/lit/ - Literature

>>4728438

what's your question? whether i think there are worthwhile enterprises outside of the academy? obviously--or i wouldn't be leaving it.

i couldn't care less what krugman has to say; his brand of public appeal is up there with fareed zakaria and malcom gladwell as practitioners of a unique strain of starbucks intellectualism. when i say "corpsed," it's to borrow from beckett's Endgame--which i take to be formally analogous to the conditions in academia today; somewhere between lear's "nothing comes from nothing" and beckett's "I can't go on/i'll go on" there is 95% of today's graduate student population. lifeless, unoriginal, self-referential and self-aggrandizing, committed to academia because "everything else out there sucks"--such are the conditions of the majority of graduate students pursuing degrees in the humanities/social sciences. of course, there are really exceptional minds here and there, but they are few, far in between, and ultimately too marginally insignificant to warrant one's loyalty to the profession.

>>4728470

bachelor's degree--then get experience doing something else. approach academia if 1) you are truly devoted to/passionate about the topic you intend to study (and you have a clear sense of what that project is); or 2) you have exhausted the other more "practical" alternatives at your disposal and cannot see yourself anywhere else but in the academy. the latter is the decidedly weaker reason, but its a reason nonetheless. otherwise, stay out of school and intervene directly in the world.