his ideas in a much deeper sense? How can dismissing Huntington out of hand help us truly understand the making of U.S. (or indeed other) foreign policy? Huntington's passing alerts us to the enduring problem of the harmful mutual disengagement of scholars of international relations with practitioners of foreign policy. Both see the other as misguided and out of sync with reality and because each side thus has their pet intellectuals, the bridge is harder to divide.

Thirdly, and related to the points above, to truly understand the workings and deeper sociological roots of foreign policy anywhere requires us to give up the rote conventions of academia, to be wary of political correctness and to take more seriously the arguments of those we disagree with. We owe it to ourselves as members of academia as Kanti Bajpai reminds us in a fairly devastating piece he wrote on the Clash of Civilizations in 1998. To 'pirouette dismissively' from Huntington, Bajpai says, is lazy.

Thus, I, like many others, have my differences with Huntington but I respect his contributions to our discipline, will engage with his many insights and admire his always provocative, always challenging mind.

And, in true Huntingtonian spirit, I relish any and all arguments that this post might provoke!

ETA: Here's the NYT obit
on him

It's chaos but it's MY chaos!

A nyt blogpost that tackles one of the biggest trials and tribulations of academic life: how to roganize all the materials you work with. As someone who has a gazillion documents called 'proposal', 'terr' or 'final paper' with random numbers after it this post is after my own heart.

The basic point being made is that it is so easy now to just download and save articles that you often end up with more chaos on your computer than you can handle- multiple copies of the same article with different names depending on idiosyncrasies, emails with the same paper saved every 5 minutes etc. She's absolutely right that what happens now is that you end up re-researching every paper you write, even if it is substantively close to other things you have done before. It's just easier to re-google scholar an article and download it than sift through various folders and oddly titled files named pdf.17973567. The small enviornmentalist in me is also aghast at how easy it is to print off reams of articles, most of which remain unread (studying by osmosis anyone?) and then get thrown into recycle bins. Recycling does not mean that we should be printing copies of the same article every couple of weeks.

The article suggests some new software to get around this problem that seem worth checking out. They sound like more organized and functional variants of endnote.

But it only addresses the download problem, not other hassles like how to back up work in an organized fashion or how to arrange your own materials. Also, it still means that you have to be disciplined enough to enter the information about each work into the database. If you're struggling with an impending deadline, or if endnote is bugging as it seems to on Mac, that's easier said than done.

I could be a lot more organized (for those familiar with my desk, this is patently obvious) but there are a few things that I do that seem to work (ie. I can generally find things I need, I don't have tons of copies of the same things) that I'm surprised to see my friends and peers don't. So, in the best tradition of unsolicited advice, here are some tips for more organized filing:

1. Save things in multiple places- not just on a flash drive. I strongly recommend a gmail account- there is more space than you will ever know what to do with and it's free.

2. Email yourself your work every 20 minutes or so when working on a paper. I've learned the hard way of never going too long before saving and backing up work.

3. Name your documents in a standard, logical manner with some sort of numbers. like Version/V 2 or IDpaperDec232008...it really helps later on

4. Delete! Delete! Delete! Every few months go through your computer and delete the multiple copies, the million emails with the every-20minutes-backed up paper. It makes life a lot easier and a lot less daunting to look at 600 emails all sent to yourself with identical looking attachments. Just keep the final couple of versions of any completed papers.

5. Use folders on the desktop instead of just putting individual paper icons..

Those are my words of wisdom. Now if I could only practice what I preach. I think I'm going to try extra hard...

...and give up chocolate, take up jogging and write 5 pages by 10:00 am every day. (Don't get your hopes up papa!)

Ambition

Sitting in the library today, I realized that the depth of my ambition is to one day have a book (all of my own) that nestles dustily on some forgotten shelf on the 5th floor of a quiet library...
That, and to get a job.