Evolution or D-Volution:

Invoking Darwin, Wyatt Ehrenfels Details the Selection Criteria and Socialization Pressures that Narrow the Range of Ideas and Depth of Talent in Psychology Departments over Successive Generations

And the field of aspiring profs (professors and professionals) narrows over the years. As the incoming class is subject to training (and more ideological rites of passage, tests of loyalty, and general hazing), the faculty will find some misfits who, by the new standard of comparison, do not seem quite the willing or eligible clones that their peers are. These students are forced to submit cheerfully and apologetically to a drastic makeover, or they're harassed until they withdraw by choice or disqualification, put back out on the doorstep like a skanky barn cat. Still, too many students will survive to earn a doctorate, a number that far exceeds what a traditionally soaked sponge can absorb. Knowing the odds, many graduate students will gild the lily with all kinds of frivolous vita-building, delaying graduation for years while they join a few more extracurricular research teams in the hopes of becoming the sixth author on a few more four-page publications. They will fall over one another vying to take the reins of a section of 101 Psych from another disinterested prof. How many graduate students develop cases of 'ADHD' as they seek the quickest and dirtiest ways of inking another line to their curriculum vita?

With no shortage of applicants, faculty search committees can afford to be very particular, very fussy, about what they want in a new colleague. Using the apprenticeship model to justify their neglect prospects with diverse and innovative interests or research strategies. Apparently psychology faculty do not think they can train anyone short of a perfect clone. And psych profs will spin it so that it seems their discrimination has the student's interests in mind. Even I once thought of nominating a psych prof for a humanitarian award after he explained just how fair he was being to me: that it was my education and my training that would suffer -- that it was he who had nothing to offer me rather than the other way around. Even the American Psychological Association got into the act when it considered drafting some kind of resolution requiring psych profs to mentor students with similar research interests. Had such a requirement been in place in the mid 90s, I would have never been admitted to a doctoral program. I found an unusually student-oriented psych prof willing to supervise my dissertation on dreams despite the fact his interests were food preferences and ethnic humor. You see, psych profs do not really believe they need to be subject matter experts to advise your dissertation on matters of methodology. If you talk to enough psych profs, you will get the distinct impression that all phenomena is just about interchangeable (i.e. anonymous units) from a research methodology standpoint. All they see when they read a proposed study of dreaming in cancer patients is the same thing they see in a study of strategies for teaching gorillas how to work viewfinders: variables. Just identify your independent and dependent variables, select some universally familiar statistical technique that could be applied to just about any data (e.g. analysis of variance), and consult the table in the back of your statistics text to determine if your data is statistically significant. So naturally, students are left on the admissions doorstep for proposing novel or complex methodologies as much as they are for writing enthusiastically in their admission essay about their original hypotheses or interest in exploring unexamined phenomena (e.g. dreams). But the laziness or clubhouse mentality notwithstanding, when psych profs evaluate applicants to their PhD programs, they are judging prospective research and teaching assistants. The driving questions behind the review of the applicant files: "How can this student help me run my experiment? How can he help advance my career by performing a dissertation that picks up on where my research left off? Can this student carry my banner?"

Psych profs like to pay lip service to racial and ethnic diversity, but when it comes to selecting the next generation of professors, the range of talent and interests is restricted largely to the replication of themselves. This is why so many psych profs I have met enjoy speaking of their lineage. I have seen some professors maintain flow charts that resemble family trees tracing themselves and their mentors to psych research royality. "I studied under [INSERT NAME HERE]. You may have never heard of him, but as you can see here, he and these three other guys (i.e. siblings) studied under [INSERT NAME OF REPUTABLE RESEARCHER HERE] who, in turn, studied under [INSERT NAME OF OTHER REPUTABLE RESEARCHER HERE]."

Naturally, psych profs also make deceptive comments about their diversity when they refer to all the topics researched in the field and all curves in the field's branch structure (i.e. physiological, clinical, social, cognitive, and psychometric). This inert conception of diversity and individual differences strangulates innovation and individual expression. These distinctions are arbitrary, shards of something that no longer add up to Humpty Dumpty before the fall; and the individual psych profs serve as passive instantiations of something very inanimate and unreal. Psych profs would bask in the glory of a metaphor that compares them to physicists by bearing witness to them 'splitting the atom,' so instead I will say that they've dismembered the basic building block and indivisible unit of psychological life into a melange of distinct but equally dead fragments. Rather than carving up the psychological universe into an arbitrary and static collection of topics and constructs, we should allow a natural diversity of curiosity and scientific reasoning to thrive within its human vehicles (i.e. individuals). From a workforce solutions standpoint, psychology professors place all their eggs in the training basket and pay absolutely no attention whatsoever to capacity building.

