In the NYT today, Mark C. Taylor (no relation), the chair of the religion department at Columbia, argues that “GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning.” He outlines a six-point plan for restructuring how graduate (and, later, undergraduate) educational institutions are structured and how they operate. He makes a number of good points–and a few I’m ambivalent about–but here’s one that especially resonated with me:
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. […] In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.
He’s talking about the more traditional kind of academic, but I think the point is a salient one for MFAs and other creative degrees as well. The idea that all, or even most, of the people who specialize in a creative discipline will then be in a position to make any sort of living at the practice of that discipline is at best a willful delusion, and at worst a pernicious lie.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is the dystopian novel you’ve never read. Or maybe you have read it. I don’t know. I had not heard of it until I found it on a recommended reading list of Russian novels, and then a former student of mine learned of my planned trip to Russia and loaned me his copy.
I am so fascinated by Jimmy Chen’s peeks into the bookshelves and psyches of Giant readers, that I find myself wondering what volumes were lying on the periphery of the pictures submitted for Haut or Not, outside the camera’s some-encompassing portrait. What books do we not want our fellow tea-sipping lit snob confederates to see? I think we should lay it all out on the line, and I’ll start. In the interest of full disclosure, I won’t even stop at one bastard lovechild—I’ll give you three.
So, forgive me for posting, but there’s more talk about Narrative Magazine, which just announced the results of its 
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