From my earliest years as a faculty member, my greatest desire and preoccupation have been graduate education. Over the years, I have compromised my personal life and my research productivity to nurture and guide my many doctoral students. I have spent countless hours helping them revise seminar papers for publication, prepare for comprehensive exams, rewrite dissertation chapters, craft vitae, compose teaching-philosophy statements, and negotiate job offers.
And now I’m wondering why.
Having sent more than 20 new Ph.D.'s out into the world, I find myself in the midst of a severe midcareer identity crisis, jettisoning values and assumptions about the profession that I have held for more than 25 years.
I finally understand the words of a sage colleague that had mystified me when he uttered them decades ago. At the time, I was an assistant professor at a fairly prestigious university and had received an offer to help develop a doctoral program at a nearby public university. When I informed my colleague that I planned to accept, he recoiled and replied, “Why in the world would you want to spend your valuable time working with graduate students?”
His response genuinely shook me back then because my whole orientation, my identity, was wrapped up in graduate education, and not only because I was good at it -- I felt it was my calling. I was determined to give my students what I had never had: a genuine mentor to help them thrive in graduate school and build a scholarly career. As a feminist, I believed that that was especially important for female students.
And I believed the hype: that working with graduate students -- especially doctoral students -- was the pinnacle of academic success.
What I believe now is that working with graduate students is not all it’s cracked up to be. Graduate school is such an emotionally fraught time for most students that being in a program is like being a member of a profoundly dysfunctional family, complete with all-too-frequent psychodramas and even, at times, nervous breakdowns.
Simply put, graduate school too often brings out the worst in students -- and, by extension, in faculty members as well. I came to that realization recently after discovering that one of my most accomplished doctoral students had plagiarized parts of her dissertation.
The light shed by that instance of broken trust was clarifying: I should have been investing my effort in my own scholarly career rather than helping those who ultimately didn’t deserve the help and, more important, didn’t respect the life that they themselves claimed they wanted.
In hindsight, I realize I have dealt with several recurring types of students. Consider just a few.
There’s the student who seems incapable of developing original ideas and who simply adopts your research agenda as her own. You’ll probably first notice it when the student’s final paper in your seminar seems a regurgitation of your lectures and publications. That will become a pattern in other courses, and you will try to point that out with carefully composed questions written in the margins of her papers.
Before long, the student has become a professor, and her first book appears to be a compendium of your own research over the past two decades. You’re tempted to shrug it off as the sincerest form of flattery, but you can’t come to terms with the fact that the student fails to cite your work or formally acknowledge its influence.
Then there’s the student who always turns up during your office hours wanting to discuss, not the latest scholarship he’s read, but the latest gossip about this or that student or professor. After too many of those office visits, you realize that, rather than concentrating on his own work, he actually wants to become your best friend and confidant and is consumed with pressuring you into a “friendship” (or, in some cases, a romantic relationship). Because the student has no personal boundaries, he is often inappropriate.
If you resist such overtures -- as I believe we are obligated to do -- the student’s disappointment eventually turns to anger, or even rage. I have witnessed situations in which students have turned on their primary advisers, sometimes viciously. Some cases have even escalated to lawsuits.
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.
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.
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.
In too many cases, what you thought was a genuine dedication to intellectual work turns out to be a strategy (conscious or unconscious) of currying favor for the short-term goal of getting through graduate school.
An especially exasperating type is the student who is determined to extort a degree. That student’s attitude is, “I’ve paid my tuition, I’ve taken the requisite number of courses, so you owe me a degree.” The fact that the student has invested the bare minimum of effort in his work is beside the point.
If you are directing that student’s dissertation and he thinks you are so demanding that you are slowing his progress beyond what he himself deems acceptable, then you may well encounter frustration, animosity, and even hostility.
I know of one case in which the disgruntled student complained to the dean that her major professor was intentionally holding her back from completing her degree and threatened to sue the university. In her complaint, the student successfully shifted blame, describing the professor in terms that closely resembled the Charles Dickens character Thomas Gradgrind, the rigid and doctrinaire headmaster in Hard Times.
Fearful of a lawsuit, the dean reconstituted the student’s committee and quickly ushered her through the process. The student went on to a tenure-track position at a midsize metropolitan university, where she later threatened to sue the administration when her application for tenure was denied at the department level. She is now living happily ever after as an associate professor.
What’s sad about all of those cases is that the students have lost sight of the real purpose of graduate education: to become a scholar and a teacher whose expertise will make a difference in their field of study, in students’ lives, and in the world. Those who simply borrow a research agenda rather than engage in the hard work entailed in creating an original one clearly care little about serious intellectual work and what it means to be a true professional. So do those who spend their time attempting to cultivate personal relationships with their professors rather than working to master their subject; or who persuade you to serve as their major professor because they want a research career, only to abandon that career at the last minute; or who extort degrees from you and the institution.
In fact, those types might be said to exemplify unprofessional behavior. I have found myself wondering on too many occasions how they ever were admitted to graduate school in the first place. If my experiences are typical, and many of my colleagues tell me they are, then we need to re-examine the whole system of graduate education -- from admissions standards to assessment to mentoring. We need to step back from the myth that working with graduate students constitutes one important badge of academic success and ask whose interests that myth serves.
It’s not that every one of my graduate students has been a disappointment, or that they all exhibited the same boorish behavior that I describe here. I have fond memories of my time with many of them. Several have gone on to become leaders in the discipline, and I am still in contact with some of them.
But the truth is that, for me, the bad apples have spoiled the whole barrel. I’m more than ready to join the ranks of the many eminent scholars who rarely take up the arduous and largely invisible labor of guiding graduate students. I guess I’ve finally made it!
Lagretta Gradgrind is the pseudonym of a professor at a large public university.