A more functional and integrative division of labor, which I discuss at length in another document, is grounded in the scientific process itself rather than in content mapping. Here I refer to the roles of researchers, some foraging into a phenomenon's mysterious twilight to collect a sample of facts with which to reconstruct a spectrum (or landscape) of possibilities. This will be the primordial soup which contains the basic building blocks, the amino observations, out of which a meaningful idea, a question worth asking, will eventually spark. This is no easy task. The fact "too many psych profs" will read this paragraph and think I am talking about pilot studies is proof itself of what is lacking in psychological science. If you are a talented exploratory researcher, you are proficient at envisioning a landscape of possibilities and designing pre-theoretical research to gather the facts that will constitute the possibilities to varying degrees. You have to be flexible and capable of working with little or no leads or pre-blazened trails. The exploratory researcher works where there are no guiding theories, or when the theory so broad or vague as to support a multitude of interpretations, manifestations, and conditions. But the exploratory researcher designs research that is fluid and phased, gathering a base of content broad enough to allow him or her to shift or adjust to meet this or that contingency, which is usually a constellation of facts that determine the form of the next question, and how those facts should be represented and analyzed in addressing that question. All within one study. These are your detectives, visionaries, and intellectuals. And there is a place for them in an ideal Psychology, even if the work they do does not represent the ideal (i.e. end) state of a scientific project.

Unfortunately, in Psychology's academic community, the people are evaluated on the basis of how well their work meets this 'scientific ideal.' Psych profs think of themselves as dutifully patient types whose science deals in small gilded units that may labor for decades before it reaches answers to any meaningful questions. This sentiment would be accurate if we were talking about a seashell-like scientific process broad at its open end that narrowed through a logically necessitating connection among empirical facts toward a material point of conclusion. In actuality, what we're dealing with resembles a beach worth of miniscule shells with no open ends. I realize authors refrain from drawing conclusions and "talk the talk" about needing follow-on research and replication; but by holding each research project to a standard whereby it should resemble end-stage science, we encourage researchers to design research that seeks to create something from nothing and that fails to provide a suitable building block for future research. But this is the work we demand in in Psychology and the best of it is rewarded with publications and faculty appointments. This is the only role for which we draft in Team Psychology. It's like a general manager demanding his scouts give him a list that consists of nothing but wide receivers with a habit of 'going deep' on every play and which will function as part of an offense that plays each down like a game-ending 'Hail Mary.' They hold future generations of researchers hostage to a 'pseudo-scientific ideal' and to 'standards' to which they bear false witness, and it is the skills, the experiences & achievements, the temperament, and the attributes associated with this false standard that will ultimately decide whether one is fit to survive within academic Psychology.

In the academic ecosystem, the characteristics most conducive to survival, and those which get transmitted into the academic community as next generation professors, can be summarized under the moniker, 'ADHD.' Oh, the superficiality. Superficial work. Superficial relationships. It's all about numbers. Take for example the one occassion in which the student will be expected to assume sole responsibility for an original and conscientious work...the dissertation. Everyone is aware that faculty search committees do not look at dissertations and place no value on them in distinguishing among applicants. Why? Everyone does one. But not everyone gets one's name on four publications. Yes, it's a bit of numbers game, I know, but counting is quick and easy, especially when you're trying to decide who, among 200 applicants for a tenure-track assistant professorship, to invite to an interview. So there's no premium on characteristics like originality, independence, or conscientiousness. But proving you're a team player and perfect fit, well, these judgments are incidental, if-not-intrinsic, aspects of the faculty search process, and thus simple. Moreover, ignoring the idiosyncratic features of candidates is an easy way to avoid disagreement among members of the faculty search committee. The generic 'team player' characteristics are easily adjudicated by a team like a search committee. All an applicant needs to do is to make himself sufficiently generic, interchangeable, and anonymous to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the committee. And committees knows that this is also the best way to insure that the DNA of the academic community they represent will be passed on in future generations of professors. 'Community' became as much a watchword as 'perfect fit,' and over training and hiring generations the departments of psychology inevitably evolved into a remarkably homogeneous and like-minded community with the power to shape, celebrate, and enforce policies and procedures (so-called 'standards') that drive everything from knowledge production to teaching to mental health delivery to...faculty selection. Now we have a vicious cycle of self-perpetuation that cannot be broken, and professors whose attitudes are more inbred and whose work is more derivative than ever before. And that affects everything!

Take for example the tools of the academic community -- among them statistical analyses, experimental design principles, and teaching resources. They were originally developed to serve the wits of individual academics. Eventually the cart outran the horse, the tail wagged the dog, and the slave became the master. Psych profs to cede their freedoms and faculties in service of the tools themselves. Isn't this not what they're doing when they seek answers not to questions they know to be worthwhile, but support for risk-averse, form-fitted, and generally frivolous 'hypotheses'? When they remove from their anti-septic science of personality, the personalities of the research participants and scientists? When in solving for 'p' (the real objective of their research), they put a herd of research participants no one gets to know individually through a statistical sausage grinder (and end up with a 'model' that assigns to individuals probabilities measuring the extent to which they are exceptions to a rule that does not exist in reality)? When we perform rigorous research for the sake of rigor? When we develop dull and inadequate theories for the sake of 'parsimony'?

