Grrr-effing-argh

Okay, I've said I wouldn't spend so much time railing against Chronicle columns, but really, when life hands you lemons...

Pseudonymous Lagretta Gradgrind states that throughout her career, her "greatest desire and preoccupation have been graduate education." She has "compromised [her] personal life and [her] research productivity to nurture and guide [her] many doctoral students." And now, after twenty-five years, she's "wondering why." (Personally, I think I'd wonder why I was willing to compromise my personal life and my own research productivity before twenty-five years had passed, but then, I'm selfish like that.)

She catalogs the variety of disappointing student types she has encountered through the years. One is the student who regurgitates her mentor's research without ever really acknowledging that fact. Okay, definitely frustrating, I can buy that. Another is the student looking more for a friend than a mentor, who knows no boundaries, and I also agree that these students are troublesome.

And then she goes on:

Another familiar type is the student who swears she wants a career at a major research university where she can become a leader in the discipline and where she, too, can work with graduate students. So you throw yourself into guiding her, and she constantly enlists your help in preparing for that career. But you start to notice that she always takes shortcuts in her research and resists your every attempt to move her work beyond a penchant for the facile, one-dimensional thesis.

Then, out of the blue, she announces that she has accepted a position at a nonresearch, nontenure institution, claiming she finally realized that teaching meant more to her than anything else.

Okay, I'm tired and can't think of an elegant way to put this, so: WTF? First, does she really mean to imply that those who express interest in a research career but end up at nonresearch institutions (putting aside the linking of nonresearch with nontenure) do so because they display a "penchant for the facile, one-dimensional thesis"? That someone who states that teaching means more to him/her than anything else does so only because they're a hack who can't actually do real research on their own?

But more troubling is the implication that the only worthwhile investment is in a student who wants to be at a major research university, and that someone who takes a different career path is categorized as one of those disappointing types of students who makes Gradgrind question her dedication to graduate education.

She also notes:

A variation of that type is the student who claims to want a plum academic career but who, upon completing the Ph.D. and landing a research position at a major institution, suddenly leaves the profession, insisting that family considerations were paramount after all.

Damn. God forbid people actually consider their family when planning their careers. How dare they.

It's not that any one of those decisions is "bad" on the face of it. People need to make the best career decisions given their circumstances.

What is frustrating is the apparent deceit of would-be scholars enticing you to help them become the field's next superstar, only to discover that it was all bluster and empty talk.

Clearly Gradgrind feels strongly that these changes in career trajectory amount to betrayals. And I'm sorry that she's found such students so disappointing.

But I call bullshit.

First: she seems to assume that her dedication and guidance will guarantee that a student end up at a "major research university" and have a "plum academic career." Has she paid attention to the job market lately? Maybe she's in a field that suffers no glut - they are out there - but in much of academia, many new-minted Ph.D.s who want to be at a major research university will take a job at the nonresearch, nontenure institution (and no, the first does not necessarily imply the second, thank you very much), simply to stay in the profession. Is it all that surprising that a student in such a position might claim a great love of teaching, even if they don't feel it, in order to reconcile their desires with the reality of their luck on the market? The alternative is disappointment and bitterness. And you know, if I'd worked with Gradgrind, and failed to get a plum research job (as, in fact, I did), I'd probably claim a desire to teach, too, rather than acknowledge my failure to an advisor who so clearly considers teaching a come-down.

My point here is this: a student who takes such a position may well have wanted a research position, but given the vagaries of the job market, could not get one. Gradgrind sounds like she's blaming the victim.

Second: she also assumes that focusing one's graduate training on a particular kind of career means that one will automatically be happy if one achieves that kind of career. But life is not that predictable. Maybe that plum research job lands you in the middle of a cornfield where there is no employment at all for your spouse. Maybe it lands you in the middle of a wildly overpriced urban center where you will never be able to afford the kind of schooling you want your kids to have. Maybe you just find that the amount of time you don't get to spend with your family is not worth the career glory. Why is it a betrayal for someone to realize this and decide this career is not for them? Such a decision does not mean that the student in question didn't want the career to begin with.

