By Jon Cogburn
One of the pleasures of being married to a novelist is that I get to help out with the research sometimes. One of the books that Emily is working on now concerns a couple of disenchanted Classics professors. So one of the things we've been thinking about is what could be the most boring possible title for a prospective book manuscript, the attempted completion of which is so tedious and devoid of meaning that the professor in question is sometimes moved to tears. Right now we're toying with Funerary Inscriptions of the Transapline, Part III: The Constantian Inheritance. To be fair, this probably won't survive scrutiny by colleagues of mine who actually know something about life in imperial Rome. But it's a fun game even if you are not a specialist.
Another task is to think about behavioral archetypes of staff, administrators, faculty, and students. Usually writers just kind of set up their characters and then see what happens, but it can be helpful ahead of time to think in broad (and unfair!) terms about the kinds of people who populate a given milieu. Of course, once the instances of these archetypes are set up and going, then if you are really listening to the muse each fictional person's individuality will shine through in ways that problematize any course-grained set of archetypes. But it can help to start with such a picture.
This week I've been thinking a great deal about all of the graduate students I've known since I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas in the late 1980s. Note that at LSU I only teach MA students, and that these archetypes only concern PhD students. For some reason I'm writing this as if to prospective undergraduates about to enter a PhD program.
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Golden Child: Fairly early in the first year of a matriculating class, a non-trivial percentage of the faculty will come to the consensus that this guy (due to sexism, it's always a guy) is markedly better than the other members of your cohort. And you will all know it, both from the faculty behavior and from the casualness which the golden child evinces when he refers to them by first name. Prognosis: The problem is, you just can't tell that much about how a person is going to evolve over the next five to seven years, much less during a whole career, based on his set of achievements as a twenty-two year old. If the golden child doesn't wash out in the first year, transfer to a better school, or suffer a mental breakdown during qualifying exams, he will get his degree and then almost certainly not live up to the expectations of the faculty. As a result of internalizing these expectations, later in life he will conceive of himself as a failure, even if he has tenure and a 2-2 load.
- Libertarian: Nobody will be able to figure out what's really going on with this guy, especially if he's not a Randroid (we all know what's going on with them). Is likely to, even as a graduate student, be slurping the drippings from one or more conservative think tank slash gravy trains in a way that might lead to greasiness with departmental funds later on. Prognosis: Slightly more likely than non-libertarians to be successful as academia rewards monomaniacs of all stripes.
- Evangelical: Found Plantinga absolutely liberating as an undergraduate at a small Christian liberal arts college and found he was good at philosophy in the process. Maybe, but probably hasn't, given up on the idea that the Bible is literally true. In either case, you are likely to see him walking across the quad with a just-checked-out-from-the-library DVD of the Ken Burns' jazz documentary in his hands. At some point in the semester he will lean forward and say, "You know, jazz really is American classical music" and you will be overcome with love for the poor bastard. Prognosis: Can go one of two ways. If all goes as it should, his religious background ended up giving him a big stake in philosophical debates and (whether or not he rejects aspects of this background) he has minor superpowers as a result. If it does not go as it should he has divorced his religious self from his philosophical self. Such people are scarily able to pick and defend a thesis merely because it's likely to get published. It doesn't matter, because the religious stuff which is outside of the space of reasons is the important stuff anyhow.
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Drunky McDrunk Pants: Will, perhaps multiple times, pee on your couch after a belligerent evening of insulting faculty and throwing up on the lawn. Prognosis: Always remember that if he could do well enough in undergraduate to get into a PhD program while being this soused, then he's almost certainly much smarter and has much more on the ball than you. If he doesn't have a breakdown, suffer liver failure, or get murdered buying drugs he will be the most successful person in your cohort.
- Arty McFarty: For some reason, in Philosophy, Arty McFarty is almost always a musician: classical, jazz, rock, edm, or some combination thereof. Not too much bluegrass. Very rarely a theatre or dance nerd. Almost never painting or the plastic arts. The early Nietzsche would say that this means that philosophy is Dionysian as opposed to Apollonian. The early Nietzsche would be wrong. Prognosis: Pretty good, for basically the same reason as McDrunk Pants' are good, unless of course McFarty insists either on being in a rock band or starting an improve theatre troup while still in grad school. Put that shit off until after you have tenure (at which point you are no longer numerically identical to your graduate school self and probably don't care that you don't make art anyhow).
- Aliterate: Most Americans can read but don't. English graduate students do read but can't (because of their training). Philosophers are supposed to both be able to read and actually do so. But at this person's apartment there are no books other than some of the textbooks that have been saved from undergrad, almost certainly a small liberal arts college. Prognosis: Not good, but not because of the aliteracy. It's rather that doing well at his SLAAC didn't prepare him at all for doing well at a research institution. If he or she does somehow make it through the Ph.D program will probably be good at doing just what's needed to get a job and tenure. Most of his colleagues won't read novels either.
