Coming of age in the 2000's

Now that exams are over, I cannot bear to think about history for a while. So I've been shifting my reading to mindless pleasure reading and the similarly-mindless Style section of the Washington Post. A recent article critiquing the new genre of coming-of-age movies featuring 20- and 30-somethings caught my eye. The author is apparently not of this age group and wonders why Generation X and Y are convinced that they "are singularly incompetent and unprepared for life, more so than their parents or grandparents or any other humans in the history of adult preparedness." She seems to think the answer is in some kind of feedback loop of movies, self-help books, and narcissism.

In movies and in life, Gen X and Y are listless, rootless, searching for meaning and failing at being adults. Why, if only we knew that what adulthood is really about is (as the author tells us) "fumbling through each day the best one could and remembering to schedule dentist appointments"!

If only that banal vision of adulthood was even available to our generation. Many of us would love to schedule dentist appointments if we had dental insurance. And fumbling the best you can, for our parents, was done from the security of a job and a house. The "quarterlife crisis" the author mocks is not some sort of media creation, but a result of the fact that to be a middle class young adult in America takes a hell of a lot more work, time, education and money than it used to.

On top of that, society fostered in Gen Y the idea that our generation could Change Things. When you have second graders sent on neighborhood clean-ups and learning about how to save the rain forest, can you blame them for growing up to yearn for something more than a desk job? Sadly, particularly during a recession, our economy just doesn't have that many entry to mid-level jobs available for young people who want to make a difference.

So, having been raised to seek both change and middle class comforts, we can sympathize with those angst-ridden, adulthood-delaying movie characters like Lainy in Reality Bites, who had thought she "was really gonna be something by the age of 23." Getting to where we've been told we should be going can hardly follow the smooth path of college, job, marriage, house, kids that many Americans could in the post-war period.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing, either. Maybe we can find, out of the angst of coming of age in this changed world, a meaning for adulthood that is more fulfilling and productive than simply "fumbling." Oh yeah, and a way to pay for those dentist visits.

The PhD rite of passage

In the strange world of academia, there is a period of time when the PhD student sequesters him or herself for several months with the ritual objects referred to as academic literature. She may reduce her social activities, change her eating, drinking, and sleeping patterns, and show signs of acute stress. This period of intensive studying and social isolation is the first step in the Comprehensive Exams rite of passage, a step commonly referred to as separation or segregation.

During the second step of the rite, the liminal phase, the PhD student enters a room with her advisers for a couple of hours for her exams. During this stage, as anthropologist Victor Turner characterizes it, "liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony." Thus the student is neither in coursework nor in the dissertation phase while in the room; her fate is still to be decided. The "decision" is preordained; the student who enters the ritual will almost always be passed. The tension is created by the ritual, rather than the reality.

The liminal phase climaxes with the end of examination, when the advisers ask the student to leave the room and await her fate. After perhaps 3-5 minutes, the student is asked to reenter the room and congratulated for her success. The student is now ready to be re-integrated into the graduate student community as an ABD--a term mysterious to those outside of the academic culture, but highly significant to those within it.

The student begins re-integration, the final stage of the ritual, by consuming alcohol and snacks with other students down the hall from the examination room. The process continues with more alcohol and likely inebriation in the evening. From this point on, the ABD student will no longer take courses and has attained the status necessary to teach at the collegiate level.

I write this having completed the ritual yesterday, and I can only excuse the arch anthropological tone by having read far too many books in the past four months.