HOW
UNIVERSITY MELTED MY BRAIN
Edited version published: Frankie #27 (Jan/Feb 2009)
Most university students have the right idea. With
brutal efficiency, they knock off their degrees in three or four years,
before heading off towards illustrious careers as nurses and lawyers,
landscape architects and chemists—all professions I can’t
even begin to understand. Instead, I pursued the type of degree that,
literally, had the word ‘creative’ in its title.
When you’ve
got something like that framed in your mother’s house, you know
the future’s potentially bleak. So unsurprisingly, arts graduates—like
me—will find any excuse to hang around campus, long after they’re
needed. Honours? Why not! Masters? Don’t mind if I do! It’s
alluring: continue to score adequate marks, and you’ll be kept
safe by a combination of HECS debt and Centrelink. Psychologically, you
know you’re trapped; but you’re comfortable, so you stay.
Similar things happen in other institutions, like the Catholic nunnery
or prison.
Soon enough, other offers come in: pursue a PhD, and we’ll
pay you for the pleasure of studying. It sounds like the sweetest deal
on earth: read some books, write a big report over three years, and we’ll
keep you fed and watered. But no one tells you is that there are ramifications
too. Here are some.
1. You will stop reading for pleasure.
If you’re
academically-inclined, you’re probably the bookish type as well.
You dig magazines, bookshop-cafés and anything text-based turns
your crank. But once your postgraduate career begins, say goodbye to
McSweeney’s and The New Yorker. Instead, say hello to your new
friend Heroic Ethnocentrism: The Idea of Universality in Literature.
Or Research through Practice: Positioning the Practitioner as Researcher,
and 4102.0: Australian Social Trends. But out of the 221 texts I read
over three years, my favourite title was The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination
as Literary Strategy. Ah, those pesky Eskimos. When will they learn?
2. You will cease being able to communicate normally.
At first, using
familiar words in new contexts is exciting. Did you know “enterprise” doesn’t
have to exclusively relate to business, but could be used to describe
totally abstract pursuits, such as postcolonial anthropological discourse?
Fascinating. But after a few years, this type of language starts bleeding
into your everyday world too. You’ll find yourself speaking like
an author being interviewed on Radio National. Despite your best abilities
to blend in with The People, you will never again be able to end a sentence
with to” or “by”. You’ll start using “to
which” and “by whom”, even when drunk and trying to
hurl abuse. People will laugh at you.
3. You will become a 1950s housewife.
There will be weeks of being glued to the computer monitor, living in
a small nest of academic journals and empty mugs lined with instant soup
dregs. After these dark periods, going to the grocery store will become
your sweet reward. Housework becomes a legitimate and desirable past-time.
Baking, cleaning, scrubbing: you will seek any form of productive work
to get the hell away from the thesis. On the upside, your partner will
love you more, as one loves a prostitute who doubles as a maid.
4. You
will smell.
By the end of her Masters and my PhD, my friend Anna and
I exchanged notes, and both realised that you weirdly reek in the final
week, no matter how much you bathe. There are several theories as to
why, but mine is that your body has begun to weep, because you’ve
lost the ability to yourself.
5. You will feel deep shame.
My mother
couldn’t be more proud that she’ll soon have an official
doctor in the family. Not one that can heal wounds and prescribe drugs
mind you, but one that understands postcolonial media theory and screenwriting
structure. Yet, there’s a special type of shame that comes with
having stayed in university for over seven years. Perhaps the Germans
have a word for it, something precise and exact, like Akademischen-schande,
or Universität-demütigung. While I should share my mother’s
pride in having completed a PhD, I know that in the real world, this
flimsy certificate is the equivalent to an adult education correspondence
degree, the ones from the back of TV Week catalogues, where you’d
lick-and-stick stamps of the courses in which you were interested. Oh
god: in which you were interested. Did anyone else notice that too?
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Updated :: 19 April 2009
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Benjamin Law 2009