There was a BIPOC grad student thread a bit ago about how all the reading in PhD classes just feels like another form of hazing, and a bunch of professors jumped in to say that they don’t assign much reading anymore. I kept out of it because I didn’t want to derail the thread, nor did I want to be a bad guy, but I think there is an art to dealing with reading and references in grad school that needs discussing.

First of all, just assigning long reading lists IS kinda hazing, but not really hazing: it’s part of the privileged world of the academy where students with educated parents have a HUGE advantage over students like me, with parents who couldn’t help because they weren’t privileged enough to go. Nobody believes that you can read 800 pages a week closely. Nobody. If you can, congratulations, you’re better than me. But most people can’t.

So what’s the point of putting all that reading down? Well, as scholars, there is a lot of work you should be AWARE of even if you have not read. It’s enough for me to know, tangentially, that one of Hobbes’ important points in the Leviathan has to do with the sources of political authority because I am somebody who is tangentially interested in political authority. I don’t write about it, but I am interested, and maybe someday I will write about it. Or not. It’s just nice to know that I am watching/reading convos about it that when somebody drops Hobbes, I know his *general* line. If a dispute arises over exactly what Hobbes meant when discussing slavery and human rights, then I am out of my league generally since I have read bits and pieces of his material on human rights (remarkably contemporary in my read) but not all of it. But since I’m not a Hobbes scholar, this is ok.

My life would be less good, and I wouldn’t be as good a scholar as I am (to the degree that I am a *good* scholar, let alone a scholar anymore but let’s leave that debate to another day) without Hobbes in my peripheral vision.

But do I know Rawls? Oh yeah. I’ve read all of Rawls, so thoroughly and repeatedly in fact, that I have strong opinions on what the rest of you can skip in Rawls. (Ignore the minimax chapters) unless you are really, really interested in the debate with John Harsanyi. Then read that chapter for sure.) I have read a bunch of writers on Rawls. A bunch of critiques. All of them? Not sure, but I have a Google alert that tells me whenever a new thing is published on Rawls, some of which I need and some of which I don’t, and I’ll pick and choose what I need. But I will see it all, and probably log them all, in my citation manager because maybe I will take my research in a direction where I will need to engage with that material.

If professors don’t point you to all the readings, then how are you supposed to know the possibilities and directions thought has gone and can go? Answer: You sample, you don’t read everything like your life depends on it. 1) because it doesn’t, and 2) because you can’t. But how do you find the research area you want to work in if you don’t sample widely? How do you bring new ideas into otherwise stale research debates?

Plenty of young scholars think being a scholar is about expressing their opinions. This is a major problem for young scholars: when I was starting out, the internet was younger, and uniformed opinion wasn’t Every.Bloody.Where the way it is now.

To wit: your value as a scholar comes from your informed ideas. Anybody pushing a lot of reading at you may be hazing you depending on how they act about it, but they are also giving you a gift. What students tend to forget is that even though they are students and don’t have a ton of power, they still control how they organize the material for themselves and what they want to go deeply into and what they don’t.

If you refuse to read the things to show your big bad oppressor professors what’s what, you WILL very likely have reviewers hand you your ass for not citing and discussing the important literature in your manuscript, and since everybody has a different idea of what matters in any given field, having a big reading list to go back to when this comes up is handy as all hell.

Tomorrow’s installment will share some very cool things that our brilliant PhD student, Ben Tomey, put together to help students out with All The Reading.