MOYER: “I am speaking with Dr. JW Ehrenfels, who has just informed me it is perfectly acceptable to address him as JW Ehrenfels – author of "Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun". Good morning, Wyatt.”

EHRENFELS: “Morning, Kate.”

MOYER: “You requested I start off by explaining to your readers that this is a redux of a March, 2001 interview. Why?"

EHRENFELS: "Well, Kate, when I read through the transcript of the original interview, I realized a lot has happened over the past three years, and I wondered how I might be able to improve on answers to your questions."

MOYER: "I believe that at this point in the original interview I was talking about having read the synopsis for your book, but we both know that your book was released in March."

EHRENFELS: "February 29. Yes."

MOYER: "That's right. The 29th. The date held a special significance for you given all your history with dreams."

EHRENFELS: "I knew since childhood that I was born to lead a rich dream life. Since adolescence that I was born to study dreams. And early into my adulthood that I was born to promote and defend the study of dreams."

MOYER: "Would I be correct to say that by 'study,' you are not referring to dream interpretation?"

EHRENFELS: "Correct. This is not to say I do not spend a great deal of time understanding the meaning of my own dreams, but the term interpretation implies that I, or anyone else for that matter, knows enough about dreaming at this point to interpret someone else's dreams or, for that matter, that even your relatively more common dream images have a fixed and universal meaning. Even within the life of any one individual, the meaning of a motif is likely to evolve along with developments in waking life and along with developments in the person himself [or herself] -- maturation. I also don't want to foreclose on the view of the dream as a series of manifest images that have a one-to-one correpondence with latent propositions -- latent meanings. I view the dream as an experience and, like any other experience, it is capable of altering sources of awareness. And if a dream, as an experience, can alter the foundations of waking experience, let us say hypothetically by redistributing value across criteria for waking judgment and perception, then it can predispose us to meet the events of the world differently, re-direct our goals, and even shape our identity. Psychologists, both clinicians and researchers, have invested a lot of hard work to the role of waking events in shaping us. Trauma. Schedules of reinforcement. Parental influences. But the role of dreaming as an experience has been overlooked -- "

MOYER: "Let me stop you there. Why? Is it that few of us recall our dreams? That dreams are so bizarre? That they don't pick up where they left off in the same way one day evolves into the next?"

EHRENFELS: "To be perfectly honest, I don't think interpretation, sufficient attention, or even recall is required for a dream to have its effect. I don't believe we empower the effects of our dream experiences. I don't believe dreams need our permission or blessing. They are what they are and I believe they can affect sources of awareness whether we remember them or not. But dreaming is difficult to study. Psych profs are not prepared to give to dreaming what dreaming requires in the way of sacrifices and in the way of risks to publishing on a career timetable. And over generations of using these criteria to appoint faculty, and grant them tenure, we built an academic culture and community that suffers from a 'failure of imagination.' I don't want to get sidetracked here, so I will direct my readers to various reports on my web site, like the one on ADHD Science."

MOYER: "Yes, but -- not so fast -- what would a psych prof be most likely to say if I read him the results of your rather interesting cancer research, for example?"

EHRENFELS: "Well, that's just it, Kate. Many profs -- and many students in fact -- without so much as an affirmative word -- just want to goad me into admitting that I can never be 100 percent certain that the subjects in my research did not lie in telling me what they dreamed. Or that my honest subjects did not falsely recall elements of their dream. But if you took this problem that seriously, you would have to throw out all research based on questionnaire data. Any research involving a written or verbal response. But we don't fret over that uncertainty because we are trained to replicate our research anyway. The fact is, you bracket the uncertainty, you collect your data, and where you actually find in your data meaningful conclusions or meaningful questions for future research, you note them and then you do it all over again with a new sample. If anything lying is likely to introduce static into the data, not clarity, but if you find clear and consistent results across individuals and across research studies, you can feel reasonably comfortable that your results are valid. The notion we can't study dreams unless we can put a camera in someone's head is absurd."

MOYER: "So you are saying that there is more to it than a genuine concern for science. A bias perhaps."

EHRENFELS: "The policies and procedures that govern the way we do science in Psychology actually have less standing in science than in meeting the requirements of the psychological community as a social institution. I understand we want to share expectations to facilitate our day-to-day transactions. We want to simplify and routinize various aspects of our lives, like how we go about choosing a new faculty from among 200 applicants, or how we decide which of the 500 submissions we're actually going to publish in our trade journal. We'd like to be able to fit together our products more readily into an organized body. And we'd like to project an image of solidarity and scientism for the public. But doing all this has a disproportionate effect on different would-be scholars depending on their strengths as scientists and depending on the phenomena they choose to study. Some of these policies and procedures can be quite restrictive and force some of us interested in the more psychologistic phenomena to make greater sacrifices to our freedoms, our wits, and our phenomenological fidelity than we can tolerate, just so we can keep our career prospects alive. Thus I like to say these policies and procedures behave like prejudices, or systemic biases, that adversely impact the advancement of knowledge about certain classes of phenomena and adversely impact the careers of those who want to study them. And so, if we take an evolutionary view on this profession, over the course of generations of training and hiring, the academic community becomes more homogeneous and they happen to have views and other characteristics that harm dreams and dream researchers. So you can say that through evolution, the systemic biases find human incarnation in the attitudes and personalities of individual psych profs. Is it any surprise that so many psych profs consider dreaming an inappropriate subject for investigation by psychologists?

MOYER: "Would you say the field attracts people who are not really suited to study human nature?"

EHRENFELS: "Attracts is such a small part of it. Yes, the field makes itself more available to such people. It favors such people during selection for graduate programs. Career-driven types are easily molded. And then the graduate training programs socialize them, further altering these trainable types into serviceable standard-bearers and administrative and technical savants. Along the way it weeds out or wears down those students who managed to get through the first gate with an individual conscience that is too highly developed. There are students out there who are driven by a curiosity to study natural phenomena, like dreams, for example."

MOYER: "That's your interest."

EHRENFELS: "Yes. The curiosity is real. It comes from within. Call it innate, if you will. It just seems to come of age at a certain time in a person's life, as if the phenomenon itself were somehow part of that person's psychological DNA. The person is aware that somehow he or she is intrinsically tied to the phenomenon, and so by studying it, the person grows into the object and the object is somehow humanized. It's a symbiosis between scientific progress and personal development."

MOYER: "And it sounds to me that you would require this of a student of psychology."

EHRENFELS: "I'm not speaking about requirements here. Requirements are arbitrary and by that I mean purely social. They are imposed on persons from without. I'm talking about a natural imperative from within whereby the person feels compelled to become a student of a particular phenomenon. Now I believe these conditions are fertile soil for productive scholarship. There are people out there whose science is an intrinsic part of the life process. Their research tends to respect the fundamentals of science -- the conceptualization and fact collection -- and does not engage in the kind of gratuitous cosmetic science we so often in a Psychology that is trying so desperately to appear as if it belongs among the rank-and-file sciences. For the research psychologist, rigor is glamour, especially when you grow accustomed to performing unremarkable, unproductive studies. When the science is not productive at affirming what is real, it gets hooked on using science to tell the world what isn't real, and it gets in the business of phenomena-debunking and performance-enhanced skepticism. When you don't have anything affirmative to offer in the way of a product, you turn to the process for glory, and you glorify the protocol. Suddenly, there are all these new and unnecessary conventions and practices that govern everything research and teaching psychologists do, and as long as you observe and celebrate these things, you can call yourself a scientist. Psychologists have down to an art form science as an ideology and as a vehicle for socializing new students into a professional community. But their brand of science [what Kuhn calls a paradigm] is largely ineffective and some might say have broken with the transdisciplinary fundamentals of science. And this is all largely because for research psychologists, science is something out there to be imitated. And if you imitate the most cosmetic features of science and if you earn yourself a credential so you could call yourself a scientist, then you can pretty much win people over to your view of things by claiming you have science on your side even when you don't. Conversely, I believe any work that emanates from within the psychology of the person will address and respect the psychology of the phenomenon. But it is clear to me that what we have here is many people for whom genuine science and the human condition is not in or of their natures. But they wish it were, or they simply like the amenities that come with the role of scientist. So they go looking for science out there in some educational/training program. They get their makeover and their cosmetic credential. It's my job to show you what these people look like without their makeup."

MOYER: "Your book is replete with characters who do not respect the psychology of phenomena. Let's face it. You don't respect their work. And you justify that with aspersions on the motivation for the work.”

EHRENFELS: "I believe the quality of the work is determined in large part by the way in which the work is brought into being and the purpose to which the work is put. Where does it come from? And where is it headed? Both answers should be the subject matter itself. We serve the subject matter. If you can't be clear on this -- or if this is clearly an instance of science toward ends other than the subject matter -- sometimes I like to talk about Psychology having 'hijacked' science -- than the work itself will be muddled and hollow. A dreadful and unproductive bore."

MOYER: "I'm not quite sure your audience would know such a person to meet him – someone whose motivation is muddled or servile. And this is just about every character in your book."

EHRENFELS: "In reality, unfortunately. That is the point of my book."

MOYER: "You do an excellent job portraying how creepy these people are, and they are the source of a hypocrisy and corruption which you blow the lid clean off. Describe these people for the audience."

