Grad School Allegory

Some friends of mine and I recently watched a DVD of a production of the opera, "Dialogues of the Carmelites" (1957) by Francis Poulenc based on the Martyrs of Compiègne.  It's somewhat modernist, being almost completely in recitative with occasional ensembles.  Unfortunately, the DVD forewent subtitles since the production used the English libretto, but can anyone ever understand a soprano in any language?  I understand the libretto is deep and thoughtful ("Dialogues..."), so I'm sorry we missed out on that.  Still, it ends with a most heartbreaking scene.  I could not stop thinking about it, so I looked up a few different productions of that scene on YouTube and decided I liked this one.  Watch it once and tell me it doesn't move you.  Yes, that is the sound of a guillotine that repeats 16 times for these 16 nuns.  Listen to the texture of the music thin down from chorus to quartet, trio, duet, solo.  It's tragic!

And then I realized it works as an allegory for our sad lives as PhD students.  Read on for my translation.  And excuse the sacrilege.  It's just satire.


The scene opens with a group of shabbily-dressed women being rounded up by soldiers.  The women are PhD students.  The soldiers are the government.  See how they're forcefully rounding up the students instead of letting them volunteer out of their own interest?  That's like how the persistently insufficient funding for education and research forces us grad students to be exploited as cheap labor under false pretenses of a sure career in academia instead of letting us choose to enter grad school based on realistic considerations of the value of that education.  Yep.

Soon, an angry mob gathers.  They're the ignorant public.  You might see some tea-party folk in there.  They think magnets make you healthy, but cell phones make you sick.  They don't like seeing their tax dollars "wasted" on things like research or arts education.  That's why they're so arm-wavingly mad.  You can see that government can keep them in check, but it's also acquiescing to their demands to stop funding the grad students.  Go figure.  You can see that some of the students are confused and don't know how to deal with the unwarranted vilification.

Government opens up a path.  Kinda looks like an ivory tower, right?  By following that path, the students are giving up their lives.  They all kinda realize it, but they've come this far, so why stop now?

You can see they're not happy about it, though.  Everyone but the black woman is on her knees.  One student collapses, but she's helped by remembering that at least she doesn't have it as bad as the black student who somehow manages to stay strong.  The black student is also reminding everyone of the dream by making their hands into representations of that ivory tower.

OK, so now the black student is the first to defend her thesis so she can take on the world.  In other words, she's the first to get put down.  Of course.  She touches her head (gotta be smart), heart (gotta be calm), and shoulders (gotta be able to resist the abuses of the examining committee).  They all start singing, "Salve Regina," which you might translate as, "Hail the Queen."  Think of it as a pep rally.  They're encouraging each other.  That shaggy dude in the crowd who makes the sign is an old drop-out who knows what's in store for everyone.

What follows is a sad procession of students defending their theses only to have their lives taken away and their dreams crushed.  About halfway through, you see one student despair.  Another comforts her.  "Be strong.  We can do this.  We'll reach that ivory tower!  You go first."  And a little later, who's that lurking in the shadows?  hmm....

Two left.  And then one.  In a moment of clarity she realizes the futility and starts to run back to normal life.  But who should pop out of the shadows?  It's her old classmate returned as an adjunct!  (or postdoc, if you wish)  You can tell because even though her clothes are still shabby, at least her face isn't dirty.  Seeing this illusion of success revives the notion that there's hope in academia and she goes back up the path cheering herself on.

Finally the adjunct/postdoc makes the climb, though she sings a different tune.  The music is more despondent, tired, fatalist.  You hear her end.  Then echoes of the procession.  Finally everyone leaves to bite the next hand that fed them forgetting anything these students ever did.

It's just like real life!  But in all seriousness, these victims of Robespierre's Reign of Terror find worthy remembrance in Poulenc's beautifully haunting music.  Whether Catholic or not, one must be moved by their grace in martyrdom.  I still get shivers listening to this tableau.