Reasons why

I am leaving my PhD program.  I decided that about four months ago but I have told very few people.  I suppose putting it on a blog is a strange way to announce it, but I assume that most of the people who would be bothered by my decision to quit have no idea that I have a blog.  I think I'd like to keep it that way.

I will always love archaeology and ancient Rome.  I will always love sifting through books and site reports and ancient texts in search of a better understanding of the way people lived in the past.  I will always love getting caught up in an academic debate.  But I am done with school and done with academia.

My first stirrings of discontent with the PhD began almost as soon as I arrived here.  I saw quite clearly that I would not be able to just transfer in credits from my MA and finish in four years (as I had been led to believe).  I also saw that once I finished my coursework, I would not be free to just live wherever I wanted while crafting a dissertation.  So suddenly, instead of two years in Minneapolis followed by freedom to live where I wanted while researching, I was faced with a probable seven or eight years here, in the big city, far from family and friends.

Another set of disappointments came with the discovery that I really do not belong here.  My advisor actually admitted to knowing very little about Roman religion.  I study Roman religion.  In fact, no one in the department knows about Roman religion.  My advisor suggested that I was the local authority on Roman religion.  Why am I studying here if I already apparently know more than everyone else?  The trouble is, other than a few other big universities, there is nowhere in the US to really study Roman archaeology.  I understand now why my advisor in Newcastle (on my MA program in the UK) was astonished that I was leaving the UK to do my PhD--there really are no good programs for it in the US.

This realization was followed rapidly by another--if I couldn't even do a PhD in the US, how on earth did I think I would get a job here?  Only a few schools employ full time Classical archaeologists and they all have people happily employed in those posts at the moment.  I did not want to gamble my future happiness on the off chance that the professor of Roman archaeology at a college in New England would retire the moment I graduated.  Suddenly, I saw myself a slave to where the jobs were and I did not like where that was taking me.  If a PhD was going to take eight years and leave me with only a few, undesirable job prospects, I did not want it as much as I had in the past.

The final piece of this intricate puzzle of discontent was slowly fitted into place.  I never imagined that the culture of academia would become distasteful to me, but I now find myself revolted at the "Ivory Tower" mentality and the arrogance, rudeness, and (to put it bluntly) common idiocy that sometimes accompanies it.  Many of my fellow graduate students appear to have the maturity of twelve-year-olds.  The professors aren't much better.  Just as musicians and actors really live for applause, so academics live for flattery. When they find flattery lacking, they resort to bullying to make themselves feel more significant.  Often, the criticism of a fellow researcher's work is really just thinly veiled bullying.  The worst behavior I have seen, though, is in the absolute disrespect the teaching assistants (graduate students employed teaching undergraduate classes) have for their students.  I have seen the ugly underbelly of academia and I want to thoroughly wash my hands of it.

This does not mean that I have lost my love of learning, intellectual pursuit, theory, philosophy.  It has actually fueled my desire to learn.  I have read more books of an intellectual sort this year than in the past four years combined.  Hopefully, through this blog, my "continuing education" will be evident.  For now, though, I am walking away from what some people see as a grand opportunity to seize a greater one.  Life calls.  I am trying to answer.

--Allison