A brief story
At a conference in my early years of the doctorate, I ran into a colleague and got to chatting. They were very kind in introducing me to others there. Before I could get completely comfortable, the introduction took a turn.
"This is Kevin, he's getting a PhD because...well, I guess for curiosity?"
(my reaction) "Oh! Is that why you think I'm doing it!" (laughter)
Living abroad I've become circumspect when it comes to social awkwardness. Getting older I've learned to give people space for two reasons: a) sometimes I misunderstand them at first or b) most awkward and ill-meaning people will hang themselves given the right length of rope. Hesitating is not something I was taught to do when growing up; I've learned it by watching others draw me out and watch me struggle.
I wouldn't say my colleague struggled with their odd comment, precisely, but I do hope it haunts them a bit as it does haunt me. What it did in the moment was set me off on altogether the wrong foot with whoever I was meeting right then. To be described as pursuing something grueling, expensive, difficult, and basically vulnerable out of 'curiosity' is to be presented as either an idiot or a person made stupid by privilege and free time. I'm neither of those things, and my colleague ought to have known better. They needn't tried to characterize my interest in higher learning at all. Why bother to try and guess all the myriad reasons a person might go after a PhD?
The interaction haunts me not because it speaks to a deeper truth but because it represents to me how little academics, I think, seek to really know one another. Revisiting my idea of academfluencers, I view a lot of the people I interact with at conferences as engaged in essentially entrepreneurial work with their selves and their ideas as the core business proposal. So maybe I was introduced as merely 'curious' because I was not entrepreneurial enough. Maybe a clearer mentor could have warned me that many people in academia are there because they wish to grind axes not only against a few dead authors, but contemporary ones as well, and maybe even family and friends, and the whole world while they're at it.
Some academics are passionate for what they perceive to be social or intellectual justice, to the point of being bloodthirsty for it. If its your business to promote yourself, and you only see space for yourself in the chunks you can cut out of others, then your academic career will be one characterized by conflict and zero sum musical chairs: one day you're in on a top publication, the next day you're out on a bad one. Careers have upswings and downswings, and one must self-mythologize at all times.
A long effect
I think after getting the doctorate last autumn, I arrived at a state of simultaneous relief and regret. The relief was made up of feelings of validation and arrival; no one could say I didn't or couldn't finish, and now I could append the proper suffix to my name if I wanted, wherever that might be useful (still searching for places where that might be true).
The regret is what I am dealing with now, if I'm honest. It isn't the sink of time and effort, nor the aggravating experience of distance learning, long term and part time, while running an entire separate life on the side. I haven't met any other PhD student with remotely the same experience as me, and the process is too freshly finished for me to really feel special for it. I feel more like a loner who chose an exceedingly difficult path - not because of visible barriers, nameable challenges, conventional prejudices - but because of the hardest sort of hurdle to wrap your hands around: indifference, silence, unavailability. I feel that I did my PhD in the dark, with barely a candle for light and only tiny tinkling sounds to give me a sense of the space, like drips of water falling from the ceiling now and then.
That I passed the entire thing surely makes me confident on one level of my abilities, but moreso makes me wonder what precisely I received from the institution that assisted me in along the way. I cannot feel, in other words, what the advising and instruction was meant to add to my efforts. This could be my own shortcoming; perhaps it takes several years for the impact and lessons to make themselves clear, in problems or barriers I do not see yet but that will be overcome thanks to my connections.
What is easier to believe now, in this moment, is that the institution merely certified a process I did by myself, in the common self-help neoliberal environment we in the West seem to have agreed to put ourselves through. No induction, no peer groups, no book clubs, and no graduation. Simply another day on the job, another meeting online, and another vague deadline to meet.
It is confusion more than regret that I feel when I look at my time as a student; what changed, and how? A lot certainly did. I think throughout the time I focused on the work and avoided the big and strange questions of what it all meant. But maybe like other students, once the work was done and I had an occasion to see it as a 'finished whole', I was shocked at how unfinished it appeared to be. What I expected I was not sure -- maybe that's the point of pomp and circumstance, it's to grant the student a moment to feel that things have ended and new things can begin.
Back to Curiosity
So the remark at the conference was not hurtful, I want to restate. It was odd and awkward and maybe if I were younger it would have done more damage. I've heard worse.
It sticks with me, I believe, because it speaks a basic truth. My first reaction was that everyone involved in higher learning ought to be doing it for curiosity. Perhaps my colleague feels the same and even as the words came out of their mouth or right after that, they felt a bit silly: look at this person studying for the sake of knowledge! Well...yes, yes I guess that's right. Sounds pretty good.
If it was an attempt to illuminate an imagined privilege of mine - look at this white man who can study purely for curiosity - then it bounced off the cold hard reality that I have worked full time, this whole time, and the PhD is a strategic professional move. I couldn't and didn't explain it to my colleague just then, because who wouldn't understand that a higher degree opens doors for anyone?
When I circle around this thing trying to figure out what was going through my colleague's mind, I mostly come up empty. Conferences are weird; people interact in new configurations and things are said sometimes to fill silences or make bridges between new crowds where maybe no logical bridge exists. Maybe my colleague felt an introduction of sorts was in order for me and realized too late that they knew too little about me to make it good.
Coming to it in the end, then: the point. I think PhD students get these kinds of experiences all the time. I think young scholars do as well. And I think discrimination in its many wild forms and unexpected visits comes to us from friends just as often as strangers, and probably stings all the more so for having a smile on its face and good intentions behind it. When it does come from a friendly if stupid corner, I want to say that it's a chance to see what we look like to others. Not how we are, but how we look, and after all that's how the world remembers us.
I did do the PhD out of curiosity, for the record. And I wish at that moment I'd been witty enough to embrace the poisonous compliment and draw my foolish colleague out more: indeed, I study for love of knowledge. I'm the only one here like that. Most of you are in it for the money. Not me; I'm here for the curiosity.