Cranky

I just ran across this post by Archidamus in response to Thomas H. Benton's piece on grad school over at Invisible Adjunct's a while back. I appreciate his vehement defense of history as a calling and historian as an important identity -- I feel very strongly on both counts myself -- and agree that important scholarly interaction can and does occur in grad school, but where we deviate is in regards to the preceding question about what you do with yourself after grad school. Archidamus sees grad school primarily in terms of fulfilling that vocational urge and argues that one will always be called, regardless of whether you can find a job in the field afterward. He is also scornful those who demand more from the institution in terms of professional outcomes and complain when they fail to be fulfilled.

I have to politely disagree. An institution that permits the exercise of one's calling at an apprentice level but then fails to ensure that a majority (or even half) of the apprentices go on to become masters is a failed institution -- no matter if the people who were called found their apprenticeship fulfilling. I did find my apprenticeship fulfilling. I believe that I have achieved journey-woman status at least. But is that all that was promised me? No. Were those other promises fulfilled? No. That's where the problem lies, not in the vocational aspirations of the supplicants.

When he then concludes, "But if things don't work out, they don't work out. But I won't some less-than-perfect fortune ever deprive me of what I've learned in graduate school, and my own self-conception as a historian" I feel that perhaps the larger point of many of the complaints, my own included, was missed. My grief stems not with the loss of "my own self-conception as a historian." It stems from my rejection, systemic though it may be, by the very church in which my faith matured and was nurtured. A sense of knowledge and self may be important, but I also feel called to do more with my skills and experience, and am hurt that they are apparently unwanted by the very system that claims to prize them. I am a historian, but the traditional space for the practicing of my art has been denied me, and the system that trained me is part of a larger system that perpetuates that denial. You cannot separate the good from the bad, no matter how good the good. I may find other spaces for my craft, but this does not undo that moment of disillusionment and sense of failure resulting from that rejection.

At least grant me the space in which to lick my wounds while they are still fresh!

(I would have posted this there, but there is no commenting option. And yes, I am taking this personally. How could I not?)