Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
The Graduate Adviser

Remember, Professor, Not Too Close

When to keep your distance from graduate-student advisees

By Leonard Cassuto April 22, 2013
Not Too Close 1
Brian Taylor for The Chronicle

Everyone tells tales about advisers. Some of the stories are heartwarming, while others are prurient, even horrifying. We’ve all got such stories on tap because the adviser-student relationship is the most crucial in turning a graduate student into a professional.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Everyone tells tales about advisers. Some of the stories are heartwarming, while others are prurient, even horrifying. We’ve all got such stories on tap because the adviser-student relationship is the most crucial in turning a graduate student into a professional.

So what should a dissertation adviser do? In last month’s column, I proposed that advisers spend more time with their graduate students as people, not just as academics. In doing so, we encourage the student as a professional, not least by making ourselves appear less forbidding.

That approach is not without its pitfalls, however, and they lead me now in the other direction—to ask what an adviser should not do. Elizabeth Leake, a professor of Italian literature at Columbia University who directs many dissertations, told me recently that doctors of philosophy should borrow an idea from the other kind of doctor: First, do no harm.

Borrowing the Hippocratic Oath makes plenty of sense because doctoral advisers have the capacity to do plenty of harm. The ties between graduate students and advisers are both professional and personal and therefore uniquely strong—and tense.

So don’t get too close.

Part of what I mean is obvious. Don’t make your students into your flunkies, for example. That ought to go without saying, but I’ve known graduate students who have picked up their advisers’ dry cleaning.

That kind of exploitation disgraces us all, but it’s also possible to take advantage of graduate students inadvertently. You may think it’s a gift to offer an impoverished advisee a chance to earn some money doing research for your latest article or book, but remember that the student may assume that he refuses at his own risk. Of course graduate students should be invited to collaborate on projects that might advance their training or careers, but an adviser has to be careful to offer them graceful ways to say no.

We need to treat our graduate students as people without getting overly personal. Do yourself a favor and don’t friend your graduate students on Facebook. Those connections carry risk—and this one can come back to bite you in ways you won’t notice until you’re bleeding.

Why the caution? Because our graduate students are already so very close to us, closer than we sometimes realize. They think about us, and they care about what we think in ways that can be hard to believe. One professor told me how, when she was a graduate student, she ran into her adviser at a supermarket. He made an offhand remark about what was in her shopping cart. She turned that remark over and over in her mind for months, and remembered it vividly two decades later.

A graduate student can’t tell her adviser, “You look good in that shirt,” so don’t say the same thing to a graduate student, no matter how pure your intentions. Most graduate students will become as well versed in your personal life as you allow—and when you need to criticize their work, too much personal involvement can swiftly complicate the transaction. All of that was true before the well-marked minefield of social media. Such interactions are much easier now, but just as cautionary.

ADVERTISEMENT

Don’t brag about your job—that’s another obvious one. But here’s one that’s perhaps less obvious: Never complain about your job in front of graduate students, either. It’s in the poorest of poor taste to do so. Our students aspire to jobs like ours, so our complaints disrespect their goals. They also make us look spoiled and unappreciative of what we have, regardless of the righteousness of whatever we might want to grumble about.

The fact I’ve been circling is this: Many adviser-student relationships—especially those centered around a dissertation—involve a transference. As Freud outlined in his writings on therapeutic technique, transference involves the projection by the patient onto the analyst of “some important figure out of his childhood or past,” so that the thoughts and feelings of the earlier relationship (perhaps with a parent) affect and inform the interactions with the therapist in the present.

I don’t mean to suggest that teaching graduate students is like psychoanalysis. It isn’t. (If students need therapy, it’s our job to refer them to counseling.) But I am suggesting that the long-lasting hybrid relation between graduate student and adviser—professional and personal at the same time—invites the kind of projection that characterizes transference.

I’ve heard Ph.D. advisers describe their dissertators as their intellectual children (and genealogical metaphors abound to describe that tie), so why shouldn’t Ph.D. students experience some filial feelings toward their advisers? When I learned some years ago of the death of the last of my two graduate-school advisers, a man I’d not been in contact with for quite a while, I immediately thought of myself as an academic orphan.

ADVERTISEMENT

With transference comes countertransference—that is, the identification of the therapist with the patient. Or in this case, the teacher with the student. It’s a basic tenet of psychotherapy that the therapist needs to manage the countertransference. The task can be difficult. There’s an interesting example of that in the 2010 movie The King’s Speech, one of the best teaching movies to come out in a long time.

The story, based in fact, centers on the efforts of King George VI of England to conquer his stammer with the help of a speech therapist, Lionel Logue. When Logue pushes too hard at one point, he drives the king away in anger and frustration. The disappointed teacher then realizes that he had tried to project his own ambitions for his student onto an unwilling recipient. That’s an example of badly managed countertransference, and Logue apologizes for it to his royal student the first chance he gets.

“Not too close” serves as a professional caution as well as a personal one. Countertransference can transform teachers into nannies who worry more about a student’s deadlines than the student does. That can never do. Graduate students are in the final stage of becoming professionals, and they have to figure out their professional identities for themselves.

Advisers can also turn into mad scientists who seek to clone themselves. Graduate students know the difference between advisers who want to reproduce themselves and advisers who help students to know their own minds. That difference obtains even in science labs, where the adviser approves and pays for graduate-student experiments, and places his or her name on all student publications that come out of the lab.

ADVERTISEMENT

So don’t get too close, but don’t stray too far either. How to maintain that delicate equilibrium will vary with each graduate student.

When the relationship works, though, it doesn’t just end, no more than a parent will cut off a child when he or she moves out. It’s not just that our students are our legacy (though they are), or that they still need us for a while even after they get jobs (we’re still a vital source for recommendations until they build up their own contacts, for one thing).

In fact, they gradually need us less and less—and then they can start doing things for us, just like children do for parents. I’ve had former graduate students help with the advising of my current students when their topics align, a bridge across the generations that’s exceptionally gratifying. And of course former students form a great employment network.

Lionel Logue and King George remained friends until they died, in the early 1950s. We can become friends with our advisees, too. All we have to do is wait till they graduate.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
cassuto_leonard.jpg
About the Author
Leonard Cassuto
Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University who writes regularly for The Chronicle about graduate education. His newest book is Academic Writing as if Readers Matter, from Princeton University Press. He co-wrote, with Robert Weisbuch, The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education. He welcomes comments and suggestions at cassuto@fordham.edu. Find him on X @LCassuto.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Vector illustration of large open scissors  with several workers in seats dangling by white lines
Iced Out
Duke Administrators Accused of Bypassing Shared-Governance Process in Offering Buyouts
Illustration showing money being funnelled into the top of a microscope.
'A New Era'
Higher-Ed Associations Pitch an Alternative to Trump’s Cap on Research Funding
Illustration showing classical columns of various heights, each turning into a stack of coins
Endowment funds
The Nation’s Wealthiest Small Colleges Just Won a Big Tax Exemption
WASHINGTON, DISTICT OF COLUMBIA, UNITED STATES - 2025/04/14: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holding a sign with Release Mahmud Khalil written on it, stands in front of the ICE building while joining in a protest. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rally in front of the ICE building, demanding freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and all those targeted for speaking out against genocide in Palestine. Protesters demand an end to U.S. complicity and solidarity with the resistance in Gaza. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
An Anonymous Group’s List of Purported Critics of Israel Helped Steer a U.S. Crackdown on Student Activists

From The Review

John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson
Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin