Malcolm Gladwell wrote one of the best essays of the year in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. In Offensive Play, Gladwell begins by describing the terrible brain injuries that linebackers get from repeatedly hitting each other. Their job is to use their heads as battering rams, and the repeated bangs in the head, sometimes as many as a hundred in a routine practice, add up and lead to dementia similar to those of people who suffer from Alzheimer's disease.
That bit of reporting was interesting on its own, but Gladwell subtly adds another layer to the article. Using Michael Vick as a bridge, he turns to the topic of dog fighting. He discusses anthropological research about dog fighting. The dogs are bred to keep attacking over and over despite terrible injury. Due to their intense desire to please their owner, they fight with broken bones and blood gushing from their neck.
He makes clear comparisons to the football. Is football just as cruel and blood thirsty as dogfighting? Are we destroying these athletes? And are football fans just as diabolical as those who sit around the dog fight rings and put money on the fighting dogs? How different are my son and my husband who watched the football from a friend's sofa last night from Michael Vick who did jail time for cheering on the pitbulls?
He ends the essay with a discussion of the current situation for Vick's pit bulls. Instead of being euthanized, they were sent to an expensive and intensive rehabilitation center to learn how to trust humans again. Most of those dogs will never be the family dog in a suburban home. They have been too thoroughly ruined, but Gladwell said that we still feel that their expensive care is morally justified, because we have an obligation to care for dogs that heroicly fought for the love of their owners.
Perhaps we have a moral obligation to care for dementia-ridden linebackers who also heroic fought for their owners without regard to their personal safety.
I haven't been a huge fan of Gladwell's books, but this essay is a triumph. I love the gradual and layered transitions. Fine writing.
In Harvard Magazine, Louis Menand writes about the PhD problem. Students, especially those in the humanities, spend a decade getting a PhD that doesn't prepare them for teaching or for gainful employment. The system results in homogeneous, over-prepared teaching staff; it uses ABDs as cheap labor. Like Gladwell, he questions the cruelty of the system that destroys hard-working, young people. Instead of using their heads to slam against the opposing team, they slam their heads against the books, dissertations, fickle advisors, and an impossible job market. They face repeated assaults from nasty peer review letters and snide discussants at conferences.
One pressure on universities to reduce radically the time-to-degree is
simple humanitarianism. Lives are warped because of the length and
uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and
drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never
finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put
in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking
people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in
programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not
get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that
graduate students constitute a cheap labor force.
One of the commenters said that after getting a Harvard PhD, he/she has been unable to find work and was on the brink of homelessness. Certainly the system has an obligation to help these individuals who gamely fought the losing battle of graduate school.
UPDATE: Great response from Lillian.
Apt. 11d 
To me, this anecdote really resonates when I consider our responsibility towards veterans. Much to say on that score, but I don’t feel up to it today.
I have long wondered why there are no natural “brakes” on the process of producing PhDs. Why do people continue to receive student loans when they have very little hope of employment?
I can’t speak so clearly about football. From what I’ve heard, football players typically know very well that they’re cutting their lives short. Yet many of these men have few other real options in life, and they’re making the decision to commit to football at a tender age. I do think many of these injuried would stop if the NFL were taking on the burden of lifetime healthcare for all these players.
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I can’t speak for all programs and schools, but my school continues to support me as (1) TA so that they can continue to offer huge lecture classes, yet keep average class size down (all large lectures have a 25-student section component; TAs usually also handle all the grading and writing training) and (2) as a fellowship student other semesters to help improve its rankings. (I was lucky in that I got my package before the “five years and out” was made standard across the fields. Between outside fellowships and other offers, I’ll be done in eight, without having to barrista.)
For the graduate program component of the college rankings, a program wants to get students from top undergrad schools, and produce students that get jobs. Regarding the first, that means putting together packages that will compete with Yale and Harvard, which can attract students on reputation alone. For the second, there’s a push to getting lots of students through to the PhD. If you assume that getting a job is completely random, you’ll still want to play the game (produce a student for the market) as often as possible. There’s a penalty for students who leave without a degree in the statistics as well. The tragedy of the commons, perhaps?
I do think that we students have a certain amount of personal responsibility for our fate. Although my father (an academic himself) thinks I have a decent shot at the job market, I’m looking at it like this: although my computer skills have atrophied (I was a web programmer before school), I have gained more useful math (statistics), international experience, and a few languages from the program. I also enjoyed myself for at least part of it–no cruel commentators yet, knock on wood. If I go back to the business world, I’ll take a pay hit, but I’m thinking of doing international or government if academics doesn’t work out–and that, I would not have been able to switch over to as a code monkey.
Of course, your mileage will vary for other fields. (English, for example.)
I think the athletes have it worse. I’m at a football school, and in return for their play here, they’re supposed to get an education–the requirements of the coaches severely limits their ability to learn, or even to catch up on rudimentary skills they should have to succeed in life. So few of them will “win the lottery” and make it to the pros. Add brain injury to that…. Recently, too, a star player here was crippled for life in a training session.
I mean, lost earning potential is one thing. Neurological functionality–or the ability to walk or use your vocal cords–is another thing completely.
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Thanks for posting the link to the article about the PhD problem. This problem is in my thoughts every waking moment and at the center of our family life (and troubles) given that both my husband and I got our PhDs and still aren’t profesionals. He’s on the job market now, having graduated 5 years ago (which is beginning to become a liability, not an asset as his postdocs were supposed to be). Anyway, I hope to find time to post about this (if the cyber-schooling of my sons allows).
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I read a lot of blogs by humanities academics, but I still don’t really understand the PhD ‘problem’. These folks are well educated and well informed with alternative options. There is just not that much demand for humanities PhD’s! Go into some other field if you need some career stability. And if enough people do, then things will get better. The only way this system could be reformed is if it were more like Europe were a test you took early on either allowed you into the academy or shut you out completely. That way, no wasted time. But somehow I don’t think people would regard that as satisfactory. Wishing there were more demand for these degrees because it’s a job that sounds appealing to you is just not very reasonable.
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This is actually somewhat relevant:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/ultra_realistic_modern_warfare
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Hmmm, mpowell, what you argue is not Menand’s point. He’s not suggesting that there should be more academic jobs, but that the graduate programs should be changed to become more relevant to the real world thus allowing even more people to get PhDs and getting jobs in various places.
Anyhow, I came here to let you know, Laura, that I did write my post after all.
Here it is, fresh from the “oven.” 😉
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