During graduate school, a friend of mine had a recurring dream about our shared adviser as a charismatic leader who required devotion and obedience while also meting out punishment. All of his advisees followed his words as if they were holy writ, and we even wore robes.
When my friend told me about this dream, we both laughed nervously. “Do you really think we’re in a cult?” I asked. After a few moments’ hesitation, he said, “No.” But the notion has stuck with me for more than a decade.
And I’m not alone. On her blog, The Professor Is In, Karen Kelsky tells us that “academia is kind of a cult” that doesn’t tolerate deviation from shared norms. PhD Comics proclaims that “coffee is the Kool-Aid” of higher education. In The Chronicle Review, Rebecca Schuman compares academe to a cult because it isolates grad students, breaks them down, makes them believe there is no other path than the life of the mind, and uses the threat of shunning to keep scholars quiet about the conditions of our labor. “What are the similarities between academia and cults?” someone asks on Quora, where an upvoted answer emphasizes mind control, shame, and struggling adjuncts who can’t bring themselves to quit.
Many but not all of these comparisons are made at least partly in provocative jest by writers I read and admire. But the cult label puts me off because it understates academe’s allures and mistakenly casts academics as passive victims.
I have a Ph.D. in religious studies, and I’ve taught and written about “new religious movements,” the term sociologists and religious-studies scholars now use instead of “cult.” We’ve largely abandoned “cult” because of its tainted connotations for general audiences, who associate it with Jonestown, Waco, and Heaven’s Gate. A cult, to most people, signifies danger or downright evil.
Since the late 1970s, this stereotype, according to the religious-studies scholar Lynn Neal, has become “firmly entrenched in both journalistic endeavors and public perception.” Conjured are images of indoctrination, brainwashing, charismatic leaders, obedient followers, special clothing, mental and emotional harm, separation from the larger world, and the inability to break free from the system.
In The Chronicle in 1999, Margaret Newhouse writes about the need for “deprogramming” from the cult of thinking of academic careers as “superior to others.” This emphasis on only one type of success leads graduate students to think that other careers represent a “failure.” She asks, “On your deathbed, what are you going to regret more — disappointing your advisers or not being true to yourself?”
Also in The Chronicle, Meredith Clermont-Ferrand describes how grad schools, like cults, seek to mold you in their image by giving you an identity, rituals, sacred texts, colleagues, and leaders, while also taking your money. Like other cults, the doctoral ones have “priests who, like Jim Jones or Charles Manson, use their positions as bases for abuse.” Fear of exile from academe (i.e., the job market), she admits, “drove her nearly crazy.” In spite of everything, Clermont-Ferrand describes herself as reasonably content with her choice to get a Ph.D. “Despite the difficulties of reaching the prestige of Ph.D. priesthood,” she writes, “I have experienced many more joys than sorrows.” It didn’t hurt that she got a tenure-track job.
Sometimes, if we love an intellectual arena, all we have are bad choices; brainwashing has nothing to do with it.
Writing as Thomas Benton in 2004, William Pannapacker remarks on the similarity of graduate school to “mind-control cults.” He cites the controversial anticult consultant Steven Hassan’s BITE model of behavior, information, thought, and emotional control.
The most recent resurrection of the meme is Daniel Drezner’s in The Washington Post: Graduate school “has a cultlike effect on what you think you should want as a graduate student.” Training for the doctorate changes your goals because “part of you drinks the Kool-Aid while earning a Ph.D.” Yes, yet another reference to the poison that members of the Peoples Temple drank to commit suicide at Jonestown. I flinch any time I hear someone use the distasteful, cynical phrase. Drezner insists that adjuncts persist at low-paying jobs in academe because they “have been trained to believe this is the only thing they should do with a doctorate.” Graduate school warps our sense of success, so we remain there against our best interests. Why else would we stay? (Never mind that many of us don’t.)
For all the analogy’s rhetorical cheap thrills, it’s misleading. It also shuts down conversation before it’s even started. It’s a cult, and that’s all we need to know, right? Explaining away the plight of adjuncts as brainwashed dupes ignores the structural realities of the disastrous academic job market. Sometimes, if we love an intellectual arena, all we have are bad choices; brainwashing has nothing to do with it.
The cult reference obscures important questions about how graduate students are trained and the effects of that training. Take a look at Academia Is Killing My Friends, on Tumblr. Subtitled “Anonymous Stories of Abuse, Exploitation and Suffering in Academia,” it includes a warning: “This site contains descriptions of suicide, self-harm, mental illness and all kinds of abuse, harassment and oppression.”
If that’s what academe has become in practice, we need to think carefully about the norms and behaviors we encourage. How do we keep our institutions from harming those we are supposed to train? Why do we need people to reassure us that it is OK to leave? Why did it take me more than two years to recover from my time in academe?
In seeking a better metaphor, I find myself drawn to Erving Goffman’s vision of the total institution, “a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society … together lead an enclosed, formally administered form of life.” Goffman was writing about asylums, but he wanted to characterize the ways in which institutions in general take over and recreate our lives.
Religious orders and the military fall under his definition, and academe does too. Total institutions are in our worlds, but separate from them. They are “training stations” consumed by bureaucracy and chains of command, with a “work-payment structure” different from the rest of society. They untrain us in what we know, so that we can learn their system of being. Other roles are lost to us because the particularity of what the total institution wants us to be. They treat us as less than adults by wearing down autonomy and freedom of action. There are rewards and privileges for obedience, yet little loyalty from the institution. We grant institutions power over our fates when we enter into them. We don’t just participate in the total institution of academe, we support and bolster it. We help create it and perpetuate its norms. Mary Douglas cautions that we, in fact, let institutions think for us.
Academe is an all-encompassing institution that comes to define our lives. It is high time to think about what we give up to be a part of it, what we expect from others who do so, and what we might do to reform it. What are we perpetuating by our participation?
The cult analogy is perversely comforting even as it discomforts us, because it lets us too much off the hook. The total-institution model, on the other hand, makes us recognize our collusion. Victimization by cults is scary. Complicity in work and social structures that we’ve readily, even hungrily, surrendered to — well, that’s scarier still, isn’t it?
Kelly J. Baker is a columnist for Vitae. Her books include Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011) and The Zombies Are Coming! (Bondfire Books, 2013).
