Lucky Jane

gnksnarfnooooooo! (swallows own tongue in horror)

The whole point of a dissertation is learning to do research and to struggle through this stuff on your own. It’s all about process, regardless of how miserable it makes you (and him) going through all those drafts. There’s something about pain as a learning tool that really helps you get it, unlike being simply shown the right way. What good is it to your student if he finishes and gets a job somewhere where they want him to publish and write things and he didn’t ever do this out on his own? Will you write his next book for him too?

Now, I know a lot of people who read my blog have said that my advisor is too mean and evil and not mentor-y enough, but I actually really believe her PhD student philosophy: she throws the absolute worst shit at me that she can so that I will not be fazed by anything once I’m a professor, when it’s almost impossible to get help. When I first asked her to be my diss advisor, she told me, among other things, that I must “own” my dissertation, and I keep struggling with this, writing myself into a corner and wanting to take it to her and have her fix it or make decisions for me rather than go through the effort and the ownership of choosing how to fix things myself.

I went through at least 6 months and a dozen drafts of my prospectus; when she met with me over the first one she very gently told me to revise it by turning over the proposal, opening up a new window on the computer, and writing it out again by memory, keeping in mind that I needed to always explain “the stakes.” Many of the later drafts she would say, “better, better, but sharpen, Sisyphus, sharpen” and she’d make these clawlike kneading motions with her hands. So I’d have to reread and rewrite until I figured out for myself what this “sharpness” was.

Has he looked at models of good solid dissertations that have passed at this school? Have you? Or maybe he could look at yours? Model prospectuses? (prospecti?)

I’m watching one of my friends go through this exact same point with my advisor at my school, and it looks so much more horrible and painful than I remember it for me, but that might just be a combination of suppressing my past trauma and being on the outside watching someone constantly complain and be frustrated. I think it’s the main point of this process. Not to be too masochistic about it. But we start the whole thing as students, and are supposed to be full-fledged colleagues when we file —- that’s got to be a pretty drastic transformation as well as an identity change.

All I can say is keep the entire paper trial stored somewhere so that when this inevitably goes south, you can prove it is not your fault.

Well, I’m glad my comments didn’t seem too harsh. I’d still make the dude figure it all out on his own, though. But then again, not only am I not an advisor, but I’m in the thick of dissertation misery myself and probably want to spread it around so’s to have some company.

Now, though, I’m having fun brainstorming other ways he could re-write the proposal to see it in new and different ways —- write it out in heroic couplets? as a dinner invitation and grocery list? The opening statement of a murder trial? (hmm, is he presenting for the defense or the prosecution?) The overture to a tragic opera? A letter to a long-lost brother explaining what he’s been up to? Portray it through interpretive dance? haiku?

More seriously, I found that writing (or saying) letters/emails to my sister, who’s not in academia, really helped me figure out the big issues and explain them in clear and understandable ways. Perhaps asking him to re-articulate it _outside_ of its usual context will help him literally re-vision the project?

(I write this as an asst who has been heavily involved in advising grad students, and someone who has twice taken on people about whom I felt “hesitant” or “skeptical” because my colleagues pushed it on me or because the graduate adviser said “there is no one else who can do this here.” One of those, with whom I stuck it out, is now a Ph.D. but has no chance with that dissertation of finding a tenure track job, and the other, for whom I was the third try as an adviser, dropped out after I ended the relationship after showing my evidence to our graduate adviser, and she could not find anyone else in the department to take her on.)

I have never met you nor the student in question. Also, I am all in favor of supporting students who don’t immediately appear promising, and also agree that student writing grows through the dissertation process, and that not everyone who seems problematic at the beginning ends up being problematic at the end. That said:

There is a debate right now going on elsewhere in the blogosphere about whether grad students should pick an asst prof as a doctoral adviser. Various aspects of the debate point to one reason to pick an asst being that the asst will be a lot more involved in a hands on way than a big name or even a more experience professor. This is true, no question. The problem is that if the student can’t even get his-her thoughts together enough to write an acceptable proposal after twelve drafts and extensive coaching, you both should think this through. Are you prepared to read his dissertation twelve times to get it past his committee? Do you want one of your first dissertations in your department to be one where your colleagues agree to hold their noses as they sign the signature page, or to sign because they are sorry for you? What are you going to write the job LORs that you write for this student? Will you be able to say honestly that you recommend him for a position, or are you going to have to do three shots before sending every letter? Because it sounds like that is what you are setting yourself up for. You really don’t want to be thinking, two years from now, “I could write this project better than this student has.” And I find the student’s behavior really sketchy, without knowing more about it–it is really impossible to see someone for an entire semester? To me, from your description, this looks like massive avoidance and lack of commitment on his part, not to mention laziness, since even advanced undergrads know that you can’t just delete sentences from proposals without patching the resulting holes.

I am not saying don’t advise him, although the flip side of what people are saying about asst profs spending more time is that doctoral advising is usual a negligible part of the tenure dossier for an asst and time could be spent more profitably on other things. I am just saying keep a paper trail. Because if this turns into a train wreck, you may be able to use it to get yourself out of advising this student. And in the worst case–yes, people sue–you have a concrete record of what you said and did to get this person on the right track. I am just suggesting that you look down the road, to everything that the demonstrated inability of this student to get on track is going to suggest about your relationship for the future. Being a doctoral adviser is a lot like adopting children–you get what you get, and sometimes what you get is someone with unanticipated, unredressable problems.

