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.
This became evident the other day when I read Karen Kelsky's important post, "Graduate School Is a Means to a Job." In it, she gives a laundry list of maxims that every graduate student must follow in order to be successful. The maxims are organized chronologically and begin with what should be done before graduate school begins, in terms of choosing a program, communicating with potential advisers, negotiating for more funding, and being "entrepreneurial" in applying for multiple sources of funding. This is just the beginning, once in, the list of commandments grows even more daunting.

Though on the face of it Kelsky's list may seem absurdly arduous, I can't think of one piece of advice she gives that's wrong-headed. All of it is good advice. Many of the commenters wish they'd had her list before they started, and are now going to make it mandatory reading for anyone considering a graduate degree in the humanities. If I were in that position, I'd do the same.

But I was also dismayed by Kelsky's commandments, not because they aren't true but because they are absolutely true, that is, they are the very truth of our experience as graduate students. What I see in this list is the reflection of my (non)life as a graduate student-laborer: the confirmation that there is no room for an ethic of self-care. No room for well-being. The institution has been my life with very little else besides, and it has been so for six years, from the start of my master's degree to the now imminent finish of my PhD. Though this elaborate training has apparently not been my job, I've done it for more years than most professionals hold a single job (the average reported for 2010 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was 4.4).

Here is where Kelsky's advice rankles. "Never forget," she says, "Graduate school is not your job." I wish someone had told my institution the same thing. In what I can only imagine is a new model for graduate students, we are required to teach far more than ever before. It is built into our contracts. Non-negotiable. In my program, there is no way to "minimize [my] work as a TA" as Kelsky advises me to do. So, the question is, if I teach a 2/2, is it still not my job? If I teach a class of fifty students, am I still just a graduate student with all of the apparent freedom that implies? The rebut, here, might be that I chose the wrong program and if I had chosen differently, my experience would have included a space for self-care. Though this may be true in some ways (not that I had much of a choice), I don't think the majority of programs look all that different from mine, or that universities, besides the most privileged, are maintaining feasible work loads for their graduate students. If anything, those workloads are going up.

Kelsky says she has "no patience whatsoever with the 'love' narrative," but I don't see how this level of work is possible unless it is founded on the "love narrative" since it does not permit the love of anything else. If we are asked to work this much and then told it's not a job, then what is it? It must be love. What else would compel us to do so much for so little? And it's not love on a small, personal level. It's a grand religious love, a love and obedience founded on commandments that can only look exactly like Kelsky's advice. Maybe what she meant was that graduate school is a means to be Job, the one who gets everything stripped away by the God he loves. Graduate school (and maybe even those vaunted TT jobs we all want) is a means to strip away all of the other things that make a life, and the only thing that's left, after the near self-destruction, is a love and hatred for a God that would take everything away.

But as with any artificial system, it doesn't have to be this way. Though we may agree that Kelsky's advice is good, we don't have to agree that it's a good thing. In the end, such ruthless demands won't strip the chaff but deter the best students from training and teaching in the humanities. Why would they?