There are days when I wish I had a job driving for UPS. The idea of being responsible for discrete tasks where you either deliver or you don't is appealing, given the level of uncertainty that surrounds academic work.
How do you know, really, if a piece of scholarly work is any good? How do you measure up? Whose opinion can you trust? How much success can you attribute to luck or good timing?
A long time ago, I believed scientists had it easier than other academics on this front. With the naïve breeziness of an angsty humanist, I thought: The experiment either works or it doesn't. Then I watched a friend in the final throes of getting his Ph.D. in physics. A standout in his department, he was—and still is—one of the smartest, most reasonable people I've ever known. But when he was about three weeks from finishing his dissertation, he decided to quit. He had never given up on anything. He had always worked hard and had always been successful. But graduate school had beaten him down.
As a scientist, he was accustomed to having his ideas knocked around. But graduate school can be demoralizing. You're with a cohort that is just as serious, smart, and hard-working as you are. It's difficult to be a star. You are asked to master information, to consume the best that has been thought and said in your field—all while struggling to be inducted into a trade guild with unspoken rules and rituals, arcane language, and secret handshakes.
And you're constantly being told that your work is not good enough. You want to be with people—professors and peers—who will push you to think harder. Part of the excitement of learning is finding out how much you don't know, even if the discovery is accompanied by a stinging "ouch." Graduate school can instill insecurity in the sturdiest of egos.
His work, he said, stunk. His adviser had suggested his own dissertation research as the source of a topic for my friend. Not knowing what else to do, he had agreed. But ultimately, it wasn't interesting. It was, he said, with three weeks to go, meaningless and stupid.
Worse, after his adviser got tenure, he stopped paying attention to his students. My friend, by nature reticent and respectful, complained that he had to beg the guy to talk to him. There was, therefore, no one to help him think through what he was doing, to see how it fit into a larger picture, and to remind him that the dissertation was the end of a process, not an end in itself.
He had an uncharacteristic meltdown.
So I drove him three hours to the beach, let him talk, and asked a few questions. If you dropped out, what would you do? How do you know your work is terrible? Why not let your committee tell you that? It was their job to teach you—why not let them take responsibility for showing you how you've failed?
I took my friend's concerns seriously—even though I knew they were nutty—and let him wallow. Considering quitting seemed to be liberating for him; he'd never tanked at anything in his life.
A few days later, he decided he would finish. A few weeks later, he won the biggest prize in his department. After a dozen years, he was running the research arm of a large high-tech company. He still has never had a major professional failure. But he—like everyone else—has had moments of self-doubt.
We are all capable of feeling, at times, like impostors, promoted to our level of incompetence. Anyone who doesn't cop to that is a big fat liar. Or a deluded narcissist.
In some jobs, there are objective, quantitative measures of achievement: How many ball bearings have you produced? How big a pile of cash do you have at the end of the fiscal year? In the arts and sciences, it's more complicated: How many great painters languish without ever being "discovered"? How do master carpenters know their work is really masterful?
In academe, the big (unspoken) questions are: How smart are you? How fresh are your ideas? How interesting is your thinking? Those are not easily measurable values.
It's easy to confuse professional success with quality. Having been a part of the publishing process at two excellent scholarly presses, I know that a fancy imprint, while one indicator of worth, doesn't tell you everything. Sometimes books get pushed through because of personal connections and a stacked deck of readers' reports. Sometimes a project is approved but the topic ends up being more interesting than the book. Sometimes, I hate to tell you, publishers make mistakes. How do you know if the decision to print your book was a mistake?
A colleague at a state university press who had built an exquisite list of authors liked to taunt me at conferences. "Rachel," he'd say, "you'll never know how good you are until you come out to the sticks. You don't know if people want you as their editor or if they just want that big old Oxford imprint." The unassailability of the challenge propelled me to want to prove myself in the sticks.
Many people cover up fear with a thick layer of bravado. One of the skills I developed in college—where, like everyone, I panicked about not being smart enough—was how to disparage books I hadn't read.
