Good for Them and This Place

My buddy Babu, whenever he hears that one of our peers has had a stroke of good fortune such as getting a good job or having something published, always says, “Good for them!” He says this without a trace of sarcasm in his tone or intent.

The first two years of my graduate program, longer if I am to be honest, were not lived in an environment of collegiality. The university that I attended was not by any means prestigious. We had some very good professors, but as a whole, the school and the program were not the sort that made people sit up and take notice of you immediately if you said that you went there. In fact, I have since had people visibly grimace when I tell them where I earned my degree (not that some of these grimacers have attained anything like a Ph.D. or published anything at all, but that’s another story for another time).

Thus, most of the graduate students who went there could not get into a better university, could not afford a better university, had familial obligations in the city that prevented them from going elsewhere, or had to choose between an equal or better university that would not give them funding and this one that would. Most graduate students knew that they would end up in the job market, after having worked very hard for many years, with a strike against them for having gone to "this place." Who was going to consider a candidate from Mediocre Urban University when they have a thousand others from Main State University and better? So, we all had a bit of status anxiety. We knew we were taking a risk, and we were afraid, often paranoid.

This sense of anxiety was encouraged by most of the faculty. The faculty, of course, all went to much better schools than ours. Many of the younger ones, especially those hired while I was there, were ecstatic to just have a tenure track job, and in a place where they could afford to buy a house and that did not require them ever to shovel snow.

Others, however, were quite open about the fact that they considered this school beneath them. One repeatedly referred to his degree from Princeton and how they did things at Princeton and how much better Princeton was than “this place.” His degree, incidentally, was earned in the 1960s, and he had been at “this place” ever since. Another, who served as graduate advisor for a year, gave every student who entered his office a look of disdain. “Why?” he would ask. “Why would you want to get a degree in history? You will never get a job, especially coming from this place.” His tone was dripping with disgust. He then dismissed the students from his office. Not surprisingly, he was not graduate advisor for very long. Another said that, if we could not find a tenure-track job within a year of graduating, then we should go find something else to do because, coming from “this place,” we couldn’t expect much.

Well, of course, he and others like him did have a point about the difficulties we students faced. The attitude, however, was not “so how can we make you competitive?” nor “lets look at the types of jobs that you might have a shot at.” That might have helped improve some of the mood of the place. Instead, the attitude was "we are wasting our time teaching a bunch of people who won’t get jobs anyway. "

The limited funds for graduate students also increased our anxieties. Our program admitted far more students than it had seats in classes. One professor actually agreed to teach a seminar consisting of over 20 students when the average number of students was usually 12. Our program also admitted far more students than it had funding to support. The average number of t.a. positions was 25, while the average number of applicants for those positions was 80. Out-of-state students were lured to the school with a promise of a t.a. funding, only to not have the position renewed for the next year. This left them with out-of-state tuition to pay, no insurance, no income, and no hope for any future funding because now, having to work other jobs, they were not progressing at an acceptable rate. They were never given any reason, nor was anyone else, for having not been renewed. The only common denominator for getting or having a t.a. contract renewed--at least as far as any of us could determine--was whether or not your advisor sat on the graduate committee that year. Thus, from year to year, your funding, if you were so lucky as to receive it, was in jeopardy.

The students developed a defeatist attitude from the beginning, which only became worse as time went on. Unfortunately, because there was some truth to the obstacles that we faced, the defeatism was difficult to dismiss. We began to feel as if there were a finite amount of success in the world. That only so many t.a. positions existed. That only so many jobs existed. That only so many books or articles could be published. Teaching assistant positions, jobs, publications, any other sort of award or achievement did not depend upon your own hard work or the quality of your work. They depended upon arbitrary factors.

In this environment, we all turned on each other. “That one only got her job because she bought everyone lunch at all of the faculty meetings.” “That one only got a t.a. position because she’s fucking her professor.” “That one only got a publication because he knows the editor.” “That one only got an A because she quoted French in her paper.” “I could never get that job because I’m not a minority.” All of that, and much worse. Thus, if you did achieve anything, you almost didn’t want to share the news because you were afraid of how people would say you did not deserve it. At the same time, you also wanted to gloat.

All of this anxiety and fear and anger, I am certain, impeded some of our intellectual development. I know it poisoned our collegiality and friendships. I know it was why so many dropped out in defeat and disgust. It certainly had a bad effect on me. Yet, being who I was, being someone who responded well to fatalism and defeatism having been raised in a similar environment, I did not know any other way to think.

Then, came Babu. Not just Babu, the crop of new graduate students who came into the program in that same year seemed to have an entirely different outlook. They seemed less defeatist, less inclined to resent others’ accomplishments, more inclined to support one another. Babu, however, was dubbed the Voice of Reason. He had a very healthy, balanced attitude about the world in general. He did not believe in finite resources. More accurately, he did not believe that someone’s success automatically transferred into his failure. Just because someone received something did not mean that that same thing was taken away from him. He believed that a success for a colleague was something to be celebrated. If one of us could do it, he reasoned, the rest of us could.

This attitude shocked me at first. Not be jealous? Not seethe with envy? Not backstab with bitchiness? Not revel in schadenfreude? I almost dismissed him as naive; but Babu was never naive. Plus, his seemed like a much more joyful attitude. So, I tried to adopt it, just as an experiement, and found that Babu’s attitude is, in fact, quite liberating. Yes, we should revel in the job, the prize, the publications of our colleagues. Yes, we help each other, not cut each other. Yes, the more of us out there supporting each other rather than resenting each other helps us all. Good for them! Good for us!

That unity has, in fact, helped many of us overcome that initial setback of having graduated from “this place.”