[EAS] Labs, Advisors and Higher Education

[Peter J. Kindlmann]

Dear Colleagues -

This last issue of "Tomorrow's Professor" brought 
into much clearer focus a value that science and 
engineering brings to higher education, that of 
the closely-knit tutorial interaction between 
advisor and student. I found the circumstances of 
isolation of PhD students in the humanities, 
described here, rather startling.

The call for a humanities equivalent of a 
research lab environment is worthwhile. I would 
caution though, that engineers at least do not 
fully realize the value of their old-fashioned 
tutorial circumstances. Instead they are busy 
deconstructing and virtualizing it with 
technology, at the loss of much of what is good 
about a lab environment.

     --PJK

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>Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 09:57:00 -0800
>To: tomorrows-professor at lists.Stanford.EDU
>From: Rick Reis <reis at stanford.edu>
>Subject: TP Msg. #684 WE NEED HUMANITIES LABS
>Sender: owner-tomorrows-professor at lists.Stanford.EDU
>
>"My curiosity about this hypothetical English 
>professor's reaction began after a discussion 
>with my father, a professor emeritus in physics 
>at the University of California at Santa 
>Barbara. As we chatted about my work as a 
>dissertation and tenure coach, he expressed 
>shock when I recounted how graduate students in 
>English could go a month or more with no contact 
>with their advisor. He estimated that his 
>students usually saw him daily, and never went 
>for more than a week without interaction with 
>him, except when he was traveling. As he quizzed 
>me more and more about the grad student 
>experience in humanities departments, it became 
>more and more clear to me that there is a deep 
>divide."
>
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>Folks:
>
>The posting below looks at the need for greater 
>communication among graduate students and 
>between graduate students and advisors, 
>particularly in the humanities.  It is by 
>academic career coach, Dr. Gina Hiatt 
>(Gina at AcademicLadder.com) and it appeared in the 
>October 26, 2005 issue of INSIDE HIGHER 
>EDUCATION (http://www.insidehighered.com/).  © 
>Copyright 2005 Inside Higher Ed, reprinted with 
>permission.
>
>Regards,
>
>Rick Reis
>reis at stanford.edu
>UP NEXT: Building the Teaching Commons
>
>			    Tomorrow's Graduate Students and Postdocs
>
> 
>	-------------------------------------------- 
>1,172 words 
>------------------------------------------
>
>			              WE NEED HUMANITIES LABS
>
>By Gina Hiatt
>"Solitude vivifies; isolation kills."
>-Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest, 1886
>
>I wonder how an English professor would feel 
>spending a week in a physics lab. Not about the 
>scientific work, but about the frequent, ongoing 
>interaction between students and peers, 
>post-docs and faculty. Scientists see each other 
>in the lab, if not daily, then at least weekly. 
>They have frequent lab meetings, colloquia and 
>interaction with scholars at other universities 
>around joint research. During my graduate 
>training in psychology at McGill University, 
>especially in the research lab at the Montreal 
>Neurological Institute, I spent hours hanging 
>around the post-docs. I learned at least as much 
>from them as I did from my interactions with my 
>professors. The expectation was that I would be 
>at the lab 9 to 5 or more, every day. I saw my 
>adviser every day.
>
>My curiosity about this hypothetical English 
>professor's reaction began after a discussion 
>with my father, a professor emeritus in physics 
>at the University of California at Santa 
>Barbara. As we chatted about my work as a 
>dissertation and tenure coach, he expressed 
>shock when I recounted how graduate students in 
>English could go a month or more with no contact 
>with their advisor. He estimated that his 
>students usually saw him daily, and never went 
>for more than a week without interaction with 
>him, except when he was traveling. As he quizzed 
>me more and more about the grad student 
>experience in humanities departments, it became 
>more and more clear to me that there is a deep 
>divide.
>
>In the humanities, outside of the classroom, 
>this kind of easy and even semi-formal 
>interaction is rare. The isolation for the grad 
>student begins in earnest when the coursework is 
>finished and the qualifying exams are completed. 
>The fledgling ABD is nudged out of the nest, 
>left to fly solo for long periods. The luckiest 
>students have advisors who are mentors and 
>insist on frequent meetings, which increase 
>accountability and allow the student to learn 
>how to think in a scholarly manner. The large 
>majority, however, are left to flounder, some of 
>them working as adjuncts far from the 
>institution where they are trying to finish a 
>Ph.D.
>
>The students whose advisers organize monthly 
>dissertation meetings get some help with the 
>isolation. These meetings usually involve prior 
>submission of one's work, with a presentation 
>and then feedback from peers and one's advisor 
>during the meeting. The opportunity to present 
>one's own work may come up only once every few 
