Not with a Bang but with a Whimper?
Finishing a Classics PhD During the Pandemic
As COVID-19 deaths rise and our lockdowns wear on, many of us are anxiously wondering what our worlds will look like post-coronavirus. But not all of us interact regularly with the graduate students who are the future of classics. Those who’ve finished their coursework and are now dissertating in comparative solitude are the most easily overlooked in this crisis, even though they’re among the most vulnerable to its consequences.
With that in mind, I recently Skyped with three graduate students finishing their PhDs in the department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Rebecca Moorman is soon to defend her dissertation on the aesthetics of disgust in Latin literature; Amy Hendricks is about to submit hers on chorality in archaic Greek poetry; and Ximing Lu is in the final stages of his work on study abroad in the Late Republic, with a focus on its role in Cicero and his son Marcus’ self-fashioning. They’re the first grad students I’ve worked with throughout their entire PhD careers, I’m honored to serve on their committees, and I’m proud of all they’ve accomplished. I also worry how the coronavirus crisis is affecting them and their peers as they finish multi-year projects in these weeks that have overturned the world.
What surprised me — and I hope comes through from the following transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity — was how pragmatically, even stoically, they’re handling this upheaval. I had intended to offer them comfort and companionship, but I came away the beneficiary of theirs, and more confident than ever that they’ll be able to meet the future, whatever it may hold. But we don’t claim to speak for anyone but ourselves. If you have grad students in your life, we urge you to reach out to them, too.
Nandini: Let me first ask, with all that’s going on, how is everyone doing?
Amy: I’m pretty good. It’s definitely — strange. But in some ways it doesn’t feel that different because I have been working at home for most of the last year, at least half the day. All in all, I’m fine. Healthy. Able to get what I need, so that’s good.
Rebecca: I go into the office every day, so I have a hard time working from home exclusively. But I also got kind of lucky because I turned in my dissertation last week, so I don’t have the pressure of having to finish that right now and access library resources in a time crunch.
Ximing: It’s a bit weird to think that if school is not in session, are we in break mode or are we still in semester mode? That’s the psychological effect on me — trying to differentiate where we are at the moment.
Nandini: It’s definitely a category shift. For two of you, this is your final semester of grad school, and this is certainly not what anyone was expecting; any thoughts on the emotional side of that?
Rebecca: It’s been really disappointing. I don’t want to make too big a deal of it, because there are so many people now who’ve lost their jobs — I’m still getting a paycheck, and I have a spare room where I can work, and I’m quite comfortable and secure right now. It is a let-down to think that this process we’ve been working on for so many years is going to end in this way. It’s uncertain how long we’re going to be in isolation, but if I move away from Madison this summer, there’s a chance [these are the] last few months I have with my community here — and to have it be online this way, and not be able to continue enjoying the relationships I’ve built here, is difficult.
Nandini: On the undergrad side, there’s been a lot of disappointment with the cancellation of commencement. Do you think it’s different for PhDs, who are at a different place in their lives and have invested so much more time? Is there anything we can do to recreate that chance to celebrate with your faculty and friends here? [This is as meaningful, I’d add, for your advisors, given the time and care we invest in our relationships with grad students.]
Rebecca: Well, what I was most looking forward to about commencement was the hooding, and that moment with my advisor. So that’s something I don’t need a large ceremony to mark. I think if UW has a ceremony at a later date, I might consider coming back for that … or [if we have] some departmental celebration after everything clears up, that’d be a meaningful way to mark the accomplishment with my mentors and colleagues and community. This is the longest I’ve been in a place in my adult life so it’s a place I’ve grown attached to.
Nandini: This epidemic has paused our lives; I wonder if we should consider pausing our own professional lives and maybe making time at the SCS and CAMWS for people who want to be hooded by their advisors if they’re both able to be there.
Amy: I think it’s especially hard if you’re not continuing in the field; if you’re planning on going into a non-academic job, you might not go to the SCS. It’s been so up and down the past couple weeks that I feel I’ve already become conditioned to not plan anything, because it’s so likely to get cancelled or postponed or just become very different. And I’m not necessarily uncomfortable with that uncertainty, I just think that’s something that’s really going to shift in our general mindset — just being a little more OK with not knowing what’s going to happen in the next month.
Nandini: It’s interesting how this situation writes large some problems that are already endemic to this late stage of grad school. You’ve done your coursework, you’ve done your exams, you’re sort of on your own in this Ovidian isolation bubble anyway — and then this [pandemic] enhances that and deprives you of the company and community that helps you get through. And on top of it there’s already so much future anxiety, and this magnifies things. I mean, we don’t even know how long this shelter-in-place order is going to last, much less what’s going to happen afterwards. … What are some other challenges or questions you’ve been grappling with as the situation continues to unfold?