Eventually, most of us learn to embrace our ignorance for the sake of acquiring knowledge; we become more adept at accepting criticism. What I found, as an editor, is that the grace with which writers accept a critique is often in direct proportion to their intellectual security. The best authors were the easiest to edit, appreciative of comments that made their work stronger. Those whose books were not so good would throw a hissy fit if you pointed out a misused semicolon.
I remember a water-cooler conversation at Oxford University Press a long time ago about a talented author who was particularly insecure. We wondered: Is there anyone who is totally intellectually secure?
"Yes," said a colleague. "I know someone." He named a famous editor. That guy, he said, never doubts himself. My colleague wandered back to my office a couple of hours later. He remembered hearing from a friend who had found a trivial technical error in something the famous editor had proofed and wrote a friendly little note pointing it out. The editor sent back a three-page jeremiad.
I think often about professorial Mr. Ramsay from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. His, she writes, was "a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q."
But the question that plagues Mr. Ramsay: What if he never gets to R?
Most of us wonder how we stack up intellectually—not only against others, but on some grand and objective scale. Graduate students can feel that most urgently, where each day they must make the decision to continue on a path that is difficult and frustrating. They learn to puff themselves up by attacking others; it's easier to deploy a snarky put-down than to do the hard work of constructive criticism. But, as we learn on the playground, most bullies are just plain terrified. Arrogance is the conjoined twin of insecurity.
For some, glittering prizes, dazzling reviews, and bravos from colleagues may never be enough to quell self-doubt. What you can hope for is to understand what you are good at and be able to admit your faults instead of scrambling to cover them up.
Comments
1. lolabn - June 28, 2010 at 09:48 am
When the value of research is often based solely on how sexy it is or whether the media loved it, it's hard not to have self doubt. I can think of a lot of lousy research that received endless news coverage because it was well-packaged and never questioned by the unknowing media. Meanwhile, good sound research is often overlooked by the boss and a lot of others because the author isn't a sales(wo)man.
2. 11159995 - June 28, 2010 at 10:28 am
Rachel's last sentence speals to me personally, as I made a decision after two years of graduate school to pursue a career in publishing rather than teaching, mainly because I felt I could not be as good a teacher as my own father (a college history professor) and my undergratuate mentor, Walter Kaufmann, had been. Luckily, I have thrived as an acquiring editor at two presses. I might have been that editor telling Rachel to test her talent by moving to the sticks because it was the challenge of seeing what I could do at Penn State after spending twenty-two years working at Princeton that partly motivated me to become director at Penn State's press, where I've spent another twenty-two years, which come to an end in a few days. I always wondered whether my success at Princeton could be replicated at another press that did not have the same "prestigious" imprint. So it was gratifying to see that one could indeed build up a distinguished list without that added advantage.---Sandy Thatcher
3. jack_cade - June 28, 2010 at 10:39 am
Ah people like siskin are great.
They are what seperate really smart people from people who are just acting smart.
The former accept their ignorance as the guidinglight (a smile for a Monday morning) of their ever-continuing education.
The latter memorize rules and occassionally get them wrong.
The smartest people in the world stand always in the presence of their own boundless ignorance.
The ignorant-successful people stand in the always in the presence of the autobiography of their fatuious genuis.
4. jack_cade - June 28, 2010 at 10:41 am
Eh, last sentence typo, drat.
5. 11261897 - June 28, 2010 at 11:12 am
James Thurber once remarked on a (very successful) journalist friend who woke each morning with the thought, "Today's the day they find me out." A little Angst is good for the soul.
6. bigtwin - June 28, 2010 at 11:37 am
Interesting article. "Smarts" is such a subjective thing in higher education. Aren't we all wearing invisible clothes to some degree?
7. afnaar - June 28, 2010 at 01:28 pm
Wow! to #8 (11261897). I think that everytime I write a paper for one of my graduate classes! The paper is never good enough, the writing is awful, and how in the world do my professors bestow on me 'A's? Then it occurs to me, the ones who never take themselves for granted as being anywhere near smart or even competent, are the ones who actually finish; maybe not with banners flying, but they DO finish. That is all I care about; to make some sort of meaningful contribution before the end.
