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[t_r_b]

What Kamiakin said, particularly:

But I wonder if this approach does not have a lot to do with the extreme difficulty so many people in the humanities have with finishing their dissertations. I mean when you spent the week tearing down David Hackett Fischer and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Gordon Wood, what are you going to write?

Graduate seminars devoted to tearing everyone else apart do little to help PhD students figure out how to create something worthwhile themselves. If you can't read an award-winning monograph without pointing out every imagined flaw, how on earth are you going to survive reading through a rough draft of your own dissertation?

[the_honey_badger]

fiona:

"Chime" is a generous acknowledgment,

I disagree---its a "me too!"  

I had one great seminar instructor in my doctoral program who after the first session where *brilliant* students told each other about the "missed opportunities" and other failings of a book that was not only a Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winner but picked up a raft of other deserved sub-field honors, simply looked over her glasses and said: "Now that you've told us what you could do by standing on his shoulders and have thoroughly whipped him for perceived shortcomings, let's go around the table and each describe our own credentials as critics."  The brighter ones paused, the denser ones were raring to go!

A few years later I remembered that seminar as the most influential I ever took because that was only the first valuable lesson I learned about the importance of a little humility and a lot of preparation before criticizing another's work.  It also struck me as interesting that those who were clueless about what she did that first day of seminar were without exception those who left the program, struggled with comps or finishing or never finished at all.

I now start all seminars with certain things stipulated and the first is that the article or book under discussion *has* passed peer review. Our goal in "dismantling" it is to see how the argument and evidence is put together, what makes it a useful new approach or an addition to an existing body of literature on a subject. Finally, we consider what new avenues of investigation this reading suggests for work of our own.  I think its more useful to approach it as a "let's take this apart and see how it works" exercise both for understanding the work in question and for thinking about doing one's own.

[drlanguage]

In my own experience and observations, the hypercritical tendencies are only a phase of grad school. I think this is just part of learning to think critically. Undergraduates and very beginning graduate students often believe just about anything they read by an "expert", and when presented with published articles have difficulty identifying even glaring problems. As students slowly begin to be able to identify weaknesses in methodologies, reasoning, etc., the pendulum often swings the other way and they begin to tear everything apart because it doesn't meet their previous notions of the perfect scientific process. Ideally, as students begin to design and carry out their own research, they become increasingly accepting of some weaknesses as part of the process, and are better able to see both the positives and the negatives.

[frogfactory]

To what extent is this true in the sciences?  As a grad student myself, I don't feel qualified to judge, but during a recent seminar class/journal club, the professor has not disagreed with our tearing apart of multiple unconvincing papers over the semester.  I've seen a similar tendency in departmental journal clubs.

[terpsichore]

To what extent is this true in the sciences?  As a grad student myself, I don't feel qualified to judge, but during a recent seminar class/journal club, the professor has not disagreed with our tearing apart of multiple unconvincing papers over the semester.  I've seen a similar tendency in departmental journal clubs.

I'm in the physical sciences. I find that student often start grad school accepting everything that is in print as correct. I think this is because undergraduate education in the sciences relies so much on textbooks, which focus on conveying established information.

Grad school encourages students to read critically, but once they get the hang of critiquing, as languageabd noted, they tend to go overboard, looking for flaws everywhere and sometimes missing the strong points of an article. Over time, as they become better read, students begin to see work in the context of other work. They learn to follow an argument, assess methods critically (in the best sense of the word), and begin to see the published peer-reviewed literature as an ongoing dialog, not immutable fact. That's when they make the transition to colleagues.

[barred_owl]

To what extent is this true in the sciences?  As a grad student myself, I don't feel qualified to judge, but during a recent seminar class/journal club, the professor has not disagreed with our tearing apart of multiple unconvincing papers over the semester.  I've seen a similar tendency in departmental journal clubs.

It's interesting, FF, that you describe the papers as "unconvincing."  The first thought I had, when I read that sentence, was:  Are the papers unconvincing as a result of your group tearing them apart without intervention by the professor? OR Did you tear them apart because they were, in essence, "offered up" as unconvincing before the criticism began?  My recollection of several grad seminars (in biology) was that the latter scenario was more likely--at least to my young, naive graduate student mind.