Gradgrind characterizes these career moves as "deceit," because the students in question professed to want the biggest, best, shiniest, plummiest research position they could get.

Of course they did.

Graduate programs WANT their students to aim for big, shiny, plummy positions. While there are programs out there that do a decent job of preparing graduate students to teach and thus accept the reality of their students working at teaching institutions, and there are also programs that celebrate their students following the academic path that speaks to them most directly (my program was like this), there are plenty of programs that continue to believe that the only acceptable career path is one that takes you straight into an R1 school.

Students in such institutions are not stupid, and they know what it is that they're "supposed" to want. Any number of bloggers I've read, or commenters on blogs I read, have said that they couldn't talk to their grad advisors about wanting jobs at teaching schools, because their advisors looked down on such jobs and the culture of their graduate programs scarcely acknowledged that such jobs existed.

If you were in such a program, do you think you'd tell Gradgrind you wanted a job in a teaching institution? If you were concerned that the path to success in an R1 might take you too far away from your family, would you say so?

The culture of academia still values research success over teaching success. It still expects a career trajectory built on having a stay-at-home spouse (oh, let's be real, a wife) to take care of all the little piddly mundane things (like all the housework and care of the kids) that might get in the way of Thinking Deep Thoughts. Graduate students who are intelligent enough to get into a Ph.D. program are also usually intelligent enough to figure out what the profession, or at least that program, values most.

Such graduate students are also intelligent enough to realize that their advisors have significant influence over the course of their careers. In fact, I'd suggest (based on what I read around the web) that grad students may overestimate the degree of power that their advisors have over them. Is it surprising that if students believe their advisors value a plum research position the most, those students will tell their advisors that such a job is what they want, too? At least, until they have that signature on the dissertation submission form?

I don't believe such statements are deceit, because first, I don't think a lot of students entering graduate programs have any idea what a faculty job entails, let alone an R1 job (there are probably plenty who do, but I knew many who didn't). An R1 job? That's the best? Sounds good! It takes a little while for someone who has been good at school their whole life to figure out how exactly that translates into the ideal career for them.

Second, students do what they have to do to maintain positive relationships with their advisors. If that means avowing love for the research path above all others, students will do so. While ideally students and advisors have a much more egalitarian relationship in which students can speak freely about their true career interests, and I believe these relationships do occur, in practice it's not so simple. Often, grad students feel obligated to live up to their advisor's expectations for them.

Hell, I have a friend who after working full-time as a professor for something like six or seven years, at a good job, has decided to change fields and was pretty apprehensive about asking his/her former advisor for a letter of recommendation, because s/he was afraid the advisor would be angry that s/he was leaving academia. (no longer LD)H has often worried that he's let one of his graduate mentors down by changing fields. Now, in neither case were the mentors remotely upset - they wanted their students to be fulfilled in their careers. But I don't think it's coincidence that both these people worried that how their advisors would receive such news - and for both, this was long after they'd finished their dissertations and earned their degrees. And both earned their degrees in programs willing at least to question the prestige hierarchy that dominated academia. If they were still students, in a program to which non-R1 jobs were invisible? I wouldn't be at all surprised if they had practiced the "deceit" that Gradgrind describes.

It is definitely instructive to see a faculty person talking honestly about working with graduate students. But I suspect that Gradgrind's characterization of certain students as disappointments does nothing but reify a value system in academia that places all the prestige and worth in jobs that very very few Ph.D.s will ever get.

Comments

[PhilosopherP]

Your analysis is spot-on.

I didn't know the anti-teaching bias when I started grad school. In my first week the grad advisor asked me flat-out what I wanted to do with my degree. I answered honestly that I wanted to teach and thus I was put in the back of the line for assistanships etc. I learned the hard way that wanting to teach isn't something that you tell anybody in grad school... as a result, I share my story with every grad-school bound student I encounter... because I wish someone had told me.

