We got some good emails from you guys about professors.
Nathan wrote:
I would say that the professors who I have known have been relatively
free of the social and moral ills you describe in your post, Sherry--my
experience has been more like Megan's. I think this might have to do
with the fact that I have dealt mostly with professors in the hard
sciences; my impression from personal and anecdotal experience is that
science faculty departments are less political and more oriented to
objective standards, which are, after all, easier to come by in the
hard sciences. (This might only be a reflection of my own bias toward
the scientific viewpoint, of course!) I don't know if it's related or
not, but many scientists I've met do not seem particularly
intellectual, as I understand the term--especially the experimental
scientists, who often have more of an engineering, pragmatic way of
looking at things. On the other hand, science does tend to collect the
socially awkward, and much of what you (Sherry) describe (the judgement
by credentials, the failure to communicate across discipline
boundaries) could be a reflection of that, both as an over-reliance on
the standards and credentials by which one has finally found
recognition of one's talents and as a failure in what would, in other
communities, be considered routine social interaction.
Maybe scientist-professors are more chill, although I suspect they are also more subject to the attitude that Truth only resides in peer-reviewed articles. Also, it occurs to me that none of us are experiencing the professors as staff, like Sherry is. Maybe professors treat staff and students differently.
Parker wrote:
Sherry, you're just anti-academia. You'd be anti-intellectual if you
thought, for example, that GoMOOS is run by a bunch of four-eyed
fisherman-hating propeller-heads who should get real jobs. Or that
public education is a waste of money because half the kids are going
to end up working at Wal-Mart anyway. Or if you voted for George Bush
over Al Gore not because of a legitimate difference on the issues, but
because W was the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with. That's
anti-intellectualism.
When I was in grad school, I read a lot of academics' blogs, and
basically I left with the MS (rather than going for a PhD) because I
didn't like academia. It's not a meritocracy; in many ways it's a
lottery, with far too many grad students chasing far too few stable,
tenure-track professorial positions. (Also, it's less true at Bowdoin
than other places, but there's a shrinking number of tenured positions
available; many aspiring professors work as adjuncts, which is the
academic equivalent of sharecropping.) Grad school is treated as a
weeding-out process, and the tenure process has a lot in common with
hazing. Professors are expected to be teachers but are trained and
considered as "qualified" if they succeed in an entirely different
pursuit, research. Grad students are recruited with promises and
dreams and then subjected to neglect, impossible expectations, or
both.
It doesn't surprise me at all that many of the professors produced by
this system can be petty, bitter, condescending, vindictive, or
outright abusive, in the same way that hazing and other abusive
initiation rituals go with teams full of bullies. It also doesn't
surprise me that many of these academics were the geeks and the
picked-on when they were younger, and now that they have positions of
power they wreak revenge.
It surprises me more that I find as many as I do who come through with
their idealism intact, who genuinely want to pass on their enthusiasm
for their work to their students, who really believe they're there to
help. I love talking to people who love what they do, and those were,
for me, the good professors. I was lucky enough to find several of
them.
I'll say this every single time. If grad school feels like hazing and you simply cannot understand what dynamic you've been sucked into and you can't seem to make headway even though you've been a good student before, you should read the book Disciplined Minds, by Jeff Schmidt. Grad school has an overt agenda, to teach you material, and a covert agenda, which is to channel your thought. If you are failing the covert agenda, grad school will be a miserable vicious experience and you will not know why.
Nick wrote:
As far as the original post, I do offer two thoughts, both from a
perspective comfortably outside of academia. The first is that, in
addition to the tournament career model, I imagine that working as an
intellectual could be emotionally stressful because success and
progress can be so unpredictable.
I work as a computer programmer in a very small company doing mostly
contract work, and I am frequently quite frustrated at the fact that
my productivity more or less follows an 80/20 rule -- 80% of my
productivity comes in 20% of my time. The other 80% of the time is
frustrating because I feel like I'm just wasting my time and someone
else's money. I can sit and look at something and poke away at it for
two or three weeks and then get it all done in three days. Part of
what happens is that in the down times I am mentally getting things in
order, figuring out exactly what problem I'm trying to solve, and what
approach I will take. But, in addition to that, some days I have it
and some days I don't and the type of work I do makes that very
obvious. There isn't much that I can do to appear productive (or to be
productive) on the days when I don't have it.
I imagine that academic research could be similar, but over longer
time horizons. I generally finish a project in a couple weeks or
months.
The corollary to that, is that I imagine that academia invents all
sorts of substitutes for real productivity so that people can have
some feeling of progress during periods when they aren't being
particularly creative. Back when I did debate in High School and
college, I was struck by how formulaic much of it was. I did
exclusively extemporaneous formats, so I wasn't carrying around boxes
of evidence but it still felt like the better debaters were better
because they were able to do the same things for a wide range of
debate topics. After thinking about it my theory was that nobody would
stick with it as an activity if the measure of success was coming up
with a genuinely insightful argument extemporaneously. That's just too
difficult. No matter how smart you are, you aren't going to be able to
come up with a really good on topic argument more than 40% of the
time. So the activity has to promise something on which you can fall
back if you lack inspiration, and debate certainly did that. You could
always make relatively vacuous arguments in the correct style, and win
a decent percentage of the time.
I imagine that academia has to do something similar. It has to allow
people to the opportunity to win by playing the game "properly" at
times when they can't win on substance -- because nobody has the
substance all the time. But, the problem with that, is it only works
if everyone buys into it. It creates a strong incentive to become
invested in certain forms, because if you aren't willing to pretend
that those forms have meaning than so much of everyone's time and
energy feels misdirected (not wasted, necessarily, just directed into
satisfying stylistic requirements).
Sherry answered him:
I think you're on to something, with mental work and its
unpredictability, leading to a different view of the things that can be
controlled. I'll be mulling it over a bit more, but I think it's
pretty seriously right.
In law, where again, the product of mental effort is similarly
elusive, you charge clients by the hour, even if it's an hour spent
running down a blind alley. That's not distinct from a breakthrough
idea or a really great negotiation. It's a bizarre and stressful
business model -- the incentive is to bill more hours, good or bad, but
the practitioners know the difference between a valuable hour and an
hour of futility. I think jobs with that characteristic have a
peculiar and specific sort of stress. And of course, you can't be
smart on demand, or think faster under pressure.