The other night, inexplicably, I had a dream I was stuck in one of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an episode titled “Lies My Parents Told Me.” To keep from doing a long synopsis of an episode of a decade plus old show, let me tl;dr it: in this episode Spike remembers his life with his mother (overcoming his own guilt over his past) and because Buffy’s mentor, Giles, is trying to kill Spike and fails, Buffy realizes that Giles has done all the teaching he can do for her and she effectively ends their student/teacher relationship.
I loved that episode when it aired, but as time has passed, it has come to mean more to me. I mentioned earlier this week that I’ve had a spotty past with mentors. I decided today that sharing some of my mentor stories could be an interesting way for me to comment on academia. After all the best way to share my knowledge is by sharing my experiences here. Don’t take it as self-indulgent; I’m writing from what I know.
So I’m going to do an intermittent series of posts covering the “lies” my “parents” told me, or things that I’ve been told in the academy that are flat out wrong. And the first one is actually a pair of things that bring me around to a single point, starting with a story. No names have been mentioned, because I don’t want this to seem like an attack on a person. But if you piece together who it is by looking at my CV and realizing you have a one-in-four chance, please keep it to yourself. I’m not trying to be unkind to the speaker here. This is not about anger. It was, once, a while ago. I’m not mad anymore. But I feel like sharing my frustrations from the other side might help some people that are still going through the process.
That said, I had a challenging time writing my dissertation. I won’t lie. It wasn’t because I didn’t know how to do research (I did– I actually wrote a dissertation length masters thesis because I’m crazy) and it wasn’t because I didn’t get good data (I got too much data, but I had all the data for what I wanted to do). The problem was that during my prospectus defense and during my drafting process members of my committee shot my intellectual framework and theory to bits, and because I was exasperated from grad school and had that health scare/was bed ridden for like seven months at the key moment in this work, I was having a bit of trouble standing my ground. I should have taken a year off and not tried to soldier through, but I’m stubborn.
I took a moment of challenge as the invitation to defend myself and fight for my ideas, as I thought THAT was the lesson that I was being taught. It wasn’t that. It was meant to be a moment of the discipline machining me into a specific kind of thing. And I sort of failed at that.
I had this dialogue with a mentor:
Me: I can’t figure out what you want me to do.
Them: It’s not about what we want you to do. This is your project.
*hard stop*
This is a lie. Your dissertation, kids, is “your project” but it’s also a document that needs to prove to four or five people that you’re worthy of a PhD. It is NOT your project. Not really. It’s your attempt to make those people happy. That anyone pretends it isn’t is one of the biggest lies in academia, and if you turn your dissertation into a book, you will see how much your dissertation was not a book but a book length attempt to prove you’re done with school. Editors will even mockingly come at you with “this was a dissertation, wasn’t it?” or “this looks like a dissertation,” proving to you without a shadow of a doubt that a dissertation is some weird sort of niche thing. It’s a very specific thing that serves as a gatekeeper. I needed someone to tell me that. I needed someone to say “just do this and move on with your life.” I thought it was supposed to be my original and valuable and hard-fought for ideas. It was just a thing that had to be written.
*resume*
Me: It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I have to do specific things to insure that you feel like I can move on to the next chapter. It’d be easier if you’d help me understand what that is.
Them: Are you treating this like some kind of game? Is this a game to you?
*hard stop*
It is. It was. If you know me at all, that’s part of my entire “thing” academically. I study game theory. Not the economic game theory, but the theory of games. So yes, giving me a rule-set (a degree program) with a win state (passing a defense) and sub-bosses (classes, exams, prospectus) and a final boss (dissertation defense) with grinding (research, drafting) and the need for proficiencies is A GAME. It’s more clearly a game than some of the games I teach with.
But knowing how to play that game means that when someone accusingly says “is this a game to you” I had to play the game and say “no, of course not” because the fact that it was a game and that this was a boss fight was not at all lost on me. I had to say the right thing to win that part of the game.
