question about grad student publishing

“would also be interested to hear you or braver reflect on the role of publishing in the graduate student process. It’s my understanding that a generation or two ago, there wasn’t an expectation for phd students to publish much, if at all. But now, with the way the job market is turning, it seems as if one not only needs to write a good phd, publish articles/chapters, and even short books if possible, as well as editing projects and speaking at as many conferences as possible. Sometimes it’s a bit overwhelming. any thoughts would likely be helpful to those of us currently in the ‘thick of it’.”

If the question is about whether it’s necessary to get a job, it certainly doesn’t hurt. But if I were in charge of a hiring process, I wouldn’t necessarily choose a new Ph.D. with a few articles over an equivalent student with none. There is reason to be suspicious of the staying power of premature publications, and I’d be more interested in trying to guess what someone is going to do over the next 10 years than what they’ve done in the last 2 or 3.

If you finish your Ph.D. with even one publication, then you’re ahead of where I was. I did quite a number of conference papers in graduate school, but no publications. At the time I was afflicted with the idea that my work was too strange and journal referees wouldn’t like it.

So, at the time I arrived in Cairo in Fall 2000, I had literally zero publications to my name, other than 140+ sports articles. True, my translation of Cristina Lafont’s Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure was in press with Cambridge at the time, but it wasn’t quite out yet at the time I arrived for this job.

Tool-Being was finally accepted by Open Court a couple of months into my first semester in Cairo, though it wasn’t actually printed until August 2002. And that was, in fact, my first-ever academic publication of original work, anywhere, ever. And I was, what?… 34 years old. There was a long paper trail behind me at that point (see the unpublished papers at Speculative Heresy), but it did take me quite awhile to become comfortable with the publication process.

the UK angle

Here’s a suggestion from a grad student in the UK that it’s a bit different there:

“1) At least in the UK, there seems to be an expectation that if you complete a ‘good’ dissertation, it damn well better be publishable. I’m not sure if I think this is fair, but I think the idea is if you spend 3-4 years working on the one thing (which is silly, because clearly over those years you’re working on chapters, reading other things, writing papers on various topics, etc) it should be a ready to print book.

2) Another UK difference is the adviser relationship. From my experience I’ve seen two types of advisers out here: the hyper involved adviser, who functions more like a personal tutor/teaching; and the nonchalant barley around adviser who the student sees 5-8 times in the course of a calender year, and when they do meet, merely wants to make minor corrections, ask really broad questions, and suggest a few books to read. One affect of this seems to be that a bad adviser relationship (and here, we often seem to pick our advisers on area of interests, as its hard to gauge what sort of adviser they are ahead of time) can lead to a really demoralized phd student who feels constantly insecure. I’ve dealt with this to a lesser extent and it’s not fun.”

sorry

Just noticed that there are *145* e-mails in the inbox awaiting a response (some of them reaching back to April). If you’re one of the victims of that, I can only ask your forgiveness.

And this is one area where I’ve become less productive than before. I always swore by Freud’s maxim that letters need responses within 48 hours. (I even followed that maxim during the long-gone paper letter days.)

Now, as my busyness has increased, e-mail has been the big loser.

Braver weighs in on dissertations

Lee Braver, author of the excellent A Thing of This World, also weighs in:

“I’d add one more thing to your discussion of getting the damn thing published (not waiting & tinkering for years).

In general, tougher, more demanding prof’s are extremely valuable–they push us to be better. But when it comes to the dissertation, some prof’s take this too far. So much of what one learns comes from the process, regardless, within reasonable parameters, of the quality of the end product. Very, very few dissertations ought to be published so making that your goal can easily lead to destructive perfectionism, where the part of the energy-sucking critic is played by one of your own mental voices.

Regardless of effort or will-power, I simply could not have written a worthwhile book at that point in my life; I wasn’t able to. I hadn’t read enough, or taught enough, or thought enough, or possibly lived enough to produce something I could ask others to sink time into. I needed years more of reading, thinking, and teaching–a long period of slow digestion, like a snake–to have ideas worth reading.

