The other issue, beyond my own anxieties, is that I’m not entirely convinced that graduate students should be publishing in the first place – despite rumours (circulated at, among other places, The Valve) that job hopefuls require two published papers and experience teaching a dozen courses (and a PhD?). Professors get paid a salary and are expected to fulfill three functions: research, service and teaching. Graduate students, meanwhile, take out bank loans to be there or – the lucky ones like myself – receive enough scholarship money that they can survive in school without taking on loans.

Either way, the point, from the perspective of both institution and student, is to get the student from entry to completion as soon as possible. (In addition to percentage of students finding tenure-track jobs – or “jobs in their field” insofar as non-university jobs are concered – and “time to completion” are two of the major indicators of “success” on the part of graduate programmes.)

So, graduate students are either paying to be there or getting paid a minimal sum to leave as soon as possible. Yet, all the same, graduate students are expected to take part in departmental, faculty and university committees (i.e., perform service), they are expected to first T.A. and then teach as sole instructors (i.e., teach), and they are expected to not only write a dissertation (i.e., research), but also published a couple articles before going on the market (i.e., research on top of research). We’re told to think of it as “pre-professionalization.” I think of it as make-believe – pretend you are a professor, even if you aren’t, even if you don’t have any security whatsoever and even if you don’t have access to any form of institutional support, and, when you finally finish, we’re done with you (but, please get a job quickly so we can continue to attract more students).

All the same, I’ve done committee work, I’ve T.A.ed and I will teach a course next semester, I’ve started on my dissertation, and I’ll likely (eventually) publish (and by that I mean submit, revise, get accepted and then wait two years for it to appear) something tangentially related to it within a year. And I’ll continue to complain about it until I’m done.

By the way, I’m not so sure my writing style is “American.” (Have you read major – not that discipline matters – American sociologists? Parsons? Collins? Alexendar?) Perhaps in the style of “Claude Lefort goes to a party, gets drunk and gets mad” – the discipline dies away with the beer and the sarcasm slowly rises to the surface. Considering my reading is largely in the form of French and German in translation, my actual written work remains surprsingly coherent.