EHRENFELS: "These are my arch-nemeses. They have no intrinsic interest in psychological phenomena. To speak to them for a few minutes, you have the distinct impression that when the time came, they made their way for the Psychology counter at the career fair – much like a Roman Catholic to the tri-color tortellini at the cafeteria line on Good Friday. I’m not sure whether they wandered or gravitated there – except – here they are – and it has to rank among the curiosities of our culture. I think we are more sure how aliens choose their abductees then we are why students decide to enroll in graduate coursework in Psychology. And yet they preside over the psyche – it is in their charge that we place the study of human nature – and people turn to them for answers to such basic questions as ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I doing here?’”

MOYER: "Questions you think they should put to themselves?"

EHRENFELS: "I'm content to put it to many of them myself. I think that they shopped for careers much like women shop for dresses. They consider very heavily how fashionable the role appears to others, and these particular students – or let me call them ‘pupils’ to differentiate them from real students – these pupils are drawn to the demeanor and reputation of psychologists. They believe they will don all the impressions of a 'doctor' – right down to the white lab coat – with a fraction of the effort required to achieve an M.D. From the nameplate on the door, the title, to the pager and cell phone they wear like Batman’s utility belt, to the adoration of naïve students aged 18-22 who assume their – ‘instructors have access to a special font of knowledge about the mysteries of the human mind. And I think the reputation associated with being a psychologist is actually much broader than that associated with being an M.D. They can be anything from gurus to professionals to mind-readers, manipulators, and authorities on human nature and social policy. Somewhere in the middle of my book, one of the characters spouts the philosophy of my real life adviser on this issue. And I think it’s incisive."

MOYER: "And the money."

EHRENFELS: "If you are pursuing a clinical degree that will certify you as a therapist. But many students pursue the research degree that qualifies them to be nothing other than an academic."

MOYER: "A professor, you mean."

EHRENFELS: "Yes. Teach and do research. These people are not in it for the money, though they may have been clinicians at one point who obtained jobs in universities."

MOYER: "To supplement or succeed an unsuccessful practice."

EHRENFELS: "Or maybe they just want a new sail for their boat."

MOYER: "But not for the psyche."

EHRENFELS: "No, their scholarly motives, if you could call it that, can be impure."

MOYER: "And you believe that this is not without its consequences."

EHRENFELS: "You see, Kate -- because many of them are there for social validation and because they have no authentic love for the phenomena, they are dogged by this basic uncertainty that what they are doing is right -- that their approach to teaching and research deserves the confidence of the public and the adoration of its adolescent class. Now this uncertainty belies their programmatic adherence to professional texts and manuals.”

MOYER: “So you would never think they were unsure of themselves.”

EHRENFELS: “That’s the idea. So we have this hyper-obedience to the letter of these manuals – like they were handed down on Mount Sinai – and yet if the reverence with which they treated this central document repository was warranted -- we wouldn't need a field of psychology -- we'd have all the answers – which may explain why they act like they have all the answers.”

MOYER: “I suppose it would explain a great deal.”

EHRENFELS: “It would justify why there has been no progress in the field for the past four decades. None would be needed. But it does not justify why we have been systematically undermining all the progress we’ve made in the field up to the year 1950. I refer here to the philosophical foundations of the field and to the theories derived from the casework of thinkers like Freud and Jung.”

MOYER: “They don’t respect the likes of Freud, do they?”

EHRENFELS: “You know – I listen to these sniveling little brats – who have never had to work at a thought their entire lives – who have had every thought they ever had handed to them from someone else or from some manual – I listen to these crass young students bash Freud and Jung with a reckless abandon – and I realize – even their criticisms are copped – and by that I mean – they are all second-hand – borrowed from what their mentor or Psych 101 advisor once told them or culled from the collective chortle among students in the Psych lounge. Such a scene would feature prominently in my academic adaptation of the film Clueless. The students embrace the criticisms because they’re convenient. Freud and Jung are not around to advance the careers of these students much like they are not around to defend themselves – Freud has been dead since ’39 and Jung since ’61. Makes them easy targets. But by grinding the company ax, the students siphon sympathy from their professors and sidestep the one mine placed squarely and conspicuously in the center of the field – a mine that makes up in destructiveness what it lacks in stealth – a mine that in one mis-phrased or mis-placed opinion could blow any accepted and achieving student to alienation and anonymity.”

MOYER: “But do the students really believe their own press?”

EHRENFELS: “The mind WILL follow the mouth if it has no ideas of its own. You know – this reminds me of what is perhaps the most popular topic of research in Psychology over the past 30 years -- Cognitive Dissonance -- the tendency to alter one’s attitudes to conform with one’s behaviors. People outside the fraternity system may tell you that hazing is petty, demeaning, and unjust, but once they rush one, and once they’ve been initiated, they would be more than happy to build their own spanking machine for a fresh crop of pledges. I mean at that point they will wax moral and sentimental about the virtues of their hazing experience and how it has made them a better man. Once they have explained why they believe hazing is a process everyone should experience, the making of a chapter officer is complete. The active ingredient in cognitive dissonance is said to be a motivation to reduce the unpleasant tension associated with having two inconsistent thoughts or with acting in a way that is inconsistent with one’s views. It is not an uninteresting idea – but I don’t think it’s worth thousands of research publications. And I suspect that Cognitive Dissonance owes its popularity to the centrality of its role in the psyche of the Psychology student. I don’t think the function represented by Cognitive Dissonance is nearly as prominent in the public psyche as it is in the psyche of psychologists. I mean -- if the mind were like the body and if psychological processes were like bodily organs, Cognitive Dissonance would be the heart and brain of the psychologist. I think one of the defining characteristics of psychologists is their inability to tolerate inconsistency and unpleasant tension. This would explain how psychologists could have created a culture of consensus and conformity so profound. They extol Cognitive Dissonance as one of the most significant findings of 20th Century Psychology, and yet I have never heard anyone condemn or ridicule it. They honestly do not see in Cognitive Dissonance its potential as public health threat. And the reason for that is simple: the public health threat is the profession of Psychology. As far as 20th Century science is concerned, they have treated cognitive dissonance as their equivalent of nuclear physics, and thus I believe they should hold all applause for their discovery until they recognize their own radiation poisoning and clean the radon out from the foundation of their own profession. This field is an A-Bomb in the making – a military deliverable for forces of (human) nature that have been distorted for their own ends – and one day it will explode in a blaze of bias and misinformation – the fallout from which will contaminate the rest of us with a toxic level of impotence and ignorance. Now of course I am being carried away a little here by my love of metaphor, but that should not detract from the fact that cognitive dissonance is how fraternity pledges become fraternity officers and, less insignificantly, how Nazi recruits can slavishly comply with orders intended to erase a whole people – a whole religion. I say this because – much like religion -- systems of thought are precluded from – or weeded out of -- the profession of Psychology wholesale. The view of human nature – and the recommendations for its treatment – offered by these professionals is – well – even when you disregard the prejudice -- the inadequacy -- the inaccuracy – there is still the matter of the ugliness. There is no art in artifice. Just visit some of the faculty and student home pages on the web. From the community college up to Harvard itself, you will find dynamic images of rotating brains – seldom a human drawn below the neck – and you will find some line – usually with multiple commas and a colon – in which they list their research interests – for example – “My research interests include: Attention, Concentration, Memory, and Gender” – which reads much like Miss Teen USA’s pledge to feed the children, feel good about ourselves, and of course, world peace. Unlike psychology students, some of those beauty contestants can stake a claim to certain talents – some play a mean piano. As you will find on most of these web pages, the students and faculty often have separate links to personal pages – many labeled “About Me” – which is even more bereft – more bankrupt -- than their professional pages – consisting of no more than a photo of their friends, a description of their cat, and a list of their favorite films – a cross between Nosferatu and There’s Something About Mary. If their web pages are any indication of who they are as both professionals and people – and I believe it is – then it is clear the two share nothing but a profound emptiness. They are like empty vacuums whose sole purpose – whose whole being – consists of pieces of dust and lint they have sucked into their hull from the world outside them.”

MOYER: “Worthless.”

EHRENFELS: “Not so much without worth as without purpose. I didn’t say ‘what little worth’ – I said ‘whose sole purpose’… oh what the hell is the point of this distinction?”

MOYER: “I have no idea (laughter) – where you were going with that.”

EHRENFELS: “It just sounded so harsh the way you said it – ‘worthless.’ And I knew you were paraphrasing me, so – ”

MOYER: “Not really. I went to college. I have web access. I’ve seen some of these web pages.”