Further, "Gradgrind" doesn't seem to understand that the vast majority of institutions out there are not R1, and that even the grad programs at the top of any field can't place their students exclusively in the few R1 jobs out there. Expecting students to sacrifice for years as her gradstudents and then expecting them to turn down a decenent paying job at ANY level is ridiculous.

Finally, the lack of interest in teaching leads grad programs to NOT help their students figure out how to teach. As a result, the first few years out the students have a very difficult time balancing teaching and research. If they had some basic teaching skills, they'd be better off.

[aqua]

Brilliant post, NK. I agree with you 100%.

[phd me]

As soon as I read this column, I knew I could count on you! I couldn't agree more with your analysis. While "Gradgrind" may have some valid points about graduate students, she comes across as a bitter academic looking for an excuse for her lack of success.

[What Now?]

Amen, sister. I also find very troubling her labeling as "deceit" what may simply be changing one's mind or changing life circumstances. If one starts grad school in one's early 20s, the R1 job may be exactly the aim. But in the intervening 6 or more years, all kinds of things can happen: relationships, kids, health issues, family circumstances, etc. And sometimes we can do one thing for several years and find it rewarding and then want to go do something else, which is hardly deceitful. I get really frustrated with this single-minded approach to academic careers in which nothing else is supposed to matter and we're never supposed to step off the single, narrow path once we're on it. And it's annoying enough to be written off as "not serious" or "just not smart/driven/whatever enough to pursue the career," but to have a moral judgment put on top of that -- "she lied to me! the deceiver!" -- is really too much.

[Another medieval professor]

NK, I'm so glad you got on this one. I was thinking the very same thing when I read the column. Gradgrind sounds so self-serving and completely oblivious to the realities of the job market. I think this column also points to the self-perpetuating academic hierarchy in which R1 jobs stand at the top for those from so-called "elite" universities and "teaching" jobs are for the rest of us schmucks who couldn't get a real (R1) job. This has troubling implications for the quality of graduate education and also continues the rather artificial "divide" between the academic "haves" and "have-nots." I suppose we should be glad that Gragrind has decided to stop mentoring graduate students.

[Anastasia]

you've all said it better than I could. She sounds like someone I'm rather glad I don't know.

I think I've internalized a bit more of the must. get. R1. mentality than some of my peers. I just had a chat with a friend where he dismissed one of the jobs I'm applying for--I was excited about the light teaching load--by saying "yeah, but you'd have serious research requirements." True. And clearly not what he's looking for. And you know, I think as a rule, our department is okay with that. they get just as excited talking about placements in happy little liberal arts colleges as in big R1s. And most people, honestly, get the latter.

That said, there is a little something called being "high powered" that lands you the R1 and people do make that distinction. As in did you hear Johnny got a job at Big Research U? Yeah, but he's high powered. Um, and what am I? A low watt bulb? No, I'm the mother and primary caregiver for an infant and a toddler. Johnny, incidentally, has no kids and a wife at home to take care of the house.

I also feel like my mentor sort of thought I was on that R1 train until I had the second baby and all that. Now I'm feeling a tiny bit mommy tracked. At this point, people are going to be more surprised if I do get a research job. If I get a teaching job, they'll be pleased of course. They really do try to balance out the unhealthy focus on the R1. But it's still there a little bit.

[Rokeya]

It's too bad Gradgrind didn't learn anything from the source of her pseudonym--Charles Dickens's Hard Times, in which Louisa Gradgrind adheres to a soulless, life-sucking utilitarian philosophy that she eventually rejects, realizing how flawed the whole system is. Our Gradgrind sounds like she still has one step left to go.

What bothers me is the unashamed, unembarrassed conceit of what Gradgrind thinks her role as an advisor to graduate students is. She has been so brainwashed by an illusory notion of success (R1) in the academy that she honestly believes that her role is to churn out, machine-like, graduate students who take on such positions. She actually believes that it is her hard work, her effort, her time, that is responsible for where her graduate students end up (thus she reads it as a broken contract, or "deceit," when they do not follow the path she wants for them). While advisors do of course play a big role in where grad students end up, no one signs in blood what career path they will take on if they enlist the help of their advisor.