In the academic ecosystem, the individual professor and everyone subject to his or her work (individual research participant, individual student, and individual layperson to whom research findings will be applied) becomes a creature of imprimatur, a policy instantiation, or apotheosis of the tool that once served our wits and conscience. The first of the professors abrogated grudgingly. But over history, the criteria for faculty selection favored those who willingly abrogated their basic human functions until we reached an era in which academics have neither the wits to cede nor the freedom to choose their abrogation.

Social Darwinism

As I alluded to above, the congenitally saturated university labor market spells death for a diversity of ideas and sets in motion an evolutionary course on which unique values and skills are systematically weeded out of an academic genome. The product of this social evolution...a race of serviceable standard bearers. Quite capable of policing themselves so they can hardly be faulted for what they do wrong but sure as hell can be faulted for what they fail to do right. A race of conflict-phobic and career-driven clerks who have managed to achieve a form of perfection at the expense of progress.

Let's examine the mechanisms through which this generic professoriate self-administers its manicure.

• The Rogue Professor
  

  Most student's horror stories are tales of rogue professors who abuse privileges in roles of sole evaluator, as when a professor fails a student as a classroom instructor, dissertation advisor, or practicum supervisor. However, committees are not silver-bullet solutions to the problem of individuals.
  

• Committee Skewed by Individual
  

  Committees can not save a student from a professor willing to rant about a student in a committee meeting. A single professor can choose to disqualify a student's work as sub-standard on arbitrary, personalistic, or preferential grounds. This principle is illustrated by the end-of-academic-term evaluation meeting in which a committee (for all intents and purposes, the general faculty minus the adjunct instructors and graduate teaching assistants) discusses student performance and "classroom attitudes." Masquerading as an evaluation of academic progress, a professor escalates his or her characterological assessment of a student into a full-blown character assassination in what amounts to a temper tantrum designed to low-ball tension-averse colleagues into censuring a student he or she does not like. Like Supreme Court justices, these professors share a hallway for life but unlike Supreme Court justices, faculty bodies do not resolve issues by applying a majority decision rule to a tally of individual votes (e.g., 7-2; 5-4). Faculty bodies typically seek a decision that satisfies all members or, alternatives, that does not dissatisfy any one member. This methodology reflects the 'one truth' premise underlying their philosophy of science and also reflects their prioritization of group harmony and solidarity (i.e., remember, these professors have to live with one another for life). All professors are thus reflected in a compromise settlement. Since most faculties seek a consensus (or compromise) among its members, concessions are offered to appease a complaining professor, which explains how students with 4.0 GPAs end up being placed in some category of conduct probation. The probation outcome is unfortunately not a measure of the support for the complaining professor's indictment, and the student (often confused by a letter of reprimand), is forced to speculate as to what various professors really believe. One can understand why many professors exhibit a blanket complicity with a colleague's complaint. The complicit professors may not have been acquainted with the student; may not have been in a position to evaluate the student; or may not be in a position to challenge the professor's complaint.
  

  Formally hanging the label of "probationary" on the slandered student necessitates unwanted scrutiny in lieu of a follow-up assessment (not unlike a parole hearing). A second probation at any point in the student's future can trigger an automatic dismissal.
  

• Death by Committee Proper
  

  Committees have emergent properties that inadvertently subject everything processed by committee to the lowest common denominator (LCD) of committee member skills, interests, and values. In order to receive approval, a person must either: (1) win unanimous support from a committee which seeks to determine whether the candidate "meets standards." One must be wary of this phrase, as "meeting standards" may have multiple meanings. In the relatively benign prohibition model, the candidate is passed as long as he or she does not violate any rules. But in a less forgiving prescription model, the candidate is passed if he or she affirms, celebrates, or embodies the standards or even a broader and more intangible epistemology. (2) When a prescription model is in effect, the candidate may have to compete with other candidates in what amounts to a popularity contest that determines which five or the 80 applicants "best embody" the standards. In this case, fortune smiles on the candidates who pander directly to the lowest common denominator of the committee. Whenever you hear committee members using words like "perfect fit," such a model is in effect.
  

Involved at every major checkpoint and presiding over all career milestones, committees shape the academic and professional community (i.e., graduate admission; peer review; student ethics & evaluation; faculty search; tenure review). Very simply put, whether we are speaking about selection, training, or placement, committees determine the population of this field. The lowest common denominator becomes more constricting over time as the communities populated by its selectees inevitably become more homogeneous (i.e., like-minded). No one likes to receive a third- or fourth-generation photocopy or videotape, since by that point you'd be lucky to make anything out after the degradation in quality. In Darwinian terms, this is a world in which survival depends on committee approval.

