I woke up this morning with the answer: the reason I so resent people insisting that research and writing are so hard is that they are bent upon converting creative and intellectual work into drudgery. There are already enough truly tedious tasks in the world and in our jobs, and enough tedious aspects to manuscript preparation, that this demand for further suppression of all excitement and pleasure is entirely uncalled for; it cannot be tolerated.
Then this afternoon a former student and her friend came to my office hour. They were undergraduates with us, and have now started a graduate program; they are disgusted precisely because they have undergone six weeks of training in the ideology of difficulty. It is not actually difficult, they said; they are teaching 1-1 and beginning graduate courses are utterly manageable if you were a crack undergraduate and wrote an award winning honors thesis just a year or two ago. Why were they being bombarded with the idea that everything is so difficult? they asked. How they resented having their fun ruined, they said; how could they resist this onslaught? they wanted to know.
I said their questions were precisely my own, and that I did not understand this phenomenon or support it, but I knew it was real and had ruined the experience of many. How many hours were they working in all each week? I asked. Forty, they said; they were handling everything in forty hours with no problems. Good, I said. I am raising the bar to 55 and you must not let anyone invade the existing 40 or the new 15 with discussions of suffering and drudgery.
For the extra 15 hours I suggested a series of activities: travel to nearby universities, attend conferences and symposia, hobnob with other graduate students and professors; get to know all the libraries and archives in Louisiana and Texas; inundate themselves with film and art exhibits related to their degree programs; attack the MA reading list ahead of time; do preliminary research in various subfields just for purposes of discovering interests; read intellectually oriented newspapers and the New York Review of Books; think seriously about life plans and career desires, and inform themselves about the variety of paths for which they might consider preparing.
They went away quite satisfied. They said they guessed that a reason for the cant about difficulty was that the professors were trying to convince the more wayward students that this was serious. They also said they thought the “culture of freakout” was perpetrated even more by the other students than by the professors. You may criticize me for not pulling wool over their eyes, but you cannot say that I am not a brilliant adviser or that this was not in fact a good teaching moment.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Ecco, October 4,
N. Ed.: I wish you’d expand on the relation of this to the post! –Z
Dear Z,
Sorry for not responding sooner. I was out of town. The relation is more with the apparent interest on education and the multicultural beautiful flair of your blog.
October 4 is the day dedicated to Francis of Assisi and Francis, Francisco, Françoise, Francesca etc used to be popular names in the American continent as well and Europe. Yesterday, as I woke up from my usual dreamy short night, I thought of Francisco de Asís and the movie from Franco Zeffirelli “Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna” opened up my day. And I wanted to share the day with you and participants in your blog.
I love Zeffirelli’s movie for his extraordinary sensibility to capture and express the originality of the human experience. Francisco de Asís, the son of a prominent wealthy man, educado entre algodones de lujo y riqueza, was able to feel in his own flesh the ravages effected by poverty, ignorance and oppression. Neither his genes, nor his environmental upbringing would have anticipated such a striking reading on the gross reality. How to explain it?. A sudden burst of timeless leadership? I don’t know but it happened !. As it happened with Paulo Freire who envisioned the roots, branches and effects of “una educación liberadora”.
Perhaps is the contemplative attitude of every human singularity in harmony with the entire universe that, from time to time, resonates in timeless leaders and, from there on, nothing would be the same.
Sensibility, timeless leadership, transformative commitment….. some fundamentals sustaining and nurturing ageless, revolutionary literacy.
Hazme instrumento de tu paz.
Bonjour Z.
St Francis’ day! Excellent, he’s a good saint. I hadn’t thought of the film for a long time, but I did see it in a theatre when it was new. Somehow it seems more ethereal now.
“You may criticize me for not pulling wool over their eyes”
Are you kidding me? That was brill! I wish I had someone like you in my line of work. I’m thinking very seriously of going back and doing my PhD from scratch again, and I could use an adviser as wonderful as you. Could you find me Z v.02, only in Economics? 🙂
What an excellent response, and what a brilliant advisor. I think the students are right about professors trying to convince students to take their work seriously (perhaps they should encourage them to find the joy in it, but seriousness and joy are not antithetical), and about other students “freaking out.” I also think that a lot of the “hard” comments from other students, when not from those who actually are underprepared or simply not too bright, is coming from people who have time management problems. That is, they have not learned to say “I have 2 hours a day for five weeks, that’s 5x5x2 or 50 hours, and I need to do this, this and this.” They’ve got used to throwing together papers in binges at the last minute, and they don’t know how to work properly, and so it is hard both to learn to work and to learn new material. I have to admit I was such a student. That is, I did do a lot of reading and preparation simply because I loved it, and that made it possible to write good papers under a deadline, but it took me a long time to learn to manage time sensibly and really I am still struggling with how to do that well. But I am clear, at least, that my problem is one of time (and physical energy) and not the work itself, which I love, as I love writing. I find it hard to juggle the demands of teaching with those of scholarship and service, and with my home life and what I have to do to be healthy, but the work itself is easy and fun, not drudgery.
And I wish I could go back to grad school, knowing what I know now, and do it over. I did well as it was, but I could do brilliantly now.
Women, especially, must resist the invitation to turn into worker drones.
A very key point.
Wow…I can’t believe that they complained! Are you kidding me!?
I have to say that I like your suggestions for doing more.
My students or the others? I totally believe both. Most academics I know go on and on about how they are suffering … it’s part of what you must do in our culture to prove you are smart. I think that is ridiculous and destructive, and I totally see why these students don’t like it.
What about student who seems to be trying but doesn’t have “it.” Without “it,” tremendous effort is required, and even then might not be sufficient.
Terminal MA for those people. But I think a lot of the advice to professors assumes they are this kind of terminal MA student.
I’ve done the tenure track twice since I didn’t make it the first time, and I am not at an institution with a PhD program in field for me. Faculty in departments with PhD programs treat faculty in departments without them as though they were that kind of MA student. I was always treated that way as an assistant professor, and my dissertation director did it too because I was still blondish then and she had serious issues about that.
In most places I’ve been Spanish faculty are also not considered as intelligent as English / French / German because of race, and on, and on, so we get infantilized more, condescended to more, and so on.
I am 100% convinced that most publicly given academic advice is invented to get people through who should be cut, and simultaneously to destabilize people who are totally capable but not in the demographic who is supposed to be. It’s created to help cover for incompetence and at the same time project it.
I’ve been in departments where Europeans (Spanish, Germans) did not think us Americans were very smart too. I know Americans who get that in Spain too, when they go over there to do research. People in the French dept at Kansas would never condescend to us, because we are a much superior department.
Your advisor sounds awful. I don’t know her but I know people who do.
At least your French department has some grace, then.
Advisor, in her defense – other people are as destructive but don’t get called on it as she has been. But yes, she’s destructive. In the blog though, I la culpo as a composite because there are other people I can’t talk about yet.
Thinking Americans are less intelligent, yes. This is something I escape from since I am not usually taken for American and so it becomes something I’m not wounded by, am sort of immune to and can make fun of. But it’s a really real phenom and I wonder how it feels to people that it gets to.