>months. For many grad students, most writing is 
>accomplished in the days preceding submission of 
>their work. I believe that these meetings are 
>too infrequent and too formal to make up for the 
>absence of ongoing interaction with other 
>scholars.
>
>Beyond these dissertation meetings, scholarly 
>dialogue with peers or advisers is sporadic in 
>most departments outside the sciences. In many 
>cases, the adviser's expectation is that the 
>student will request a meeting when the student 
>is ready. Thus begins one of the vicious cycles 
>of graduate school. The student, working in a 
>void, measures himself against what he imagines 
>his peers are doing. Often he finds himself 
>lacking, and feels ashamed. So he puts off the 
>meeting with his adviser. This increases his 
>isolation and sense of inadequacy. He feels that 
>he is floundering and going in circles. Without 
>encouragement and deadlines, such students can 
>languish for months, and even years.
>
>As a dissertation coach, I've worked with many 
>such students. The luckier ones are early in the 
>process and not yet consumed with self-loathing 
>and shame. Others have been at it for years and 
>feel terrible about themselves. It is noteworthy 
>that 80-90 percent of the calls I receive for 
>dissertation coaching are from students in the 
>humanities, social sciences or education - all 
>fields less likely to have a lab environment. 
>The rest are writing their dissertation away 
>from their university and find it difficult to 
>work in that void.
>Conferences and conventions offer important 
>opportunities for scholarly dialogue, as do 
>online blogs. However, there are limitations to 
>conferences (too infrequent) and blogs. What I 
>am advocating is injecting into the humanities 
>department some of the freewheeling dialogue 
>found in the halls outside the conference 
>presentation or in some of the better scholarly 
>blogs.
>
>Why is there such a difference between the hard 
>sciences and the humanities? An obvious reason 
>is that science is best done in groups, due to 
>the availability of expensive equipment and the 
>need for collaboration to make elaborate 
>projects work. Second, science is funded largely 
>by grants, which contain within them the need 
>for accountability. The person in charge of the 
>grant will make darn sure that neither time nor 
>money is being wasted, by frequently checking in 
>with those doing the research and writing.
>
>Barton Kunstler, who wrote "The Hothouse Effect: 
>Time Proven Strategies of History's Most 
>Creative Groups," in Futures Research Quarterly, 
>argues that organizations can grow into 
>"creative hothouses," much as Ancient Athens or 
>Renaissance Florence. If humanities departments 
>were to proceed as outlined by Kunstler, they 
>would go beyond counting their peer-reviewed 
>publications, and move into creating lasting 
>legacies and nurturing breakthrough thinking. 
>Kunstler identifies the attributes of 
>organizations likely to spawn such changes, 
>including the following: "workers immerse 
>themselves in others' ideas and work, absorbing 
>creative influences," and "mentor relationships 
>abound." Clearly, it would benefit all the 
>members of such a department, not just the 
>struggling graduate students, to create an 
>atmosphere that "spawns 'geniuses'" and "stands 
>at the center of a wider cultural movement."
>
>How will such changes occur in actual practice? 
>Certainly there is not a need for more 
>departmental meetings. Kunstler suggests that 
>you "reevaluate the basic assumptions and 
>methods of your discipline," and "challenge your 
>most treasured paradigms." Those at the higher 
>levels can begin by modeling the behavior they 
>would like to see in others - proposing informal 
>discussions, sharing work with colleagues, 
>discussing publishing with faculty from other 
>departments, and seeking out a grad student or 
>two to bounce ideas off of. If every professor 
>advising graduate students made it a point to 
>have a substantive conversation with one of his 
>or her ABD's a day, the picture for many grad 
>students would change radically.
>
>I suggest that graduate students begin at the 
>grassroots level. They should suggest weekly 
>meetings to peers, with the only agenda being 
>the discussion of work in progress at an 
>informal level. If they are geographically 
>scattered, they can meet by phone - there are 
>free conference lines available. In my coaching 
>groups there is a high level of closeness and 
>support, even though none of these people have 
>met in person. People should be encouraged to 
>attend with partly formed thoughts, poorly 
>written paragraphs, or just an idea they want to 
>develop. The idea is to think of all such 
>scholarly dialogue as a laboratory. Ideas are 
>cooked up, thrown in the test tube, and mixed 
>with human interaction, creativity and 
>motivation. These experiments will produce 
>better written and less painfully produced 
>dissertations or publications, and might 
>engender a "creative humanities hothouse."
>
>Gina Hiatt is a clinical psychologist and 
>dissertation and tenure coach. She is the 
>founder of Academic Ladder. Her blog is 
>AcademiBlog.
>
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