do stop whining about your ph.d. and the market for perfessors...

     So, you went and obtained, at great cost in both time and treasure, a Ph. D. in one of the disciplines delightfully bundled as The Humanities. Good for you. Perhaps it took many years, and perhaps you had to endure hour upon hour of hard labor to finish everything. Again, good for you. Now hear the good news - the world owes you not a damned thing for such an achievement. 

     That's right, you are owed neither a tenure-track position, nor a good salary, nor benefits, nor the prestige that used to accrue to the title 'Professor' (such as it was). If there are no good teaching jobs available for you, well, suck it the hell up. You took the risk, you signed on the line that was dotted, and now you have to live with your decisions.

     Here's the even better news - the sheer fact of obtaining a Ph. D. in The Humanities signifies nothing. From the fact that you now possess a Ph. D., I can infer nothing about your intelligence, your talent, your brazen originality or lack thereof. To be blunt, I find most Ph. D.'s to be little more than somewhat smart time-servers. They have an uncanny ability to please, to negotiate bureaucratic tangles, and to stay just on this side of the truly transgressive. Most can write somewhat serviceable prose, but don't ask me to spend time reading it. In short, rarely does the labor and time required to obtain a Ph. D. signify anything other than a desire to never leave school, and that, dear reader, qualifies a person to do absolutely nothing.

     This implies that the lack of good teaching jobs might just reflect on you, the holder of that newly minted Ph. D., as much as it does on the 'Market'. Perhaps, despite your GPA and all those reviews, you're at best a passable teacher and a mediocre scholar. To put it in the most brutal terms possible, perhaps you're just not worth the $250k a year a good school would spend on you as a tenure-track professor pulling down a good salary. 

     So please, stop whining about the State Of The Humanities. Stop whining, for the love of God, about how you can't make a living teaching Old Church Slavonic at the local state school. You knew the odds, you took your chances, now be a grown up and live with the consequences. 

     Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to review the Greek Verb in the Subjunctive Mood, then drive thirty miles to inspect an enormous roof. If all goes well this week, I should secure three contracts worth around $18,000 to my company. This might allow me to hire another person - it'll take some more math to figure out if that's possible. All the while, there will be world enough and time to read Homer, study some Greek, and contemplate Pranger's argument in Eternity's Ennui. What do you have planned?