Committees are the instruments for the creation and enforcement of standards. While determining mastery of a standard might appear simple and straightforward, compliance is often a matter of interpretation or worse, the standards themselves are often congenitally arbitrary. Committees never have to settle for less than full compliance with their criteria. All you have to do to understand this is to examine the lexicon of the committee, where members speak of "professional standing" rather than "potential." Why would a committee settle for potential when it can reward candidates who have already established a reliable record of publishing and relationships with external sources of funding? With a curious disregard for the individual nature and quality of the applicant's work, committees favor candidates whose records of generic achievement prove their worth as pre-packaged instantiations of the prevailing paradigm. Is it any wonder the catchphrase "pursuit of truth" was replaced by the phrase "commitment to excellence," reflecting a shift from a subject-focused Psychology to a self-centered Psychology (i.e., self here referring to the community's preoccupation with its own preservation and transmission).

This creates a musty and stingy culture in which qualities other or less than those demanded are treated not only as superfluous but as damaging, for such qualities are inconsistent with the coherent image departments of psychology project to their students and the general public. I'll say it again. Graduate admission and search committees can afford to seriously consider only those applicants not only willing to tow the company line, but who have made an art form of towing the company line. Search and admission committees bypass candidates with incalculable potential for proven and pre-packaged embodiments of the epistemology, selecting from the same petri dish next generation profs who have proven they can serviceably drone in their drabbest, dullest voice. Therefore, when asked whether I could blame the pathology of psychology's members entirely on characteristics associated with a certain class of individuals for whom psychology is an attractive career option, I replied with a resounding "no," faulting selection pressures for both creating a real uniformity and for requiring students, candidates, and colleagues to suppress idiosyncratic (personal) sources of diversity. Those credible candidates who develop the competitive CVs are those who (1) have no inclination or capacity to appreciate or formulate an original idea, (2) can willingly sacrifice their freedom and originality without considerable angst, or (3) derive meaning or enjoyment from mastering the task of elevating CV building to an art form.

As I mentioned earlier, committees employ a deindividuating metric in the measurement of a candidate. Peer review committees prioritize submissions that add scientific gloss to its cosmetic sheen (and secondarily reward works with a generic popularity, utility, or social import). There is a great deal of research out there with no immediate bearing on these 'virtues,' research that does not benefit from the treatment of the end-to-end scientific process as synonymous with end-stage confirmatory research. But the scorned second-class research does reflect an adequate exploration of salient psychological phenomena about which little is known due to its complexity, abstruseness, or material inaccessibility (e.g., dreams). Nevertheless, if supported by a depth of conceptualization and a breadth of fact collection, the exploratory phase stands to pay the most dividends in the long-term.

Selection committees desultorily browse CVs for structural or actuarial features indicative of publication quantity, journal reputation, and professional affiliations (any ties to external sources of funding?). The field appears on the surface to be diverse because its committee members are indifferent to topic of interest, except of course for those phenomena that do not lend themselves as readily to the knowledge production combine (e.g., dreaming) and thus require more fluid and phased exploration by flexible and divergent thinkers. Ironically, the phenomena of which I speak are those closest to the heart of the human condition and the original or rightful definition of psychology. Unfortunately, the committees cannot be attuned to the nature and quality of a candidate's work for as long as they remain unshakably devoted to the quantity and affiliation game (how many publications? what is the worth of this person's professional relationships and contacts?). But you better believe that after implementing their so-called standards, norms which govern the day-to-day operations of research and publication, the topics of interest represented by the faculty are increasingly utilitarian, technical, or political in nature. Awards like the The Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award offered by the American Psychological Association for "advances in psychology leading to the understanding or amelioration of important practical problems" is just one example of the underlying political agenda. But within this basic framework, whether a professor studies racial prejudice, the basic composition of pigeon stool, or the design of a cockpit is in and of itself immaterial. (Again, unless you study dreams, in which case you have a credibility problem whether you adhere to an empirical methodology or not. It takes a lab full of white coats and wires to overcome the negative perceptions about dream research). In addition to the inclusive aspects of their materialistic and political bias, their fetishistic rhapsodizing about multiculturalism, allows them to disguise a deep-seated oppression against a diversity of ideas and personalities. Like their experiments, in which they use strict controls to minimize the variance associated with their subjects (also called 'error'), they use strict controls to minimize differences and disharmony among themselves, creating a homogeneous group of interchangeable workers.