Ximing: Well for me personally there’s been this rising racist sentiment against people of Chinese heritage. Yesterday there was this graffito on campus: #CHINESEVIRUS. So that’s very personal — something that makes me afraid for the future. With this virus, bias seems to be on the rise and it’s a terrible situation.
Nandini: [That’s really important for us all to keep in mind, and] part of this is the mixed messaging, right? Where the president is obviously encouraging this sentiment even as we get emails from our own university saying this kind of racist behavior won’t be tolerated. So it’s a moment when you see a fracturing of authority.
Rebecca: [Less urgently, this crisis has] also made the tumultuous job market even more tumultuous. People are very uncertain about how long this is going to last and what the economic fallout is going to be.
Nandini: I’m torn because I want to keep asking about the challenges you face but I also want to ask what I can do as a faculty member to help you, what our institutions and profession can be doing… I think people are well-meaning but not everyone has contact with grad students, and maybe just having and sharing this conversation can help move some gears.
Amy: You’re one faculty member who has reached out just to check on the grad students. Which I hope is a relatively easy thing for you to do but which was quite meaningful to me at least. I think grad students in general [appreciate faculty] checking in … to say, ‘I know where you are in your work and I can support that.’ Or ‘I’m here if you need anything.’ I think faculty are doing that with students they’re teaching, but [ABDs] are already isolated from the teaching and advising community generally.
Rebecca: Amy’s comment also makes me think about the way my understanding of working alone has shifted, because as a dissertator I’ve grown very comfortable going for weeks without contact with colleagues and advisors — so this situation suddenly made me feel very vulnerable, and having more frequent contact than I otherwise would need has been really comforting. One thing people may consider is being open to more personal forms of communication. In the past my communication has been only email, and now I’ve been texting or calling Alex [Dressler, my supervisor] and it’s nice to know that I have that more immediate contact for asking questions or just talking to check in.
Nandini: You [three] are on fellowship, and I’m on research leave — so we’re in a place that’s normally enviable, because we have a lot of mental space for our own thoughts. But the nature of that space changes when you can’t go out and your alone time goes from being a privilege to feeling like a prison. I find myself envying people with classes, even though they have to struggle to put them online, because they have that human contact and that sense of usefulness.
Ximing: This crisis also makes me think about the future of university teaching. We place a lot of value on our classroom interactions, our face-to-face instruction, which is a good thing but at the same time I don’t think we’re prepared for teaching online or through other media. [Our students, too, don’t have equal access to technology and the internet, quiet spaces for work, or basics like food, shelter, and time; the quarantine’s necessitation of remote education heightens preexisting inequities.] On the other hand, to teach a class online can be very democratic; it’s much cheaper; and it can be a good way to make the discipline more inclusive.
Rebecca: I think in a way the humanities might have an advantage over other disciplines. In language it can be very difficult to have asynchronous learning, which can be more successful online than synchronous learning. But we still have the ability to do things as long as we have a video connection or can post written assignments and have some sort of online discussion — whereas for other fields, there really is a component where you have to be there in person, you have to be at a lab, completing these experiments, or you have animals that you have to be taking care of. So in that sense, I think classics and the humanities are able to navigate this online experiment a little more easily than other fields.
Nandini: I think that’s a great point, and I’m hopeful that people entering the profession could be the forerunners and leaders of this change toward online education. On the other hand I also wonder if this will lead to a further devaluing of the humanities, if our courses become distribution requirements that you can get out of the way online, [while] you actually have to show up for a lab class?
Ximing: I wonder if it’s a perception thing. I have a friend who went to medical school and her lectures included an online option instead of going to a classroom. … If a student is very self-disciplined and works better on their own schedule, online instruction might be better for them than going to a classroom at certain times. And it also makes it easier for people to schedule their lives and avoid work-class conflicts.
Nandini: Do you think that this pandemic is going to make universities around the world revalue subjects? It really proves the need for more health care workers and data analysts. Do you think there’s an opportunity for classics to re-prove its importance [or accept its limitations]? Where do you think this crisis is going to leave us as a field?
Ximing: I think certainly health workers and STEM will be very important, but at the same time, the humanities [remain valuable]. We see a lot of politicizing the crisis from both sides, in the way Trump is saying this is a Chinese virus, and [a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry tried] to pin the source on the States. So helping society tell rhetoric from truth is a place we can impact.