I started on mine about a year after a friend of mine who had a very tough chair; I finished 3 years before him (I believe). Now I’m sure his was better, but so what? I was able to begin my professional career which itself enabled me to write a worthwhile book.

This is another aspect to your motto, the more you write, the more you write. Writing, as I believe you’ve said repeatedly, is part of the process of thinking, not just the recording of its conclusions. Sartre quoted someone saying, ‘how do I know what I think until I see what I’ve said?’ The more practice you get at articulating yourself, the easier it comes, and teaching is extremely good practice in articulating what you think in comprehensible, interesting ways.

So one factor in choosing a Diss Chair (I’m really glad you’re putting out an advice book) is, counter-intuitively, not picking a hard-ass. Or, to put it a bit better, someone who appreciates the role a dissertation has in one’s career as a whole. When we teach, we always have to keep in mind just how differently a student takes in the ideas from how we do. The same should apply to Diss Chairs–their students aren’t writing books like theirs; an entirely different set of criterion should be used, and one that’s less rigorous.”

He’s absolutely right that it’s great to take a seminar from a hardass, but not great to have one as your advisor. The dissertation is meant merely to show that you are capable of respectable, un-embarrassing scholarly duties.

My own strategy was a bit different from Lee’s… Namely, I deliberately viewed my dissertation (Tool-Being) as a book all along. I needed that mindset as a sort of comfort that allowed me to look ahead to a post-grad school existence. But this was particular to my situation. (I also don’t blame this on my graduate program, which is still a good one, and filled with mostly benevolent people. I simply wasn’t a very good fit either with the grad student role in general, or with the main currents that then dominated in American continental philosophy. The state of things in 2009 is much more congenial to my interests than was the state of things in, say, 1993.)

So, I think you can do it either way– finish off the disseration as a licensing exam and save your real work for a few years later, or use it as a personal vehicle and counter-environment for whatever makes you uncomfortable about the graduate school experience. I did benefit from the fact that DePaul was a fairly “hands off” program that had no comprehensive exams and (at least in my case) quite minimal advisor intervention. It was like a good, long independent study in some ways, and I’m happy with the results even if there were discomforts at the time.

But I would agree completely with Lee that a hardass advisor is not what you want. I’d also distinguish further between:

(a) a good, genuine, psychologically clean and simple hardass. We had Stephen Houlgate at DePaul before he went to Warwick, and he fits under this category. He can be very tough, and very dismissive of sloppy work, but he doesn’t have a manipulative bone in his body. He’s someone who can be trusted, and my good friend Paul seemed to enjoy working with Houlgate.

(b) the psychologically destructive hardass. We all know the type; no need to court further battles on this blog by naming names. These are the insidious confidence-sappers, and I feel fortunate that my radar was sensitive enough to this type that I never got too close to any. But I’ve seen potentially good students turn into insecure sycophants in the course of just a couple of years by making the wrong choice on this point.

and, to repeat a maxim…

I’ve said it here before, but it bears repeating.

Our careers are made by people older than we are; our reputations are made by people younger than we are.

It is possible to have both a good career and a good lasting reputation, but these two need not go together, and often do not. And in fact, I think most people who are successful at some stage generally fall into one of two types: those who please their elders, and those who please their youngers.

The first category are the star students referred to in the letter below. The second category are more of the “late bloomer” variety, because at least in the humanities you have to ripen a bit to do work of lasting significance to others. (Again, the dynamics are a bit different in the physical sciences and especially in mathematics… I’ve been told by a mathematician that you’re supposed to do your best mathematical work in your 20’s.)

I recall once seeing a reference letter for a graduate student whom I happened to know personally– great guy, very talented, but never really got his act together, and now I have no idea where he is (certainly not in the profession). The referee, a professor I also knew well, gushed about how this particular student was the best student he had ever seen.

But, when it came to spelling out the details of why he was the best student ever, the main point seemed to be that this student was good at taking criticism. That’s certainly a virtue, but it’s just one virtue among many, and far from the most important of them (intellectual history is replete with hyper-sensitive geniuses who couldn’t take criticism, but whose work was vitally important nonetheless).