8. racheltoor - June 28, 2010 at 01:45 pm
I never read the comments on my columns and accidentally scrolled down. Ouch. You're right: I stink (or stank or stunk). To give credit, Sandy, it was the great Lewis Bateman who told me to come to the sticks. Then he left for Cambridge.
9. ellenhunt - June 28, 2010 at 01:49 pm
It always seemed to me that if I got an "A" the nation was in serious trouble.
Some who read/post/write on the Chron believe I was correct.
10. velvis - June 28, 2010 at 05:40 pm
Honestly -
Stink - stank - stunk or stoonk. This was incredibly helpful.
Daily, I hear only my own voice in my head as my fingers strike my keys, most of the time I'm not sure if it's good or not until a couple of days later. I read the occasional text messages/emails of my cohorts who are having laurel wreaths thrown at their feet or feats and it freaks me out.
It's nice to know that insecureity isn't reserved for teens and grad students.
11. drnels - June 28, 2010 at 07:02 pm
@racheltoor, you never read the comments on your posts? I was going to say a couple of nice things about this post but don't see why I should expend the effort for someone who blatantly says these comments are irrelevant to her. As someone who writes for a blog hosted by CHE, I know you can turn off comments on a post. I'll also add that I check the comments on my posts regularly so I can engage in the conversation I (hopefully) started.
12. eyeswideopen - June 29, 2010 at 09:02 am
I really enjoy having good ideas, and being around others that have good ideas. That led me to a life in academia, but my life in academia has not been without a fair amount of frustration and disappointment. What I consider to be my best ideas have been dismissed out of hand, and my derivative ideas, although accepted as canonical (and therefore publishable) must be described in a writing style that conforms to what editors and referees deem appropriate. I can honestly say that I am not proud of a single thing I've published. If I had taken to heart my intellectual "success" as defined by the current system, I would be driving a UPS truck as Rachel suggests. Instead, I played along enough to keep my job (get tenure), while remaining focused on my own assessment of what is intellectually valuable. In the meantime, I am fortunate to lead an intellectual life without threat of starvation or reprisal.
13. gahnett - June 29, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Everybody's smart in academia.
14. racheltoor - June 29, 2010 at 12:21 pm
@drnels: I think these comments often, though not always, represent the worst of academe. When I read comments on other essays--pieces that I think are excellent--I am always surprised by the anonymous vituperation. Mean, snarky comments by people afraid to sign their name is not worthwhile intellectual discourse. I get many email messages each month from people who take the time and expend the effort to say nice things. I have made lots of real friends this way. I also get messages from people who disagree with something I've written. I cherish the opportunity to engage and often learn a lot. But I have made it a practice in my life never to write anything anonymously (or pseudonymously)and not to write anything I wouldn't say to a person directly. Perhaps you are studier of ego than I (who isn't?), or perhaps you are such a great writer and thinker that no one ever takes pot-shots at your work. I don't know, since I don't even know your name.
15. gahnett - June 29, 2010 at 01:50 pm
...but isn't it fun to be anonymous? There are lots of good stuff about it that don't need mentioning.
16. hulibrary - June 29, 2010 at 02:34 pm
I think Rachel's comments are true in the United States or possibly Germany, but are cetainly not true of the United Kingdom. Oh! Oxford University Press is not British, but American. In the UK competition is not the norm in academe, collaboration is. Consequently doubts of worth, or self-worth, are likely less to arise. I think that if society in general and academe in particular was far less competative the world would certianly be a nicer place and we'd all be happier and more satisfied. Let's all relax and cooperate.
17. bigtwin - June 29, 2010 at 03:30 pm
if you dont read the comments that stem from your own blog posts why bother blogging in the first place? it soudns like either you have a very thin skin or you aren't interested in anything but your own ideas.
