Jan. 24, 2006

Collegiality and Graduate School Training

By Donald E. Hall

In parts one and two of this series, I described what I perceive as a still profound need in graduate school training — mentoring in collegiality — and then how we might embrace such work in our graduate classrooms. In this concluding section, I turn to two other venues where a discussion of the skills of supple conversation and supportive relationships with one’s peers might be integrated into our professionalization of potential new colleagues.

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In research and dissertation projects:

Even if students’ capstone projects and most of their other research that leads to publication or presentation remains solely conducted and authored, we can still impress upon them how such work is always done in dialogic fashion. In every field of research, one’s own findings must engage with previous research and assertions. I stress to students always that they are, through their work, entering a conversation with their predecessors and their peers. They must understand and acknowledge previous contributions to the conversation, its norms and points of disagreement, and then they must prove themselves to be responsible and credible contributors to the ongoing dialogue.

Conceptualizing their contributions in this way means that they can avoid the trap of thinking that they must provide the “last word” or definitive statement on a topic or research question. I remind them often that the conversation that they are entering will continue long after they have contributed to it, hopefully with a generous acknowledgement of their contribution, but in ways over which they have no control. As I stressed in The Academic Self, it is not useful to obsess over the response or acclaim that we hope to receive for a given project or piece of writing. For graduate students too, it is best to focus on the responsible and skillful completion of the project itself, and the joys that can be derived from pursuing it. Its impact or reception will always be chancy.

Yet certainly many students do want to publish and disseminate their contributions to a wider audience, to participate in conversations beyond those of their classes or home departments. It is also useful to emphasize that dissemination itself is part of a conversational process. Scholars are always writing or speaking to an audience whose needs must be understood and met. They are also engaged in exchanges with conference organizers, editors, and publishers, the success of which can lead to opportunities to disseminate or that can lead to rejection.

In this way, all successful research and writing has to involve a de-centering of the author from the position of sole authority. She or he must listen carefully as well as express skillfully. And I stress to students that if they do not learn first how to listen carefully to feedback from faculty and from their peers, then they are certainly doomed when they have to work with readers’ reports and other responses inherent to the dissemination and publication process. In every graduate class I teach, I remind them of this conversational dynamic as they work on their final projects. It infuses every aspect of a successful research life — from the conceptualization of a project through writing to an imagined or known group of readers to the mechanics of working with editors and a production team.

In the professionalization of graduate students:

This emphasis on conversational skills and commitments allows us then to fine tune also our definition of what “professionalization” actually means. Certainly in the venues above — the classroom and in research mentorship — we work to make our students more aware of the norms and best practices of academic professional life. But the graduate programs that are most concerned with meeting their students’ needs attend also to that professionalization process by offering seminars, roundtables, workshops, and other activities to students intent on or just thinking about pursuing an academic career. In all of these it is important to note that aspiring academics are not only entering the conversation represented by their research fields, but also the conversation of a dynamic and multi-faceted profession.

This does mean encouraging literal conversations among graduate students and recent graduates who have taken a wide variety of positions — from high profile academic, to teaching centered, to those in the publishing industry and a wide variety of non-academic fields. I started this essay by noting that when I was a graduate student I had never heard from or about individuals who had taken jobs like the one I eventually took. Certainly I could have sought out those individuals on my own (though I didn’t know them personally, since they were not part of my cohort group), but it is also true that those individuals were not generally recognized as ones to emulate.

One hopes, given the terrible prospects that most new Ph.D.’s face today as they enter the academic job market, that such snobbishness has waned. However, I still would not go so far as to say that we should tell students that “any job” is better than “no job” or that they should simply “take what they can get.” Some individuals would be terribly mismatched with certain positions — weak teachers who live for research should not take positions at teaching universities unless they are willing to re-prioritize and devote their energies to improving their pedagogies. Similarly, I have known superb teachers with poor research habits and skills who have taken wholly inappropriate positions at prestigious universities and then lost those jobs for low research productivity during third year or tenure reviews (unfortunately, they sometimes got their jobs in the first place because they were able to — and were counseled to — market themselves within certain highly sought-after identity political fields but with no recognition of their own individual needs or abilities). A discussion of who will be happy and will succeed where must be part of any broad conversation on the academic profession, whether that conversation takes place in seminars, workshops, or with groups of students about to “go on the market.”

Indeed, it is vital to invite students into conversation on these matters as often and as early as possible. At the beginning of every meeting of every graduate class I teach, I ask if there are any questions on the minds of the students regarding their program, general professional issues or processes, or the often unexplained norms of academic life. Even if students are sometimes too shy to ask what they really want to know in class, their recognition of my willingness to address such issues means they often show up during office hours to ask what they consider an embarrassing question (“how much do assistant professors typically make?” or “what do you say in a cover letter when you send out an article for consideration?”). We have to let students know that we are willing to share information with them in an honest and practical manner. We should be “open texts” for them to read and learn from in their own processes of professional interpretation and skill-building.

