Cha-Ching (Part I)

Honestly, I really didn't learn all that much in graduate school. Maybe my ability to write improved. Through practice, not instruction.

I went for two years and earned an MA. I made tentative plans to get a Phd until I realized I might be buying a one way ticket to habitual under-employment, which in itself isn't half bad (being a secretarial temp for several years, I acclimated to this condition)but add to it the mountain of debt that accompanies grad school, and conditions get ugly.

I attended a state school for undergrad and a private university for graduate school. I'm proud of my alma mater, the first one that is, and while the second degree comes from an institution with some clout, the quality of education itself was far below that of the first. But that's New York City. In that town, product doesn't necessary follow promise.

I am far more endeared to my undergrade professors than my graduate professors. For years I kept in touch with my history and english professors from Metropolitan State College, who were willing and eagar to correspond and write recommendations for my graduate school applications. In contrast, I haven't spoken to any of my grad school professors since I earned my MA.

However, it wasn't all for naught. I did earn the MA degree. And when I look back on my time spent at the New School for graduate studies, I can honestly say that I did learn a few things, and that at least one person, one professor, had a profound influence me. Interestingly, he wasn't a political science professor (that was the department I earned the degree in). He was a Pakistani-American Marxist economist.

All told I took three classes from him, all in something called "political economy." The first two course covered the foundations of intellectual thought in this particular area of economics, and the third class was survey of contempoary world political economy. The undercurrent of the class was based in the professor's propective and philosophical bent based in Marxist economics.

Marx's great treatise is a deconstruction of a global political system, or rather capitalism. Most people are most familiar with the book Marx wrote with Frederick Engles called The Communist Manifesto. I'm not crazy about this work and think that in comparison to Das Kapital, really Marx's life's work, it is insubstantial (not to say that it wasn't profoundly influential to some).

(to be continued...)