I just had a great chat with @royal_t14, @kimmerrlee, @BurnAcademia and a couple of other people about precarity, collectivity, and “leaving” academia.

But this question stuck w me:

“Given the precarity of academic careers, what might one want to get out of graduate school?”

At the time, I said something like: “Well, whatever happens to you after graduate school, it might give you space for intellectual exploration and a break from mainstream labor discipline, so that could be good anyway.”

Afterwards, I immediately started thinking:

“But of course, grad school does inculcate its own brutal forms of labor discipline and compulsory productivity — it’s just based on audit culture, self-overwork, governance by anxiety, and market tests of your outputs.”

So maybe grad school – of the kind I went to anyway — is, rather, an exemplary place for learning about contemporary labor relations.

Not to put too fine a point on it:

Grad school is an absolutely great education in post-industrial capitalism.

It teaches you so much about what huge, post-industrial corporations are like — since that is basically what a big research university is now.

Grad school is a great object lesson in the difference between the formal and real subsumption of the labor process. Since one finds a lot of both in a big university. It’s a place where work is constantly being reorganized.

Grad school is a great place to see how expertise about one thing does not mean expertise about everything. People can be so reflexive about certain things, so clueless and dogmatic about others. It’s a lesson in the limits of ideology.

Grad school is a place to learn about the brutality and subtlety of power. Ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing, what forces impinge upon you, upon those around you…

Universities are a major space of racial power, of patriarchal power, of class power. They are deeply contested spaces: it's worth taking the time to map which forces are doing the contesting.

Grad school is a wonderful place to learn about how inequality gets naturalized as “market outcomes.” People will equate the success of a person with their competitive capacity to acquire grants, fellowships, prizes, relationships, and jobs.

You likely can’t fight that ideological system as such, but you can at least see through its illusions.

But grad school is also a place to learn about solidarity. Not everyone is doing OK in the academy. Not everyone is equal, even when they’re "supposed" to be. Not everyone is going to have “good outcomes.” So the question is: what kinds of solidarity can form in the face of that?

Grad school is a place to find your comrades. Not only among “peers.” Sometimes our comrades are much younger or older.

Sometimes the right book can be your comrade too. Though books alone are never enough.

So yeah, regardless of what happens to you, I think there's a lot to learn in grad school.

It's just not necessarily what they put on the brochure.

(Also, in precarious worlds, there are few good models either, so don't take any of this as definitive :p)