EHRENFELS: “While I wipe tears of laughter and tears of pain from my eye – let me say that – a recent cover of the APA Monitor featured a photograph of an Asian man in a suit in front a Nasdaq market ticker. The caption read something to the effect of ‘New Careers for Psychologists.’ I did not read the article but in all likelihood it celebrates a swelling sphere of influence for homeless minds. I mean – think about it – if we cared about the essence of psychology – we wouldn’t dabble in such great numbers in such far off fields as engineering and CGI. We actually have divisions within our programs devoted to Sports Psychology and Human Factors. I realize everything has applications – but what are you applying? It is not like we are learning first about human nature and then extending those patterns of knowledge in various directions. We may think we do, but the fact we know virtually nothing – coupled with the fact our research is growing exponentially more grant-driven and applied – means that at best – at best – we will end up one day with a myriad of branches ranging from the Psychology of the Windows NT Employee to the Psychology of the Left Foot – with still nothing substantive to say about who and what we are – how we function and grow as personalities – what the needs of the psyche are. Actually, that is their cure for the common ignorance – specialize – focus! The molecule is too complex to understand – so we spend years figuring out how to split it ethically and professionally into atoms – until we discover these atoms are also fairly complicated. But as long as we know nothing, we might as well be ignorant in style – we might as well appear to know something or at least appear to be very close to knowing something. So we invent this jargon and these manualized procedures and these ethics – in other words – we create systems we are capable of knowing. How do we know these things? We created them. We are quite adept at filling the holes in nature with social fiction and artifice. So where does this all lead? Well – at this present speed – fast – and at our present heading – nowhere -- we will probably dissolve into a race of consultants paid $200 an hour to teach meat packers how to manage stress. And yet – as long as we have a well-defined and well-enforced code of ethics, as long as we can bill for third party reimbursement, and as long as we can don badges at annual conventions, subscribe to periodicals, and populate list-serves, we can call ourselves professionals. But will we be psychologists? No. Why? Because we do not deal in the psyche.”

MOYER: “And the criticism of Freud and Jung – this is an indication?”

EHRENFELS: “We’ve turned on the founders of our field, which is symptomatic of the unconstitutionality of modern psychology. It has departed from its foundations – ignored the conservative principle in the psyche – human nature – and set in motion this scientific and professional juggernaut in the name of progress. But if you ask me -- we have to be the only science that is actually moving backward. If you think the professors are bad – you should get a load of the students – the next generation of professionals. They decry Jung’s theory without ever having read it – they want to discount over a decade of my devotion to Jung’s works on the premise that Jung had an affair with one of his patients. Whether or not that is true does not interest me. I judge the theory on its own merits – and the truth is that it is too much for them to read. There are too many books and Jung was too intellectual for them. So they find some other reason for discounting his theory – which is that he was not one of them – or wouldn’t be one of them if he were alive today. This is the same reason professors embattle certain students – because they suspect they don’t share in their agendas. The truth is that Jung lived and practiced in a pioneer age – without the constraints of an APA Ethics Code. And they want to treat this generation as unprofessional much as we would treat a Neanderthal as uncultured. Their basis for all their decisions is purely social and serves the modern concept of professionalism, which is to say the subject matter itself is not its primary beneficiary. They will believe anything you tell them about the psyche if it involves membership in associations, participation in conferences and conventions, and subscriptions to periodicals. That is what Psychology has become – a lodge – a union – a club – just hand them their card, their name badge, and a hat with some kind of tassel, and they are down with it. And the Jungians – God bless them – are no better. They have joined the few remaining Freudians as the ‘snobs’ of the field – with their exclusive club. To call yourself a Jungian you have to complete a five-year post-doctoral program, which includes more than just coursework. You have to submit to at least one year of Jungian therapy, and then you have to practice Jungian therapy under the supervision of a certified analyst.”

MOYER: “What do you think Jung would think of all this if he were alive today?”

EHRENFELS: “I want to exhume his body – because I’m pretty sure it’s rolled over. And like everything else in the field, one roll from Jung has more meaning than all make and manner of modern professional contortion. I don’t know even where to begin telling you what he would think is wrong with the professionalization of the Jungian discipline. First of all, he would not stipulate that enrollment in his school require a doctorate, because he knows that doctoral programs weed out free-thinking intellectuals like himself. So right there, you restrict yourself to a pool of second-rate scholars. And then he would oppose the monopoly of his affiliation by clinicians, understanding that there are researchers in the field of Social, Developmental, or Personality Psychology who would like to benefit from advanced Jungian coursework. In his work, UNDISCOVERED SELF, he rues the bifurcation of practitioners and scientists in Psychology, treating each principle equally, as he incorporated both principles into his own scholarly study of the psyche. Granted, you may not be able to practice as a therapist – Jungian or otherwise – unless you are licensed and that most (if not all) State boards require a degree from an APA accredited institution before you can petition to take the licensing exam. However, either Jungians should make their case to the APA for accreditation or they should take it to a higher court and demand recourse to an authority higher than the APA. Only then could the Jungians be faithful to Jung and to the true Jungians like myself who was punished by my professors if not for my alignment with Jung than for my Jungian-like ideas. But instead of fighting for the essence of Jung, the Jungians sold it out for membership in a profession. But what you have now is the worst of all worlds – Jungians have no authority or standing in the psychological community – fine – but then they have not positioned themselves as a rival community – a Shadow Psychology -- fine again – but then they behave like professionals and communities in ways that undercut their base and exclude persons who can win support for Jung and thus for the idea of a psyche.”

MOYER: “You think the APA should not be as influential as it is politically.”

EHRENFELS: “That’s just it. It’s a lobbying and political organization – and a document clearinghouse for professionals. But I see no reason why any Government agency should grant the APA any jurisdiction over Psychology and, in turn, over the Psyche. Graduate programs in Clinical Psychology should not have to slavishly comply with the arbitrary political views of a few bureaucrats on First Street in Washington, D.C. Their APA Style Manual and their DSM-IV has created languages that carve up the world into artificial categories that constrain independent and intellectual thought. I mean really – you spend more time researching the manual to figure out whether to use an ‘and’ or an ampersand in a reference – which is doubly painful if the endnote system disrupts the flow of your ideas and offends your aesthetic sensibilities. If the APA itself does not have the power to demand strict adherence to these categories and guidelines, surrogates and sycophants on university campuses, State licensing boards, consulting rooms, and granting agencies implement these demands on its behalf. WE have made the APA what it is. We are accomplices. The texts and manuals -- with all their constraints on intellectual freedom -- seem to guarantee nothing gets discovered and that a wide blanket of skepticism is cast over all the intriguing leads we inherited from the free-wheeling fathers of the field. But we are eager to pick the flowers grown from the gardens of APA Central, because in the absence of any substantive ideas of our own, we will settle – no – we will rally and rhapsodize around the SEMBLANCE of ideas. We allay our insecurities – our angst that what we are doing might not be right -- through conformity. So professors conform – conform to the putative consensus -- and they require this same conformity from their colleagues and from their graduate students and assistants. Anyone who steps one inch on either side of the white line will be punished for resurrecting the repressed seed of doubt from the Unconscious of the modern psychologist. But no matter how precise we are able to mechanize our movements so they mimic those of the Central Machine, we will not create a product worth having. The Artifice is grossly lacking in Worth, Wisdom, and Wherewithal. Meanwhile, the APA police in every university psych department glowers at everyone who misplaces a comma. What about our misplaced trust in the APA? And really – this is a monopoly of sorts. We break up Ma Bell and yet the States give exclusive authority to the APA as an agent of accreditation. I once appealed to the APA’s Committee on Ethics – I appealed to them to investigate a somewhat obvious violation of ethics and an even more glaring injustice. It was so obvious – even the school’s Dean took immediate action when I brought the matter to his attention. But the APA ground my complaint through their gut-wrenchingly slow and painfully perfunctory machinations – all of which culminated in a letter dismissing my claim on grounds they claimed I was not entitled to know. I mean – I would call it a sham and look the other way if it weren’t downright humiliating. Whatever injustice I received from the school – that was one thing – but my treatment at the hands of the APA…that was far worse. No agency in and of itself poses so egregious an aspersion on the dignity of the individual quite like the American Psychological Association.”

MOYER: "So you would say the field needs more people who think outside the box."

EHRENFELS: "I'm not so fond of that expression. I guess it’s because it’s a business term. It is used primarily by psychologists employed as Bell Laboratory consultants who hold seminars on how to conduct workshops. My wife had a professor who required her students to think 'outside the box.' Yet she is one of the professors about whom I speak. Anyone who thinks at all in reference to a 'box' is not really thinking outside it. It strikes me as the kind of term used by some of the professors who goad applicants during interviews into speaking freely until they find evidence of the style or orientation they don’t want to see. Smiling the whole time -- feigning agreement -- throughout the whole ruse."

MOYER: "So then it’s a trap?"

EHRENFELS: "They don't like free-thinking people. Once they've identified them, they wallpaper their wastebaskets with their applications. And the applicants have no clue how they could have been turned down after such an interview. Believe me -- you never want to show a psychologist your true colors. That is why I find the therapy requirement in some programs offensive."

MOYER: “Therapy requirement?”

EHRENFELS: “Some programs require you to receive therapy as part of your training. It usually occurs on the premises with a faculty serving as your therapist. It may be performed so that you learn the therapy method, or it may be performed so they produce graduates with a clean bill of mental health, but in either case, it gives the faculty the ammunition they need to declare you unfit for their training. During the therapy, you are so ‘out there’ – so ‘exposed’ – so likely to express your personal habits and beliefs – and if the faculty doesn’t like them – unhealthy or not – they find some basis for retracting their support of your candidacy. The APA is deliberating a policy that would discourage if not prohibit this practice. But so many members of the field support it and have connections in the APA that I would be surprised if the APA did anything about it. Hell – I even know a faculty member at the school described in Fireflies that is attempting to fight it.”

MOYER: “You don’t seem too impressed with the APA.”

