an objection from a reader

A reader sends an interesting objection to the part of my earlier advice post that recommended listening to all the gossip of your fellow older graduate students. Namely:

“Just wanted to respond to your recent ‘advice’ post on your blog, which I read avidly. I must take issue with your suggestion that listening to other grad students when it comes to professorial associations is a good idea. In my experience, grad student advice often consists of trickle-down versions of professor squabbles, or petty jealousies, or campaigns of strategic dis/mis-information. Those graduate students dispensing advice/information are often unaware that they are spreading these agendas. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t really trust anyone, but I don’t like to think of it so negatively. Keep your eyes and mind open seems to be the best strategy. Relying on others’ opinions is dangerous especially in academia’s snake-pit environment! As a woman I feel this to be especially the case. It’s a relatively small quibble. More importantly, I wanted to say that I have benefited quite a bit from reading your writing posts and greatly enjoy your work.”

The point is certainly well-taken. I was probably overgeneralizing from my own experience… The two graduate programs where I studied had one or more nasty characters who made life extremely difficult for many of their students. I was warned about these professors quite early by several streetwise and cynical older graduate students who did, in my opinion, completely hit the bull’s eye about those particular people, and I was lucky to have listened to the advice and largely avoided them.

However, that does not preclude that there might not be abundant malice and disinformation in some of the things you hear. So maybe a good corrective to my earlier remarks is to make sure you’re hearing the same things consistently from several sources. But I thought I should post this reader’s corrective remarks to cover situations of possible slander. (In my own experience the “slanderous” remarks turned out to be true, but that need not always be the case.)

The broader point I was trying to make was this… If you are hearing from older graduate students that certain professors have had debilitating effects on the morale and self-confidence of their past students, then please don’t think that you are special and things will go differently in your case. Most likely, they will not. I still think your best bet is to choose an advisor you really respect and admire as a person, even if this requires changing your preferred topic slightly.

[ADDENDUM: I should add that I did hear two plainly slanderous remarks about a professor in one of my programs, but both of those remarks came from other professors, not from students! My experience has been that students have a certain basic respect for the authority of their professors that generally stops short of all-out character assassination, but that professors locked in professional death struggles with one another will often stop short of nothing. Much of the power of the reader’s objection is that students might become the unwitting pawns of these death struggles without realizing it.]