So anyway, back to that lie I mentioned. I don’t think the person who said that to me realized– at least not entirely– that I was being lied to. I also don’t think that person realized how badly implying that seeing education as a game cut into the very fabric of who I am as a scholar. It certainly wasn’t meant to be an unkind, malicious moment. I know that. I wasn’t supposed to be under attack. It was all supposed to be helping me. But that’s the crazy thing about language and actions and interpretation and feelings: if you say something that isn’t true, it doesn’t become true just because you didn’t think you were lying, and as the cliche goes, hell is paved with good intentions and “teachable moments.” There’s a reason we call them dissertation defenses and not “Doctor Parties.”
And my home field in particular is all about talking about the freedom we get to shape our own dissertations. Only that’s a line. It’s how our field justifies itself, how it fights its elegant war with anyone who wants to claim to be a master of the field. If we ever were to admit that we tell our first year students to do things a totally different way than we do them ourselves, that we theorize about a type of writer and a method of writing that we do not practice ourselves, the field would sort of collapse as an intellectual practice. So we double-talk. I get it.
Near the end of my time as a PhD student, one of the people I worked with (not a major part of my degree… just someone I had a course with) said to me, with significant anger, that I “acted like I didn’t change at all” in the time I was there. Of course that’s a misstatement; I learned a TON of theory and how to deploy it. I also developed a rather sophisticated sense of how games and cultural rhetoric work together. But I didn’t learn that by regurgitating the field and reciting the lessons of the people that I took classes with, so to some I appeared to be this audacious punk who had the nerve to claim his right to his own ideas. I’m always told I don’t have enough citations in my work because I don’t put extraneous nods to scholarship that I know I can’t defend as part of my argument. I didn’t turn into what this person, who had me for a single class, expected me to turn into, so I’d obviously did it wrong. Because it wasn’t about me. It was about expectations of what I could achieve. I missed the goal. In that sense, sometimes I still feel like I failed at grad school, although my sweet diploma swag and job in a top 25 program in the country say different.
I never did figure out what it was that was expected of me, but I wrote a very bizarre document that I had to essentially gut and re-write into a book after I graduated. I did learn a great deal from it, and I’m grateful. I’m super sick of that decade long project, but I learned A LOT from it. I learned so much that I am comfortable saying A LOT even though I know A LOT is weak language. The thought is that strong. And I am not saying writing a dissertation is a bad thing. I’m saying that blinding people to how it works is wrong. We can talk about it in a real, visceral way. It’s an exercise in pleasing the field. It’s perfectly fine to say that in order to have a PhD you have to show the other PhDs that you can PhD. If I want to play on a team, I have to tryout for them, too. They don’t tell me to just do what I want with a ball and I’ll make the Lakers roster.
Anyone who tells you that my dissertation was what I wanted to write and not the act of a man clinging to his identity trying to finish his degree so he could go do the work he wanted to do is a liar. My dissertation is not what I wanted to write; it’s what I had to write. And when my book comes out, you can look at the book, then go check my dissertation out of the library, and see how different they are. The book is what was baking in my head the whole time, but that wasn’t what would get me past the gatekeeper. I had to do the dissertation and defend it to be allowed to write the book.
And that’s fine. It’s a learning experience that shaped me in profound ways. I needed it. But that doesn’t mean anyone should pretend it was about what I wanted to do or what I wanted to write. Pretending that just makes it a confusing experience. I was trying to please four people who got to decide my future. That was my only real audience. I was writing to and for them. It was a boss fight from a long open-world RPG.
When I advise students, I tell them that. I tell them all about the sophisticated sense of writing for audiences and genres and how to do book research and everything else. But then I remind them that if they need to pass a class or a defense, that document is for the people who are going to decide their fate. That is the only real audience.
Because I believe in the truth, even if telling the truth hurts a little.