The Attrition of Rudimentary Thinking

The norms for psychological research and teaching, which ultimately shape the criteria for hiring, constrain creativity and independent thinking. The range of choices available in any given process of scientific inquiry is theoretically illimitable. At the broadest level, there is the choice of topic, question, research design, statistical analysis, materials & procedures, and sample composition & size. Psychological researchers would have you believe that research occurs according to the following fixed stages: literature review, hypotheses derivation, research design, implementation, statistical analyses, and the interpretation of data. But each stage contains opportunities for thinking that, if realized, would not only make this staged conception seem less apropos. Unfortunately, inconsistent with a value of thinking and essential science, the literature review and hypotheses derivation stages are often undertaken without pre-empirical contemplation and reflection. The academics simply skip all this thinking and jump right into the writing and execution phases, because these satisfy the minimum requirements under the norms and these immediately show up on paper. In other words, they do what is immediately expedient to the publication of a paper on a career timetable rather than what is sufficient to explore the question or phenomena under study. None of their pre-empirical contemplation and reflection is permitted on the final draft of a publishable trade paper due to limited space in journals and to this perverted concept of what constitutes a polished end-product. Moreover, if we allow ourselves time for contemplation and reflection, we are likely to produce ideas that vary considerably across professors. Unlike the rudimentary discourse required for a paper with a publishable format (i.e., "the following hypotheses..."; "a 2 x 2 analysis-of-variance was utilized..."; "...< .05. Hypothesis 1a is rejected"), it takes time and effort, to make one's thoughts and ideas comprehensible to one's peers. Unfortunately, we've reached a point where our writing skills have atrophied, not to mention our disposition to entertain our own thoughts or those of our colleagues. The APA style for publication provides a framework of expectations which was originally intended to facilitate communication and reduce the energy required to understand a colleague's writings. This style is more cherished in psychology than comparable styles in other fields because the subjects researched by psychology professors is potentially wide-ranging. We are always concerned whether a professor's publication on facial expressions in chimps can be readily grasped by a professor who studies racial prejudice in Congressional Republicans. So the common writing style makes anonymous interchangeable units of research subjects, but unfortunately, we have grown to love the mindlessness so much, that we have made anonymous interchangeable units of research methods, of ideas, and ultimnately of professors. The generic format is observed, the minimal requirements for research methodology deployed, and what may have once been regarded as a contribution of honorable mention -- thought -- is honorably discharged.

The attrition of basic thinking may account for that cloud of mediocrity that hangs over psychological research. This cloud shrouds every aspect of the scientific process, from the very beginning, when the academic either fails to ask a question worth studying, or when he or she skips the question entirely to what is called a 'hypothesis.' While psychological researchers seldom choose research designs and statistical analyses that are incorrect, and while their execution of these procedures is normally flawless, the research is rarely adequate, lacking scope and detail with respect to the collection of data, with respect to the inclusion of descriptive and exploratory data analysis techniques, and with respect to mulling the range of possible implications associated with the product of the analysis. It is this lack of thinking that may be responsible for the confabulation of theory with hypotheses; question with hypothesis; theory with method; facts with data; data with products of statistical analysis; and conclusions with findings. If we can restore some intelligence with respect to how all these things differ, we can expand our psychological inquiry and begin addressing its TRUE requirements in earnest.

What This Means for the University as a Scientific and Intellectual Ecosystem

Truth is, academics are easily prodded to truncate the scientific process and restrict the range of possible observations and decisions to those which are legitimate or politically prudent/expedient. Bottom line: the "psych-" is abandoned for the "-ology." Professors fail to inform their research with their own wits and fail to attend adequately to the subject under study. Departments of psychology become inhospitable to intellectuals, independent thinkers, and essential scientists, phenomenologists, and humanists. If universities could be likened to an intellectual ecosystem, then departments of psychology no longer support life. To extend this ecological metaphor, if psychology were a river, then the natural hydrologic and sediment transport regime is impeded by damming and pollution, the lack of nutrients in the water threatens rare species along the riverbank, and downstream beaches become more susceptible to erosion and storm damage.

The Manual

The vast majority of the norms and criteria of which I speak are unwritten. They do not need to be written because no one needs to be reminded of them. There is no faculty member who is unaware of them. And there is no disagreement as to their importance. However, where violations of these norms would cause damage to the field's public reputation, manuals are written. And sometimes, where professors and professionals want to feel or appear as if part of a guild, manuals are written. But there is yet a third reason -- one which grows in urgency as the quality of professors is degraded over generations. Manuals or policy handbooks are written to both (a) "train" those with no self-direction or self-motivation and (b) promote a pseudo-scientific and pseudo-medical PERSONA that serves political and public relations objectives. The worth of a professor or student then becomes a function of compliance with the written and unwritten norms. Unfortunately, this ultimately means that tenure is wasted on tenured professors, who have survived so many levels of vetting as to have proven themselves unlikely to recognize or formulate an original idea.

