On the Effects of Graduate School

jimi sometimes talks about the awful toll extracted by graduate school, how oft times the merry life of a pizza delivery driver seems like a frolic in paradise compared to the dreary misadventures of those seeking stature in the academy. Harry Hutton (who I’ve just discovered) wonders about the downfalls of professorship too:

But is it good to spend so much time in universities? In The Sleepers by Walt Whitman there is a phrase, “The sick-gray faces of onanists”. Another four years in higher education and that would be me. In four years time I would emerge thin and pasty, blinking like a mole. I can see myself on my release day as I stand on the pavement, shabby and pathetic. I am hunched against the biting wind, and all my possessions are next to me in a battered suitcase. Laughed at by women and splashed by the passing trucks, Hutton cuts a pitiful figure.

All alone in the big city. A group of schoolgirls pass. They look at me in disgust, and cross the road. I raise my shabby head to stare at them and piss into my trousers. Trudging aimlessly through the cold streets. The city is a bewildering place. Faces without names, where are they going? People curse as I get in the way. They want to kick me.

I make my way to the Salvation Army van to get some soup. Make it last Hutton; there’ll be no more Formal Dinners in your cardboard box. But who is this? A wheezing old man is scavenging from the bins. He takes a swig of Brasso and staggers towards me. No wonder he looks familiar- it’s the Dean! He left college six months ago to take up a position with a merchant bank, but having spent his entire adult life in universities he was unable even to boil an egg, and now look at him.