Continuing on from my QOTD from last week, here is another quote from the same chapter from Leonard Cassuto ("Professionalization"), but focusing on student debt--which given the current public discourse should be very relevant:
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Jeffrey J. Williams of Carnegie Mellon University persuasively compares student indebtedness to indentured servitude. For a new Ph.D. who is lucky enough to land an intellectually rewarding job in his or her field (whether in or out of academia), the burden of paying off student loans on a relatively modest salary means a life of poverty from which the gentility wears off like a cheap coat of paint. Economist Paul Krugman warned in 2005 that the United States is threatening to become a "debt peonage" society, in which borrowers work endlessly for creditors to service debts they can never retire.
We can't talk honestly about professionalization--or the larger meaning of being professional--without bringing debt into the conversation. Debt affects what kind of professional a student is or can be. Graduate students don't explore many of the assumptions that underlie their own professionalization, but they are unsurprisingly well aware of the onus of their loan debts. In this case, it's the professors who lack self-awareness. When professors and administrators countenance practices that maintain (or even increase) time to degree, we make ourselves complicit with a system that hurts our students' lives.
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But we can also view the time-to-degree question--and with it the idea of professionalism--through the prism of graduate student debt. When I complained in a newspaper column about how academic job searches tend to privilege candidates who stay in graduate school longer, some commenters disparaged my concern. "Who wouldn't hire a [more experienced candidate]?" asked one, while another declared, "Potential is just that" and called it a "risk" to hire a less experienced Ph.D.
But if more time in school equals more debt, then a preference for more experienced Ph.D.'s essentially adds to graduate student indebtedness. If we ask for graduate students to acquire a hyper professionalism in order to get a professor's job, we're essentially asking them to buy that training out of their future earnings--which, given the shakiness of the job market, are uncertain at best. Put simply, we're asking them to spend money that they haven't got and that they can't be sure they will ever get, to acquire a specialized skill set (how to succeed in academia) that they may or may not be able to put to direct use. And we ask those who want to try for a professor's job to do this at the expense of shaping their preparation for other kinds of work.
Viewed thus, a preference for more experienced job candidates is not simply instrumental. It's also pernicious, and redolent of malign neglect of one of our most pressing, but least visible, concerns as teachers of graduate students. We can debate the intellectual pros and cons of graduate student professionalization (hyper specialization, the utility of graduate student publication, etc.) until the next millennium; but let's not forget that money is at stake, and it belongs to the poorest members of academic society.
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From the outside looking in, there is something very disturbing about this: by creating an entire class of professors who can never retire due to debt, we are only exacerbating the situation that is the dismal job market. Because modern medicine has extended the quality of life for all (which is a good thing), people can literally work for longer number of years. And this all the more so for jobs that are less physically intensive such as the professorship. All things being equal, even without the debt, I can imagine many professors wanting to work for many decades, well past the usual age of retirement that is common (or required) in other jobs. Therefore, professors can work a longer number of years (because health and desire) but they will and must (because of debt). That means even less jobs for those finishing graduate school, which means bigger debt for such graduates, which leads them to lengthen their years of work if they make it to the other side, and on and on goes this downward spiral.
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