When advisors don’t advise

Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.

Lennard J. Davis rocks

I was fascinated last week by a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed in which Lennard J. Davis, a professor at the University of Illinois – Chicago, outlined how he mentors his graduate students.

He goes far beyond the obligatory “the job market sucks” speech. When they first become “his” graduate students, he outlines the baseline requirements to even get into the job game and reminds his students how slowly academic publishing moves. He tells students to plan their dissertations and their committees with the job market in mind. He personally walks students through the book displays at conferences and introduces them to editors. He takes their job materials well in hand and helps them shape those applications to their best possibilities.

In short, he believes a significant part of his job as advisor is to explicitly professionalize his students.

This is not usual

While I hope that this kind of explicit professionalization is happening more and more, I have to say, in my experience this kind of support is rare. And there are reasons why it is so rare.

First, many academics, whether they’re aware of it or not, still subscribe to the myths of merit and intellectual purity. In this story, what gets jobs is the best intellectual work, and the best work naturally rises to the top, like some special thinking-flavored cream. In this story, shaping your work to get a job is pandering, because it’s supposed to be the work itself that matters. In this story, the good students will get jobs, regardless of how they’re positioned vis a vis the market.

Under this myth, the job of the advisor is simply to get the best intellectual work out of the student, and that not only keeps everyone in the realm of research and writing, if often leads to work that doesn’t fit nicely into disciplinary categories, further complicating a job search.

Second, few academics were properly mentored themselves. Even those who battled job markets that were, in their day, notable, were rarely given this kind of explicit instruction or support. They muddled along with the hints and the unspoken expectations, trying to figure out how journals ranked, how many pubs they needed, and how to get them.

So many of academia’s rules and procedures are unspoken, assumed, and passed along through a kind of departmental or institutional osmosis that they’re hard to articulate at all – much less pass along to graduate students who might themselves be clinging strongly to the myths of merit and intellectual purity.

In other words, it’s not your fault

It’s not your fault that you couldn’t intuit early enough or quickly enough what the rules were and how to play the game at the highest level.

It’s not your fault that the rules weren’t laid out where you could find them.

It’s not your fault that you didn’t get this kind of explicit advising and mentoring.

It’s not your fault that you landed in the worst academic job market for the liberal arts without the tools you needed to maybe make it work for you.

But it’s not their fault either

While I would argue that it is every graduate advisor’s responsibility to professionalize students and help them learn the game, it’s not surprising that it happens so rarely. So many structures are in place to maintain the intellectually pure status quo that it’s the rare person who can buck so strongly against it.

But the bottom line is that, if you weren’t given this kind of support and mentoring, you were left without some of the key tools you needed to succeed in this profession.

Would it have made a difference? Maybe yes, maybe no. The bottom would still have fallen out of the academic job market. The national economy would still be in the toilet, and states would still be responding by cutting higher ed allocations right and left.

Maybe it would have given you an edge. Maybe that would have been enough.

But when I talk to people who are struggling because they didn’t get a tenure-track job in academia, what I hear is self-blame, when what I see is a set of structures that didn’t much allow for success to begin with.

The state of the job market is not your fault. The quality of the advising you got was not your fault. Even the naivete most of us start off graduate school with isn’t exactly our own faults – it’s part of being young, part of being passionate, part of following the dream.

Sure, there were things we might, in hindsight, have done differently – chosen a different advisor, chosen a different topic, chosen a different school, asked more direct questions, made a different kind of plan. But there’s no guarantee that it would have changed the outcome. And there’s nothing to say things couldn’t have turned out differently even with the choices you made.

All of which is to say this

Try not to beat yourself up too much, wherever you are in the process.

Yes, if you haven’t gotten that tenure-track job, it’s disappointing. It’s horribly disappointing. But let it stay disappointing. Don’t beat yourself up over things you only had a little bit of control over. That turns disappointment into self-loathing. Disappointment we can recover from. Self-loathing is much harder.

If you got in to graduate school, you’re by definition smart and capable and interested. Whatever has happened since you got that acceptance letter, all of those things are still true.