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If you're still telling grad students to save their best ideas for their second book, when you know they're statistically super unlikely to even have a first book, then you're doing real harm. Dissertations can't be a mere formal exercise: they have to have intrinsic motivation.
We are post-professionalism. Graduate work that is primarily aimed at justifying one's academic credentials is meaningless when most of us are temporary scholars, here for a few years and then gone. We have to be allowed to do work that fires up our souls now: there is no later.
The dissertation as a genre must be opened up. It can't be allowed to remain a superficial, formulaic, deadened mass done mostly for the sake of others. It must allow for personal stakes, for aesthetic and argumentative forms that matter first and foremost for the writer.
If you're not yes-anding our highest hopes and aspirations, then what's the point? Otherwise, grad students are being mined for their research, contributing to a field that will not return the favor; otherwise we are jumping through hoops for a circus that has already left town.
There was a time with enough jobs to almost justify pretending that the dissertation as it is made sense. That time has passed. We must reject work in any form that isn't free and personally worthwhile. That's the only way we can stop all of this from just being exploitation.
