Why I’m Quitting Grad School

It’s been over two years since I graduated from McGill, three months since I started my Masters at Western, and a few weeks since I decided to withdraw from the program. Some of you may already know I’m quitting grad school — for others it will be a surprise. I’m still pretty surprised myself, although I’m absolutely certain it’s the right choice.

I have always been an impulsive decision maker. Despite spending weeks questioning and rationalizing this new direction, the realization itself hit me like a thunderbolt out of the blue sky. It was/is irreducible to the reasons I’ll enumerate below. It emerged directly from a growing feeling of wrongness — an intuition that I have learned to trust in recent years. While my reasons may be the products of that initial feeling of wrongness, just as that feeling was the product of the situation in which I found myself, they are not wholly constitutive of that “felt truth”. They are expressions of it — just as this is merely an expression of those reasons.

I was leery of the ‘ivory tower’ phenomenon even before I applied to grad school, but I was determined to essay the academic avenue regardless. I don’t think my misgivings about academia negatively affected my experience of grad school either — I was quite excited about my Masters program initially. My plan was to spend 2 years there and see what happened next. But I was not the same person as when I left university two years ago; when I made the resolution to return. Time and travel changes a person. They reshape the horizon of our desires, altering our experience of the world. What I saw — when I started studying again — was a mounting incompatibility between the way I’d chosen to live my life (outside of school) and the way I was being asked to live it within an academic context: the way I was being asked to think, to write, to talk, and to relate to others.

There was a very specific moment when I knew I was going to quit grad school. I was sitting in a 9:30 seminar class, discussing Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind and I was trying to follow the discussion. I was getting quite nervous attempting to keep track of the terminology, figuring out how to contribute. Then I realized I just didn’t give a shit about what we were talking about… Not the specific subject matter, mainly the way we were talking about the book. It had been a fairly stressful week already. Paper deadlines and grant proposals were looming, and I’d had an in-class evaluation (for the course I was teaching) the day before. I realized my time would’ve been better spent preparing for the class I was teaching — making sure I did a good job presenting the materials and looking after my students — than contributing to this abstract discussion. The latter seemed almost petty to me. I wasn’t motivated by it (beyond a certain compulsion to look well-informed). That was when I decided to quit.

Flickr: jeffrey james pacres – Writing

To be clear, I am not saying that I don’t have academic interests or that I don’t enjoy intellectual discussion. If you know me, you’ll know that is patently untrue. I was incredibly interested in many of the things we talked about in that class (and other classes), but we always seemed to end up talking about them accidentally. The true purpose of those classes was reading and interpreting other people’s thoughts — not to have our own. I understand this is simply the way many subjects are taught today at the graduate level. You have to jump through the hoops before you get to the point where you’re allowed to think for yourself. But, although I like reading and thinking about philosophy, I don’t think this kind of pressure cooker environment is conducive to productive intellectual activity.

The current state of academia (especially in disciplines like philosophy) is defined by this publish-or-perish mentality. Most departments are incredibly competitive environments, where there is a constant battle over tenure-track positions — often highly ideological in nature. Universities demand excellence from anyone aspiring to be a professor, but they also demand productivity, political savvy and presentability. Teaching ability falls near the bottom of their priorities.

There is something incredibly paradoxical about this simultaneous demand for excellence and productivity. Personally, I would rather see someone spend their whole life working on one “great work”, rather than publishing dozens of mediocre ones. Not everyone can be a prolific genius like Dickens. Sadly, mediocrity seems to be the status quo. Modern day academia asks professors to “sell themselves” in a way that is inimical to original thought. It asks them to become popularizers of the discipline — not even in a way that is accessible to laymen, but in a way that is accessible to other specialists. It asks them to perform an exercise of connecting-the-dots, using the techniques they’ve assimilated while jumping through the hoops, in order to replicate existing forms of discourse. There is a lack of critical distance between their commentary and the original text. No straight talk. No direct speech. Just pandering to a bunch of dead writers who are probably turning over in their graves. Academia asks for the illusion of excellence: its mimicry — not the real thing.

