How Could I Still Be So in Love When I Know, We've Been Had?

I ran into S this weekend. He's an old friend from my program. He's been adjuncting in a department that has a graduate program, but not one that's in the 50 ranked on Leiter's list. (In fact, it doesn't even get an honorable mention, or whatever Leiter's also-ran cataegory is.) It's one of these PhD programs where if it disappeared, no one in the profession would notice.

S told me about watching the attitudes of grad students in his department change as they make their way through the program. When they start getting ready to hit the job market, it slowly dawns on them that it's all pretend, make-believe, bullshit, and that they've been had. They realize they will never work in philosophy, and the goal they've been working towards for the past five or six or seven years is a mirage.