August 23, 2007
If you are like most entering classes of American Studies graduate students, you are filled with people who aren’t sure they want to be here. Aren’t sure they want to be in graduate school. Think they could do more good teaching high school, doing government work, being a reporter or adman or at-risk counselor or counter-terrorist. Really want to make movies, play music, sing, paint, act.
This is one of the things that’s great about American Studies: people bring so many hidden wishes to it.
I tell you not to give up your hidden wishes. Clever as you are, you should be able to weave them into your American Studies work. Further, if you find that American Studies isn’t quite—or isn’t at all—what you want and fall by the wayside before completing the Ph.D., as one in two of you will or at least used to do, you can take American Studies with you into the next wish you try: as our dropouts, MAs, and ABDs have taken it into (I’m citing real people—names available on request) the Foreign Service, writing and singing folk songs, high school teaching in Missouri and San Antonio, bestselling men’s movement-personal growth-drug and alcohol recovery guruing, writing wine criticism for the New York Times, book criticism for the Boston Globe (she won a Pulitzer Prize), running a political polling company or starting an Austin high-tech spin-off that does something I don’t understand involving a phone-bank and the internet.
You’re here now—just as Ram Dass tells you to be—and I trust you’ll give your best attention to your American Studies’ work. But don’t be afraid to listen to your hidden wishes because, much though we love what we’re going to teach you, we, as good Americans as well as American Studies faculty, know that what matters is you, your happiness, which we encourage you to pursue now with us, and always.