So what kind of applicants do they favor? A competitive CV demonstrates either a propensity for abrogation or, better yet, evidences pre-abrogation. Just whom do we reward? (1) "Heavy-hitters," seasoned veterans (currently employed at other universities) whose hiring confers an instant gratification on the university in the form of grant appeal. Also, the appeal of the heavy-hitter for the faculty selection committee is another illustration of their penchant (and eternal search) for the “no-brainer.” Believing the past is a best predictor of future behavior and then placing certain requirements on what aspects of past accomplishments can be discussed and in what manner is a very conservative approach. Choosing candidates who progress through their professional development at a precocious pace is a conservative choice. But professionalization is something just about everyone is likely to acquire at one point or another. There are much more valuable commodities which are not as common or which cannot be acquired or taught. And then there is also the matter of potential. We could and should give more weight to what a candidate plans to do with his or her research position. The only thing which has been lacking up to now that has prevented said candidate from realizing these plans as professional publications and accolades is the position. But if I submitted a vita that consisted only of planned programs of research, it would be discarded as a non-vita.

(2) We favor applicants whose CVs boast the most textual sound and fury, signifying a lack of quality, originality, and reflection.

(3) Applicants who will do just about anything to add a line of ink to that vita, serving as the sixth author of a four-page publication -- delaying progress through graduate school to teach multiple sections of undergraduate courses -- manning the overhead for an advisor at the national convention. These applicants understand search committee members lack time and tendency to read the CVs, browsing them for actuarial features (e.g., thickness, number of publications) with rare regard for the quality or nature of the work. Over time, this has to have to an effect on the quality of the individual professor. It's a trade-off. In essence, this extraverted field subverts individual development for the sake of community relationships. Unfortunately, it has also created a situation in which the reputation of an entire profession is vulnerable to the wits of a single critic who sees the one mind at work, and scoffs.

Those who go far in this field include naïve students, vapid drones, and administrative savants with no inherent vision -- no true calling -- no genuine interest -- in the human condition. These are psychologically unsophisticated career-seeking youth who are as easily socialized into the professional culture of psychology as their fluffy topics of interest are amenable to the knowledge production machine. It is not unlike boot camp. I have often heard it said by acquaintances in the military (I was once in the ROTC) that the function of boot camp is to break you down and rebuild you in the image of the military so you function well within the team. While liberal professors are critical of the military, I find this strategy quite appropriate for its purposes. I only wish these same professors would recognize the same tactics at work (and quite misplaced) within their own field. Those who are easily and happily welcomed into the team are those who bring little or nothing that needs to be broken down. Otherwise it is just painful -- painful for the inductee and painful for those inducting him or her. That is what my graduate school experience was all about -- about the senseless exchange of irritation between my professors and I.

On a related but distinguishable note, I recall a dream in which a commercial 747, commandeered by the military to tow heavy metal material, crashed in Afghanistan. In pondering the dream, I realized that the military refers to a specialized function within a broader public. Our military refers to the organization and mobilization of tools that serve ironically the freedom of the broader citizenry. I believe this dream refers to the inappropriateness of faculty subverting their own wits and freedoms in service of the highly specialized tools (their apotheosis into norms). Rather than using the tools freely as an extension of their wits, psychological researchers blindly serve a restricted subset of statistical and methodological applications. Within this culture, exploration and scholarship -- true science -- is unsustainable. And neither is Psychology.

Humpty Dumpty & the Fragmentation of the Field

Hyper-technical compliance with the narrow conception of science has altered the face of psychology departments. It is my contention that the mission of psychology has itself been remade in the image of the professional culture. The fact the 'psych-' has been abandoned for the '-ology' is evidenced in the changing face of psychology departments. I/O and Human Factors are growing while no one knows enough about Personality to notice its disappearance. The academic equivalent of the practitioner’s DSM, the Big 5 is just about the only Personality subject light enough to carry in the professional winds, a theory-free personality taxonomy distilled statistically from self-ratings along trait-dimensions developed from the mother of all manuals, the dictionary. The taxonomy is an attempt to prove that a science of Psychology can exist without concern for the facts of individual psychology and without contributions from the mind of the individual researcher. But I can see why the Big 5 appeals to them. Considering the fertility of the modern academic mind, it is the only thing they can grow from desert sand. Small group dynamics, once a staple of Social Psychology, was exported to the highly specialized I/O branch—reducing Social Psychology to the 'talk-show,' with its Chinese menu of popular topics like racial prejudice, self-esteem, and gender identity.

Psychology has been chopped up piecemeal into cosmetic fiefdoms of expertise that resemble less the study of the psyche than Sociology, Engineering, Actuarial Science, Biology, and Statistics. These fiefdoms represent tiny fractions of human nature over which any psychologist can profess expertise. Unfortunately this hubris has made a soup strainer of Psychology. By that I mean we are forced to sift our graduate applicants through a soup strainer, passing over those who make the effort to see the horizon for those who can hardly see to the edge of their own sandbox. The division of Psychology into fiefdoms (e.g., Social, Developmental, Cognitive) is an arbitrary one with catastrophic consequences for holistic research, which cannot survive if applicants to graduate schools can not earn admission because their interests are too large to be a prototypical leaf on one of their branches.

