As my Ph.D. drew to a close in 2018, I had no plan. I had been living abroad with my spouse and our three children, completing a final fellowship that I was sure would make me a better candidate for academic positions.
It didn t.
Instead of heading off to a new post, our family moved back into my parents’ basement. It was an anticlimactic end to my academic career and, frankly, one of the hardest periods of my life. Many professors don’t appreciate how difficult leaving academe can be on their students who expected to be professors. It can be a devastating loss of purpose and identity.
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Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, teaches and writes about American literature and culture. Cassuto studies the place of higher education in the United States. He writes a monthly column for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “The Graduate Adviser.” His latest book is The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education (with Robert Weisbuch; Johns Hopkins, 2021). It follows The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard, 2015). Cassuto is the author or editor of nine books, among which are The Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011), of which he was General Editor; and The Cambridge Companion to Baseball (2011), winner of the Best Anthology Award from the North American Society of Sports Historians. He is the author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories (2009), which was nominated for the Edgar and Macavity Awards and named one of the year s Ten Best Books in the crime a
summary
For too many students, today s PhD is a bridge to nowhere. Imagine an entering cohort of eight doctoral students. By current statistics, four of the eight 50%! will not complete the degree. Of the other four, two will never secure full-time academic positions. The remaining pair will find full-time teaching jobs, likely at teaching-intensive institutions. And maybe, just maybe, one of them will garner a position at a research university like the one where those eight students began graduate school. But all eight members of that original group will be trained according to the needs of that single one of them who might snag a job at a research university. Graduate school has been preparing students for jobs that don t exist and preparing them to want those jobs above all others.