EHRENFELS: “I filed an ethical complaint with them a few years earlier. It was a clear cut violation of an ethical guidelines – and just a plain dastardly thing to do – and the APA washed its hands of it. You can’t speak to anyone personally about the matter – all correspondence occurs through forms – and their final letter to me announced not only that the APA Ethics Committee dismissed the complaint but that the Committee availed itself of its discretion not to reveal the specific reason for dismissal. The letter enumerated four possible basis for dismissal. I thought what happened to me was humiliating – so I appealed to the APA for relief and dignity. Instead I suffered a greater indignity at the hands of the APA.”

MOYER: “Is it covered in your book – what happened to you?”

EHRENFELS: “Yeah. But I don’t wish to discuss it here. I’d like to return if I can to the evils of careerism in Psychology.”

MOYER: “And toward that end, you had made the point that professionals and professors in the field of Psychology demand compliance with a pseudo-consensus.”

EHRENFELS: "Yes. Universities are anything but monuments to intellectual freedom. Professors do not tolerate anything but their own points of view. This is a form of discrimination in and of itself, especially when you consider the fact that it shuts out of the field just about every student who is either introverted or who loves his or her phenomenon of study. Nothing creates freedom more than true love -- more than love and authenticity. Because students who march to the beat of the phenomena they study is bound to march astray of the company drum. The road to true knowledge must lead through the phenomenon about which we seek the truth, whereas the methodology we adopted to study phenomena aims to treat all phenomena equally and is itself a product of social agreement."

MOYER: "The field needed some guidelines."

EHRENFELS: "To keep all its members in unison. Yes. Partly so we could communicate with one another effortlessly, and by that I mean lazily. So if there are requirements specifying what a Table or Figure could look like and that it must be presented on an overhead projector for conferences or dissertation defenses, then any thought must be capable of being formatted for these requirements. One thing leads to another, and before you know it, you are re-arranging your whole theory or project proposal. But this isn't all. It's also partly so Psychology could emulate all the characteristics of a science. This is the debate. There are those who believe the mind itself created the methodology and thus should not remain under its thumb -- and by that I mean -- the mind should not cede absolute authority to the method to study itself -- especially when we consider the methodology was thought up with purposes other than the mind in mind. But there are those who believe that to be scientific, the mind needs an external point of reference -- an independent counsel if you will -- and so they ignore the fact the methodology -- which is created by so many people across disciplines and across time -- is in fact a product of the mind itself. They consider the methodology an independent arbiter of hypotheses about the mind -- an arena in which competing theories about the mind can do battle."

MOYER: “By ‘created by the mind’ – ”

EHRENFELS: “I see where you’re headed. I don’t mean ‘created by the mind’ in the same way I mean a dream is created by the mind. I trust dreams more because they are objective and natural products of the psyche. No arbitrary will enters in its creation. But when I say ‘the methodology is a product of the mind,’ I mean that it is not a source or product of Science itself with all the facticity of a rock. It is a product of committee, of the agreement of people with many purposes in mind other than the psyche itself. I KNOW that to satisfy certain scientific precepts -- I have had to re-arrange my proposals. I have had a professor tell me that my theory was too complicated and my method was thus too complicated."

MOYER: "Shouldn't it be as complicated as need be?"

EHRENFELS: "Ideally -- as required by how much we don't know and by the phenomenon itself. But in reality -- less complicated. Always less. I don't know whether you've heard of Occam's razor, otherwise known as the principle of parsimony. Basically, it states that if all things are equal, the simplest explanation is the best. I don't disagree with that. But -- this precept has been abused and co-opted for what I think are clearly unscientific purposes entirely. First of all, rarely is anything equal. Where you have 2 theories, they are often apples and oranges. I think psychology suffers from a severe vitamin C deficiency. Phenomena are complex and to explore them open-mindedly without preconception or predilection often means starting with a complex theory and then trimming away or even re-affirming the details that make it complex. You have a theory -- and its measure of complexity is in the eye of the beholder. If someone objects to it, it is not because it is too complex, but because they don't like the theory. The theory that aliens created Stonehenge is very simple, and yet I've heard Occam's razor invoked for the purposes of dismissing the theory. Occam's razor has become a tool of materialistic, rational scientists and skeptics who want to reduce all psychological phenomena to a formula describing the activity of a few neurons in the brain. These brain theorists seem to think that any explanation that is not operationalized in terms of observable and measurable brain structures is lacking or a just a metaphor waiting for its surrogate to emerge in brain research. This is dangerous. It gives all the power to a select few people and disenfranchises students of dreams who are not trained EEG technicians and who do not have access to a lab. But I do not want to convey the impression that this would be at all desirable to me. Dream lab equipment -- for all the wires and electrodes -- are not able to learn anything more about dreams themselves. We are still dependent entirely on the report of the dreamer. Lab techs don't like this, because it places them on the same level as people like myself. So they refer to the reports always as "subjective reports," -- you hardly ever find the one word without the other -- and they rhapsodize the necessities of the laboratory methodology as safeguards against threats to the quote unquote reliability and validity of the research. Dream samples that are not taken from the same REM period introduces a confound into the research -- which I am not dismissing entirely -- there are assets and liabilities to all kinds of research. One of the benefits of home diary reporting is that it makes demands on the intelligence of the researcher and the other is that the dreams occur within the natural life context of the dreamer. When you rip the dreamer from his or her life and place him in a lab, you alter the life and the meaning of the dreams. If dreams have any meaning at all, they are meaningful in relation to the life of the dreamer. Take him out of that habitat, and who knows what you have? This argument disturbs the lab techs, and so the only meaning -- the only purpose -- their research can have is to prove that dreams themselves are meaningless. This has become their mission -- their bias. The roles of dreams in these theories range from random by-products of brain secretions at worst to file cabinets for mental information at best. But no theory regarding an active role of dream symbolism and experience in the personality and life of the dreamer can be proffered by these pseudo-scientists. And it's ironic that I should call them pseudo-scientists, because while they affect the demeanor and behavior of the hard sciences, they are sloppy and irresponsible philosophers. And the Ph.D. is a doctorate in philosophy. Sure, their methodology and analyses are impeccably designed -- meticulous and impervious to formal criticism on its own grounds -- on methodological grounds -- but these people commit errors and biases in thinking that undermine their own conclusions from the data. Let's not forget the many stages in the scientific process in which thinking enters. First we have a theory. Their theories as I mentioned are lacking. They are so parsimonious as to be inadequate as an explanation that would interest anyone. They isolate the phenomenon from the life context to such an extent that their study no longer has the appearance of psychology. There is no "psych-" in their method of inquiry, just "-ology." That's what I like to call them: "Ologists." They deprive psychological phenomenon of their psychological implications, humans of their humanity. Thinking enters again when scientists have to derive hypothesis -- predictions -- based on their theory. Theories can never be tested in a laboratory. Any theory worth its salt is too broad and too rich. A scientific study can only have so many ingredients -- so many independent variables and dependent variables -- so the theory guides us in the formulation of certain predictions on the form a dependent variable will assume under the influence of an independent variable. These predictions are called hypotheses and they are based on our theory. Now some scientists stack the deck in favor of their theory by claiming an opposing theory would predict x, when in fact the opposing theory would never select these independent and dependent variables in the first place. Thinking enters again when an experiment must be designed to test the hypothesis and when statistical analyses must be selected for the analysis of the data that comes out of this design. There are many possible choices here, and despite the ravings of the purists, I would say the very fact different experimenters would select different designs and analyses to test the same theory indicates a different understanding of the theory itself. And finally conclusions have to be drawn from the data. There have been experiments in psychology in which ‘Ologists’ have argued that brain activation during REM sleep -- which is when dreams are said to occur -- is 'generalized,' which is to say so much of the brain is activated. On those grounds, these Ologists have argued that because they cannot see any pattern in this orgy of neuronal activation, that none exists. The pattern is deemed ‘random,’ and therefore dreams themselves are random and have no meaning. The holes in this thinking are so obvious, I don't think I even need to explain them to the layperson. Clearly, the psychologists who subscribe to this thinking are either unintelligent or politically motivated. Either way, the conclusions they draw are dangerous to dream research. The conclusions are like envelopes that carry a scientific seal, and they threaten to shut down dream research. True dream researchers can come up with so many rich conclusions from their home diary research because they are not constrained by limiting methodological requirements and because they are not biased toward a certain conclusion. They can look at so many aspects of the dream in relation to some many aspects of the life, where the lab technician can look only at neuronal activation. I condemn the hubris and hauteur of the Ologist. What they are doing is in effect Unconstitutional, if we regard human nature as the Constitution. They seek to disqualify the validity of a whole phenomenon -- of a part of human nature. Now I would have to admit that perhaps dreams have no meaning if I had not already come across so much evidence to the contrary in my personal life. The truth is – science can no more predict that dreams have meaning than that dreams DO not have meaning. Science itself cannot adjudicate this matter – it is tantamount to attempting to prove scientifically that a rock which rolled down the hill DID or DID NOT intend to roll down the hill. Science has no jurisdiction over meaning. It is interesting so many Ologists sing the praises of the lab to study a phenomenon they hate so much, because many of these Ologists have never remembered a dream in their lives. Perhaps it is a jealousy -- or the fear they are missing out -- that compels them to disqualify a source of meaning and experience for the rest of the world.”

MOYER: “But an air-headed lab technician – just kind a learning the trade -- commands more authority than any intellect outside a lab coat.”