Gradgrind wants to control other people for her own benefit, plain and simple. She thinks her name is on the line and feels betrayed when she cannot be listed as the dissertation advisor for a series of superstar graduate students. Unfortunately, Gradgrind really exists beyond this one case. At my uni, there is a woman who tells graduate students who want to work with her that they first have to take a seminar with her (acceptable), and that they also have to AGREE WITH HER POLITICALLY. Like Gradgrind, she does not want her name associated with a scholar who does not fit her agenda, all of this to bolster her own ego as someone who "produces" a certain kind of scholar.

[K2]

Just to note: there are a few female professors out there with the joy of having a spouse who is a stay-at-home dad. I find that others in academia seem to be amazed that I have a husband willing to do this or that I would want it that way.

[Notorious Ph.D]

This column pissed me off like no other CHE column has, ever.

First of all, I imagined the other side of the situation: You're a new graduate student, happy to get a chance to work with the illustrious Professor Gradgrind -- Hooray! But you arrive to find that you are one of a cohort of 8 or so other Gradgrind students. You note that she gives more of her attention and uses her considerable connections to help those who she thinks have potential to become research stars in the field. So, do you disclose your abiding desire to work at a SLAC like the one you went to, where undergraduates got plenty of face time with their professors, and so had a truly inspiring educational experience? Hell, no. Because you know this would banish you to the equivalent of Siberia in the advisor-student relationship, and you'll never get the support to get the job you really want. So you profess a love of research (which you do honestly enjoy), do your work, and figure that she'll have to support you when you go on the market.

Second, I can't help but impute a note of narcissim to the author: these students' main fault is that they are depriving *her* of establishing the "Gradgrind School" -- a cohort of famous researchers who learned everything they know from her. The fact that many of her little turncoats are probably first-rate intellectuals makes no difference: if they don't get R1 jobs, no one will know about them, and, by extension, about *her*.

Of course, I could be wrong. But you've got to wonder.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

*sigh* Can I say once again how much I adore my Doktorvater. At only one point in my career did he ever indicate that I didn't have a choice in what I did. That one point was when I got down to the last deadline, and he had stuck his neck out for me several times for extensions, and he did pretty much say that, if I didn't finish, he would fly across the country and rip me a new one in person. But other than that? When it looked like I might not come back to academe? He was disappointed but supportive. When I came back to teaching? He was overjoyed and said that he thought that was where I should be. He was entirely supportive of my teaching at a community college. Still, as I started writing again, and giving papers, and applying for jobs at 4-year schools, I could tell he was a bit happier -- but so was I! And even though neither of us think of me as a candidate for an R1 (I am a really good teacher, and love it, but don't think I could write quite that much), we both agree that I can and should try to get a job that demands more writing and is more challenging. I think if I quit tomorrow for anything other than a major family crisis, he'd be disappointed, but not let down. I talked to him the other day, and he told me how pleased he was that I stayed in contact -- and that he has always been proud of me and my closest academic sibling. To me, that's a mentor.

[Prisca]

NK, you are my favorite voice of academia these days. You said exactly what I wanted to shout at the computer.

You also made me feel better because I secretly believe my adviser actually wrote that column. I want to think my adviser is more gracious than that, but deep down I know advising grad students no longer holds the joy it once did. Not enough of us are going on in Adviser's mold. Mostly for all the reasons you cited!

[Belle]

Hear, hear. To all of the above. Gradgrind needs her head, and her priorities, examined and perhaps, just a thought, re-examined. You've all said it before, so I say again: hear, hear!

[An Americanist]

Really great post!

I have a Ph.D. from a private school on a coast, and am now working at a smaller state school in a rural area with a 4-4 teaching load. I love my job and could hardly be happier. (Well, OK . . . a little more time for my research would be nice.)