In those seminars, I often felt like just another piranha nibbling away at the next article on the list.  Readings were handed out like prey for our next feeding frenzy, and there was rarely any true guidance once the group attacks began.  When the frenzy was over, rather than feeling satisfied, I felt bewildered.  Yes, critique and argument and challenges to conventional wisdom are important in science (and, likely, any discipline), but over-the-top criticism just for the sake of criticizing doesn't seem constructive or helpful at all--except for those who get some sort of weird ego boost from doing so, of course.

I think that useful criticism of published works is a skill that develops over time (in much the way that languageabd and, on preview, terpsichore have described), and in a broader learning context than the weekly seminar or journal club session.  Maturation as a scholar is not necessarily fostered in these settings, although the seminars or journal clubs may serve, at least, to introduce students to current literature or topics in the field.  What I would love to see is an entry-level graduate seminar that provides some real guidance in how to critique others' work without resorting to hypercritical attacks.  Unfortunately, that old expression "we teach the way we were taught" probably has some truth, with respect to the typical graduate seminar course in the sciences.  I'd be interested to know if any others following this thread have ever taken such a course or, perhaps, teach one now.

[king_ghidorah]

I've always thought the attitude in the humanities (and, let's just say this is not every grad-student / ABD / MFA-er on the planet either - plenty have respect) described here can be attributed, at least in part, to the perception so many of us have about intellectual discourse as somehow being polemical and confrontational (well...okay, duh, but...) and I've always thought that it came from following the Baby Boomer / Beat Generation of intellectuals who appeared to be, in fact, in-your-face - or at least this is the impression I've always gotten from that all-important Ginsburg, Kesey, Derrida moment in time: they were rule-breakers and rule-makers who were, actually, too cool for school.  It's really a media thing.  I think we academic youngins oftentimes conflate radicalism with intellectualism because this is who we imagined we would be - but then again, I'm from the '80s, so not a real youngin, and maybe my perception is warped.

[doctor_torrseal]

In those seminars, I often felt like just another piranha nibbling away at the next article on the list.  Readings were handed out like prey for our next feeding frenzy, and there was rarely any true guidance once the group attacks began.  When the frenzy was over, rather than feeling satisfied, I felt bewildered.  Yes, critique and argument and challenges to conventional wisdom are important in science (and, likely, any discipline), but over-the-top criticism just for the sake of criticizing doesn't seem constructive or helpful at all--except for those who get some sort of weird ego boost from doing so, of course.

I think that useful criticism of published works is a skill that develops over time (in much the way that languageabd and, on preview, terpsichore have described), and in a broader learning context than the weekly seminar or journal club session.  Maturation as a scholar is not necessarily fostered in these settings, although the seminars or journal clubs may serve, at least, to introduce students to current literature or topics in the field.  What I would love to see is an entry-level graduate seminar that provides some real guidance in how to critique others' work without resorting to hypercritical attacks.  Unfortunately, that old expression "we teach the way we were taught" probably has some truth, with respect to the typical graduate seminar course in the sciences.  I'd be interested to know if any others following this thread have ever taken such a course or, perhaps, teach one now.

This just sounds like really bad journal club.

In our journal clubs, which are presented by faculty, postdocs and grad students in turn, we try to pick interesting papers or that talk about something important.  (Grad students are encouraged to ask the faculty before picking a paper if they want to know if its's a god choice.)  Sometimes the papers are new and important, sometimes they are on something nobody has fully understood yet, sometimes they turn out to be less important than we hoped or seriously flawed in some way.  Sometimes the audience disagrees on whether a paper proves its point or not.  Often, we get the experts in the subfield in the audience to explain to the rest of us why a paper is important or not.

If the papers you do for journal club are boring or full of holes, it's wasting people's time and not teaching the students much.

[juanb]

In my own experience and observations, the hypercritical tendencies are only a phase of grad school. I think this is just part of learning to think critically.

Languageabd hits the nail on the head.  Being hypercritical is a necessary bit of scaffolding in the building of an insightful mind.

[mountainguy]

I agree with Balancing_Act, Fiona, and Belowtheradar, I think. Graduate students will often (but not always) mirror the attitude of faculty in their department.