EHRENFELS: “Yes. And I suspect it will always be that way. Since their intellects are relatively non-existent, it is their social and professional clout that makes them formidable adversaries. I am not sure positive scientific results will do the trick, because whatever I uncover will be considered suspect until the technicians replicate it in a lab. But it would be difficult for me to study dreams my way and even find a forum – a venue. I would have to convince journal editors and dissertation advisors and faculty search committees that my way has some scientific merit. It is tantamount to being guilty until proven innocent. No one who has ever been through a trial is ever declared innocent. They have to live with the stigma of ‘not guilty’ or – even worse – ‘acquitted’ – to allow for the possibility they got a way with something. In the same vein, no one who studies dreams -- let alone studies them my way -- is ever celebrated -- ever legitimized. I live with a skepticism that is tantamount to suspicion much like the kind portrayed in the film GUILTY BY SUSPICION about the McCarthy hearings of the 1950's. Many careers were destroyed during that era on suspicion of a political affiliation that may or may not have even been substantiated. It was meaningless dribble -- THAT in the name of which we committed these acts -- and the same force is at work within academic and professional Psychology today."

MOYER: "I believe you called that force ‘careerism.’”

Scientism as Professionalism

EHRENFELS: "As it applied to individual professors, but considered collectively, it is professionalism – scientism. Psychology has been licking the heels of Science for some time now. But if you ask me, Science should not welcome psychologists because psychologists have demonstrated that they lack the intelligence needed to apply scientific reasoning responsibly. Statisticians and physicists laugh at how psychologists portray their models within psychology. Statisticians point to the fact psychologists -- without any understanding of the theory behind statistics – simply rip the formulas from the textbooks and throw them into some cookbook for conclusions. Psychologists emulate with gravitas the efficient causation of physicists when physicists and philosophers of science would point out that efficient causation was the prevailing model during the 1920's before physicists moved on to field and quantum theories based on formal causation. Regardless of the fact psychologists have never heard of the terms ‘formal’ and ‘efficient’ causation to describe their practices -- they are poor philosophers and thus have no insight into philosophy of science or theory construction principles -- what they claim to frown on as ‘unscientific’ are actually coming into vogue among many modern physicists, who welcome flexibility and freedom in their scientific thinking. Theoretical physicists are intellects without equals in psychology. If you want more evidence for this, I suggest you consult the Educational Testing Service, which will provide statistics claiming that psychologists rank next-to-last – ‘near the nadir’ – in Graduate Record Examination test scores."

MOYER: "Next to last.”

EHRENFELS: “Thank Heavens for Education majors. Look -- I hate having to make these claims, because they are misapprehended by psychologists as arguments against science; when in fact, I am only arguing against the hyperbolic imitation and histrionic celebration of science within psychology. Psychologists should understand that they are ‘pseudo-scientists’ not because they do not subscribe to scientific principles -- like astrologers – but by virtue of the fact they apply scientific precepts with a reckless and celebratory abandon that over-reaches and in some cases violates practical necessity. In effect, psychologists practice ‘scientism’ – a religious form of science. Their methods come not from the necessity of the phenomenon they study, but from a desire to resemble scientists from the lab coat to the Nobel Prize. A sleep researcher at an Alabama hospital once told me what I would need to study in the dream lab to earn a Nobel Prize. He should be a used car salesman! My research is systematic and empirical, and I am proud of the fact it is not so blind as to be ‘rigorous’ in its method and ‘parsimonious’ in its theory. I am able to sleep at night by thinking of this farce -- this artifice -- called Psychology -- from which I have been denied a place -- but which will continue to deny the world any meaningful contributions for centuries to come. It is in violation of its charter as a branch of science and it is in violation of its Constitution as a sworn inquiry into human nature. Morally and intellectually -- it is bankrupt -- dead to the world it purports to study. It is a bunch of debutante dilletantes that erode the human nature in its students and its subject matter in the name of science and professionalism. It should receive as much funding from the federal government as is allocated to departments of parapsychology, astrology, and drama -- and even less -- because unlike the previously named three -- it does not distort or devalue the subject matter it purports to study."

MOYER: “Can you give me a better sense of what you mean by ‘scientism’?”

EHRENFELS: “Psychologists treat scientific precepts like laws -- and their hyper-technical reliance on these precepts comes at the expense of discovery. How often do they invoke these precepts like they are quoting paragraph and section from a law book? Too often! Do they cite these precepts -- falsifiability, parsimony, replicability, psychometric soundness -- like they are handing out indictments? You bet they do! Because the mere mention of them can stop an undesirable project dead in its tracks. But the problem is that these precepts are more often than not misunderstood and misapplied. I doubt they were intended to restrict inquiry and promote uniformity. But that has been their effects in the hands of certain administrators. Those aerodynamic curves may be fine for modern automobiles – but uniformity is not needed in systematic study of the human psyche. I think they have a limited role in the evaluation of what I call ‘confirmatory or conclusive research’ -- research designed to yield as definitive a conclusion as is possible within the limits of science. But confirmatory research is not worth its salt unless it seeks to confirm questions worth asking and conclusions worth confirmation. And this substance and spark of science must be provided by exploratory research. Exploratory research is bold because it asks the grand questions, and it sacrifices a measure of formal scientific rigor in designing a methodology adequate to the questions. A scientific fact takes a journey akin to that of a bill or proposal through House, Senate, and subcommittee. Things get watered down or less interesting as they get compromised. Similarly, when we consider Science in a historical and purposeful context – we realize it is a process -- not a product -- and we are encouraged to evaluate the formal and final conclusion in the context of not only the method that produced it, but the history of the research that produced it back to its exploratory roots -- even to its inspiration in – oh -- the hunch or serendipitous dream of an individual person. There is so much more to understand if we opened our eyes wide enough to embrace more than just what is resistant to scientific criticism. But as it stands today, Psychology promotes a conformatory -- oops -- confirmatory -- culture which not only limits our understanding, but lies to it.”

MOYER: “What is the status of exploratory research in your field?”

EHRENFELS: “The field does not reward exploratory research. With so many competing for publication, we publish only those submission that showcase conclusions. It’s all window-dressing. Sure, we are encouraged to explore and conduct what are called pilot tests, which are usually just dry runs of the confirmatory research, but the fact is that with our penchant for certainty, our disinterest in human nature, and our directive to publish or perish, we do not do exploratory research. The result is that we fill our journals with junk science – ‘junk’ not in the sense that it feigns conclusiveness without scientific basis, but because without suitable foundation in exploration, it fails to address anything meaningful. Academics are in no danger of perishing, but of languishing on like the living dead in a zombie state until tenure is conferred on them -- at which time they become more like vampires -- sequestered into a dark brotherhood of bloodless drones who exchange eternal life for their soul. There is no better metaphor for the tenured or tenure-seeking professor than the vampire, and I never would have stumbled on it if I hadn’t reflected on the many vampire dreams I experienced while in graduate school.”

MOYER: “Vampires. I like that.”

EHRENFELS: “In high school, we sell out our individuality and freedom for sex – in graduate school, we sell out for certification. They suffer from a interminal adolescence – these professors. I have heard a rumor that the APA will revise its Ethics Code to require dissertation advisors to have sufficient knowledge of a subject matter in order to oversee a dissertation. It was difficult enough for me to get into graduate school as a student who wanted to study dreams. Ultimately, I found some open-minded Zen Buddhist and health psychologist who was kind enough and scholarly enough to oversee my dream research. But he had no special knowledge of dreams. Such a policy is dangerous not only because it denies his advisee the right to study what he wishes to study, but because no new knowledge is possible within such a system. The APA just doesn’t get it. The field never needed fixing. Stop affecting us. The more variables we fix or constrain in the research process or the process by which we train our students to research, the more we fix or constrain what we can ultimately conclude on the basis of our research. Science has become like a ‘tell me your idea in 25 words or less kind of thing.’ And whatever we say has to be consistent either with what they expect to hear, or with what they want to hear.”

MOYER: “How would you fix the system?”

EHRENFELS: “Yikes! Now that’s a question. And here’s an answer. I would start by broadening what is acceptable research in psychology and I would do this creating a division of labor inclusive of all researchers. There would be exploratory researchers like myself who love their subject matter and who know how to think and be human -- who emphasize the ‘psych-’ in ‘psychology.’ We exploratory researchers would pass on our research to confirmatory researchers, who are indifferent to human nature but who as scientists and professionals grind our research through the mill to generate what is an acceptable product of science -- who emphasize the ‘-ology’ in ‘psychology.’ And there would be the method historians who examine both sides of the research closely and summarize it in a historiography. The product would be human, historical, and have scientific merit.”

Consumerism: University as Mall of America

MOYER: “Can you explain why the field is inundated with careerists?”

EHRENFELS: "I could think of a few reasons. I would start with the university system and the departmentalization of scholarship. University is a shopping mall. I liken the universities collectively to the Mall of America. It is a one-stop career shop where pupils can choose the least burdensome way to earn the lifestyle they desire.”

MOYER: “Consumerism.”

EHRENFELS: “It’s a buffet line where career-seekers are pushed along in line and choose a livelihood cafeteria-style. This is the only line they know – the assembly line at the cafeteria. They never have to blaze a trail. They have the menus in advance.”

MOYER: “They know all the requirements for their career, so they just have to read the textbook, show up to class, and take the exams.”

EHRENFELS: “Exactly. They don’t take risks – they manage risks. Before they ever set foot on the path, they can study it to determine the level of risk and to determine whether the endpoint is worth the effort. We even pay career counselors to tell people who don’t know what the hell they want what they should do with their lives.”

