Google the Humanities and What Do You Get?

About a year ago, The Times Higher Education published an article by Matthew Reisz titled "Google leads search for humanities PhD graduates." In it, Reisz claims Google believes in the "utility" of humanities graduate students and, even better, is willing to hire them. He cites two Google bigwigs, Marissa Mayer, vice president of consumer products, and Damon Horowitz, director of engineering and "in-house philosopher," and both maintain that Google actively seeks humanities professionals.

The article caught my interest at the time because I was beginning to realize the horrors of the academic job market, especially for a PhD in literature. So this seemed to give some hope to those of us seriously considering alternatives to the TT hustle. According to the article, Mayer says that in 2011 Google planned to hire 6,000 new employees, at least 4,000 of whom would be from the humanities. That seemed like a lot of jobs and I wondered what kind of jobs those would be (administrative assistants, was my first thought).

An Ethic of Self-Care

The first semester of my doctoral program, one of my instructors said that we graduate students must not lose sight of our well-being. Attending classes, writing papers, going to conferences, teaching, grading, serving on committees, trying to publish can too easily come to define us. He was adamant in reminding us that we are labor, and that apart from the labor we perform for the university, we are human beings with other interests, other kinds of important creativities, others lives (he liked the term multiple amphibians). It was imperative, he said, that we understand our needs outside of the institution, needs that can too often be set aside, ignored, forgotten, in pursuit of our degrees and our careers. He called it an ethic of self-care.

It struck me as a beautiful idea. And it was important advice as we began even then to get swallowed by the institution. What I came to realize was that under current conditions, that is, the conditions experienced by graduate students, an ethic of self-care is next to impossible. There are no conditions of possibility for such an ethic.