“Participate or Perish”: Reckoning with the time bind of graduate student life

Abstract

This article revisits a graduate course I taught between 2005 and 2014, ENGLISH 779--The Times We Live In, in light of the temporal stresses of graduate student life. Thinking with Donald C. Goellnicht's 1993 article, “From novitiate culture to market economy: the professionalization of graduate students,” alongside the more recent work of several graduate students (Blanchard, Wilks and Vogan 2022, Brown 2022; Stoneman 2012; Tootonsab 2022), the article explores the increasing pressure on graduate students to engage in and record activities that are “off-the-clock” of program requirements. In particular, the article considers the contradictory celebration of graduate students' participation in extra-curricular activities that challenge the temporal dynamics of capitalism and colonialism while those dynamics continue to define performance expectations within their graduate programs. Recognizing the complicity of faculty members in exacerbating temporal stress by encouraging the incorporation of extra-curricular activism into the timelines of graduate programs, the article concludes by considering ways to revise ENGLISH 779--The Times We Live in to address more honestly, if not to loosen, the time binds of graduate student life.