18. judydimmer - June 29, 2010 at 04:03 pm
Even if you are smart, you may not be intelligent. And your ability to learn or mental capacity may exist at a higher level than the knowledge you have been able to acquire. Being smart is using what you have. Be thankful for that. Teaching in a classroom or online is one way to share your knowledge base. Applying that knowledge in the field is another way of sharing which many times reaches more "students" in more effective ways.
19. psyc132 - June 29, 2010 at 04:56 pm
Great article. Although, I would argue that many bullies are quite secure in the themselves. Modern research on self esteem (Twenge et al) supports this view. Bullies probably sometimes do put down others to make themselves feel more secure, but I suspect that's not the only reason.
20. richardtaborgreene - June 29, 2010 at 09:46 pm
I am a NAIL that I drive through the layers of fluff in my culture, nation, profession, publications, editors, and civilization, I feel most of the time. I spend months or years in learning, investigating, showing around daft drafts, getting pilloried for things that are non-controversial and getting no-comment for things that are nasty, ill-conceived, and rudely done. Then I become this nail--shut down all feedback, all reaction, all bias, all support, all enthusiasm, all envy and PENETRATE, penetrate, penetrate, layer by layer, nasty and good, deeper and deeper the ATTENTION mechanisms of my groups, professions, and era, trying to hit that sort of intellectual bedrock that will result in people 300 years from now, citing my work.
I am not suggesting this is good, just that this is where I ended up, after separate careers in 3rd world developing NGOs (micro-banking 30 years before Yunnus--it is not new), mass workshop design, TQM study in Japan's giant firms, complexity theory at Santa Fe, creative writing under Bradbury, Hellman, Pinsky, Auden at Wellesley and Harvard, publishing with McGraw Hill then ePublishing on the web (more citations from the latter). Once every five or six years I spam 12,000 academics in my field with an unrequested article on our shared interest, getting 2000 thank yous, half perfunctory, half detailed appreciations, 3 statements of "a work of genius". I believe any idea spread widely enough will hit some nut who thinks it genius.
21. petelclark - June 30, 2010 at 03:19 am
@hulibrary: Oxford University Press is based out of the University of Oxford...in Britain. Like many other big publishing companies, they have branches in North America and elsewhere, but they are certainly a British publishing company.
I am somewhat skeptical of your claim that academia is significantly less competitive in the UK than in the US or continental Europe. In my field (mathematics) at least, the scale of the job market is increasingly global. Certainly I and most others I know have applied for jobs in the UK. Especially, I applied for a position at Imperial and didn't get it -- it was very...competitive.
22. mtorrence - June 30, 2010 at 01:15 pm
I believe that most in academia are indeed smart or intelligent. What differentiates these attributes is the perspective, foresight, and drive of the individual(s). I too have been privy to ideas being knocked down or going unreviewed for the potential impact they could afford an institution #15. Academia is in part a world of delightful exchanges that are positive and a dark corner for intellectual exploitation, unsubstantiated posturing, and in some cases caves in which visitors stay too long. Though all this weirdness exists, it is this mix that stagnates and moves us forward ... unfortunately in some cases we are still considerably behind in spreading the wealth of our ideas and seeing them blossom in a timely fashion.
23. radiorocket - July 01, 2010 at 05:41 am
Some time ago, I aimed to establish a mere Section in a prof. org., which I suppose should not be named beyond the fact it's initials correspond to those of an American Automobile Association. My goal was to give the group a good foundation, then step aside to let it grow on its own. I was a grad student at the time and, based on previous experience and extra-academe common sense reasoning, understood admin of such a group was not much of a challenge (not least of all since any of the tenured folks on my contact lists inevitably pointed me to their grad assistants). Given three years or so, it could grow from an Interest Group to a Section per the organisation's bylaws. It was just a matter of focusing people's attention. Ultimately, they would forget me in short order.
The level of political masination that ensued was stupifying. My name ended up bantied about like some sort of Stalin-era hot potato. At one point, a coalition of tenured/near retirement/dead figures distributed an email decrying me as illigitimate. I ended up having to respond to their emails only because it was necessary to point out more than half of the accusations made were false (i.e I was enrolled in a program for the study of Religion, not "Ritual", something easily established with a Google search or phone call). (To this day I sincerely hope their published research was/is carried out with more rigor.)
