Yeah, I know this isn't a real news flash, at least not to most of you who visit F&R and other blogs on the academics' circuit. It does seem to become the hot topic of the moment, however. Naomi Chana I believe gets the big credit with her piece "Graduate School, by Victor Hugo" but people like Michelle over at Phlebas and Cindy at making contact have added useful comments of their own. And then there are all the people posting comments in response here and at those sites. As Cindy noted, it's a terrible time for Invisible Adjunct to be experiencing server errors. I guess we'll just have to muddle along as best we can until she's relocated.
Mike, of Yet Another Damn Blog, posted a response to Naomi's piece in which he enumerated key factors in his own disaffection. I'm feeling inspired by his example, and have a desire to see if I can make things make more sense to me than they have been. As always, I make no pretensions that what I come up with is applicable to anyone beyond myself, but maybe others will get something out of it nonetheless.
So... let's see...
Pre-existing factors:
**Moving around fairly frequently as a kid, thus always being the new kid and somewhat unsure of my place.
**Being a skinny gawky kid after about age 6, then glasses added around age 14, bad acne, etc. etc. Not the best way to be popular, most places, even without the new kid factor.
**Being assessed as "gifted" at an early age, leading to the following relevant side effects: love of school, assumption that I would always be "the smart one," adoption of intelligence as my primary noteworthy trait (see skinny, acne, glasses, etc. to see why this was a desirable option). A less-positive side effect is hostility to being told what to do and being "talked down to" by people I perceive as equals or inferiors.
**Being very adult-oriented; for all of the above reasons, I did and still do look for authority figures for approval, assessment, etc. (This is not across the board, however; I have learned that one of my less attractive personality traits is a sneering contempt for authority figures who fail to fulfill the requirements of that role -- a teacher who knows less than I do about the subject they're teaching me, for example.)
**As a result of all of the above, a reluctance to admit ignorance and/or ask for help. Add in a dose of stubborness and some shyness, and you get someone who will doggedly slog away at something the hard way even though an easier way might well exist, if one only asked.
So, in a nutshell -- we have a kid who rarely felt like she fit in or was praiseworthy except when she was being a good student and doing smart things, and who was used to doing things on her own (and occasionally with equally misfit friends).
Now, combine this with various (I believe intrinsic) aspects of grad school:
**It is difficult and complicated, both in terms of the work and in terms of the administrative hoops you need to jump through (often in a particular order). This is a situation that demands a good understanding of all of the variables, but many of them are not easy to discover.
**Advisors often are not equipped to provide such understanding, whether because they are busy, don't know the answers, are playing games with you, don't think to ask what you need help with, have too many advisees, are burned out, are simply jerks... etc.
**Academia (at least in the humanities) is structured around three main approaches to knowledge (by which I mean interpretations of data more than data itself) -- amassing it, tearing it apart, and creating it. Amassing it is time-consuming and hard, especially if the material or approaches are new to you. This is, however, somewhat expected, and can be quite rewarding if the material is interesting; I believe that many people focus on this when they think of grad school. Tearing it apart is trickier, but one gets very good at it. In fact, as Tim Burke has noted in "Should You Go to Grad School," this can become a lifelong habit. Having torn something apart, you are then encouraged to develop something to replace it -- which gets torn apart in turn. In short -- tearing things apart is an essential part of grad school in the humanities, and quickly becomes a habit that can carry over into other aspects of your life.
**Praise is irregular at best, indifference or simple acceptance is common, hostility and denigration exist and can be particularly devastating. Remember that grad school involves tearing things apart for a living. Applying this skill to students' work, and to students themselves, can be a predictable result. Indifference to or acceptance of accomplishments (by which I mean that hard work and brilliance are viewed as unexceptional) encourages students to adopt the attitude that they are average at best, since their accomplishments are viewed as nothing out of the ordinary. Praise, therefore, has to work upstream to have an effect, and that effect is often short-lived.
**Insularity encourages students to believe that these conditions are normal.
To sum up, grad school requires help to get through, but the help, while probably available, is not obviously so. The culture of grad school in the humanities encourages the adoption of a mindset in which 110% is only average, and all work -- including one's own -- is imperfect and vulnerable to attack. Countervailing forces exist, but are not strong enough to challenge this culture; indeed, praise may even be viewed through that same sceptical lens and thus discounted as well-meaning ignorance.
Now, add the personality traits I described with these aspects of graduate school. To a bright scholarly person whose identity revolves around those traits, grad school would seem to be an ideal match. In some ways it is -- it demands full use of those talents and gives them room to grow. In this regard, I found grad school intensely rewarding; when I am researching, writing and talking with colleagues about ideas and projects, I feel the same. But... (and you sensed a "but" was coming, didn't you?)
If that same person is used to believing that her value rests on being one of the best students, on being the person who gets the right answers and is praised by teachers for doing so, to learn that she is ordinary at best in that regard is disconcerting to say the least. If then you add in a culture that says even the best is not enough, that even the best will be dissected and chewed up and spit out as unworthy, how could such a person not despair? At the very least, such a person will carry scars from the experience, even if later she finds a new source of self esteem; at the worst, even that new source will never go unquestioned, both because the first source was proven imperfect, and because she has been trained to be sceptical of perfection and to seek out its hidden flaws.
And all of this is, of course, even before she goes on the market and tests her worthiness against others'.
I am wryly amused to note that I shifted into the third person by the end of this. Too painful to deal with? A desire to universalize my experience after all? See: here's tearing apart in action -- I can't turn it off, even when (especially when?) talking about my own life.
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