{"id":50484,"date":"2022-10-06T01:00:54","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T05:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=50484"},"modified":"2022-10-05T09:46:34","modified_gmt":"2022-10-05T13:46:34","slug":"qotd-life-in-grad-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/10\/06\/qotd-life-in-grad-school\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Life in grad school"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Grad students spend most of their time in the library, and because of the peculiar ecology of college towns, even their non-library hours are spent almost exclusively with other academics. You have to work very, very hard to have any kind of &#8220;normal&#8221; life in a college town, in other words, so even if you&#8217;re not a goofball when you arrive, pretty soon Stockholm Syndrome kicks in and you find yourself, if not <em>liking<\/em>, then at least <em>tolerating<\/em>, experimental theater and milk made from plants.<\/p>\n<p>After a few years of this, you forget what normal life is even like. You come to understand the deep and longstanding grievances the Poststructuralist Feminist Marxists have with the Marxist Feminist Poststructuralists. Oh, there&#8217;s scads of &#8220;diversity&#8221; on campus \u2014 all those recruiting brochures they mail to dumb parents in the &#8216;burbs aren&#8217;t <em>lying<\/em> \u2014 but there&#8217;s one thing you&#8217;ll never, ever find: The thought that maybe politics doesn&#8217;t matter all that much.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the answer, right there. Academic &#8220;humanities&#8221; work is mostly bullshit because most people just don&#8217;t care about politics. To normals, if they think about &#8220;politics&#8221; at all, it&#8217;s in Schoolhouse Rock terms \u2014 some guys in Washington vote on some stuff, and that&#8217;s how a bill becomes a law. They certainly don&#8217;t mean <em>ideology<\/em>, which is pretty much the only thing academics mean. That a normal person could walk into the voting booth without really knowing if he&#8217;s going to pull the lever for Trump or Hillary fries an egghead&#8217;s circuits&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; and yet, as we all know, the <em>majority<\/em> of American voters do this, every single time. There&#8217;s something profound about normal person behavior that academics just can&#8217;t \u2014 or won&#8217;t \u2014 grasp.<\/p>\n<p>Severian, <!--<a href=\"http:\/\/www.rottenchestnuts.com\/ignoring-the-human-factor\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">-->&#8220;Ignoring the Human Factor&#8221;, <em>Rotten Chestnuts<\/em>, 2019-08-14.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Grad students spend most of their time in the library, and because of the peculiar ecology of college towns, even their non-library hours are spent almost exclusively with other academics. You have to work very, very hard to have any kind of &#8220;normal&#8221; life in a college town, in other words, so even if you&#8217;re [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,53,41,13],"tags":[622,1020,1462,764],"class_list":["post-50484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-ideology","tag-progressives","tag-severian","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-d8g","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50484"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77026,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50484\/revisions\/77026"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}