Essentially, the professor was saying that this student was a very gratifying student to work with. And that was surely true, and is also surely a virtue. But being a gratifying student for a professor to work with is not, I submit, one of the necessary building blocks of a later successful intellectual career.

a grad student weighs in

These remarks just came in from a very insightful graduate student I know in the USA. As I said in last night’s post, it is usually grad students who are the harshest (but often the most insightful) about how other grad students do business.

Over time, you need that inner fire to do really first-rate work, and it’s that same inner fire that can make it harder to flourish within the confines of a graduate program. And this is why I cut people lots of slack up to a certain age. In other words, I’m perfectly happy to recognize the innate brilliance of a 25-year-old screw-up who can’t ever put work in tangible form, but tolerance decreases as time goes by, because the understandable alibis for someone in his/her 20’s cease meaning very much at a certain vaguely-defined point that comes absolutely no later than age 40, and probably a bit sooner. (And again, I am speaking specifically of graduate students in the humanities. The timetable is accelerated in the sciences, and of course this is painfully obvious in fields such as chess, sports, and modeling.)

The very end of the first paragraph strikes me as especially accurate. There’s no harm in graduate programs weeding people out according to precisely the criteria mentioned there. Just don’t take your teachers’ views of you too seriously, because they’re really pretty much at sea when trying to guess what’s inside of you. I make constant misjudgments about which of my students will do best in post-student life, and the ways in which they are likely to succeed or fail. Lots of surprises always erupt.

“…just wanted to say that your last blog is about the most spot-on post I’ve read about grad school in general. The longer I’m in college, the more I think it’s virtually impossible to gauge potential based on ‘homework’ alone. Having just finally finished prelims, I can say with some certainty that much of what goes into the coursework period of graduate school–such as worthless politics, constantly writing papers for an exclusive audience of one professor, personal motivation problems, meeting semi-standardized expectations–tends to serve as a distribution mechanism constituted for weeding out students that that 1) won’t represent the department’s legacy, or 2) can’t manage the day-to-day responsibilities of teaching and writing.

The impulse to produce research legacies, while understandable, conceals what really goes on among graduate students; namely, that students rush to finish things at the last second 90% of the time merely to please a professor. The result is that most grad students become experts at putting slight spins on otherwise regurgitated ideas from seminars and don’t question the viability of their own work.

Most ‘future stars’ figure out how to flatter a professor before they’ve completed a Master’s degree and are thus deemed precocious. It’s a real bureaucratic talent in a way, indeed almost an astuteness that manages to consolidate the significance of a professors work—–to that professor. But often those same students enter the field and at best produce line-holding work for a few years until they get tenure, join a few journal boards, and stagnate both intellectually and in their teaching portfolio. Or, more often, have trouble finishing their dissertation once they’re left on their own, and either fade away or are pushed through by a supervisor.

Really talented students seem to actually increase in motivation in their late 20s to early 30s when they’re finally free to produce independent work for critical reception in a scholarly community. The petty bureaucrats that populate 70-80% of grad student populations may climb a few ladders, but are a generally uninspired group, and their departmental standing is not indicative at all of potential contributions. How even the best professors miss this dynamic is beyond me, but it may have to do with a combination of falsely inflated egos and the overwhelming responsibilities they face to cultivate, sit on boards, produce, etc. It’s easier to reward work that’s familiar than be challenged by a student who’s still in coursework.”

the market is obvious

The number of hits on the recent advice posts have been skyrocketing throughout the day. There is a definite market for advice by formerly Angst-ridden grad students to current ones. The market is not being addressed efficiently enough, and that’s why a book deal is being pitched along these lines (not originally my idea, but one in which I am happy to participate).

Grundlegung’s own words

I don’t disagree with any of this. And besides, anyone who can come up with phrases like “pedantry of emphasis” and “pedantry of discernment” has free access to my couch and refrigerator for a long time to come.

“Thanks for the comments. Just a quick response on the Pippin example…

The lesson was not meant to be that being externalized is a condition of something being real — that would just be a version of behaviourism. The struggling poet consoles themselves with the thought that the genuine poem remains in their mind, where it does not matter too much that the written version does not capture it. But the response was not meant to just reverse the relationship between the internal and the external. That is, it is not that the genuine poem is what gets written and that anything which goes unexpressed can be pretty much discarded.

