Culture matters. I learned this from books in graduate school, but I have also learned it first hand as I've tried to represent graduate student life in the cartoons and columns I submit to the campus press. What I've learned from my experiences is that undergraduates have a lot of anger towards graduate students, and especially GESO. I've become interested in this anger because I honestly believe that we-graduate students and undergraduates-have more to learn from listening to each other than we do by closing our ears, our papers, and our cartoons to some of our mutual concerns.
Since the Herald started publishing PhD, I have discovered that I have a large undergraduate following-among both my students and anonymous fans. And thus I have tried to use my pathetic stick figures to represent the universal anxieties of the Yale student, grad and undergrad. But as the GESO drive heated up, and graduate students became a target for slander and parody in the rest of the campus press, I began to find the purely self-deprecating route unsatisfying. I thus added Yale administrators to my cast of villains, and interspersed cartoons with an angrier political message along side the PhD sagas of unanswered e-mail messages, unfinished dissertations, and unrequited love.
In recent weeks I have hit upon a new theme-the theme of post-graduation joblessness-that I suspect might resonate with undergraduate anxieties about the future. My stick-figure PhD graduates, driving their stick-figure taxicabs, represent the fear and uncertainty we all face when we leave Yale.
In drawing the PhD cabbies I have begun to think that perhaps the undergraduate resentment towards graduate students comes as much from our similarities as our differences. Most of the graduate students here have BAs from Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, or one of the "public ivies." We didn't come here to form a union. We came here to get a degree, and we teach to support ourselves while we get that degree. The drive for a union is possible in part because so many of us feel like we don't have that much to lose. The figure of the PhD cab driver is more real than undergraduates realize.
But I think, actually, that many of you do realize it, and it scares you. You should be scared. The other, traditionally more stable professions, are going through their own upheavals, and if you want to be a journalist, a lawyer, or a doctor, you could face a future more transient and unstable than the life of a graduate student, no matter how pathetic you think we are.
As you face this scary future, this future that even a Yale degree cannot protect you from, think hard about how you choose your your models and your mentors. What skills will you need to survive in the '90s? Good writing skills? The ability to think clearly?
How about the ability to organize for the protection of your basic rights as a white-collar worker? Is GESO out to screw you? Or is GESO your future, as a graduate student with no job prospects, a lawyer with no job security, a journalist with no health benefits? What will you do when you are me? Sacrifice your rights and your diginity for your client? Or work collectively with your colleagues to make your profession worth belonging to, thus benefiting you and your client?
Think about this the next time you curse your TAs. Tomorrow they could be driving a cab. But then again, so could you.
Kathy Newman, GRD'96, is in the American Studies department.
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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