R.A.

I'm kind of obsessed with the latent assumptions the academic world, particularly in the humanities, applies to graduate students. Here are a few examples:

• All incoming students will already know the languages they need (except for particularly esoteric ones; Spanish yes, Nahuatl, not necessarily.)
• All incoming students will know what specific field they will be working in.
• All incoming students will have all the necessary background knowledge already; they will be familiar with the canon.
• Most incoming students will have the independent means to travel and research.
  

This was true, I think, of most graduate students until the last few decades.*

Everyone's used to hearing me complain about the language issue, but what I'm stewing on right now is the concept of mentorship. How it used to work was that a graduate student would be selected by an advisor in large part according to their potential as a research assistant; they'd be sent off to do menial academic labor, reading stacks of papers and preparing notes, being sent off on archival missions, etc., and the advising professor would then take the raw data, write a book or an article, and get all the credit. In the process, however, the student would be exposed to a vast wealth of information and the professor would be confident in his or her abilities and sign off on them.

Now, the way it works is that graduate students perform menial teaching academic labor in their capacity as teaching assistants, but it's increasingly uncommon for academics to delegate any of their research (again, in the humanities; I know they still do this in the sciences.) The problem is that research assistantships served a purpose: they provided an in to new, interesting topics and concrete research skills that scholars need to develop while graduate students. They also led to the famous conflicts between advisor and advisee over matters of theory and framing; practically every great thinker of the past argued with his or her teachers about what things meant, thereby honing their critical reasoning.

Today, graduate students in the humanities, with rare exceptions, are subject to a kind of semi-benign neglect. Even if they have tough advisors that make them read a lot, they're hardly ever brought on board with research projects and they're encouraged to kind of drift around, desperately searching for a topic of their own. The problem is that most graduate students have no way of knowing what has already been said and done; the problem is as much finding a topic as it is actually researching and writing about it. Research assistantships used to expose grad students to material; now teaching assistantships expose grad students to horribly-written undergraduate essays.

When you're in this business, you're constantly reminded that contacts are as important as books; having someone in a position of power know your name is as important as writing well (of course, the two phenomena are related; they're supposed to know you because you wrote something they read and liked.) The aspect of actually working with and for scholars, and thereby experiencing first-hand what we're ostensibly doing here, is one of the most neglected areas of present-day grad study, I think.

I really hope this R.A. thing I might be doing this term works out; I'm sick of drifting around in the ether, having everyone pat me on the back and sign off on my essays, but never actually sinking my teeth in to what I ostensibly study.

* These assumptions are still true, albeit modified, at first-tier schools. I've noticed that a lot of the history grads at UCSC applied to and didn't get in to Berkeley. All of us, I think, were off on a few points: we had the GRE scores but not the languages, we had the languages but not the GRE scores, we had the essay but not the letters of recommendation from bigwigs in the field, etc.

The only universally modified assumption has to do with social class; while most grad students are still from middle or upper-class backgrounds, it's understood that we all have to apply for grants to go anywhere.