The Many Uses of Graduate Students

This NYT article on graduate students reminded me of a priceless Simpsons clip:



Of course they made terrible life choices, as Bart points out. Right now (and it doesn't matter when you read this sentence -- it will always be true) some poor schmuck is locked in a library, breathing the dust of old books that haven't been opened in decades, researching some obscure thing that nobody cares about in order to write a two-hundred page paper that nobody will ever read.

Look I'm all for academia and the pursuit of the higher intellect. But have you ever been to the place in the college library where they store theses and dissertations? It's like going to the section of the cemetery that nobody ever visits.

Perhaps it's intolerant and short-sighted of me, but I find that spending years of your life looking up phallic references in sonnets written by women in the late Elizabethan period will fail to contribute a positive benefit to society.

I'm not asking that they stop studying, just that they apply these findings to today's problems, as the op-ed suggests. The purpose should be to somehow harness the inherent power of medieval studies graduate students and use it to till the waters of modern innovation, as it were. Not to fill 120 pages with jargon about how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the symbolic representation of Hamlet's ego, where they will sit unread and forgotten in a university basement until that fateful day when someone tries to prove the opposite.

Every year academics spend more and more time learning about less and less, until, as the article says, they will know everything there is to know about nothing.