Academia is the most slippery of slopes

With less than 100 days to go before May 18, graduation anxiety is really starting to kick in. Mix ibuprofen with ginger beer, rum, and philosophy readings, and you’ll most certainly start fantasizing about Demosthenes and Homer crumbling onto the green grass where you used to lay down stargazing at 5 a.m. Or at least, I did. Who the heck is Demosthenes anyway? And can we replace him with Lady Gaga? About a year ago, I was thinking, man, I should really go to science grad school. I picked a cool field. I love learning. I’ve been doing learning all my life, I feel comfortable basking in the awareness of learning. Hell, I fetishize learning. It gives me a degree of control that I will never have in the real world. I can ask questions slowly, I can avoid politics, I can be aloof if I want to, and I can always convince myself that I came across some shard of truth. But I might have been doing the one thing they always tell us not to do around here: confusing correlation and causation.
Learning mustn’t and doesn’t come only from academia. Old habits die hard, though, so in trying to decide what to do with myself next year and whether a graduate program would actually maximize my learning, I conducted an old-fashioned literature review. Here’s what I found after asking the Internet.

There’s the cognitive psychologist’s perspective—those wearing that hat have barely begun to agree on how many kinds of learning our brain is capable of. There are about as many memory types as psychologists can measure, and we are only now starting to map out the ways in which our neurons construct knowledge out of memory. Much as I love it, though, arguing about what learning means in the neuro-philosophical sense seems way too abstract to be applicable to something happening three months from now. Plus, as Jonah Lehrer announced to the world in a recent New Yorker piece: Even scientific truth wears off.

Then there’s The Economist. As usual, folks there put things in perspective using supply and demand. The numbers don’t lie—for the 100,000 Ph.D.s awarded between 2005 and 2009 in the United States, only 16,000 new professorships were created. According to the same article, which picks on doctoral degrees for not being as straightforward as Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, going the Ph.D. route is an entire waste of time and, very often, of taxpayers’ money. The academic in me suddenly feels misunderstood.

Finally, there’s Wired and the tech avant-garde. Before finding any Ph.D.-related advice there, I ran into one piece that seemed to suggest I have already spent four useless years in academia. The author collects seven of today’s awesome buzzwords and lists them as essential “skills” I could never have learned while reading Plato: among them, statistical literacy, self-expression in 140 characters, post-state diplomacy, applied cognition, and my favorite, remix culture. OK, statistical literacy I can agree with. A movie about a stuttering British monarch just won almost every BAFTA award. A movie about Facebook will probably sweep the Oscars. Britain’s got kings, America’s got Zuckerbergs—can we move on to the next construct, please? After Egypt, I’ll even concede to Twitter as an object of study. But I refuse to believe we have to settle for cultural postmodernist mashups. If staying original requires a Ph.D., I may just take that pill some day.

One can hardly be conclusive in 800 words, but here’s what I made of this review. Assuming away the value of a degree as a simple qualification, liberal arts colleges and Ph.D. programs aren’t for learning suckers like me because they necessarily teach us things. At the very least, they teach us how groups think collectively about things. At best, they facilitate the absorption of original ideas from a few very smart people we are lucky enough to call professors. Generally, they teach us a set of conventions for the complex communication of thoughts. From there on, it’s up to us to own learning. But what academia is great at is giving us time to do just that in many, many ways. For example, this past week, while I spent most of my class time studying the financial crisis, what I really internalized was the concept of neural plasticity. My brain can change as it goddamn pleases in response to music, because guess what: Listening to Rihanna over Damien Rice makes it way easier to walk around with a bleeding heart. Seriously, though, my point about this topic, one I clearly have not made my mind up about, is: Time grad school well. It’s many long years ahead of blissful, creative learning, yes. But also of missing out on other things. And other ways of learning.

Angela Radulescu is a Columbia College senior majoring in neurosicence and behavior. She is a former Spectator photo editor. The Rookie Brain runs alternate Thursdays.