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Delusional: This guy (sorry, again it's always a guy) will do some combination of: lighting inappropriate things on fire, reporting faculty members to the Drug Enforcement Agency, destroying the faculty member's house he is sitting for the summer, stealing mail from the TA room boxes, calling you up at 4:00 AM claiming to have reconciled quantum physics and relativity theory, preparing a dossier of all of your social media comments and sending that to the FBI (as well as the department chair, the dean, and the university president), briefly convince you that the Jewish Mafia of San Fransisco is after him, etc. etc. etc. Prognosis: Campuswide restraining order.
- Anxious/Depressed: Might sheepishly ask you to accommodate some bizarre neurosis such as a fear of bubble gum. Might hyperventilate during class presentations. If on happy pills will likely say inappropriate things at odd times. If not on happy pills might, in a pact of mutual self-medication, become best friends with Drunky McDrunk Pants (who he can't really keep up with). During depressive periods things like answering e-mails and basic personal hygiene will suffer. Prognosis: Will get tenure, have two children, and write blog posts about what to expect in graduate school.
- Married, With Children: Will freak you out a bit because you're not a parent. Your parents are parents. These colleagues are like your parents! Prognosis: Will invariably succeed in getting the PhD and probably a job. This is inexplicable, since having young children is basically like taking on another 40 hour a week job with no remuneration. But it's a fact.
- Married, Without Children: Income of spouse usually makes this person's life materially better than everyone else in the cohort. Prognosis: Bad, much worse than non-married and much, much worse than married with children. Weirdly, most spouses aren't that jazzed about eighty hour weeks and you going to departmental crap every weekend.
- Dress Horse: In continental philosophy there are actually lots of heterosexual male versions of this. Go to SPEP. It's nice. For some reason analytic philosophy is too disgustingly slovenly for it to happen. Prognosis: Inversely proportional to propensity to go clubbing.
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Whinger1, The Department: Every conversation devolves into a complainy festival about how badly the graduate students are being treated by various faculty members. Even if everything s/he says is true, it gets very old. Prognosis: Not great, but O.K.
- Whinger2, Other Grad, Students: Every conversation devolves into condescendingly insulting other graduate students. This person is just as boring as the first type of complainer, but vastly more destructive. Prognosis: In general, bad. Would do much better to (as with Arty McFarty, after tenure) passive-aggressively complain about graduate student archetypes.
Well, there you have it and you're welcome. I think that every single PhD student I've known fits into one or more of these categories, and moreover that they are projectable in the philosophy of science sense of that term.
very good, when I was at Stony Brook my teacher for intro to existentialism was a classic sort of unkempt Manson look in coveralls Delusional type, excellent casting I must say.
Might add the “perennial wisdom” touchy feely (as in offers massages to young ladies as a passive-aggressive way to get his hands on them) newage-hippy Daytripper type who went from Terence Mckenna to William James, Schelling, and Whitehead.
Also maybe this is an addition to the golden-child and not whole other category but there are a large number of A-student types who grab onto fragments of lines of thought and then endlessly recycle these tropes/stereo-types but do quite well (not entirely surprising as they are echoing favorite pet themes of profs) ,even get to teach, in environments where careful readings (and applications/extensions) have long been abandoned, often surly in the long run as yet another variety of unrecognized geniuses in their own minds.
Ooh excellent. I want to call the first type “Feely Dan” and I’m seeing the Tim Robbins character from High Fidelity.
On the second point, it’s interesting that “unrecognized genius” is not a category for graduate students, because in graduate school everyone can still nurse the mythology that they are going to be writing widely read papers and books. But I’m sure that there is a type who is certainly going to become (in his own mind) an unrecognized genius.
When we interview continental students I’ve noticed quite a few job applicants dropping the fact that they were getting coffee with their advisor, who said something or the other. They always designate with the first name, and most of the time I don’t know who the hell they are talking about and when I do I usually feel that that running with that person’s tropes is not going to be very much to the benefit of philosophy.. It really is this weird old German Doktorvater thing but upgraded with weird aspects of the American culture of fame, which is supposed to magically rub off from the American Doktorvater to his/her advisees. For some reason it makes me a little bit more sad than the whole hiring thing already does.
I should probably point out here not trying to elevate myself above any of these kinds of folly, all of which I’m subject to in some degree or the other.
Feely Dan is excellent thanks, yes sorry tried to signal the post grad with “often surly in the long run” but yes this sets in as they find that not only that they are now failing to rise above but even to be taken seriously as capable thinkers in their own right (to be fair not sure students are generally taught/socialized to be more/other than students).
Yes name-dropping especially with the use of nicknames, so not say John Caputo but Jack and so on, and would be welcome to never hear again terms like “problematic”, intersectionality, and the like.
Ah yeah I’ve been aspects of many of these over the years.