To my stupification, I was publically miligned to the point of libel. (Without prompting or definition of context I brought listserve postings to a lawyer - her jaw dropped [not long out of law school she couldn't believe academics would behave in such a way and suggested I consult a colleague who was more experienced and might perceive some way law might accomodate the posters. He couldn't.]).
Despite the fact I had gone through the essential process to create the foundational structure to create a Section and was clearly wiling/able to undertake the administrative functions, people who were were unwilling to do either, blocked such an effort. Eventually, the Section came to be, but not after I backed away (there was a kind of coup) and just let the posturing profs assign their grad assistants to create some mailing lists.
Long story short: You don't have to worry how smart you are; smart is easily fiegned or acted. How poltical you are will be the measure of your success.
(I've since moved into the private sector and have *never* experienced the kind of politics I saw in the academy. Love him or hate him, Kissinger said it best when he was asked "Dr. Kissinger, who are academic politics so petty?"
"Because the stakes are so low.")
24. mchag12 - July 01, 2010 at 11:59 am
Okay Hullibrary, it is a nice thought, but a fantasy. It is also about networks. Let's take one example: I know someone, an Oxford graduate, who had her dissertation published by a fancy imprint in the U.S., event though it didn't really fit their list. When I asked how her dissertation wound up published by this press, she informed me that the press had a close relationship with Oxford, with whom her mentor was closely connected. We forget that much of what is discussed here has nothing to do with intelligence but with networks and connections, and that academia has more nepotism than most fields. Who a manuscript gets sent to is a decision made by an editor, and I have rarely encountered reviews that were truly blind. True, there are scholars out there who are truly brilliant and are leaders for their fields--but most of what is published is pre-determined, and it is therefore not surprising that Cambridge and Oxford have some very poor lists in some disciplines (in my opinion) while Penn State has some really excellent work in hand. Status matters, like in the rest of society.
25. josef1 - July 01, 2010 at 04:20 pm
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26. arrive2__net - July 03, 2010 at 07:51 pm
Good article, I think it touches something fundamental in intellectual work which is that its impact really is ambiguous ... it really is tough to know whether what you produced is really stunning or just passing good. Work produced can be used or criticized by many different kinds of people with many adendas, including people who would like to prove you right or wrong for reasons that have little bearing on whether you actually are right or wrong. In academia, it is easy to find stories of people who made some huge contributions that sat unrecognized, and others whose greatness didn't survive the test of time. One important thing is to decide about it for yourself, then what the world works on is your work, not you.
Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net
27. chenlook - July 04, 2010 at 05:36 am
<Comment removed by moderator>
28. agpbloom - July 07, 2010 at 12:17 am
Toor writes:
"In academe, the big (unspoken) questions are: How smart are you? How fresh are your ideas? How interesting is your thinking? Those are not easily measurable values."
How about a another list of questions to add to this one:
Will being smart make you a moral person?
Are any ideas really "fresh"?
How thoughtful is your interest?
And then...maybe one more...when walking though a local cemetray, Can you tell me which headstones represent the ten smartest individuals?
29. ltlwng3 - July 07, 2010 at 02:15 pm
If I wasn't disappointed enough by the arrogance of the opening of this piece, I'm more disappointed by 28 comments from my apparently "smart" and "intelligent" colleagues who have tacitly accpeted Toor's discrimination against the valuable, respectable, difficult and intellectually challenging job of a UPS driver, seemingly because it's either outside of academia, or worse, because it involves physical labor. To assume and then generalize that a delivery driver doesn't engage in "uncertainty" or mental challenge blows my mind. My building's driver -- who dropped out of college for his job because of the great UPS pay and benefits, and because he likes interacting with people -- just put a box of notebooks on my desk in which I'll scrawl all manner of academic comments. That doesn't make me -- or anyone else in academia -- better than him. Moor could have used another rhetorical device to make her point. What I can hope for is the day we can admit to our faults without bringing anyone else down in the process.