MOYER: “We live in a controlled environment.”

EHRENFELS: “Yes. We feel more ‘cultured,’ more ‘civilized,’ and ‘more ‘compassionate.’ We feel Democratic. When in reality, there are fundamental freedoms that are being given up. The real student wants to take hold of a few tools and blaze a trail into the jungle. He wants his inquiry to be an expedition worthy of what is unknown about the phenomena he studies.”

MOYER: “But instead…”

EHRENFELS: “Ahh -- instead he is told to get back in his cage or he’ll miss feeding time at the zoo.”

MOYER: “Interesting.”

EHRENFELS: “It used to be that a handful of worthy scholars explored what they called ‘frontiers.’ Now we have herds of bureaucrats and professionals tending their ‘fields.’”

MOYER: “What do you think happened?”

EHRENFELS: “I don’t know. I would have to dabble a little more in the history of science and education to understand it. But for now at least I attribute what has happened to an agricultural movement within the Sciences and Humanities.”

MOYER: “Agricultural movement?”

EHRENFELS: “Metaphorically speaking. Once we learned how to plant a few seeds, we set up camp and called it civilization. And then we had an industrial revolution. We created the ‘machinery’ we needed to ‘process’ and ‘produce’ information. And then we became salesmen. We ‘package’ our products for rapid distribution and mass consumption – and we do it so our products can compete with the products of other sciences in a global market. The field itself has become a product that we sell to pupils on farms called university campuses, where we grow our future academics and professionals. In other words, there are graduates we want to keep on campus as academics and those we want to send into the world. Those we want to keep on the farm must not be more than scientific – they must be scientistic – they must study science for its own sake – they must have an intrinsic interest and technical proficiency in the production tools – in the methodology – they must master the ‘machine language’– because these people will train the next generation of machinists. Now virtually all fields can send some graduates into the world as professionals and retain some graduates as farmers. But not research Psychology. The psychological researcher has no niche – no careers in the world. He has no stay on the farm. But the problem is that the farm has very limited space – the farm is small – and yet it produces graduates at a rate consistent with the assumption there are infinite number of positions in the world.”

MOYER: “So there are unemployed PhDs.”

EHRENFELS: “Yes. There are hundreds of PhDs forced to compete for these fixed term – these one-year – adjunct positions. To me it’s like panhandling. They pay $2000 a course, so that even if you are hired to teach four courses, you are making about a quarter of what the tenure-track professor makes and you have no job security. In all likelihood you will be turned out in a year. So even when you have a job, you are constantly searching for your next fixed-term position. It is the life of a gypsy. It may involve teaching one year at the University of Maryland and the next year at University of California – wherever there is a staff willing to hire you to fill an available position. And to add insult to injury, the staff will not even allow you to call yourself a ‘professor.’ You are called an ‘instructor.’ You have the same degree as the tenure-track faculty but you have to call yourself an ‘instructor,’ which is the same title reserved for graduate students when they teach college courses as assistants or apprentices.”

MOYER: “I wonder why they do that.”

EHRENFELS: “Who the hell knows? I once asked the Vice-President of a University why he required the department to refer to me as an ‘instructor’ in all documentation, including letters of recommendation. And he informed me that the salary I earned as fixed-term faculty did not warrant the title of ‘professor.’ In other words, I didn’t get paid enough to deserve the title. What kind of reasoning is that? This may have been the single most stupid man I ever met, and he rose within the ranks of his field to assume the role of University Vice President. But I am quite frankly not as concerned about the fact there are unemployed PhDs. I am concerned about the fact that if you ARE intrinsically interested in a phenomenon of study – if your motives are pure and scholarly – and if your choices are consistent with your motivation, then you have virtually no chance whatsoever of employment in the field.”

MOYER: “Can you elaborate on that?”

EHRENFELS: “It’s a buyer’s market. It’s always a buyer’s market. Faculty search committees can afford to find applicants willing to tow their company line. They never have to worry about alienating applicants. It is always the applicant who need worry about alienating employers. I applied for fifty university vacancies and received no interviews and few acknowledgements. Today, universities could even afford to restrict their search for applicants who would bring in sources of external funding, like grants. I knew a Temple professor interested in dreams who made a living out of researching state-dependent drug behavior just so he could keep the grant money rolling in. His colleague studied yawning. I interviewed as a prospective graduate student there, in front of a cage of pigeons. I was told that I would be offered placement provided I agreed to work with this one professor on his state-dependent drug research. The hell with that! The point is that there is a light of human nature that shines brightly within some students who are intrinsically tied to a phenomena of study. I call these people "fireflies." If they do not drown their light within the shadow of the sun, they will never be permitted to see the light of day. The effect of this system is that good students are weeded out of the field at the expense to the field of its relationship with humanity. Without an earthly foundation, they have become like a sun as viewed from space which from that objective perspective demands that everything revolves around the sun, at the expense of the human perspective, which states that the sun appears to revolve around the earth. Even while we can confirm the former objectively, psychology is one science that must not be rid of the subjective factor. The earth appears uninhabited from the perspective of space."

MOYER: “So under the system now, the careerists – who can be dumb, dishonest, and even disinterested -- have the advantage.”

EHRENFELS: “Yes. Scholarship and sincerity are never questioned – never tested – only the willingness -- and capacity -- to conform to a uniform set of requirements that reduce the frontier to a field. This does not deter the careerists – remember – these people lack an interest in the inherent subject matter. The real students – the trailblazers who respect the frontier and require the freedom necessary to study it in earnest and maintain interest in it – these are people who are questioned – these are the people who endure trial and tribulation – these are the people who are weeded out.”

MOYER: “So how do we fix it?”

Tenure as Cancer

EHRENFELS: “I don’t know that you can. Once most of these careerists acquire professorships and assumed a position in a university, they have already outlived their usefulness to the study of human nature. Cancer cells are tenured cells. They just won’t die. And they collect in a tumor much the same way the professors work to build this brotherhood – this consensus – as if their life depended on it. And the tumors destroys the body much the same way the professors undermine their own science – from the inside.”

MOYER: “I like that. You’ve compared them to vampires and to tumors. You do see the shared meaning, don’t you?”

EHRENFELS: “Immortality. Each of their junk publications testifies to the fact these careerists prefer quantity to quality. It describes their approach to the study of human nature and their approach to their careers, which for all intents and purposes, are synonymous to them. With vampires you get the sense that for each moment they add to their life, they take an ounce of life from each moment – and careerism is no different.”

MOYER: “Do you believe our culture breeds careerism?”

EHRENFELS: “I believe in the Jungian psyche. I believe all systems involve a dynamic interplay between opposites, much like warm and cold air in the atmosphere. Our society – while being fundamentally Democratic – and perhaps because it is fundamentally Democratic – is bound to create its own prisons. As a society, we would like to be able to offer every person an equal opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I’m not sure this is what the founders intended, but we live in a culture in which every person feels he or she is no less entitled to a career than anyone else. Inherent or innate potentiality is overlooked as ‘irrelevant’ or ‘immeasurable’ by the system, and any advantages obtained through precocious efforts are more often than not problematic because they helped the student to differentiate an identity that is unique.

MOYER: “How much of the corruption is the result of the fact the system is so tracked?”

Simon Says: The Strategic Alliance of Tyranny and Democracy

EHRENFELS: “The track is an excellent metaphor. We refer to what is required for a career in Psychology as a ‘degree’ or ‘career track.’ The requirements are simple enough that everyone can meet them – ‘Simon says’-type stuff -- standard enough that so everyone who completes them feels part of a community – standard enough so no one can claim there was inequality – everyone except those who have a problem with structure. What most people don’t realize is that while the students process the requirements, the requirements are in fact processing them. The students are being molded and trained much in the same way one is in basic training. In fact, the structure of these programs – and the structure within university life – rivals that of the military, micro-managing its personnel, dictating how best students and faculty can use their resources in service of the professional community of which they are all members with one vote. Students who have no direction and no clue have no problem tolerating the structure – and most of them are happy to have someone else provide them with what they cannot provide themselves. It’s like a career welfare program – even a spiritual welfare program. Providing you do not violate eligibility requirements, the system will provide you with an identity and a career. And just like Government welfare programs punish welfare recipients for working, so universities punish students who think for themselves. Like the military, university graduate programs want to break you down and then build you up in the image of the department and the profession. It is a simple and painless process to submit oneself, if one does not have a well-developed sense of self. But students who know themselves, their subject matter, and their objectives can find the process unbearable, and conversely, the process can find these students unbearable. Students who are unable or unwilling to comply with the precepts of science and the requirements for membership in a profession are expelled from the system as waste material –- as deviants who refuse to play by the rules or as members of a team.

MOYER: “Interesting. Yes…I see it.”

EHRENFELS: “So this is odd. We have a class of people who by divine right, aristocratic right, or birthright have a superior claim to the study of human nature. They have this right by virtue of innate potentiality, precocious individual achievement, and a motivation and attitude that is intrinsically tied to the phenomenon they wish to study. A Democratic society fosters a career culture and bureaucratic systems that discard innate or inherent worth because freedom requires all degree candidates to be processed equally – and that means bureaucratically. The bureaucratic processing of candidates creates a community of professionals and an organized body of knowledge that resembles a Socialist if not Communist utopia. In effect, what has happened is because professors respect equally the freedom of every person to declare their candidacy for a career in Psychology, they feel bound to evaluate them equally – which means against the same standards – and in so doing, they rescind their own freedom to evaluate students according to their own subjective standards or on the student’s own terms. This has happened because professors have decided that they can serve science better as a Socialist community than as a loose collection of maverick scholars. In the latter system, the quality of the individual professor is superior, but in the latter, the quality of the relationships and exchanges between professors is facilitated.”

