Academinc hazing????

M.A. Students as Pledges
By NICHOLAS HENGEN

I'm sitting at a bar next to the master's representative to my university's Graduate English Students Association and he is about to cry. He has walked me through the list of typical master's student grievances: money, course load, general disenfranchisement. I have nodded my head understandingly. Those are, after all, my grievances.

I'm working 20 hours a week as a secretary in the English department office while taking a full load of classes. I have a conference paper due, I need to read Derrida's Grammatology, and I have to finish my master's thesis in a month or two. I should also be reapplying to doctoral programs.

But we haven't met to talk about me. Jake wants to know what I think we can do to improve the situation for M.A. candidates. I've already warned him that I don't feel very constructive, so I start to compare the pursuit of an M.A. to the hazing period endured by pledges in campus fraternities and sororities: You have to do things you don't like for people higher in the ranks. You are sometimes forced to stay up all hours engaging in strange tasks (see: Grammatology) and often made to consume unidentifiable substances (see: Grammatology). Once you do all of that for a prescribed period of time, you are allowed to relax some, sleep a little, and be treated as, more or less, an equal.

Jake gives me a laugh, but he's behind on everything -- his work-study job, his application essays, his conference paper, his committee work -- and he has taken this time to meet with me because he thinks I can help him fix the M.A. program. He asks if I have any suggestions. I tell him that other pledges often get free alcohol as payment for their suffering.

Two years earlier, when one of my rejection letters from doctoral programs arrived with a kindly worded offer to join the master's program, it seemed like a good idea. I was weak on theory and pretty much the entire 18th century. The program would groom me, I thought, into a great candidate for any university's doctoral program.

Sitting at the bar with Jake, I don't feel groomed. I feel bruised. Since arriving on the campus, my life has been a race to keep up. In my first year, I worked 20 hours a week. I was a secretary, I tutored in the department's writing center, and I did some grading for a professor's course. I also took three classes a term and wrote a conference paper.

I read tons of theory, but much of it was gulped while making photocopies. Between collating someone's tenure packet, fielding departmental phone calls, and grading undergraduate essays about Allen Ginsberg, I would hurry through Kant and Adorno and Herbert. I would run to class feeling underprepared, get the frisson of academic engagement for an hour or two, then rush off to tutor. By the time I got home most nights it was dark. I'd kick back with Ibsen -- the lightest reading I had all year.

By May, I was embittered, exhausted, and much more qualified to discuss poststructuralism. The few hours I spent in the classroom reminded me of why I was living this life, but once I stepped outside of those doors, I was back into a rush, running to my next job, dragging my bag of library books behind me.

Although I was never paddled or forced to drink more than I should have, the parallel with hazing floated into my mind frequently. If I was willing to take on this colossal debt, run myself ragged with nonacademic work, then stay up all night to perform academically, I would be allowed to join -- after I reapplied with the new writing samples and the letters of recommendation I had worked so hard for.

Life would still be busy and stressful, but at least it wouldn't cost as much. I would get my Ph.D. from a good university, get a tenure-track job in a place I wanted to live, and help students understand and enjoy literature. I just had to keep working, keep reading, keep writing. Everything would be fine.

Rejection letters from graduate programs have become a reality for an increasing number of would-be scholars -- especially in the humanities. Consider my own university. This year, my English department accepted 62 students: 18 Ph.D. candidates and 44 M.A. candidates. More than half of the M.A.'s had applied to the Ph.D. program and been denied.

For those students, a terminal master's program at a prestigious university was a beacon, a way of buying entree into academe.

Seen from the outside, M.A. and Ph.D. candidates look a lot alike. But from the inside, the two are quite different. M.A.'s are departmental cash cows. Outside of federal loans, the only financial aid that most master's students get comes in the form of work-study jobs. I was granted the maximum allowance: 20 hours a week. Work-study grad students are, I soon learned, a boon to the department.

When I worked as a secretary in my department, I was paid an hourly wage of $10, but because it was a work-study job, the federal government picked up $7 of that. The same was true for my work as a tutor, a grader, and a research assistant.

Federal assistance isn't the M.A. student's biggest contribution to the department, though. More important is the tuition. At my university, a full-time, out-of-state graduate student is supposed to pay $19,925 a year in tuition. Doctoral students get a package deal that covers their tuition, provided they work as teaching assistants. Master's students can receive a discounted tuition rate, too, so long as they teach. The catch is that few of them are ever hired as T.A.'s. In my cohort, only one master's student in our first year, and two in the second, worked as T.A.'s and got the discounted-tuition rate.