In my graduate program, it used to be common practice for faculty to "trash talk" about theoretical perspectives they didn't like and to be openly combative with graduate students in oral defenses and other formal assessment situations. After a while, rumors started to spread at disciplinary conferences that PepsiU graduates were unnecessarily hostile and asked rude questions. Most of the faculty have since toned down their behavior and the rumors have stopped. They're still critical of ideas, but no longer nasty about it.

[conjugate]

(Grad students are encouraged to ask the faculty before picking a paper if they want to know if its's a god choice.) 

Are you in Religious Studies or Classical Civilization?  I could see a "god choice" of papers in those disciplines...

[tee_bee]

Grad students enter a community in which being smart is taken for granted.  In fact, they usually find themselves shocked by the (seeming) brilliance of their peers and strongly suspect that they don't deserve to be there.  If the program encourages the casual use of very specialized vocabulary, and if the area of study is one in which students are choosing passion over becoming well-paid, the combination of these forces often encourages a compensating attitude of cynical distaste and verbal bantering.

In other words, showing how clever you are because you "see through" the work of others makes you feel better about yourself.   It's fun, and it compensates for any fears of not being smart enough or strong enough to succeed in your field.

Most of us, fortunately, grow out of this stage.  You know it happens when you find yourself admiring the brilliance of a younger colleague without feeling resentful or unappreciated.

But, of course, I could be entirely wrong.

I was one of those "I don't deserve to be here" types, and a major proponent of "can't we all just get along?" I was "set straight" several times by my more brilliant graduate students.

I am now a full professor. Many of my detractors are still major players in that industry devoted to the delivery of flat, round, Italian themed food products.

Schadenfreude is a dish best served anytime, anywhere!

[king_ghidorah]

Grad students enter a community in which being smart is taken for granted.  In fact, they usually find themselves shocked by the (seeming) brilliance of their peers and strongly suspect that they don't deserve to be there.  If the program encourages the casual use of very specialized vocabulary, and if the area of study is one in which students are choosing passion over becoming well-paid, the combination of these forces often encourages a compensating attitude of cynical distaste and verbal bantering.

In other words, showing how clever you are because you "see through" the work of others makes you feel better about yourself.   It's fun, and it compensates for any fears of not being smart enough or strong enough to succeed in your field.

Most of us, fortunately, grow out of this stage.  You know it happens when you find yourself admiring the brilliance of a younger colleague without feeling resentful or unappreciated.

But, of course, I could be entirely wrong.

I was one of those "I don't deserve to be here" types, and a major proponent of "can't we all just get along?" I was "set straight" several times by my more brilliant graduate students.

I am now a full professor. Many of my detractors are still major players in that industry devoted to the delivery of flat, round, Italian themed food products.

Schadenfreude is a dish best served anytime, anywhere!

Ha!  Oh this gives me hope!  Thanks.

[doctor_torrseal]

(Grad students are encouraged to ask the faculty before picking a paper if they want to know if its's a god choice.) 

Are you in Religious Studies or Classical Civilization?  I could see a "god choice" of papers in those disciplines...

I'm in a science department, and at times in the past I have had colleagues who studied  creation events.  Although my background is in experiment, and hubris is one of my (few) foibles, I have not myself attempted to initiate any such events in the lab.

I reserve the right to do so as my research requires, however, and if the IRB doesn't like it they can eat hot fireball:

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

[ots1927]

In my graduate school experience (musicology), I was not taught to be snide at all, and I would think that any program in which such an attitude is cultivated has a serious problem.  I was taught to read and analyze critically, and I was also taught not be reluctant to engage the literature in my field, rather than just soak it up passively.  I remember once my advisor joking that many a career has been launched by a graduate student taking some old dead German guy to task (remember, this was a musicology program).  My point is that one of the things graduate students need to learn is that scholarship is an ongoing dialogue, a discussion.  To become a substantive part of that discussion they need to carve out a little space for themselves, which can be accomplished by finding fault with established work in the field (the anxiety of influence, perhaps).  But (and this is important) this can and should be done with some degree of respect, which is what I was taught, not with viciousness or malice.