MOYER: “You have depicted the profession as an interplay between adversarial governmental principles. Now can you explain why that metaphor works?”

EHRENFELS: “I think we have two competing principles in the Science of Psychology actually. You can call them Freedom and Control. You can call them Individuality and Community. You can call them Democratic and non-Democratic. I might also call them Subjective and Objective principles. I believe opposites like these tend to check and balance one another in any other system. I am not sure whether this is the natural and thus unassailable state of affairs or simple a healthy and optimum state of affairs. But it would be preferable to me if these two principles balanced one another out in the same way two branches of Government can check a third or in the way control by one political party can in time replace control by another…However, I think balance has given way in Psychology to a catastrophe or should I say a constitutional crisis. The relationship between Objective and Subjective principles resembles less a coordination – less a flexible confluence -- and more a direct opposition. The only freedom and subjectivity exercised in the field of Psychology is the arbitrariness with which professors cite professional policies and values to embattle students and topics they dislike because of personal biases.”

MOYER: “Why do you think this has happened?”

EHRENFELS: “When a human quality is repressed, when it is not integrated into the system, it will eventually re-assert itself with a constitutional authority equivalent to the prejudice with which it was denied. I think the Subjective principle – the right of the individual scientist to make decisions in accordance with his or her personal points of view – is in that position.”

MOYER: “And what put it in that position?”

EHRENFELS: “A combination of factors were required to snuff out this source of Subjectivity in its human professionals. First, the membership maintains the shared opinion that Psychology can serve Science better as a Socialist community than as a loose collection of maverick scholars. In the latter system, the quality of the individual professor is superior because he or she is permitted to exercise and follow his or her personal views, but in the latter, the quality of the relationships and exchanges between professors is facilitated because it is standard objective criteria that determine how the individual conducts his or her research. Normally – even in a Socialist community – freedom flies below the radar where it is tolerated or hidden in such activities as theory-building. Furthermore, even in very regulated systems, individuals are still offered a range of acceptable options and are virtually always free to choose their own topics of study. But a number of forces have tightened the noose around subjectivity.

MOYER: “What forces?”

The Freedom to Conform

EHRENFELS: “As a profession, Psychology continues to tighten around a core set of values. Its members are required to comply with a host of new policies offered by increasingly influential bodies, from the APA to the university department.”

MOYER: “What kind of policies?”

EHRENFELS: “Clinical faculty are required to keep current with State and Federal laws, insurance company trends, APA policies, Jayco policies, and departmental policies. The slavish compliance of virtually all journal editors with APA style guidelines compels professors to consult with the APA Style Manual on a page-by-page basis. Furthermore, the expansion of the DSM from 60 to 900 pages over four rapid-fire editions requires members to be familiar with more disorders. All these refinements, where they do not directly substitute an institutional policy for individual discretion, makes demands on time that might otherwise be spent in contemplation and reflection. And if I think this generation of academics and professionals is vapid or confused, I really have to worry about the generation that follows.”

MOYER: “How so?”

EHRENFELS: “Students trained in these times are beholden to their professors and practicum supervisors in addition to the requirements enumerated above. And the core coursework has been expanded to accommodate business and political courses that became as quickly as they became curriculum. Students now have to take courses like Multiculturalism, Consultation & Management, and Mental Health Delivery Systems. Some of the courses sound exotic, but they actually just grind through the same old knowledge with a new blade. Some sound intimidating, but the texts resemble third grade social studies textbooks. And then they have to devote themselves to phony vita-building activities. That means participation in extracurricular activities – teaching, committees, research groups -- that slow their matriculation through the core program requirements and add years to their schooling without really adding anything substantive to their development as an individual researcher. I would say Science is like anything else – at some point it is healthy to find your own style – your own voice – because ultimately you are in it for yourself and for the subject matter. The kind of Selfless devotion to Science they practice really hasn’t benefited Science much at all. Personally, I think their careers amount to the systematic dismantlement and depopulation of their inner life – something they have elevated to an art form. In essence, the added requirements are a major drain on the time and resources of the student, and this is perhaps the greatest danger. Without the discretionary time and energy, students cannot possibly – one -- consolidate in reflection the minutiae they have been asked to memorize – two -- contemplate what any of these arcane or arbitrary details mean to them – three – develop a personal philosophy into which they absorb and organize their daily experiences.”

MOYER: “I take it that last one is important.”

EHRENFELS: “The professors discourage a personal philosophy, partly inadvertently, and partly prejudicially. But it is important. These programs are increasingly resembling trade schools, training without educating. All the freedoms associated with true education are being subverted in the name of training, and where that occurs, there is no personal growth or intellectual development. Of course, we don’t care about these things. Professors think you can get along without them for four years while you pay your dues and earn your union card, but then they wonder why tenured professors never exercise the new freedom in the name of which they sought that job security in the first place. Because after so many years of training, they have no self left to indulge. Their personal development has failed to keep pace with their experiences. I think it is very important to constitute the experiences with personal meaning – to humanize and personalize them. But by the end of graduate school, what I think I see here is that these new PhDs re-define themselves in terms of those experiences – and if they are not conditioned by the subjective factor – that self-definition will more likely than not reflect the objective influences and criteria of the profession. They will remain surrogates – instantiations -- of the profession. This means that long after tenure was conferred, they will be doing what was required for tenure. And I think the facts bare this out. Now some professors may actually stop publishing altogether, and those that do decide to do so because it simply is not fulfilling. What was there ever to gain from it but tenure? But I doubt many in this group actually fill the void with projects of personal significance. They end up becoming administrators, committee wonks, professional liaisons, journal editors, or lame ducks who pass the day playing Solitaire on their PC and planning their retirement. And this takes me to the second force and the one I think broke the back of the field.”

MOYER: “And that would be?”

EHRENFELS: “Individuals have taken it upon themselves to abrogate their own freedoms. After having been deprived of personal development, and after years in which they learned to associate professional development with the deprivation of fundamental freedoms, they ultimately make a habit of denying discretion in themselves and in their own students. Their vita remains a substitute for a personal identity, which becomes no more than a laundry list of affiliations, memberships, subscriptions, publications, committees, conventions, course offerings, and university administrative appointments. They maintain an illusion of freedom and self-direction when in fact their lives lobby for the value of tradition, formula, and objective data. They may even fill their lives with this junk as a means to excuse themselves from a personal project. There is much they have to fear about undertaking something they have denied themselves for so long. They may end up questioning some objective principles to which they paid so many years of deference or they may end up acquainting themselves with an old friend called the self.”

MOYER: “Does this apply to careerists as well or just to professors who allowed the field to lead them astray?”

EHRENFELS: “More to the latter. And you’re right – they are two different groups. I am actually sympathetic with the plight of the latter. I understand what it means to sacrifice yourself to make an adjustment. You think that you can reclaim yourself down the road. ‘When I pay my dues and earn my PhD…’ – ‘when I have tenure…’ – ‘when I publish my first article…’ – but then cognitive dissonance kicks in. They fall in love with the sense of mastery and achievement they never thought possible – with the approval of co-workers – so much so that it becomes like an addiction. It would take quite an effort and quite a bit of searching to re-discover their souls. And like any other addiction, there may be quite a bit of denial or ignorance. They may not realize that anything has been lost. They may come to believe that the new life reflects only gains, especially if their advances and if their survivals were a source of tremendous relief for them, allaying much anxiety.”

MOYER: “By that point, what you call the Socialist structure had succeeded in assimilating them.”

EHRENFELS: “Yes. But I think professors respect equally the freedom of every person to declare their candidacy for a career in Psychology, and because of that, I believe they feel bound to evaluate them equally – which means against the same standards. This respect and liberal philosophy is buttressed by the objective scientific principles of standardization and reliability. But in committing themselves to standard criteria, they rescind their own freedom to evaluate students according to their own subjective standards or, and this is very important, to evaluate the student on the student’s own terms. That last possibility is virtually never considered.”

MOYER: “And so the Democratic philosophy ends up creating a bureaucratic system.”

EHRENFELS: “It is this bureaucratic processing of PhD candidates that perpetuates this Socialist utopia -- this community of professionals and this organized – no, UNIFORM -- body of knowledge. And it also reinforces the career culture – the university as a Job Clearinghouse. And the people this hurts are – one -- introverts – who are constitutionally conditioned by the subjective factor – and second – students conditioned by an innate potentiality, precocious individual achievement, or a motivation and attitude that intrinsically binds them to the phenomenon. These factors should not be discarded – and they are – either in the name of equality to level the playing field – or simply because they are deemed inconsequential by professionals who believe that anything and everything one needs to be a member of psychology is waiting in the wings so to speak -- in the training manual. This special class of students are neither special by virtue of some Democratic principle nor by some Socialist principle. Their claim to Psychology resembles more of an old-school aristocracy – a divine right or birthright. As a criterion of worth, it is overlooked within a society so strenuously Democratic as the U.S. and may receive more attention within the psyche of Western Europe.”