I’ve only experienced this from the student POV, never as a grad advisor, but my only comment here is that when Servetus says, “To me, from your description, this looks like massive avoidance and lack of commitment on his part, not to mention laziness, since even advanced undergrads know that you can’t just delete sentences from proposals without patching the resulting holes,” I do just want to raise the possibility it’s fear more than lack of commitment or laziness. I’m not going to say it sounds like this student has much a clue how to proceed, but I know that when I avoided my advisor in grad school – which was a lot, and it came back to bite me – it was nothing to do with laziness or lack of commitment, and everything to do with sheer terror (of her, of failure).

Not that this is necessarily a helpful comment, in that it doesn’t offer much of a solution. (In my own case, bursting into tears in my advisor’s office was actually probably one of the best things I’ve ever done, as stupid as it made me feel, because I think it made her realize I actually did care about all this.) But I did want to offer the non-lazy explanation. (Not, if this student *is* terrified/floundering, that it makes them any easier to work with than if they’re lazy.)

I think graduate students tend in general to underestimate the extent to which their committees really want them to be done. I know I did. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting answers to certain pressing questions that I had asked repeatedly of my adviser and the two main readers, but a year after I was finished I realized why: if my committee had sent me down the trails I was hinting at wanting to fallow, it would have delayed my completion by another year and a half. If a half-way decent dissertation is on the table that an advisor is willing to sign off on, there is often pressure on the entire committee to agree even if they have severe reservations. The other people figure that they have expressed their reservations in written form, and the doctoral adviser is going to be stuck writing the LORs. The graduate director wants the students out quickly to “make room” for new students and to improve the departmental statistics. Often the dissertation would be substantially improved by taking another year to revise, but the department can’t or won’t pay for that, the student wants to be earning money, and the advisers want to be finished. I am not saying this is ideal, just that I see it happen with some regularity. It is unfortunate because it is a lot harder for the average person to revise either while they are a first year faculty member or working in a non-related job while being on the market. Also, I am in a very interdisciplinary area and it is not infrequent that in some of the other departments where I am a subsidiary reader (one of the five, but not one of the three), negative discussion leading up to a defense is mitigated by the adviser’s statements that “he or she is not going to go on in academia anyway.” I have heard that statement at least once a year since I have been an asst prof at an R1.

Obviously, every department is different and every student and every advisor. There are some students who get through quickly and well, those who get through slowly and well, those who get through slowly and poorly (quickly and poorly isn’t a frequent combination in my experience). But in my experience there is a small but persistent contingent of people who will not accept advice about how to improve their work but will resist dropping out. My department has a graduate committee who deals with people who have been ABD for more than five years and superintends both the student and the dissertation committee. The point of the supervision is to make sure that the student is not being stalled by any kind of personal or political nonsense on the part of the committee, and to make sure that the student is actually progressing–i.e., to prevent triangulation by any party in the interaction. So in my experience as an advisor, people in our department who are dissertating for more than five years have gotten exact explanations of what they need to do to finish, and intermediate discussions of the status of their work in comparison to what would be ideal.

The student whom I stuck it out with, because I was pressured to do so, wrote a dissertation on a topic for which he mastered the language of his sources but had not mastered the language in which most of the secondary literature was written. It was an almost exclusively source-based dissertation that claimed repeatedly that no one had considered these topics before. His first adviser dropped him for this reason. I was the second adviser and I knew the reason for the end of the first relationship, but I was assured by the graduate adviser that the student was learning the necessary language and that he needed a “fresh start” with someone else. Because I am an asst my ability to resist was low–especially if I wanted to teach any graduate courses. It was presented as trade-off: you take on this student and we will continue to allow you to teach grad classes. I was also willing to believe that perhaps this student could make a fresh start. As a very young faculty member I also had a tendency to sympathize with the grad student perspective. I had seen how poor adviser/advisee relationships had affected friends of mine. Three years later, although I made sure he was enrolled in language classes and gave him a long bibliography on the topic in the language in question to start with, he turned in a draft of a dissertation that included no secondary source in that language. Again I went to the grad adviser (someone different at this point) who said more or less, “he isn’t going to do the work, getting him to drop out will be a huge hassle as he is likely to mount a battle against our attempts to drop him, we will just change the title of the dissertation slightly to “Explorations in TOPIC based on English secondary literature” and then you can sign off and we can be rid of this problem.”

I was not in a position to resist the demands of the graduate adviser. This is a problem on doctoral committees: if you supervise a shaky dissertation, you have to be absolutely in control of the politics before you start, or you may run into a situation where one of the more senior members on the committee puts his foot down and you can’t get your student through. (I have seen this happen to both asst and associate colleagues of mine.) In my case, I told the student verbally and in written comments on the dissertation that this was not acceptable, that it would not make it past a referee in any reputable publishing situation, and that any normal hiring committee would almost immediately spot the problem. This statement is also included in the final written report submitted to the graduate school with the defense paperwork. Mostly, however, so he can’t sue us. He is currently adjuncting and on the market. I am doubtful that he will find an employer, however. Think of it this way: if you wanted to hire a professor who taught the history of the planet Mars, would you hire someone whose dissertation covered Martian sources but not the literature of the invaders from Jupiter who had conquered Mars and lived there for over 2,000 years and completely incorporated Martian history into their own? Especially if the fact of Jupiter’s conquest of Mars was a basic fact that everyone in introduction to Milky Way civilization learned the first week? Would you hire someone who insisted on studying the topic only through the secondary literature in English? When there are many candidates out there who have studied both Martian and Jupiterian sources?

I am noting a traumatic reaction in myself here, hence the logorrhea. But it just kills me to send out letters for this person and I am not in a position to refuse to do so. Also, graduate students talk with each other, and if you have a bad interaction with an advisee that can really negatively influence your rep in your department, and thus your potential to attract good students. My experiences in advising have also really soured me on graduate students; I am now basically no longer willing to work with anyone who can’t prove they have the necessary languages by the time they are ABD.