(Spring 1999)
I wrote what is on this page in order to clear my mind, during and after the process of leaving graduate school. I wrote it because I was angry and mournful and hurting, and I hoped that writing would help me sort myself out. (It did help, quite a lot.)
More than anything else, I wanted to understand my experience better. I was frankly glad to be leaving graduate school, because it damaged my health and my abilities and possibly my character, but I still grieve over feeling the need to go. It’s very easy to blame myself, believe that if I had been stronger or smarter or stubborner I would have made it without cracking. I expect that it will be easy for many who read this to blame me. I accept that, as I accepted it without comment when my own father did it.
Why I decided to put it on a website is not as clear to me, but I will try to explain. I was told by the psychologist who helped me out of graduate-school-induced depression that he saw a crusader mentality in me; I expect more justice out of the world than the world can provide, and I get very angry when I believe the world has failed to be just. I think he’s right, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.
When I first considered putting this on the Web, the motivation was about 60% anger and 40% a desire to help other people in situations similar to mine. Graduate school can be a very isolating experience, and failing graduate school is worse; failures are pariahs, often because those who aren’t failing are justly terrified of failure and need to believe that they are different from those who fail.
My anger isn’t gone, but it is fading. I do still want to help. I’m not happy with the information and suggestions available for people considering graduate school. I’m not happy with the lack of support given to many graduate students. I am especially not happy with the practically universal attitude in academia that 100% of the responsibility for a graduate student’s success belongs to the graduate student, as if the environment that student enters were totally irrelevant. And I am not happy with the complete information void and the hurtful and false assumptions that surround the ex-graduate-student. If I can add a new and different voice to the discourse, I want to.
I intend to be as honest in this record as I know how to be. When I can, I will include documentation of my actions and those of others (although I freely confess I have lost or thrown away a great deal that would be useful to anyone trying to determine whether I am on the level). I will also try to explain my own mistakes and my own misconceptions; omitting them would be dishonest, and would create a false sense that I am not at all responsible for not earning a Ph.D.
I will not use names. I originally intended to. I decided against it partly out of fear: fear of backlash, legal or otherwise, from people who are scared themselves, scared about their own status and their own jobs and their own self-image. Partly, though, I want to move away from the idea that individual people are completely responsible for what happened to me, as if the environment they exist in made no difference. Academia, in my opinion, has some serious systemic problems, one of which is a habit of pointing the finger at individuals in order to erase its own collective responsibility for the abuses it permits and even encourages.
I realize that leaving names out of this invites the suspicion that I am lying. For that reason, I am willing to provide names to anyone who cares enough about my story to email me and ask. I am also willing to provide copies of pieces of documentation I have included on this site from which I have removed names.
Anyone mentioned in this account who disagrees with anything I have written in it is invited to contact me with clarifications or corrections. I promise to give them space to explain their views, and appropriate links from my own story so that their views are easy to find for readers. I will even scan (or type) and HTML-code their contributions myself; I promise to change nothing (barring insignificant matters of formatting). I will also be thrilled if others can give me some or all of the items of documentation I have lost.
Please note that my first response to threats or pleas for silence will be to reproduce them here. So that no one thinks I am paranoid, I should say that I have been threatened before (as I will recount) for speaking my mind. I caved. I caved utterly, and while I despise myself for doing it, I don’t see what else I could have done. I don’t plan to capitulate this time; I do not believe I am doing anything wrong, and I do not believe anyone has any reason or any power to silence me.
With regard to legal threats, I wish to state that nothing I write here is intended to be defamatory, and all of it is truth to the best of my knowledge and recollection. When I did not witness or cannot prove something I write, I have done my best to label it clearly as opinion.
Who am I, and who was I?
I am an ex-graduate student, an ex-member of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. When I began writing this, I was exhausted, unable to force myself to study or work in my chosen field, insomniac, jaded, irritable, forgetful, angry, unmotivated, lethargic. (I am pleased to say that since leaving, I have found exciting work and have largely returned to my normal self.)
I was, between 1990 and 1993, an undergraduate at Indiana University-Bloomington. My undergraduate career was quite successful; I earned an honors degree and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, among other awards. I was an enthusiastic student with real, if not fully developed, talent in translation, literary criticism, and linguistics. I had friends among professors in both my major departments (which were Spanish and Comparative Literature), including one very special mentor, and I was an accepted member of the Medieval Studies Graduate Reading Circle. I wanted nothing more than to earn an MA and Ph.D and take a place in the world of scholarship; I felt I had much to contribute, and those with whom I interacted seemed to agree with me.