Looking back on my graduate education in the humanities, I think my most valuable experiences were not part of the official degree program. And of those experiences, I benefited most from working as a research assistant.
Research assistantships were never advertised in my graduate program, and I am sure many students never figured out how those positions were filled.
I landed my first one in the second semester of my first year when a senior professor who was new to the university asked whether any of us in his seminar would be interested in checking the references in the page proofs of his forthcoming book. The work paid $12 an hour, which was not insignificant for a student trying to survive in a major city on a $1,000-a-month stipend. But mainly, I wanted a chance to cultivate a relationship with a famous professor whose work I admired.
I was the only student who came forward after class. Perhaps others did not regard a research job as a rare and important opportunity. During the six years it took me to complete my doctorate, I gradually raised my fee to $20 an hour plus expenses. I also gained experiences that made it possible for me to explore positions in legal and historical research.
But more important, I got to work closely with several different faculty members on a wide variety of scholarly projects. Over the years, those faculty members recommended me to one another, and nearly all of them have become valued supporters as I have progressed in my academic career.
In many cases, faculty members are closer to their research assistants on a day-to-day basis than to their doctoral students. I know from my own experience as an employer of research assistants that my feelings of loyalty and obligation to them often run more deeply than to students I have merely advised.
Perhaps research assistants, more than advisees, come to replicate their employer’s actual academic practices and personas. Your advisees read your old books, but your research assistants participate in writing your new ones. Advisees often replicate your discarded views while research assistants are involved in the construction of new ones.
I know from personal experience that RA’s can feel a kind of loyalty to an employer that is almost militaristic in its intensity. I would have charged into a World War I machine-gun nest for my first faculty employer.
I was always more dedicated to my research-assistant work than to my graduate seminars. I recognized that I was being given the chance to follow, step by step, the process of doing research and writing a book that was likely to become groundbreaking and influential. By comparison, seminars seemed like remedial training.
I was so grateful for the chance to contribute to faculty books that I sometimes underreported the hours that I worked. If it took me three hours to verify a short quotation, I might report the time as 30 minutes. I regarded the time for which I was not being paid as an investment in my reputation for efficiency. I used to remember the advice of Scotty from Star Trek: “You’ll never get a reputation for being a miracle worker if people really know how long it takes you to do something.”
I used to relish requests from my faculty employers to accomplish the seemingly impossible: I tracked down secondhand references that professors were unable to locate. I recovered books that had been misplaced in the library stacks. I obtained copies of newspaper articles that were thought to have been universally destroyed.
My reach extended outside the university to research assistants at other institutions and to a network of secondhand booksellers (in the days before the Internet). In order to speed up my fact-checking, I assembled an extensive personal-reference library in the fields in which I was doing research. I regarded no research task as too difficult or distasteful. If a professor had asked me to locate a 19th-century graffito scrawled somewhere in the sewers of Paris, perhaps below water level, I would have had it done within 24 hours.
Around the time I started as a research assistant, I was reading George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. His description of working in a French restaurant as a dishwasher -- a plongeur -- probably affected the way I thought of myself as a research assistant. I wanted to be an academic version of the plongeur. As Orwell describes them, “Plongeurs, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It is the pride of the drudge -- the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work.”
What’s more, I aspired to be regarded as a débrouillard -- a term, Orwell writes, that “every plongeur wants to be called. A débrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se débrouiller -- get it done somehow.”
Orwell provides an example of the lengths to which a good plongeur will go in the service of his employer (and his reputation):
“One of the kitchen plongeurs at the Hôtel X, a German, was well known as a débrouillard. One night an English lord came to the hotel, and the waiters were in despair, for the lord had asked for peaches, and there were none in stock; it was late at night, and the shops would be shut. ‘Leave it to me,’ said the German. He went out, and in ten minutes he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is meant by a débrouillard.”
Now, of course, I don’t advise research assistants to commit even minor crimes in the fulfillment of their duties.
But I do remember sneaking into closed libraries by using steam tunnels, reading books by flashlight, and dodging the security guards, in order to meet a professor’s deadline. I suppose I could have been arrested, and that’s probably more than any academic employer has a right to ask.
Still, it’s not unreasonable to expect a research assistant not to be deterred by minor inconveniences, such as the absence of a call number in a computerized database. As any middle-aged librarian can tell you, there are secrets hidden in the card catalogues and in the physical stacks that only determined excavation can recover.
Every research assistant needs to understand that the job is mostly about protecting your faculty employer’s time and mental energy. Don’t waste time with a lot of procedural questions. Get the job done without needing everything explained to you. A research assistant is an employee, not a student, and “I couldn’t figure out how to find something” is not an acceptable excuse for failure.
The librarians are almost always your best friend when you are out of your depth. Don’t alienate them by regarding them as intellectual inferiors. No matter how theoretically sophisticated you think yourself, any experienced librarian probably knows more about practicalities of research than you will ever know.
Of course, it only makes sense to behave like a débrouillard if your dedication is recognized by your employer.
I strongly recommend against being part of an RA-gang: a team of people working for an editor, who, in turn, works for a superstar professor. As far as I can tell, there is little to be gained by working on a research gang for academic celebrities who don’t even read their own work. Your hard work is not likely to be recognized, and you can be made into a convenient scapegoat should something go wrong.
I worked for two years on a research gang on a major reference book in my field. I even trained several members of the team, including my replacement. But when the book came out, I was not mentioned in the acknowledgments. I doubt the professor whose name appears on the cover (in larger letters than the title of the book) ever knew my name. No doubt I learned something about the topic of the book, but I learned more about how much respect to give the prolific output of some famous academics.
In recent months, Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree’s book All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (2004) was found to have several paragraphs that appeared to have been plagiarized, verbatim, from another book.
Ogletree attributed the error to his research assistants. Apparently one of them inserted the material into Ogletree’s manuscript with the proper attributions, but a second assistant mistakenly deleted those attributions before the final draft was sent to the publisher. Ogletree apparently did not recognize the borrowed material as someone else’s writing until it was pointed out to him in the published book.
Ogletree has been cleared of intentional wrongdoing by Harvard, but the public record does not show what happened to the hapless research assistant who became the target of an investigation headed by the dean of the law school and a former Harvard president.
So how should professors behave toward their research assistants? Most obviously, they should take final responsibility for the work that appears under their own name and for which they receive royalties and professional advancement.
Professors should also be careful to acknowledge everyone who worked on a project. If an assistant made a substantial contribution, the professor should give that person a copy of the book with an inscription of thanks. Assistants should be invited to book parties. As professors recruit new assistants, they should be trained by their predecessors. Professors should not bring on a new assistant and then drop the veterans without a word of explanation. (They will take it personally -- and they should.)
Professors need to be careful not to pit their assistants against each other. Assistants should be given tasks that allow them to develop independent, complementary specialties. None of this is to say that research assistants are not employees, but faculty members sometimes need to be reminded that RA’s, like other workers, are also human beings.
A good research assistant should perform countless acts of devotion without expecting unusual recognition. But a good employer should never fail to acknowledge and reciprocate that loyalty.
Thomas H. Benton is the pseudonym of an assistant professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college. He writes occasionally about academic culture and the tenure track and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com