1996 Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want

The question of my subtitle?what graduate students want?is simply an swered at the present time: they want a job. Since the dire state of the job mar ket is well known, I forgo here a recitation of morbid statistics. I welcome the fact that both graduate students and professors are beginning to comment pub licly on the subject of the market, and I would endorse a number of recent pro posals for alleviating some of the consequences of the market's decline (e.g., see Berube and Nelson 1-32). But these proposals are not my primary concern. I am interested rather in the relation of the market to the desires invested by graduate students in the profession of literary study. These desires are not comprehended by the concept of a job. One consequence of our current crisis has been that the very uncertainty of this object of desire, the job, permits the object to stand in for many other objects as well, some of them reasonable and attainable, others, as I hope to demonstrate, largely phantasmic. When a stu dent cannot find a job, it's not only the desire for a job that is frustrated but also every desire whose gratification is thought to be contingent on the job. I ask first, then, What are these other desires? And second, How does the job mar ket, its uncertainty and arbitrary brutality, affect the formation and expression of those other desires from the moment students enter graduate school? I would argue that these desires have been deeply determined by the threat of unemployment, at least since the late 1970s, when the conditions for the pres ent crisis were firmly established.