Student Testing & Evaluation

This is probably as good a place as any to discuss the homogenization that results from student evaluation methodologies. If my view of the un-lived history is not too skewed, I imagine a time when students were required to write essays to demonstrate their comprehension and integration of original works (i.e. books). In the modern era, even graduate students are spared the effort, original works having been replaced with a hodge podge of trade papers supplemented by a textbook written on a sixth grade level. I should know. As a seventh grader, I read my first Introduction to Psychology textbook. The personality psychology textbook, Hall & Lindzey was somewhat more difficult to digest (it was, afterall, a 1959 edition with separate chapters for Freud, Jung, and Adler), which may explain why the field of psychology can't seem to saw off the personality branch fast enough (replacing it with such branches as Human Factors [Engineering], Industrial-Organizational psychology [Business], Health Psychology [Introduction to Stress], and Cross-Cultural psychology). As a both an undergraduate and graduate student, I felt constrained by multiple choice testing. The affection of psychology professors for multiple choice tests is attributable to a number of factors: (1) the mathematical properties of the test lends the appearance of scientific precision, (2) while a single correct answer creates an illusion of objectivity, and spares them the burden of having to express something variegated and immaterial (i.e., their conceptualization of what constitutes a satisfactory response) in words. In their compulsory use of the multiple choice exams, psychology professors reduce an illitimable universe of student conceptualizations, conceptualizations bound up with the nature of the individual student, to a binary pair of 'correct' and 'incorrect' choices. The short answer essays that are sometimes paraded as more open-ended supplements of the multiple-choice items which allows a student an alternative means to demonstrate knowledge, are a close cousin of the multiple choice items in that the student is usually limited to 3-4 sentences in which he or she must explicitly name so many elements on a professor's checklist. The pre-ordained checklist is old wine in new bottles, giving the professor recourse to one correct answer that allows for fair and standard grading, and even lends the question mathematical properties (as when three-fourths of the total possible credit is awarded to a student whose response references three of the four elements in the checklist. Both the multiple choice and short answer (AKA "essay") questions posed problems for me as a student. In reading the course materials, I felt pressured to organize the information in such a way as to prepare me for the multiple-choice examinations. Sophisticated and playful conceptualization were always ill-afforded luxuries that wasted valuable test preparation time and that ultimately culminated in an intelligence inconsistent with the norms by which my socialization into the professional culture would be evaluated as a doctoral candidate.

The affection of psychology professors for the multiple-choice format is also linked to the post-test application of a statistical procedure known as item analysis, which allows them to determine which among the items of the exam were the most effective (i.e., discriminated among the top and bottom 10% of students with respect to overall performance on the exam as a whole). This statistical revisionism is emblematic of their overall attitude toward their subject matter. In his or her quest to build a battery of perfectly discriminating test items, the psychology professor drops some perfectly valid items, thus inflating the scores of students who performed well while further deflating the scores of the students who did not perform as well. This very act of adjusting the scores in accordance with the item analysis puts the study motivations and habits (and possibly the very nature of these students) on a pedestal above even the right answers. It tacitly presents a homogeneous image of an adjusted and qualified student. As a young student, this friction between my nature and the norms was palpable and pervasive, but never was it more insidious and infiltrating than in student evaluation. I only wish I could have articulated the source of antagonism as well then as I could now.

fireflySun.com Report List

16 Points Memo: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Authors, Scholars Unite to Support Wyatt Ehrenfels: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Dream Researcher Gail Bixler: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Exposes Our Fear of Exposure Therapy: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Interviews with Internal Correspondent: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Says Psychology Professors Suffer from Professional Analogue of Borderline Personality Disorder: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Student Defies Psychology Professor's Warning Not to Correspond with Wyatt Ehrenfels: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Chides Daniel Dennett for Evangelical Atheism in Psychology: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Argues Psychology Graduate Education Not Worth the Money: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Psychology Professors Acknowledge Student Complaints about Curriculum: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Answers Critics, Campaign of Diversionary Tactics: Wyatt Ehrenfels

American Psychological Association Denies Listserv Members Access to Wyatt Ehrenfels OKTV Broadcast Report: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Talks about the Dissertation Experience: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Discusses a Methodology for Dream Research: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Defends Dreaming from Psychologist Negative Thinking: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Urban E-Zine Entelechy Publishes Wyatt Ehrenfels Essay: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Defends Dream Research against Vaunted Psychology News Group Moderator: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Customizes Probe to Explore Dreaming-Waking Interface: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Kindred Critic Dennis Fox: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Psychotherapist Elio Frattaroli: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Political Scientist John Freie: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Biologist John Hewitt: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Shows Support for Embattled Psychology Graduate Student: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Counsels Students on True Callings: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Amuses with Proposal of Psychology Graduate Program Insurance: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Says Corrective Statistical Procedure Emblematic of Psychology's Flaws: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Brad Jesness Target of Malicious Psychologists on Usenet: Brad Jesness

