The Ph.D. Wager
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds—if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.
—Tom Stoppard,
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Over the past year or two, while writing (or, at times, putting off writing) my dissertation, I became, almost inadvertently, a part-time professional poker player. That is, I began to play online poker as a viable source of income and not just as a hobby or means of procrastination. After years of performing qualitative intellectual labor, often wondering what could be said to constitute the boundaries of my work—was I working whenever I watched a movie or read a poetry blog?—it felt good to dispense with ambiguities and measure the results of my labors in decisive, quantitative terms: if I consistently outplayed my opponents, then statistical variance would even out and my bankroll would make a slow, steady, satisfyingly inexorable climb. And, too, my newfound poker expertise provided a convenient salve to my conscience whenever I chose to play poker instead of work on my dissertation: I wasn’t procrastinating, I told myself, I was working, putting in time at the virtual office and earning, over the long haul, an average hourly rate. To a dissertator, this kind of permissive logic is irresistible.
My newfound profession had both positive and negative effects on my quality of life and my sense of intellectual-artistic vocation. One interesting, if at times disturbing, effect was that I began to think of, even analyze, my actions as though they were actions in a poker game. When I was up too late, I’d tell myself that the smart play would be to fold and go to bed, as if the day were a pot I was reluctant to concede. When, at the end of a night out, I took the subway home when I would have rather taken a cab, I’d pat myself on the back for “saving a bet” by taking the cheaper transportation, because every good poker player knows that saving small bets pays off big in the long run. This habit of mind may sound bizarre, nothing more than a weird idiosyncrasy, but it’s pervasive among serious poker players: their language, indeed their very worldview, becomes tinctured by their training in poker thought processes.
When, therefore, a discussion recently came up on the English Students Association list-serv about the extent to which the department’s oral exam is a “high-stakes” experience, my inclination was to assess the exam itself, and graduate school in the humanities more generally, from a gambler’s perspective. Was the oral exam indeed a high-stakes experience? More broadly, what are the stakes we’re playing for as doctoral students in the humanities? How can we talk about the types of risks to which we’re exposed? And more pressing still, how should we analyze those risks, weigh and assess them as gambles?
The decision to enter a PhD program in the humanities is, unmistakably, a risky, high-stakes life choice. Life may indeed be a gamble at terrible odds as Tom Stoppard points out but, even by its dispiriting speculative standards, graduate school in the humanities offers particularly execrable odds. The laundry list of systemic labor problems doctoral humanities students face is so well known it hardly needs to be rehearsed: a swollen adjunct work force, significantly more PhD’s than tenure track jobs, financial compensation incommensurate, even for tenured professors, with the level of training, expertise and effort required. The academic labor market, never great, has in recent years gotten even worse, as attested to by the spate of articles and books discussing its crises and inequities. In gambling terms, pursuing a PhD in the humanities is a losing bet: the tangible returns, measured in jobs and salaries, don’t equal or exceed the odds of success.
There are, of course, intangible returns: the pleasures of intellectual excitement and discovery, interactions with interesting colleagues and friends, the acquisition of knowledge, as well as an institutional framework that can provide a sense of intellectual purpose. None of us became humanities students to get rich, so these intangible factors complicate the accounting of our enterprise. Here we see one of the shortcomings of a quantitative, poker-esque worldview (a worldview I’d argue that predominates not just in poker communities but in aspects of American culture at large): it can’t easily account for qualitative variables. A maxim follows: the only logical reasons to pursue a PhD in the humanities are qualitative in nature. And a corollary to this maxim: for all but the very wealthy, to pursue such a course of study is to engage, knowingly, in financial self-sabotage. I lay out these precepts descriptively, not as value judgments.
Fine. Most of us know these things already and those who don’t will find them out soon enough. What’s less obvious is the way in which this state of affairs, once elected, can, paradoxically, be liberating. That is, once you have chosen to matriculate in a humanities PhD program and thus dampened, significantly, your financial prospects, you no longer need concern yourself overmuch with risk, because you are already exposed to so much of it. It’s not that financial self-sabotage is liberating or redemptive in some way (it’s not and I’m not trying to romanticize it), but that once you’ve acted with knowing disregard for your short- and long-term finances (in the name of the intangibles I outlined above), the stakes can’t, in a sense, get any higher: you’ve already bet everything or almost everything.
Here’s another way of framing the wager: for the aspiring humanities PhD, the odds of job success are so poor that the only healthy way to embark upon such an enterprise is to assume you won’t succeed, just as when betting on a slot machine—another losing bet—you can’t expect to win money (while nonetheless secretly hoping you will). When you elect this peculiar course of study, you have to be comfortable with the possibility, more probable than you’d perhaps like to admit, that you will spend the next eight years of your life with little tangible to show for it. It’s a perverse, gutsy bet, but it’s one we’ve all made: staking eight years of your life, as well as your financial prospects, for the chance at something resembling professional intellectual fulfillment. The fact that so many students are willing to make that bet says something about the intrinsic value of the goal. And the steep odds being offered mean that the only sensible way of pursuing that goal is idealistically, uncompromisingly—otherwise, why invest the time, money (in the form of opportunity cost to earn more elsewhere) and effort?
