Should I pursue a PhD in the humanities? Should I become a professional academic?
If you are a current or recent student of mine, then this may be a good conversation to have in Office Hours — I may be able to add some wisdom based on my own experience with you as a scholar.
IMPORTANT: This FAQ entry only refers to PhD-level study in the humanities! Getting your Master’s degree in the humanities — if you can find the funding for it — is a versatile credit with multiple advantages, and the U of T English MA program is a damn good place to do it.
But regarding PhDs: even when I was pursuing my PhD, one of the most blogged and re-posted messages in humanities academia was that undergraduates should always be discouraged from pursuing a professional career in humanities academia. Back then, there weren’t nearly enough professional job openings in humanities academia to accommodate the number of applicants each year; things have gotten continually worse since then. Read this article, for starters, one of a wide selection of articles out there that can tell you just how bad it’s been. Or, for something more hilarious, watch this video, which came out right when I was about to finish my own PhD, but I think it has stood the test of time (and indeed, the statistics it cites are far worse now).
It is very difficult, and becoming more difficult, to create and sustain a career that begins with a PhD in the humanities. There is a good deal of luck involved in the process; if your roulette number doesn’t come up, you could find yourself with a humanities Ph.D., 7-10 years later, starting an entirely different career from scratch — one that will likely not at all require, and might not attach much value to (or even might be averse to), the degree you’ve worked so hard to earn. (Scholars considering pursuing a PhD are often young, at the start of their careers — and may take for granted, without realizing it, the momentum and social cache that comes to many job-seekers just from being young or new — and so may likely greatly underestimate the gravity of what it means to have to start over, completely, later on in life. You may find yourself with much, much narrower options than you can now imagine.)
I like to think that pursuing a career in professional academia is a lot like pursuing a career in professional acting — you have a comparatively slim chance in both fields of securing a financially sustainable and reliable career, and you may likely devote many, many years to your craft before you realize that it’s not going to work out. So my response to the would-be young scholar is based on the kinds of things that they told us in theatre school:
If you can ever imagine yourself pursuing a career in something else and being happy, then do that. Go do it, really.
You should enter into this career expecting to get knocked down repeatedly. If you need frequent approval or affirmation, get out of the kitchen now.
Love, pure love of what you do, is absolutely essential for this business. So is talent. But even if you have an abundance of both, you are guaranteed nothing.
You don’t get to choose which job you get, or where. Expect to have to spend much of your life far from home, and from anywhere you’d otherwise choose to be.
Success in this business is often a matter of luck; entering into it is above all a gamble. Enjoy the journey with no hope of a destination, because it is likely that the destination will never arrive; at the same time, be prepared to grind, hard, and to push relentlessly — since that is your only chance of getting anywhere.
Intimidating stuff, and yet — look how many actors are still pounding the pavement every day.
It’s the same with a career in academia. If you’ve read all this and you still want to go for it… then in a way, you MUST go for it.
If that’s you, and you’ve shown your skill in my classes, then I’ll help you in any way I can. Come chat about options in Office Hours.