Late to the Conversation....

Dr. Heidi posted a link to Thomas H. Benton's Chronicle article about turning prospective graduate students away from the humanities. While I agree with Dr. Heidi that Benton's dismissal of emotion is problematic I would NEVER encourage anyone to go to graduate school.

The woeful state of the job market is just the most rational reason not to enter this profession. Every other reason has to do with the fact that at one point in my life I loved to learn for the sake of learning. During the MA portion of my program that love was fostered and grew. During the last four years the life has been slowly and surely sucked out of my love of learning.

Sure, I went in to this project a little naive, but everyone does. It's impossible to understand the realities of graduate school until you live them. What Benton doesn't seem to realize is that the "rhetoric of sentimentality" is not about the "love of graduate school" and does not stem from a position of naivite or privilege.

As I believe I've discussed before Ouiser and I are working class girls. Getting to this point in our lives was neither easy nor expected of us. We routinely sit on my deck and talk ourselves out of throwing our hands up and quitting. We are torn because this pursuit forces us to make painful choices regarding our family, choices no one 'privileged' would have to make. We stick with it because we are stubborn old Cajun women (one of us truly Cajun and the other adopted). We stick with it because we enjoy at least part of what we do. We are not naive. We are not privileged. We cling to 'loving' what we do because it is all we have left. We speak about it all 'sentimentally' because it is the only lie we have left to tell ourselves.