I believe it would be useful to build some of the expectations above into the desired outcomes of our graduate programs. In fact, I haven’t heard of any programs that articulate specific goals for professionalization processes, but I think we should be asking what specifically we wish the end product to be of those seminars, workshops, and other conversations about academic life. I would offer that an overarching goal might be to help our students become more supple and skilled participants in the wide variety of conversations that comprise an academic career. By necessity, acquiring this conversational skill means learning the value of being both multi-voiced and open to the perspectives of others.

This bears some explanation. By multi-voiced I am not implying that students should learn to be Machiavellian or duplicitous. Rather, I mean that all of us who are thriving in our careers have learned to speak within a wide variety of contexts and to choose our language carefully depending upon the venue. I would never speak in class as I do in some of my more theoretically dense writings. I would never speak to administrators from other departments as I do to those in my home department who use the same terms and points of reference. And finally I would never speak to the public exactly as I would to a scholarly audience at a conference. Being multi-voiced in this way means being aware of your conversation partners’ needs and placing their need to understand above your own desire to express yourself in intellectually self-serving ways.

And this is, in fact, an important component of being open to the perspectives of others. Yet that openness also means allowing one’s own beliefs, values, and opinions to be challenged and transformed by contact with those of conversation partners. This does not mean being unwilling to defend one’s beliefs (whether on matters of social justice or minute points of interpretation), but it does mean being able to position oneself at least partially outside of oneself in the process of conversational exchange. It certainly means working to understand how the general public perceives the academy (and the debate over tenure, for example). It means trying to see the world through the eyes of a different generation of professors who may not use the same methodologies or theoretical touchstones in their work. It means seeing one’s own sacredly held positions as ones that exist in a landscape of positions, many of which are also sacredly held.

And this is perhaps the most important point that I would like to make here (in response to some of the critics of previous installments of this essay): I hold as my highest values a wide and rich diversity of opinions within institutions and a dynamic in which those opinions are exchanged in a vigorous, supple dialogue (and in which listening carefully is always as important as expressing effectively). Indeed, for those beliefs that we do return to with renewed commitment after that process of conversational exchange, we are often even better able to explain and defend them in subsequent conversations. This is true in our interactions with the public, with colleagues in committees, and with administrators over matters of budget, personnel reviews, or programmatic design.

This is a hermeneutic move, and indeed, one indicator of “success” in our graduate programs is the extent to which our students understand their professional lives as a series of such hermeneutic moves. Through the professional conversations that they enter, they are able to reflect upon their standpoint epistemologies and adjust their performances in a variety of roles and venues. As teachers in training, they enter conversations with peers and with students that afford opportunities to hone their pedagogies. As researchers in training, they receive feedback from classmates, faculty, audience members at conferences, and reviewers at journals and presses that provide external perspectives on otherwise solipsistically generated articulations. Indeed, only by listening carefully to and changing (sometimes significantly and sometimes incrementally) by way of those external points of reference are researchers able to fine tune even their most revolutionary and iconoclastic ideas. And finally, this dynamic is especially important when dealing with the larger public in ways that I will explore in my forthcoming book.

We in the academy work in one of the very few professions where we have complete control over the training of our own future colleagues. Law firms hire from law schools; engineering firms from engineering schools; high schools hire from university programs in education. However, we at universities hire from among those whom we collectively train. That gives us more control over the skills and attitudes of our future hires than practically any other field and more responsibility for changing what we do not like or what we perceive as failings. If we want our programs to produce a different type of professional, we do not have to convince any external body or group to take action — we only have to convince ourselves and our university colleagues that change is desirable.

The question then remains, what type of colleague do you want, and how is any program with which you have influence meeting the needs of its students and our collective future through their professionalization? We should all think of ourselves as agents of change in this arena. However, if we are tenured, especially, we have the responsibility to raise difficult topics and initiate conversations that may threaten some faculty (especially those invested, for whatever reason, in the status quo). Indeed, that risk-taking, in research, teaching, and here, service, is the only justification for the job security that tenure represents. The professional qualities that we would like new Ph.D.’s to exhibit is clearly a difficult topic to discuss carefully and sensitively. Predictably enough, a discussion of collegiality seems to test collegiality like no other issue. Ever the optimist, I believe that we can meet that challenge. So I invite my readers here to offer their own lists of qualities for new colleagues and discuss how those might be linked to our seminars, workshops, and other venues for the professionalization of aspiring academic community members.

While the stereotype of the shy and fumbling professor has elicited laughs on television and in films for many years, in reality, ours is a more social and performance-based career than just about any other, outside of politics and trial law. While gregariousness is hardly a job requisite, responsible and effective communication skills are. Beyond our individual successes as researchers and teachers, our supple and smart participation in a variety of overlapping and discrete conversations will determine our collective fate as a profession and the health and stability of our individual departments and institutions. We must face that fact and train our newest colleagues in the skills necessary to meet those challenges.

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