As usual, this is great Jon (if I may). Made me oddly nostalgic for my old days in grad school (late 70s UT Knoxville), which laid the groundwork for my subsequent modest professional success and very grand personal failures. I should write a book–wait–I guess I am doing that–about a retiring philosophy professor at a minor SLAC school who ends up a caddy for a mysterious woman who plays in a men’s golf tournament with only 3 clubs. Well, my own retirement will see if that comes to pass.
It did strike me that the reason this post resonates is that between 1-13 you’ve captured most people–and mostly men I think, not just grad students. Not surprising, since grad students are just people. I did recognize many in my cohort: a good friend who regularly drank coffee in seminars, and dominated them typically. And then there was the day I saw him in the grad student Swamp room pouring his cup half full of coffee, followed to the brim with vodka.
But someone you left out was characterized by another colleague, a woman who, with grace and quiet authority, was the only one of us who passed all her 8 PhD comps without one failure (I had one–in my specialty). She was just–well–delightfully balanced in about every conceivable way. While I was a viscous combo of many of your worst, and still am, I always aspired to be as accomplished as she, and that was a big reason I got through. Some grad students–probably a very few–are in fact just good, balanced personalities.
Please do send me a draft of your novel whenever it’s ready to share!
Yeah, I think it did slowly dawn on me that I was mostly describing different types of male graduate students. Some of this is I think a result of the fact that when I was an undergraduate and grad student most of the grad students were male, and part of it is I think a function of the sexism of the milieu that led to that.
One of the deepest discussions in Tristan Garcia’s Form and Object concerns racism, which he characterizes not as being disposed to negative thoughts about people of a given ethnicity, but rather in terms of the tendency to see people of that ethnicity as mere instances of that ethnicity and nothing else. It’s a blindness to differences.
However, one of the way we notice differences is by subsuming people to categories other than merely that of their ethnicity or gender. But when plotting a comic novel such subsumptions are going to be of necessity negative. In addition to the statistical bias from my own experience, I suspect that I mostly thought about male graduate students for two reasons then: (1) a lesser ability to think through differences among the oppressed gender due to being a decades long participant in a sexist milieu (instantiating the facets of sexism that Garcia thematizes) that systematically obviates these differences, and (2) a desire not to inadvertently contribute to negative stereotypes about women (not instantiating the other, Aristotelian, form of sexism where female equals lesser version of male) or even just the kind of essentialist thinking that is an input to both forms.
One of the jobs of novels is to undermine racism and sexism. This is *not* a concession to didacticism, but rather just an instance of the fact that one of the jobs of novels is to help us understand better. I noted above that it helps to start with arechtypes but that if you are really listening to the muse while writing, the individuality of the characters shines through in a way that simultaneously humbles our arechetypal pretensions and suggests new archetypes. On the latter, Mary Sirridge has written some wonderful articles, for example with how Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov gives us a new type of human being and a new way to look at social reality. On the former, I don’t think there’s much in the aesthetics literature, but I’m sure that some of the continental philosophy of the event (especially Badiou) as well as Brandom’s reading of Hegel (against the “two factor” theory of meaning) would be really helpful. This is arguably an instance of where literature does a better job than philosophy of doing what some of our best philosophers have taken philosophy to do.
Chris Rock famously told Barack Obama at some point in 2008 that if he wanted to get elected president he was going to, like a black boxer trying to get the boxing judges to declare him the winner, have to hit twice as hard. I think, at least in the late 80s and 90s, the same thing held for female graduate students in philosophy. From “What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy?” we know that this is still to some extent the case. I don’t want to inadvertently glamorize the system that requires women to punch twice as hard, but I do think that such a system might select for people like the graduate student you describe and that many of us work with.
But it is possible to cherish Jackie Robinson without being an apologist for the system that he operated in.
One more thought along this vein. I should have put a “Mansplainer” category above. The most salient thing about a couple of PhD students I’ve known is their tendency to lecture female professors in ways they don’t lecture male professors. The absurdity of this sometimes rises to a kind of bleak comedy.
As for boring manuscript titles: It’s too bad “The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485” is already taken!
“It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. ‘In considering this strangely neglected topic,’ it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what?”
Yes!
We’re hoping that inability to come anywhere near close to the genius of both the title and Jim Dixon’s reflections on it is not a harbinger of the novel, though suffering by comparison to Lucky Jim is possibly the fate of all academic novels.
I’d wanted to work in madrigals, but Emily quite sensibly vetoed that.
“Funerary Inscriptions of the Transapline, Part III: The Constantian Inheritance. To be fair, this probably won’t survive scrutiny by colleagues of mine who actually know something about life in imperial Rome.”
I can confidently say that if I saw a reference to this book, I would immediately track down to see if the inscriptions were included in the book in their original form (i.e., not modernized or translated), and if they were originals, would hound ILL until I got a copy. Sources like that are fantastic treasure troves of names, gold mines for onomasts.
So, there’s at least one person who wouldn’t react to that title by describing it as dull or boring! 🙂