Learning inside the box

I do not hate graduate school. I have surprised myself a number of times this semester by getting really engaged in class discussions about Paradise Lost, even though I loathe the epic on so many levels, developed an unexpected love for Shakespearean tragedy (he's so bawdy!), and have discovered that Thomas Middleton's The Changeling might be one of the top 5 raunchiest things I've ever read, which of course makes me love it. I've most definitely become a better poet, and I've finally learned to (or at least I've begun to learn to) read a poem. All of these things are good, and I'm glad I have learned them.

What I've also learned, or at least taken notice of for the first time, is how classist and vanilla higher education can be. I study literature, a discipline rich with so many important and interesting minority voices--the voices I want to hear, I want to study. So why am I hard pressed to find, say, a person of color in the English department, or a gender studies course, or another gay man in my program? I'm refreshed by the number of women in English at UT, working both as professors and graduate students, but I'm disappointed by the patriarchal structure that seems to have subsumed their voices, at least that's how it appears on the surface, because, while I respect anyone's research interests, I haven't found many people who seem really interested in studying--in hearing--the crucial voices of the racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, etc., minorities.

I can give the UT English department this much--it's chock full of wonderful people who seem interested and often helpful when I introduce myself as Tim Sisk, first-year MA interested in Feminism, queer theory, and poetry. But it seems like the buck stops there, and I'm left with a nebulous list of authors to read and people outside the department to consult, and I've yet to find a professor in English who teaches these topics I'm interested in researching. In all fairness, I may not be looking in the right places or asking the right people, but in a conversation with the graduate director about the suspicious lack of even a women's lit course (I got that much at UCA), he agreed with me on the importance of such classes and said perhaps in the next five years they'd hire a gender studies person.

What I'm getting at is this: I can make do with the education I'm receiving. I love learning, and on most days I love literature, so nearly any class in any genre from any period (besides maybe 18th century English novels) would offer something I find interesting and important. The problem is, though, I sometimes feel like I'm stuck settling for what's canonical, what's safe. In an English department that painfully lacks diversity in the professors and the students, I sometimes feel like I'm part of the problem and not the solution. I'm a white, college-educated male spending another two years, getting another free degree, taking classes with and teaching classes to middle and upper-middle class white people about largely middle class white concerns. A large part of me feels like I'm buying into an out-dated and repressive patriarchal system, that I'm not living the change I want to see in the world.

I'm not religious. These days I don't believe in much of anything as far as a higher power is concerned, but I really do buy into the old aphorism, "to whom much is given, much is expected." And I've been given lots, y'all. So many people have sacrificed and believed in me to get me to where I am today. I am grateful, and I'm not lying when I say I want to show my gratitude by changing my little corner of the world the best way I can. I sometimes wonder if being in graduate school is doing that.

I can convince myself that getting this masters will make me a more experienced, more knowledgeable teacher for my future students. I'd really like to do Teach For America in the future, or at least work in an at needs school district. Those students deserve a well-educated teacher just as much as the rich kids at, say, Webb or Pulaski Academy. What really scares me though is that I'll lose this sense of duty I have to the kids who need a leg up in this world, that by May 2009 I'll chalk this notion up to youthful idealism. Higher education has a way of changing people by claiming their priorities and their voices, and I'm resistant to losing my ideals and forgetting who I am and why I'm here. My moral compass is askew enough already.

I guess I won't do anything drastic like cause an insurrection or drop out of grad school. I am here for a reason, after all. I'll just wait (must I always be waiting?) until I can be the teacher and person I want to be. In the meantime, at least I can write papers about under appreciated 17th century female poets.