Learning from Error

An old-school blog by Adarsh Mathew

Pandemic & Grad-School

Last Modified at — Sep 23, 2020

Spending time with pip has given me a more close-up window of insight into her life in graduate school. I’ve wondered how she and her students deal with coursework and research that deal with truly horrifying topics – sexual violence, genocide, structural patriarchy. At the end of her class today, she took the time out to remind her students to take a breather, that it’s natural for them to feel overwhelmed and deflated and drained due to the sheer weight of the topics they deal with. She shared some of her coping techniques with them, and they were well received by the class, she tells me.

This triggered a conversation on how academia and graduate school in particular is dealing with the pandemic. How remote seminars make no sense to either one of us since you don’t get to be in the same room as the others, there’s no natural flow of discussion/conversation. I made an off-hand remark that if I didn’t have visa restrictions, I would happily take a year off to work.

pip and I had a bit of back and forth on this, where we discussed that that claim definitely depends on the typeo f job we’re in. And that brought about the realization in my head – graduate school does feel exponentially more difficult in these times. I can’t imagine how students are able to immerse themselves into readings or assignments when it seems like everything around you is falling apart and you’re holding things together by the barest of threads. The significance of your academic pursuits – even if they’re driven by personal passion or a more utilitarian job-driven objective – seems to pale when the global death count rises every day, economies are contracting, and it feels like we don’t share the same reality anymore.

Graduate school is different from a standard job because you’re expected to blur the lines between your personal and professional life. Perusing through the #AcademicTwitter trend online puts forward several instances where the hierarchy expects you to spend 80-hour workweeks, demands that you’re always thinking about your research. I feel every hour I’m not spending on coursework or my thesis is a ’lost’ hour of productivity, strangely. If this has been the standard operating procedure in academia, one doesn’t need to wonder why it’s mostly been individuals from highly privileged backgrounds dominating the hallways of these hallowed ivory towers.

With several graduate programs halting enrolment temporarily (one hopes), I did think that academia as an institution would take a deep hard look at itself, scale back its exploitative capitalist vibe, and examine its role in society. That obviously hasn’t happened.

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