Rebecca: Yeah, my research looks at contagion and plague narratives in antiquity, and just as Ximing says, there’s a rhetoric in society now [about contagion and contact] that impacts us all on a really human level. We’re thinking about these big questions like what’s our place in this online world and how are we going to interact with other people and how do our relationships change. Humans need contact, but now there’s a fear that contact is dangerous — in fact it’s not a fear, but a reality. And the way that people in antiquity talk about [the importance of contact and the need for human connection and cohesion in times of crises like a plague], I think, can give us a way of thinking about how we can talk about the pandemic and navigate it as well.
Amy: I think another possible hopeful outcome is that people have so much time right now, and eventually you get to a point when you can’t fill it with more news or rhetoric or thinking about what’s happening day to day. And I’m hoping that there’s [more space to think] about art and literature and things that make us human, in those times when you are quiet and you’re at home and you need something to fill that time.
Nandini: I think that’s a beautiful sentiment and I was going to ask you whether there’s any particular art or or passages of literature that have been helping you get through this.
Amy: I’ve been thinking about the line from the T. S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men,” “not with a bang but with a whimper.” It kept coming into my head about the way this PhD is ending.
[They laugh.]
Nandini: I think there’s room for gallows humor! To be honest I’m glad to see you smiling, and surprised to see you all seeming so constructive. I’m trying to read your mood and trying to decide, is this fatalism? Because if I were you I would be cursing my fate that this is the year I happened to be graduating — and I’m not trying to feed your anxieties, but this sucks, right? I mean, people have been talking about 2008 and the post-9/11 job market and you guys are a brave and unique generation, this graduating year.
Amy: I do feel fatalistic about it. … You don’t get to the end of a PhD without having a lot of really personal reasons for doing it and a lot of intense, individual motivation. And there are always a lot of bumps in the road and setbacks and hoops to jump through along the way. So now it sort of feels like we were just getting to the end of it, and it was all going to be OK — and it is fine, and it’s going to be OK, and our lives are being conducted in front of a computer anyway — but [this crisis is] one more thing that’s really hard. Maybe the last six years have led me to the point of: well, here’s a difficulty and we’ll do our best with it, I guess.
Nandini: I like the way you’re going from the personal up to this gigantic cataclysm that is real and is wrapping all of us up and yet is so hard to see. In a funny way this [crisis] crystallizes so much of the anxiety and uncertainty that come with the package of grad school. … Is there anything in a perfect world, without worrying about pragmatics or finances, that our institutions could do to help out? Do you think that our university should consider trying to scrape up extra funding for people who are currently on the job market or who are in good standing but might not have a job to go to, like so much of this country?
Rebecca: I’m hesitant to suggest more postdocs because it’s kind of a necessary evil, but it’s [also] creating a market where it’s all but impossible not to have these temporary stepping-stones after the PhD. But it’d make it easier to have another season with some sort of connection to UW with continued employment or teaching and office space. This [campus closure] has taught me that I’ve been craving my office, and craving students, some sort of external structure and someone to be responsible for. If I had students, I could invest my energy in making sure they were OK, and that would distract me from worrying if I’m OK.
Nandini: I can relate to that. Do you think we should be talking about extending deadlines or timelines for grad students, on analogy with institutions that are extending faculty tenure clocks?
Ximing: I think that the concept of “furlough” might be helpful: maybe grad students could for a period of time keep their health benefits and library access and benefits while still graduating on time.
Amy: I think what you said earlier about this situation shedding light on existing problems is really true. When you finish, if you don’t have something lined up, you’re just done. There’s no transitioning out of the PhD process where you can continue to have health care, or continue to function as a young academic [and your program] will try to find you [short-term] campus employment. Especially when your university and by extension your department are eager to get people finished up in a timely manner. There’s no stopgap. Even if we weren’t dealing with a pandemic, once you get to the end, that’s where you get off — there’s no next station for the train to stop at. And there are a lot of people left in the lurch.
Nandini: I really love that idea, kind of like a bridge year outward from the PhD program. And again, I’m trying to figure out my role here because — can I talk to you honestly about my anxieties? I’m afraid that a lot of institutions are going to be ruined financially by this, and especially [some more vulnerable] SLACs will be closing down. Our university’s big enough that it can absorb a lot of this, but the picture is not pretty, financially. And with all the grad students who are already on the market from previous years and your year and probably next year, and all the institutions that will have to have layoffs, there’s going to be so many people struggling to operate within this economy and I have no idea what that’s going to look like.
One good thing may be that this country’s going to have to really reinvent how people are getting their money and their health care, and it’s fascinating to see the Andrew Yang universal basic income thing coming back into the conversation [with the $2 trillion CARES Act]… There’s a really big societal reckoning that needs to happen and I’d love to see where universities fit into that. I’d love to see some early retirements, I’d love to see money getting freed up at the top of the academic ladders, and maybe — will faculty volunteer to furlough themselves, or donate some of their teaching time to help see graduates through? I think there could be some really interesting solutions, especially if that wave of solidarity we’re seeing right now continues.
