TURN OUT THE LIGHTS, THE PARTY IS OVER.

A doctoral candidate in one of the trendy disciplines at New York University warns readers of Jacobin.  "I am not willing to sacrifice my health, my family’s future, and my well-being to perpetuate a system that is bankrupting my students as much as it is bankrupting me."  Yes, I get that.  From about 2005 on my response to any senior contemplating doing graduate work was "Why?"  And that's in economics, where the adjunctification problem is not as serious as it long has been in history or gender studies.

Many of us who pursued graduate degrees were told that education would be our way out — out of poverty, out of the places where we grew up, out of the bigoted or homogenous communities where we couldn’t thrive — and into something better: a stable career with a clear moral purpose.

Our teachers, seeing our promise, told us to keep going, to the next degree, and the next. And the people who warned us not to keep going seemed cynical to us, or out-of-touch. We were the special ones, we thought. We could go anywhere, do anything.

The sad thing is that those of us who made it through are now in a position where we are meant to tell the same thing to our students. We love what we teach.

By 2005, I was cynical about the higher education enterprise, and probably viewed by many who adhered to the trendy popular perspectives as out of touch, long before then.  It's interesting, now, seeing the left wing taking up an argument that was popular long ago and mostly with the right, to the effect that graduate education is multi-level marketing.

We can’t be the educators we want to be, because we are being forced into chronic precarity by universities that are only concerned with their own bottom line. We have been trained to embrace an almost pathological scarcity complex about academic work, making us undervalue our own labor and accept a myriad of indignities, often working for free or for little pay just to prove our worth. Not to mention the fact that all of this makes it nearly impossible to research and write the scholarly work for which we have, theoretically, been hired (and without which we can be fired, as the “publish or perish” idiom suggests).

At least the people peddling Amway products have shiny floors or tidy pantries to point to.  Those future freeway flyers, not so much.  "I have had the privilege to design and teach several courses on queer and feminist history, and the connections I’ve made with my students have been profound and lasting." There are limits, though, to how far the experiments against reality go. "You may think it’s a bit of a stretch to compare academia to a notorious cult — a sign of my jadedness as a disgruntled graduate student."  You get two cults: the cult of the priesthood itself, and the cult of the false doctrines of critical theory.  Damned, without a single imprecation from me.

Not praised either, according to Inside Higher Ed regular Steven Mintz.

I find it hard not to wonder how institutions like the New School—that are very expensive, rely heavily on low-paid adjunct labor and charge very high tuition for training in fields that often fail to provide solid jobs—sustain themselves. I make no claims of understanding the school’s finances or the quality of its offerings, but I do find it hard to imagine how anyone (even Elon Musk) could run a business this way, especially in light of the New School’s leftward-leaning orientation.

I also find it difficult to understand how the faculty in humanities departments can, in good faith, encourage undergraduates to pursue doctoral studies given the job market’s bleak realities except in the most exceptional circumstances—and how their institutions can continue to admit Ph.D. candidates that have only the most limited prospects of a tenure-track job, whether at a two- or four-year school.

It strikes me as patently unethical to prepare someone for a job that doesn’t exist.

The professor fears that history as a "dynamic discipline" can long be sustained, and has his own E-T-T-S moment. "I never imagined that I held a professorship during history’s golden age. But I did, even if it was at the tail end of that golden era."  When your "dynamism" is about "transgressivity" and The Narrative over careful inquiry, the purgatory you find yourself in is self-made.  I'll let The American Conservative contributor Sumanta Maitra continue the argument.  "Any destruction is morbidly fascinating; self-caused ones, even more so."  Exactly.  He writes with the voice of experience.  “One has only to look at the history departments in British Universities to see how seriously interdisciplinary research has diluted the discipline. Today, a historian of World War I studying fleet tactics is considered to be on an equal footing with someone exploring post-structural erotic subtexts in letters from the trenches.”  That, dear reader, is the most optimistic passage in his essay.

University students can be forgiven for imagining academia as a mix of Indiana Jones and Theodor Mommsen. But the specific socio-temporal dynamics they evoke are now lost. Fewer than 10 percent of history grads will be professors, most of the half-decent ones will be culled under a DEI regime, some others will end up adding to the bloat as some form of DEI Borg in a system that is already about to burst at the seams. Most of their “research” is perhaps fine to study as a pastime or a hobby, but practically worthless socially, civilizationally, or materially. A handful might end up writing a coherent book, but even fewer will be remembered for any rigorous and scholarly contribution in the coming decades. Most “peer-reviewed” papers in history and international relations go uncited or even unread.

He's through with academic history. "Incendite eos, novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius."

The losers will be the students, who will neither have any basis for grasping the recondite points of critical theory nor be able to complete famous passages for Jesse Watters's crew.