I have both personal and philosophical objections to academic culture, beyond this, but I’ll start with my personal one because the latter stems from it. Bluntly put, I do not like external pressure when I’m doing philosophical work. I don’t believe thought should be rushed. I am incredibly self-motivated, driven, even intellectually ambitious (the recurring criticism made by my undergrad supervisor), but I have difficulty working through philosophical problems — to my own satisfaction — when a set of artificial deadlines are forced upon me. I think it’s important to work at your own pace, particularly when you’re being asked to think on a very deep level. My view is that clarity of thought will only emerge in its own time, when we allow it to “think itself out”.

I have no problem rushing work when I’m simply being paid to produce something (creative or otherwise), but I dislike yielding to this pseudo-economic imperative when I’m writing philosophy. I suppose my concern is that “rushing it” will only lead to philosophy that reflects the conditions under which it was generated (i.e. artificial ones). The importance of philosophical clarity — and the danger presented by its lack— indicate (for me) a fundamental problem within philosophy. At the end of the day, this is my personal view on the matter and I have difficulty reconciling it with the bare-bones structure of academic culture.

My philosophical objection to academic culture is that it demands students engage with the history of progress (regardless of their discipline); a type of engagement that situates them within an inherently competitive framework, leading to even more external pressure, stress, etc. The university asks: which of you will become the next great contributor to this glorious history? (of philosophy, physics, mathematics, psychology, whatever…) “Write to the death!” it demands. Instead, it should be asking: which of you will genuinely engage with this tradition? Which of you will treat it as a living object, rather than simply using its products to further your own ends? There does not need to be an ego battle within every classroom. There needs to be a conversation with history. Sometimes there is — often there is not.

From what I can see, this way of posing the question of intellectual pursuit stems mainly from the sciences, where it is easier to consider things in terms of ends-and-means (perhaps even permissible). Science has retroactively configured its own origin — remember that all science was once called ‘natural philosophy’ — making even philosophy and the humanities into disciplines of progress, when they ought to be pedagogical tools. The point of studying these subjects isn’t to reach some end point of radical, undiscovered knowledge. It’s to learn things that are already known, but forgotten in their own time. Unfortunately, this type of learning doesn’t sell. Education has come to acquire these same characteristics, turning schools into places where the process of learning (of engaging with knowledge) is discarded in favour of passing tests and getting grades. Only the pieces of paper hanging on our walls remain to remind us we were once educated. Can we remember what it feels like? Of course not — we are looking for it in the wrong places! Real education happens on the streets, in the night, in “college” programs — places where people are forced to decide what they want to learn for themselves.

Despite all of this, I’m still motivated by intellectual questions — those of education, ethical conduct, technological progress, the development of human sexuality, among many others. I want to engage with history, but I want to engage with it on my own terms. I want to work independently of institutions, develop ideas through conversations with others. And I think this will increasingly become the case in the future: the true intellectual work of the humanities will be done outside the university.

Flickr: .brioso. – .read

These days, I’m trying to figure out how to build networks outside an academic sphere. Mostly I spend a lot of time reading online, searching for bloggers with similar inclinations. I am starting to write more often, looking for ways to publish what I write. Ultimately, I think that spreading these ideas in a broader sphere will be a much bigger challenge than it would’ve been within academia. It may be less rigorous intellectually, but cutting through the “noise” will be more difficult, for one thing.

My plan for the future: move to Toronto, look for work as a freelance writer, and blog more frequently. I will be re-vamping this site in a major way, hopefully within the next few weeks/months. I’ll be writing on a lot more topics, so this will start to become less of a personal blog — although I’ll continue writing in this vein occasionally. Follow me on Twitter @WAHamiltron to stay updated OR click the drop-down menu and sign up via email. Please leave a comment if you found this discussion interesting, confusing, or if you think I’m a pretentious idiot!

That’s all for now, thanks for reading! 🙂