The math isn't the only thing that doesn't work out in our favor. Graduate students at my university take three sorts of courses, numbered in the 500s, 800s, and 900s. A zealous undergraduate could register for the 500s, which were often basic courses with 20 or more students. The 800s were more exciting -- their titles often included spicy adjectives -- but they were still basically thematic courses about Chaucer or Shakespeare or the Victorian novel.

The 900s were the seminars -- obscure, cultish courses built around the private interests of a faculty member. I took a few of those classes in my time and never had a problem until my final semester.

I had registered for a 900-level course -- a mish-mash of medieval and Renaissance poetry, prose, and cultural studies -- that had piqued the interest of a healthy number of students. The first day, the seminar room was overflowing and too warm. Students clustered around the table and many hung back by the walls.

The professor asked us to raise our hands to identify if we were M.A. or Ph.D. candidates. She took note and the class continued, but by the next meeting, the numbers had dwindled considerably. Later, I learned from Jake that the professor had complained about the number of M.A.'s.

In a way, her concerns were easy to understand. Master's programs often have a strange mix of characters. Some students come because they like to read novels and have money to spend or time to kill. Some, as one student proclaimed on a Web site, come to be "active with the rugby and wine clubs here on campus."

But M.A.'s with more serious ambitions are treated, by default, as academic inferiors. A friend of mine who wrote a complex thesis reinterpreting some connections between Freud and Lacan had it approved in draft form, presumably to save the professor from having to read it twice.

By the time I tell Jake that the only thing that would improve my experience is free booze, I'm not really relishing my studies, just sprinting to the end. I will collect the appropriate signatures, cite the appropriate texts, and I will be done.

From my perspective, Jake's determination is admirable, if misguided. The system won't change. Master's students dump tons of money into departments and fill out enrollments in low-level graduate classes. We allow professors to subcontract grading, photocopying, and library research on a federal, rather than departmental, dime. Why would the system change? It works.

The only people who are caught in it are the pledges themselves, and even if we happen to be motivated and manage to agitate the right people, we're not around long enough to fix much of anything. After two years (or less, newer programs tend toward a single year), we disappear, leaving for a Ph.D. program elsewhere or, more likely, in search of work.

In my last semester, I was too busy visiting the perky career center across the campus to think about the problems with the M.A experience. I had my own problems. The job market is not geared towards humanities M.A.'s. Lisa, another recent M.A. grad, put it best when she told me, "Either I'm totally underqualified (because the M.A. doesn't teach you anything practical) or overqualified (because the job is entry level and I have an M.A.)."

Almost everyone from my cohort ended up somewhere they could have just as easily been without the master's degree: law school, publishing, journalism, teaching, coffee slinging.

And the people who went on to doctoral programs -- only two from my first-year class -- both ended up at universities of significantly lower rank, which means the job search will probably be even more arduous for them when they finish.

Academe has always screened out unserious or uncommitted scholars from the overcrowded field. But I can't help feeling that master's programs have taken on that task in an insidious way -- and I'd like to think that isn't just my student loans talking.

No one promised me that in two years I'd be in a great doctoral program with a great financial-aid package. But I entered graduate school thinking I'd stay there for a long time. After a few months, I was ready to leave -- not because I was tired of talking about literature or helping students become better writers or thinkers -- but because I was part of a racket. And unfortunately for me, I was on the losing side.

Although I'm out of graduate school now, I still think about Jake's question. I'm not seething or fussing or obsessing, but each time I fill out an application for a job I don't really want -- or one that doesn't have enough blanks for my degrees -- I do think about it.

And when I see other M.A.'s from my university, we don't talk about Dostoyevsky or Dickinson or Derrida, but about how miserable we were in our program.

That isn't all that surprising. In a recent study on the effects of hazing, only a tiny percentage of hazed students reported anything positive. An overwhelming majority experienced negative effects, from depression and insomnia to internal bruising.

By comparison, my friends are just unemployed, in debt, and disgruntled. I suppose we should take comfort in that.

Chronicle Careers: 04/11/2005
(c) Chronicle of Higher Education 2005