I will always be grateful to my high-powered adviser, who was perhaps a little sad that I wasn't aiming for R-1, but who did everything he could to help me get the job that I wanted, not the one he thought I *should* want.

[Clio Bluestocking]

"Gradgrind sounds so self-serving and completely oblivious to the realities of the job market.": Try completely oblivious to mere reality!

This -- so far -- is the second blog on which I have read many fabulous analyses of this woman. So, I begin to wonder: is this supposed to be satire? Pleasepleaseplease let it be satire! I'm hoping that our dear Prof. Gradgind is, in fact, some poor beleaguered grad student or younger professor publically satirizing some of her established colleagues in order to provoke such a vociferous and articulate reaction that she forces those self-absorbed colleagues to reconsider their attitudes (or retire).

One can hope, right?

Otherwise, if darling Prof. Gradgrind is in earnest, then she needs to do what some comedian or another once recommended: Get off the cross and use the wood to build a bridge so she can get over herself!

[af]

I agree with pretty much everything you've said, especially regarding the cluelessness about the job market - and I also thought it might be satire. But it did prompt me to think about the frustration that must be felt by even people like my own fabulous adviser. Think about how often we ordinary undergraduate faculty get frustrated with our students, and how great it feels when someone finally works hard, and gets it. If most of my teaching energy were dedicated to just a few students a year, or ten or fifteen students in a five-year period, and a lot of them dropped out of academia or got worse jobs than they could because of their spouses (usually husbands) or kids (usually true more of women), had big emotional problems, were difficult to get along with to the point where it presented problems in the job search, or were lazy or overcautious in their research - it'd be really tough. All of these things have happened to my adviser and other advisers in my PhD program, and though they don't complain, this got me to thinking about how hard it could be for them.

This doesn't excuse the particular author for her cavalier attitude towards students who don't make it to the golden R1 jobs, but it did make me think.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

K2 - it's funny how some people in academia don't want family to deter someone from a plum academic career, and yet when the woman has the husband as a form of support like you mention, that's somehow suspect as well??

Clio - you know, after obsessing about this for so long, I did wonder if it was satire - although I had a creative writing prof once who taught that if you write satire, it has to be CRYSTAL CLEAR to the reader that it is satire - so if this is satire, I'm not very happy with it!

af - you know, you're absolutely right, I agree that working with graduate students must be hard and often frustrating. In fact, I hesitated (okay, for about 10 seconds, but I still hesitated) to write this, since I've never overseen graduate students myself. I haven't seen a lot of discussion by graduate advisors of the actual practice of graduate advising (not in my field, anyway - profgrrrrl and ianqui both talk about it on occasion, but their fields are really different from mine), and that perspective is one valuable thing that comes out of this column. And you know, I'm quite sure, looking back, that I was an incredibly frustrating grad student myself. (With that in mind, I'm even more grateful that my own advisor never displayed any of the attitudes that Gradgrind does!)

[Dr. Moonbeam]

Great analysis as usual, NK. And you know this is a topic close to my heart just now! ;-)

[Susan]

What struck me about Gradgrind -- in addition to all that has been said -- was her total misunderstanding of her role as a faculty member. As the psychologists would say, she had no boundaries. She was doing all these things for her students so that she was giving up her life? Her research? That's not how you are a good mentor. So on one level it was incredibly annoying, on another it was just very sad.

[History Geek]

Heaven save me from a advisor like that.

[Flicka Mawa]

Wow, so many comments! I didn't read them all...but you described this article so well! I am a current grad student, and I often feel like I'm lying when I'm at school - because I'm at one of those institutions where an R1 job is the implicit goal of every student there, and the professors don't even bother to ask if that's what YOU are there for. Well, me? I'm married, and I want to have a kid, and I DO want to be a professor, but I'll take somewhere less old-boys-club than most R1's, thank you very much. Thankfully my adviser does know some of this, but even with her I'm not 100% forthcoming about where I may want to go with this degree.