Ximing: One thing I was concerned about was the number of Chinese students that come to the States next year. Their tuition is a major financial source for institutions. Right now many people are returning to China because they perceive how poorly the US is handling this crisis. So my question is how long will that perception stay — will it stick past this year and affect the perception in general of American education? Because [the change in international student enrollments] will have an indirect influence on our job market.
Nandini: I agree it makes no sense right now to send your kids abroad. And many Americans will not want to enroll [in classes held online, or even out of state]. We might have very low enrollments in the fall. But Ximing was saying earlier that this forced experiment in online teaching is actually opening up some avenues. It’s making us explore ways we could teach internationally without transmitting pathogens. So in a funny way even as it’s a problem it might also contain some of its own solution. Can you imagine international students wanting to pay for online classes and certifications with US universities, or is the chance to travel part of the fun and the learning opportunity? (This relates so much to your dissertation, Ximing!)
Ximing: There’s some stigma against online courses and degrees because they’re considered inferior … so if we can change that perception there might be hope that people will be interested in paying for online classes. But at the same time, particularly for students in China, we have to deal with the problem of censorship, and how we are going to talk about the humanities and [sensitive topics] in online venues.
Amy: I’ve been thinking a lot about our prospective graduate students and I’m generally just worried whether people will go to graduate school for classics. I don’t think it was ever (at least in my lifetime) a sound investment economically. But now I wonder if it’ll take an even bigger hit. … Our strongest selling point has always been when you come to campus and interact with the graduate community… I can’t imagine choosing a grad school online. And I wonder, if I were a graduating senior right now, whether I would go to grad school.
Nandini: In the short term it might not be the worst if graduate enrollments were down, because that would free up money and teaching slots for graduates who might be really impacted by the tightening job market. You [graduating PhDs] are at the top of the stack of people whose senior years are being affected — undergrad seniors and high school seniors. And if I were a graduating senior I would not like to rush from an April/May that’s being taught online into another program that’s also taught online. Plus the kind of gap-year things people did to expand their perspective or sense of the world are also closed off. So there’s going to be a lot of talented people who are not going to have as many avenues for their ambition [on top of the many whose basic educational and subsistence needs are not being met]. I’m curious: where do you think people should be putting their energy right now, as we’re all trying to work from home and process what’s happening in the world?
Amy: I think maybe just absorbing, being a sponge and taking in everything you can — and maybe if you have the energy and opportunity to create your own content or response, whether that’s in a formal way, whether you’re publishing scholarship, or whether it’s a journal you’re keeping for yourself privately or something you’re sharing with yourself or your community. That’s the best I can come up with as a way to react: to have my own response. If you can contribute in some way to this point of time which is so weird and unfamiliar — hopefully it’s providing an opportunity for new perspectives and new voices to become a meaningful part of the conversation.
Nandini: So, work on yourself and your own thoughts and voice, and have faith that at some point those will be valued and at least for now might help you through.
Ximing: As Amy has said, it’s arts and literature that keep us away from the threat of the everyday. I think that’s a healthy thing. And on the bright side — the Renaissance happened after the Black Death. So there’s something exciting about imagining the future, the change of world.
Rebecca: I’ve been trying to fill my time thinking of my next projects, and I’m not sure if it’s futile since the future is so much more uncertain than it was before. … In the past there have been points of grad school that have been really hard, and the nice thing [is that] you have your cohort you can relate with, but you also have other people who aren’t going through it at all that you can turn to when you need a break. [But] right now you don’t have that luxury because everyone is going through this. And so I’ve been trying to read scholarship just to have a sense of normalcy, and pretend this is what I’d be doing anyway.
Nandini: I came into this conversation hoping maybe to help, and I found it very therapeutic myself to talk to you, not that that was my intention. But it made me realize that the state of isolation we often share as classicists is getting universalized, and everyone is feeling the same distance that we feel as scholars of the ancient past working alone in the library. Our experience is widening out even as our worlds are narrowing. And I really love how you are pointing to the therapeutic and connective power of art, and how our need to feel connected has never been more clear. Whatever happens to the ‘standard’ job path [after a classics PhD] — which we know no longer exists, and maybe never existed in the first place — in whatever brave new world of uncertainty that we venture into, I think there will be opportunity for thoughtful and creative people who can bring a broader perspective to the problems that connect us all. So thank you so much for sharing your thoughts; I really appreciate it, and I think our readers will too.
