I’m in that awkward career stage where, on the one hand, I’m a senior grad student whom people go to for emotional (and sometimes logistical) support when things don’t work out the way they should, usually related to something a faculty member has done or didn’t do; on the other hand, I’m on the market, teaching my own upper level class, and need to start thinking like a faculty member. This has been interesting because I’m usually one that does not believe in “assuming good intentions” but, as it turns out, thinking about why someone did something is rather important when I try to think about what I would do differently. I realized there is a lot of miscommunication (this part shouldn’t be surprising). People’s expectations change as they become more enculturated in academia, and their interpretation of the world changes as a result. The problem is that, once their own worldview has changed, it’s really difficult to remember what the old worldview was like or how people could possibly understand the same situation differently. Before I forget my old way of thinking, I’d like to share some thoughts I have while briefly occupying the middle ground.
Many of grad students’ complaints are about care — they don’t care about me; it’s not clear that they want me in the program, etc. It’s certainly true that some students are better supported than other students and it’s usually not merit-based, and that some faculty members care more than other faculty members, but that’s not really what’s at issue. People are not dropping out because they want to be the golden boy. They are looking for something simpler, something which every grad student should have. And they think that that something is “caring about me and wanting me to succeed”. It’s this part I’d like to challenge.
I’ve been thinking about what sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom said: “the institution cannot love you.” She has said this in the context of advising black women not to burn themselves alive for the benefit of the institution. But why do we expect love, anyway?
One premise that is absolutely clear to me is that people who are having a rough time in the academy are not getting something basic that they need. The keywords here are “basic” and “need”, and I think love is neither of those. Do I *need* my advisor to actively *want* me to succeed? I mean, I don’t want him to want me to not succeed, and I certainly want him to fulfill certain advisory duties to increase the probability of my success. Other than these, I really don’t care how often the thought “man I really wish Kino would succeed” crosses his mind. I also don’t *need* him to want me to succeed over wanting other people to succeed. I also don’t *need* him to care about me more than he cares about his research, etc.
Thinking in the other direction. I have students now. Do I want them to succeed? Sure, but only in the most generic sense in which I want everyone to succeed. Some of them have shared a bit more of their life stories with me, and I sometimes think about them and wish them well. But I also respect those who don’t want to share their stories with me. I don’t think they are less deserving of success, even though I also don’t spend any time caring for them (mostly because I don’t remember who they are). It feels incredibly demanding to ask a teacher to actively care for all of their students. I’m sure many teachers do this, but it shouldn’t be expected of all teachers.
But the question remains: what basic thing these distressing grad students need but are not getting, if it’s not care and love?
I have my own theory, but it probably differs from person to person. My theory is recognition and praise. I have written about how confidence requires receiving positive feedback. I think “feeling of being cared for” does, too. We have this assumption that promising scholars who do important work must know that they are promising and that their work is important. But that’s absurd. Some brilliant people know they are brilliant because they have been told by enough people that they are. For early career grad students, especially those who has only been in school their entire lives, it’s very natural to not know how good they are at what they do. People who tend to catastrophize will naturally assume that they are terrible. Similarly, if people don’t tell us they are paying attention to our work, it’s really hard to believe that they are.
So I think the problem really is this: as students, we need to make a lot of practical decisions. Should I switch direction? Should I keep working on this project or can I start my next one? Do I need to read more books, take more classes, give more presentations, or think harder? Should I invest time in a writing class? Programing class? How worried should I be that I’ll need to figure out a backup plan?
A great deal of graduate school is devoted to making these decisions, and yet they are very difficult to make if you don’t have sufficient external information to judge where you stand along various axes. So it makes sense that students are frustrated and lost when they lack the resources to make informed decisions that are crucial to the success of their academic careers. It also make sense to interpret this as a lack of care: you don’t care about my success, which is why you won’t even tell me whether my paper is good or whether this conference is worth my time.
Thinking about it this way, I think, also helps make sense of why some faculty members are reluctant to give such information. It’s not that they don’t care, but that they don’t want their own opinions to be taken the wrong way. Academia is supposed to be a democratic system where no one person gets to decide what makes good scholarship. If they tell you your papers are great but then none of it passes peer review, wouldn’t they have led you astray?
My own opinion here is that people put too much weight on individual feedbacks, which are as reliable as any one-shot events are (which is to say: not at all). And the reason we do this is because we don’t give/receive enough feedbacks. If we don’t have enough data points, we can’t see the trend. But this analysis is for another day.
The point here is that there are genuine things that advisors are probably perfectly willing and able to give, that they are not giving for contingent reasons. Students missing these things are miserable as a result, and attribute the situation to a lack of care. Advisors are frustrated partly because they do care, and partly because they don’t understand what it means to care. Students are frustrated because they think it’s obvious.
Of course, my thoughts on this are intrinsically limited to how I think about advising, which may be vastly different from how most people do. There are also certainly advisors who “genuinely don’t care” in the sense of knowing they should do and refusing to do it. But I think it’s important to move the conversation away from a simple “do they really not care or should I not feel this way” dichotomy. They probably do care — at least as much as you need them to. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be asking for more. You just need to figure out what that something is, and it’s probably not love.
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