This state of affairs means that, once you matriculate into a doctoral program in the humanities, nothing you do during your time in the program, no milestone or decision, will be, comparatively, high-stakes. Nothing—literally nothing—hinges on the outcome of any individual term paper, exam, conference proposal, or article submission. If you don’t hand in a term paper, you merely receive an incomplete. If you fail an exam, you’re allowed to retake it. If you have an article rejected by one journal, you simply send it to another—or you go about trying to write another, better article. No single thing you do or don’t do is likely either to make or to jeopardize your professional future: if the decision to enter graduate school is a high stakes gamble, each checkpoint along the way is like gambling for pennies. Even the dissertation itself matters more, arguably, for how it allows you to position yourself in terms of academic specialization rather than for the quality of its ideas.
The disparity between the stakes of graduate school itself and the stakes of the routine tasks of the graduate student accounts for no small amount of the psychic anguish graduate students experience. On a day-to-day basis, we perform relatively inconsequential actions that, cumulatively and almost imperceptibly determine our professional futures. We’re anxious about the latter, and for good reason, but it’s hard to see how any individual thing we do can much alter the outcome, an outcome we’re already pessimistic about to begin with. And so we go on reading and writing and teaching, continuing, thanklessly, the glacial task of knowledge production. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that the core tension of humanities doctoral programs is between the slow, roundabout process by which knowledge gets acquired and produced, and the instrumental demands of disciplinary and institutional conventions. Humanities doctoral students aren’t lazy: time to degree is so long for us because intellectual discovery involves swerves, dead ends and digressions. We may Hamletize, we may get depressed, but I’d argue these are necessary, healthy parts of the process—forms of intellectual respiration.
• • •
When you play poker full-time, as I did for the last several months of 2009, your days are comprised of an endless string of consequential decisions. Bet, check, raise, call, fold: each option is alive with instant, quantifiable results. You are never at a loss for a sense of purpose, because your purpose—to make better decisions than your opponents—continually reasserts itself in the form of a new hand to play, a new decision to make. A bigger picture exists—your long-term profitability—but you needn’t worry too much about it, for if you get most of the small decisions correct it will take care of itself.
By contrast, when you read and write professionally, as I have for the past seven years, your daily decisions, less frequent, are fuzzier in nature—it sometimes feels like the most monumental decision I make is the simple decision to sit down and begin writing—and their results are slower to arrive and largely immeasurable when they do. You can easily be at a loss for a sense of purpose, because many of your tasks can be endlessly postponed and deferred without any immediate consequences. The work you do on a daily basis is leading somewhere, but you can’t be certain where, exactly, that is, or how useful it will prove to be. For practices (reading and writing) already plagued by questions of their utility, the uncertainty surrounding them can be downright paralyzing.
More so, I think, than shaky career prospects, what every PhD student risks, ultimately, are the results of his or her intellectual labors. Will they be useful in some small way? Will they be interesting to others? In a sense, jobs are just a proxy measurement for answering these larger, more pressing questions, the assumption being that useful contributions to knowledge will be rewarded with jobs. But, given the competitive nature of the job market, I’m not sure that assumption even holds any more and, further, it also assumes that one can adequately gauge the types of contributions fledgling academics will make based on their brief track record of work in graduate school. The nature of academic work is such that it may take a doctoral candidate five or six years of study just to be in a position to ask one truly penetrating question. Pursuing the implications of that question may then take years, even a lifetime. But humanities graduate programs find themselves faced with the task of trying to make their students more marketable commodities while simultaneously trying to rush them out the door so that the program’s time to degree statistics look better. Something has to give.
What I’m trying to say, simply, is that my life as a scholar is much riskier than my life as a gambler, and not just because the academic job market is bleak. Seven years ago, I had no way of knowing what kind of academic work I’d eventually be able to produce. It was a risk I took on a bit naively, but nonetheless knowingly. Today, two-thirds of the way through my dissertation, I still don’t know what I’ll be able to produce in the future, for I’m far from a finished product (though I’ll be selling myself as one in the fall). What pleases me the most is that, with the exception of some pockets of poker playing here and there, I’ve maintained my conviction in the value of the difficult, at times seemingly Sisyphean, daily tasks of reading, writing, and teaching.
Whatever the results—in terms of the work I produce, the jobs I do or don’t get—I’m content with the choices I made that will have produced those results, which is all a gambler can ever ask.
Leave a Reply
