The Afterlife of the Mind
John Guillory, imagining new prospects for humanities PhDs no longer in the profession:
I argued further in my MLA paper that the best way to accomplish this goal is to introduce graduate students to as many alumni of the system as are willing and able to speak to them about their careers after graduate school. Many of these alumni, we know, did not get tenure-track jobs but escaped the trap of adjunct labor; many are now employed in nonacademic professions. Let us invite them to return and tell us what they got from their experience in graduate school. Many of these former students do not regret having spent time working on a doctorate, whatever the benefit of the credential in their later working life. But to the graduate schools they have left behind, it is as though they disappeared from the face of the earth once they entered new professions. This is a waste, the loss of considerable talent and passion to a diaspora.39
Can these former students maintain a relation to literary study without the organization of the profession, without the structure of graduate school? To ask this question is to put the intellectual seriousness of the literary disciplines to the test. Literary study in its disciplinary form obviously cannot be separated from the organizational structures of the university and the departments of which it is composed. But it is surely within the power of these departments to reconnect with former students and bring them into contact with graduate students currently in the system. To do so would be to enlarge, in small increments, the sphere of intellectuality by tapping the intellectual sociability in the corps of former graduate students. There is no reason why intellectual engagement with literature has to exist only in the form of a profession, however gratifying professional life may be, however abundantly scholarship has thrived within the academy. I gesture here to the realm of what Merve Emre calls the “paraliterary,” all those sites where literary study is cultivated outside the purview of graduate education.40 At these sites one might find long-standing projects such as the “medical humanities,” but the more promising locations in this context are less disciplinarily organized. These are sites (for the most part) of intellectual exchange on the internet, new versions of “little magazines,” such as n+1, or of journals such as The Point, as well as the now vast proliferation of blogs on cultural matters, some of which host high-level exchanges.41 Such sites disclose the widespread desire for an engagement with literature and culture that is more serious than the habits of mass consumption and that demands new genres and forms of discourse.
My gesture of support for outreach to our former graduate students—some graduate programs have already been making efforts of this kind—is not offered as a solution to the crisis of the job market, only a reminder of the fact that our former students are everywhere and that they are certainly still interested in literature and in intellectual life broadly. The collapse of the job market has deformed graduate education by burdening students with enormous anxiety and by constraining their freedom of intellectual inquiry in response to the market. But it has also established the conditions for the transformation of graduate school into a semiautonomous professional sphere. Insofar as this sphere transcends the organization of individual graduate programs, it has moved graduate education closer to a niche public sphere. Reconnecting our former students with our current students will strengthen the autonomy of this sphere, and if it does not resolve the calamity of the job market, it will at least reassure our students that the life of the mind can survive the crisis of the profession.
From Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022)
I was a PhD student in the humanities not that long ago. I read Guillory’s book right after it came out, and found it to be one of the most hopeful, clear-eyed visions of a renewed humanistic life in the 2020s. Guillory is not tediously prescriptive on the level of policies or proposals, but the above passage is a good sample of how how seriously he takes the humanities as a culture. At this moment, given the escalating hard times that have hit universities as a whole during 2025, the book looks even more prophetic. So, if we assume that the basic makeup of the current predicament (lack of funding, declining enrollment, absence of professional opportunities, etc.) will not change, how could the humanities thrive on different terms?
There are a lot of reasons why intellectuals have trouble finding a home in this world. Some of the reasons are internal to who they are, having to do with personality (shyness, contrarianism, an anti-joiner mindset). Others are social: if you have an above-average commitment to describing what you see–which means telling the truth–then you are likely to upset other people to a point beyond what is politically prudent for your own flourishing.
But because PhD graduate program are tied to a powerful institutions with a service function (universities), they have proven to be reliable stopping points that can both nourish and protect those with intellectual aspirations. On paper, PhD programs are professional training–credentials to hold a specific job title. They can only ever be a temporary home for relatively young, early-career figures who pass through on the way to something else. But for a serious intellectual, finding a community–a source of lifelong dialogue–is perhaps the hardest problem. Some well-known writers worked basically their entire lives, and never really found a proper interlocutor. So if you go to graduate school and do find a sympathetic group–even for just a few years–it will change you.
Regardless of the work you produced or how it helped your career, I believe many graduate students came away with an understanding of just how valuable their communities were. And that you need to either tend to what you have, or start new groups that build on what you were lucky enough to be a part of. It would be a strange but wonderful outcome if many of the formerly solitary, organizationally disinclined humanities PhDs came to the conclusion that they should use their skills to organize and build. Some of us know how precious these ties really are. We need to maintain our own while extending the circle to others.