Survival Guide Advice and the Spirit of Academic Entrepreneurship: Why Graduate Students Will Never Just Take Your Word for It

• In Event: The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students: A Symposium for Understanding, Reflection, and Action

Abstract

Survival Guide Advice and the Spirit of Academic Entrepreneurship: Why Graduate Students Will Never Just Take Your Word for It


Graduate students have probably always been natural targets for advice, particularly when it comes to the academic labor market. But recently, given the all-too familiar litany of problems facing graduate education, academic labor, and higher education in general, the pace and gravity of this advice have intensified. Whether packaged in one of the many fashionable academic “survival guides” (the recent title Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Graduate School comes to mind), or in one of The Chronicle of Higher Education’s innumerable blogs and columns devoted to hiring, or even plastered on the Academic Jobs Wiki with its infamous “Venting Page” and detailed list of “Universities to Fear,” graduate students of the 21st century are never very far from someone who knows just what they should—or shouldn’t—be doing.

But for all the advice offered up to graduate students in blogs, books, and brown bag workshops about navigating the increasingly unlikely transition from graduate school to full-time, non-contingent academic positions, few have scrutinized the nature and function of this advice. This presentation examines the nature of academic advice, or what I will call mainstream graduate student “advice-knowledge”: a naturalized discourse that constructs, constrains, narrows, and normalizes the way graduate students think of themselves as individuals constantly in need of introspective work on themselves in order remain, if not employed, then at least employable. Taking a theoretical perspective informed by thinkers as diverse as Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, Vol. 1) and David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism and The Condition of Postmodernity), this presentation further suggests that the turning inward that advice-knowledge promotes has a way of deflecting attention away from larger social concerns that require collective action, such as how we might work together to make graduate studies and higher education more equitable and sustainable for everyone. My central claim is that academic advice-knowledge espouses forms of self-governance and self-labor that actively work against collective action. Indeed, advice-knowledge is a crucial part of an overall technology of control that keeps the system functioning smoothly as it is by constraining individuals’ capacities to imagine potential avenues for collective resistance and transformation of the status quo.

Author

• Paul Gregory Cook, Indiana University - Kokomo