Instead, the point was that in expressive activities– where we have thoughts and feelings that need to be developed in a communicable form — there is a constant back-and-forth between what we actually make explicit and what we leave unarticulated. Neither has priority, such that there is usually a kind of equipoise between the inner and outer. It is hard to make sense of someone even having a truly rich ‘inner life’ when there is no discernible impact upon how they conduct themselves; and conversely, great deeds do not just bubble up spontaneously, as if from nowhere (even if the phenomenology sometimes fits this pattern). This is perfectly compatible with the idea that someone has the skills of a great poet, say, even though they haven’t written any great poems.

The practical upshot of all this is that you won’t have the requisite cognitive and emotional resources to draw on if you don’t set about acting upon your projects and intentions, getting them out in the world, and then responding to the way you’ve carried them out and the way others have responded to them too. You’ve got to cultivate a network that both allows you to express your ideas and then reassimilate them after they’ve taken on a life beyond your head. It was this general pattern of the relationship between intentions and actions — rather than the thought that the external is real — which I was trying to express.”

quarantined student video

Three quarantined students speak with a newspaper by telephone. (The sound isn’t the greatest on this video, actually. But you can pick up some of it, and there’s great video footage of the new AUC campus. Incidentally, none of us are allowed to go to the campus right now, except for essential personnel.)

Grundlegung writes

In response to my recent citation of his Brandom remarks, he has the following to say about the writing advice post:

“What you say about the need to externalize reminded me of a helpful example from a paper that I heard Robert Pippin give on Hegel last year in which he was trying to motivate a way of looking at the relationship between the internal and external. The example was this: a struggling poet might think that they have a great work inside them — their minds are full of grand schemes and profound feelings of pathos, joy, melancholy, or whatever. But the poem they write may fall flat, even to their own ears. Then, it can be tempting to think that the written work is a poor expression of the great poem inside them. But, of course, the writtten poem is actually a good expression of the poor poet inside them. I think there is good lesson here for most activities where articulating oneself has an important role.”

It’s an amusing case. But where I differ from some people on this is that I do not believe that “writers are nothing more than what they have written,” just as I do not believe in the ethical code that someone’s ethical value is determined solely by their actions. (More on the ethical point some other time.)

That would be more of a Latourian point: no one’s a writer unless they have written something, there’s nothing more to things than their public effects on other things, etc.

No, I think things can be quite real even if they affect nothing, that there are people who are actually great writers (and not just potentially great) even if they’ve written nothing so far, and so forth. For me it’s more of a practical point– namely, it doesn’t matter if you’re a really good philosopher who has done no philosophy.

Nonetheless, I think there is great methodological value to the point cited from Pippin above. I don’t believe that we are only real insofar as we externalized. (Because then there would be no difference between a blocked fine poet and an utter non-poet not even trying, which is absurd.) But I do tend to believe there’s not much value in non-externalized talents– at least at a certain age.

That age differs by profession, of course. In academic humanities disciplines, I tend to cut people total slack in their 20’s. I don’t care if one 28-year-old looks like a depressive slacker and another is saluted by his/her professors as the best in the history of the program. That’s still an early enough stage that it can completely flip around… The depressive slacker might just be sorting out a few personal issues and will become explosively productive and interesting once one or two small problems are handled. And the star student, while executing homework assignments flawlessly, may well be motivated by career prospects or teacher-pleasing instincts, and as those fade over the next decade then so too will the quality of their work. It’s simply too early to tell at that age. (Though again, I always find that the students have a better sense of this than the professors do. As a professor it’s far too easy to be pleased and impressed by excellent homework assignments, and far too easy to write off screw-up people earlier than they deserve.)

And that’s why I wouldn’t want to tell a bunch of graduate students “you’re nothing more than what you’ve done,” because some of the most promising ones haven’t done a damn thing at that age, and it would just cause them sadness to tell them they are nothing yet, and moreover it’s not even true. What I would say instead is this: “you’re obviously a lot more than what you’ve done, so why not externalize it?”