I have seen reference made to the perils that afflict so many graduate students: anxiety, self-doubt, fear, paralysis, and shame.
I have suffered from these things only since becoming a professor, and it has been due to harassment — and also, I see darkly, due to having ministered too kindly to people suffering from the feelings listed above.
The question: do you think it is harassment that causes graduate students experience these feelings? If not, what are the causes?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I don’t think it’s harassment (although I don’t have the password for BSG’s post, so I don’t know the situation she wrote about). I think it’s that as graduate students we’ve been taught to think critically about ourselves as well as about what we’re reading, and that we’re also taught to be highly competitive. Better to think badly of ourselves before someone else does it, we think. It may be a feature of the system.
Hm, I didn’t realize that post was passworded, perhaps I should delink if it is I who have made the BSG feel overexposed!
Anyway, that’s illuminating. Sometimes I suspect I may really be from another planet (a pre-Columbian stela, for instance). I was told recently that graduate school was very competitive — by someone from my own program — and I don’t remember that at all, I remember it as communal and cooperative except for the activities of a few individuals. This could mean that I was already so used to competition that I didn’t notice a change in the air, or that it was possible to ignore the competitiveness and still survive.
More interestingly, I deduce from your elucidation that in our culture critical thinking means paralyzing levels of self-doubt, fear, anxiety, and shame. Why do these things have to go together, I wonder? Why does it sometimes seem that the system actually values self-doubt, fear, anxiety, and shame OVER critical thinking?
I think Undine is on the right track.
I think it’s related to the fact that we are surrounded by and bombarded with the myth that academia is a meritocracy, combined with the reality that it really isn’t. That’s pretty paralyzing! And scary.
In my first year of graduate school I have felt anxious and afraid a lot. I think some of this is a holdover from the year before, the year I spent applying to graduate school, when I was constantly anxious and afraid that I would be judged and found wanting. I carried that fear with me here. I’m thinking it’s time to let go of it, but that is not as easy as it sounds.
OK: It’s supposed to be a meritocracy but isn’t, and you might be judged and found wanting — I guess I had that figured out before starting college, and I guess I was lucky.
Thinking critically about ourselves and what we were reading (as Undine says) and being competitive … well the thinking critically part, I’d also gotten much earlier on and I don’t believe you don’t get in college, and the being competitive, I didn’t learn or perceive myself to be being taught – ever.
Am I from some other, weird planet?
I see. I’ve been differently traumatized and traumatized much later. I know what you mean about letting go of fears one has acquired for what was in fact good reason.
When I got traumatized by academia was when I discovered that it was all even more arbitrary than I had allowed for. So I guess that means my trauma and yours are actually the same.
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A lot of people seem to think of evaluation as judging and to internalize the results. This seems to be one of the (Christian?) features of our culture that I missed. I never cared if I was found wanting, but only whether I passed, because that had concrete consequences.
What paralyzed and paralyzes me is what appears to be the requirement that one internalize authority to a very neurotic degree. It seems to me that many academics think it is more proper to be concerned about status in a metaphysical sense (e.g. “Do they like me?”) than a practical one (e.g. “Am I employed?”). This seems to me like the ultimate in bourgeois privilege, and I do not relate.
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I guess I was protected by my privileged background which gave confidence and also included knowing that academia was not a meritocracy and that one didn’t have to internalize that myth. I also knew that women and minorities had to be twice as good and would only get half as much. I was helped by knowing that I could be twice as good. The meritocracy myth in the way I understood it HAS in fact been true in my experience: you have to be twice as good, and you will only get half as much, but if you are in fact twice as good you will not be thrown out of the system.
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I am aware that there are Whitemen in charge who wouldn’t have passed their exams had they been women or minorities, and I am well aware of their power. Yet I am still not able to consider them truly important and this is perhaps why I do not have the same ressentiment I see in others. Perhaps I should.
And I should post on this separately: my advisor in graduate school always used to call me “arrogant” for insisting on skipping easier classes to make room for more challenging ones, and for insisting on making realistic schedules for work. I would always win these arguments by saying it was my T.A. time that was in the balance, I only had a certain amount and had to use it well. I missed what she was really trying to teach me, perhaps, which is that one is supposed to feign insecurity, make a theatre of reverence for power, and so on. I found out later that one HAD to do that. I still do sometimes. I keep finding out, on the one hand, that I don’t do it enough, and on the other, that at this point it isn’t as necessary as I think and is even inappropriate and inconvenient to some people; I should go back to being as I was in graduate school.
AHA, I just wrote an interesting comment and got it eaten.
I think it wasn’t the competition that irritated me, it was the emotional abuse.
This started in late graduate school and goes on into professordom.
I had it all formulated and then the comment disappeared, so this is its placeholder.