Finally, a Graduate Adviser for the Real (Academic) World

Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. By Gregory Colón Semenza. New York: Palgrave, 2005.

Imagine, if you will, the next big thing in reality television: You're Not Hired!— the inside scoop on the job market in the humanities. A mixture of Survivor, The Apprentice, and The Batchelor(ette), You're Not Hired! would take an audience thirsty for vicarious punishment into the secret workings of search committees, the countless hours rehearsing suitable answers to adversarial interview questions, the agonizing days waiting by the phone or checking e-mail inboxes constantly, and the marathon campus visits (a mixture of speed dating, boot camp, and Survivor-like immunity challenges). Of course, such a pitch to network executives would fail to generate interest or seven-figure contracts because, let's face it, our country cares more about the fate of bikini-clad mindless "celebrities" than it does about the state of higher education.

This makes a strange but nevertheless fitting introduction to Gregory Colón Semenza's new book: in a world where the pursuit of humanistic inquiry is in danger of extinction and the odds of a PhD landing a tenure-track position are slimmer than a reality star's figure, Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century both argues for the importance of the humanities and offers practical advice in a single attractive and bracing package. The most striking features of Semenza's book are its tone (brutally honest and pragmatic) and its deeply democratic ethos. To begin with the latter: Semenza reminds us that hard work and diligence can trump innate intelligence and imagination. Put more bluntly: a working-class kid from state schools can sometimes succeed where a privileged one with an Ivy League alma mater may not. The democratic and meritocratic spin Semenza puts on graduate studies is a welcome breath of fresh air in a culture so used to the "Yale hires Harvard hires Princeton" paradigm that few ever dare to question its validity or even currency.¹

As for the tone: at times too earnest, at others no-nonsense and self-deprecating, Semenza remains constant in his genuine care and respect for graduate students and his desire to see them succeed despite increasingly depressing odds. Speaking of statistics, Graduate Study does not shy from presenting the bleakest data in the bluntest terms. Roughly 40 percent of PhD job seekers find full-time employment in the humanities, and only 50 percent of students who enter doctoral programs complete the degree.

Semenza may be too polite to state his misgivings as bluntly as his statistics, but one can draw troubling conclusions between the lines: Research I institutions and the people who run them are guilty of exploitation, willful denial, and ethical failure to care one straw about students who enter graduate school in good faith, if at times dangerously naive and begging for a metaphorical slap in the face. Many faculty members have become comfortable in their cozy posttenure offices: as long as multitudes of earnest and eager students fill the graduate seminars and teach lowly first-year courses, graduate faculty have very little incentive to transform a status quo so beneficial to themselves.² Even the advisers who do care, who organize mock interviews and review job letters and curricula vitae, are often wrongheaded in their well-meaningness. Sometimes ten, twenty, or even thirty years removed from their personal search for employment, they cannot possibly comprehend the extent to which the market in the humanities has changed in the interval. They may understand in theory that a candidate without publications and too few conferences will end up on reject piles everywhere, but they don't know how to turn this vague awareness into concrete and knowledgeable advice. Here again, Semenza has much to offer the candidate scrambling to figure out the lay of the land without informed mentors in his program.

Because Semenza retains a detailed...