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Medal-Winning Author M.J. John: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Critical of Vaunted Cornell Research Claiming Opposites Do NOT Attract: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Criticizes Berkeley Psychology Professors for Left Wing Bias: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Offers Links to Education and Appropriations Subcommittees: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Thunders Away at Psychology's Load-Bearing Premises: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Counsels High School Students on Choice of College Major: Wyatt Ehrenfels

APPIC Match Service Helps Veterans Hospital Psychologists Discriminate against Applicants w/ Disabilities: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Psychology Professional Development at Odds with Adult Maturation: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Republishes Work of College Curriculum Critic and FOX News Writer Wendy McElroy: Wendy McElroy

Wyatt Ehrenfels Likens Psychological Research to Premature Ejaculation: Wyatt Ehrenfels

According to Social Psychologist Wyatt Ehrenfels, Diversity Is Skin Deep, Black-and-White at University of Michigan: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Dismantles Psychology's Standard Defenses against Criticism: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Points to Hypocrisy in Terror Management Research: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Releases Revitalized Pocket Memo: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Publishes Critique in Revolution Issue of New Therapist Magazine: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Is Psychology at Odds with Itself?: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Says Campaign Not Intend to Offend Psychology Majors: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Why Community Access Television Is Coming Around to Wyatt Ehrenfels: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Overview of Wyatt Ehrenfels's Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Psychology Careers: Careers in Psychology Wyatt Ehrenfels

Are Psychology Professors Prejudiced against Psyche: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Psychology's Science of Dreams Fails Science and Dreams: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Psychology Graduate Schools Blasted for Culture of Student Character Assassination: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Ode to Psychology Students: Are You Making A Major out of a Molehill: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Multicultural Fetish of Psychology Professors Belie Suppression of Individual Freedom, Ideas in Psychology: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Games without Frontiers: Ehrenfels Depicts Science of Psychology as ADHD: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Uses Evolutionary Theory, Natural Selection to Impugn D-Volving Psychology: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Reveals American Psychological Association as Lobbying Tour de Force: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Shares Bizarre Tale of Application for University Position: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Dreams & Dreaming Frequently Asked Questions: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Discusses Predictive Power of Tornado Dreams: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Releases Preface to Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun: Wyatt Ehrenfels

In a Drugged States, New Mexico Legislators Give Psychologists Prescriptive Authority: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun Press Release: Katheryn Moyer

Brad Jesness Exposes Malicious Stalking by Psychologists on Usenet: Brad Jesness

Psychology Majors Respond to Wyatt Ehrenfels fireflySun.com: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Offers Personality Taxonomy: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Offers Blueprint for Blighted Psychology: Wyatt Ehrenfels

From Position of Ignorance, APA Official Diverts Attention from/Urges Skepticism for, Wyatt Ehrenfels APPIC Discrimination Report: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Comes to Terms with Roiled Psychology Graduate Student and News Group Moderator: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Responses to Wyatt Ehrenfels Campaign to Reform Psychology: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Independent Publisher Offers Glowing Review of Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Psychotherapist Robert Roerich: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Says Psychology Professors Play Games with Rules: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Physicist Jeff Schmidt: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Malicious Stalking by Psychologists Abusing Psychotherapy News Group: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Reveals Groupthink, Abuse in Psychology Faculty Evaluation of Graduate Students: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Begins Sequel to Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Exposes Counseling Center Hiring Preference for Gays, Lesbians: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Diagnoses the Diagnosticians with the Shadow DSM: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Prominent UC-Davis Dream Researcher Dodges Wyatt Ehrenfels Draft of Reformers: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Teams with Management Consulting Maven R. Mallory Starr: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Overview of Wyatt Ehrenfels Dream Research with Cancer Patients: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Comments on the Short Falls of Teaching in Psychology: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Popular Psychotherapy All about Controlling Chaos: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Washington National Cathedral Site of Synchronicity in Novel by Social Psychologist: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Comments on the Value of a Degree in Psychology: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Offers Strategy for Self-Science of Dreams: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Wyatt Ehrenfels Attacks Psychology on Two Fronts: Wyatt Ehrenfels

Connie Vaughn Teams with Wyatt Ehrenfels to Explain Why She Is Not a Psychology: Connie Vaughn

Benjamin Willard Elected President of Wyatt Ehrenfels Fan Club: Benjamin Willard

Wyatt Ehrenfels Identifies Flaws in U.S. News Report of Psychology Employment Prospects: Wyatt Ehrenfels