MOYER: “The picture I am getting from you is that this system is really tracked.”

EHRENFELS: “Track is an apt metaphor -- especially if we think of it in terms of track and field. Basically, we create a track and create a place at the starting line for everyone who wants to be there. To make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to complete the race, there are certain mechanisms we implement. First, the track is clearly set apart from the surrounding wilderness so that everyone knows what direction to take and the chalk lines are clearly marked for those who desire an even narrower path. Second, the track circles back and covers old ground so that with each lap, the runners find an increasingly familiar environment. This probably also explains why our field does not progress. Third, we establish a finish line so that the runners understand there is an end in sight and can receive awards upon completion of the track.”

MOYER: “You know – we talk a lot about how culture has adversely affected nature, but this is almost always in the form of how business and industry contaminate the environment.”

EHRENFELS: “True -- we never really address the horrors of how Science and Professionalism destroy their own subject matter. Now it would be difficult to convince people – and especially Americans -- of the fact that fundamental freedoms are eroded here, so I might rework the rhetoric into the more restrained claim that our frontiers have been cordoned off from our freedoms. We have brought all disciplines into one Mall of America and turned the wilderness outside into a parking lot. But hey – it’s commercial. We send our youth to universities for job training – and let’s face it – they would not be there if they didn’t think they were being trained for careers. I would love to take Psychology out of the university and create a special seminary for it – something with a more spiritual atmosphere that reaffirms the roots of the psyche rather than the psyche as a career stepping stone.”

MOYER: “Aren’t there some institutes in California?”

EHRENFELS: “San Francisco has a few them devoted to consciousness studies and transpersonal psychology. The schools have virtually no federal funding or endowment so they depend entirely on student tuition. This means they accept every student who applies and treats them like consumers. I might have attended one of them if I thought there was even the slightest chance one could lead to an assistant professorship. I hate to admit it – but I needed the school to generate career opportunities. When you love the psyche like I do, you would like to be paid – even if it is virtually nothing – to devote your weekdays to it. I am not a hobby psychologist – on the contrary – I am a mission-driven psychologist. This means I have some fairly ambitious plans for the study of the psyche. There is much to accomplish in only a short lifetime.”

MOYER: “So their graduates – ”

EHRENFELS: “Most of their students are hobby psychologists – which is fine – because I would hate to think how disappointed so many of them would be to learn there are no career opportunities open to them upon graduation. I learned that lesson late – before I started my dissertation but still late – and it stung. It was a defining moment in my life. I will always be bitter because of it.”

MOYER: “But the schools are a step in the right direction.”

EHRENFELS: “Yes and no. I AM a scientist at heart – I am just not so closed-minded or doctrinaire. I would like the definition of science expanded for Psychology so that the field is more inclusive and occupies some position intermediate between Conservative Science and Liberal Humanity. I would like to see more playfulness and creativity – more inventive exploration -- with respect to systematic detective work. I believe that these institutes turn out graduates who not only lack creativity with respect to method, but who also lack the capacity and inclination for theory construction and criticism. They represent no significant improvement on undergraduate level work, and excel only in the art of appreciation.”

MOYER: “And this would do it.”

EHRENFELS: “It is somewhat more complex. You have to populate it with good people, like the intrinsically motivated students. They probably have generated ideas long before they even enrolled in classes, and these all get in the way of their ability to meet expectations one way or another in a mainstream university program. But this issue is complex. Even straight ‘A’ students like myself have been placed on probation for not complying with unwritten rules of conduct. Fearing my approach was not mainstream, I kept my mouth shut, but this was not enough. I was marginalized for failing to actively voice opinions consistent with the mainstream or for failing to participate in social or extracurricular activities like research groups. All this stuff is required to earn the quantity and quality of recommendation letters and teaching assignments we need to have on a vita just to compete for job interviews after the Ph.D. is finished. And you would compete with hundreds of applicants for just a dozen positions nationwide open within any given year.”

MOYER: “Sounds like a lot of serious competition.”

Me, Myself, and I - by Proxy

EHRENFELS: “It is. I have to say that much for them – they pursue work with a passion and a diligence – they leave no details to chance. They tap many professors for opinions on what they would like to see in an application package. They consult with each other. And the result is this dissertation-size tome – a packet of materials so thick that it requires an index and table of contents.”

MOYER: “What do they put in it?”

EHRENFELS: “Besides the obvious, they include materials about the courses they taught as graduate students – syllabi, student T-VALS – the director of the teaching practicum seminar at my former university even required the students to compose a document which outlined their philosophy of teaching, their teaching experience, and their method of instruction. I had to chuckle at the whole process, because the students’ documents all read the same.”

MOYER: “Why do you suppose that is? Because they don’t entertain any ideas of their own?”

EHRENFELS: “Partly, yes. They never developed their own voices. And they were never allowed to. When you step into that classroom as a graduate student instructor, you are expected to act as a surrogate for the department professor – for your practicum supervisor. When he reviewed my document, he decided he did not like my philosophy, so he revised it for me. Of course, I had no choice but to play along. I was told that a competitive packet of materials needed to contain a letter of recommendation from a professor who can speak well of your teaching. I was also told the absence of a letter of recommendation from my practicum supervisor would look conspicuous – that a faculty search committee would read into it.”

MOYER: “What did you think of that?”

EHRENFELS: “I felt – constrained. At no point in this whole process did I have any real choices. I did not want to teach as a graduate student – I didn’t think it was fair to me or the students – who didn’t know incidentally they were taking a course from a graduate student.”

MOYER: “How did they keep that a secret?”

EHRENFELS: “They don’t put ‘doctor’ or ‘mister’ in the list of course offerings. Just the name and time of the course and the last name. I was even discouraged by my practicum teaching supervisor from volunteering the information on the first day of class. But in any case -- I needed graduate teaching experience to remain competitive – so I decided to teach. In order to teach a class at this university, you must first enroll in a course offered by the education department called ‘Principles of College Teaching.’ More time out of my life. Than I was required to enlist in the department’s teaching practicum seminar, which meets once a week in an informal roundtable to discuss issues and concerns related to the teaching of General Psychology.”

MOYER: “Do you receive course credit for that seminar?”

EHRENFELS: “Yes -- and a grade. Your performance in the course is also evaluated as it would be in any other course, so in essence, my approach to teaching was fodder for discussion in the end-of-semester student evaluation meeting. It’s another way you can be ripped from your hiding place and exposed as unconventional. But we’ll take up that subject next week. So – as I was saying – I had to take this class. As a course requirement, I had to generate these documents for inclusion in my application packet, one of which was a statement of my teaching philosophy and methodology. In the process of developing these documents, it was revised multiple times by my practicum supervisor to reflect his values and expectations.”

MOYER: “Did you question these revisions at any time?”

EHRENFELS: “Mildly. I was pretty much threatened. He was fairly authoritative in conveying his belief that no one would take my document seriously in its current form. He never mentioned that I was free to write what I wished – not even a surly mention of the fact that it was my career to throw away if I wanted. He simply told me what he wanted to see and insisted I provide it to meet the requirements for the course. My whole point here is that there are no degrees of freedom in graduate school. Nothing is left to chance or choice. Nothing is free to vary from what is perceived as standard. I say ‘perceived’ because even though I have harped repeatedly on how members of this field plug this consensus, the fact is that such a consensus is an illusion. Every professor claims to refer to one when in fact he is just attempting to pass off his own subjective views as consensual. I can’t even be sure they really believe there is a consensus – they may have indeed conjured one up out of wishful thinking or perhaps they are just being tactical in modifying the behavior of their students.”

MOYER: “So there may not actually be a consensus.”

EHRENFELS: “No – not at the broadest level of the profession. But there is a very strong near-unanimous majority within any one department. But it never really mattered to me personally whether a consensus was real or not. What matters to me is the fact most of the faculty value one so highly. They view it as the goal of any science. And once it is achieved at the highest level of the profession – I always imagined this joint proclamation from the Presidents of APA and APS announcing a unified theory of the mind – it should trickle down through the ranks of the smaller professional bodies and the universities. These professors seem very opinionated and very strong-willed – but most of them are just biding there time – wanting – waiting – for someone to tell them what to do. Others just expect that their own personal opinions will prevail, and its echoes will resound throughout the profession and drop the seeds of the paradigm – of the consensus. Until that time, they may pass off their opinions as consensual or as a consensus-in-waiting, and they carry themselves as if they have a mandate from the truth. The effect of all this is the same as that of a real consensus – so you’ll forgive me if I don’t hit the distinction too hard.”

MOYER: “But when a professor attempts to tell you -- ‘this is way it is generally done’ -- it must be difficult for you to – ”

EHRENFELS: “The phrase means nothing to me – it is all a big game of Simon Says – does it really matter?”

MOYER: “Does what matter?”

EHRENFELS: “Who is Simon and what is the size of his army?”

MOYER: “So you were telling me that the students are very sober about their applications.”

EHRENFELS: “Yes – and they all look the same. I would hate to sit on a faculty search committee and have to read all this. And this is what I think the offshoot of all this is. When they receive application materials of this size from hundreds of applicants – well – I imagine they process them in much the same way book publishers process submissions from hundreds of aspiring authors. I imagine they summarize the applicant in terms of some key indicators.”

MOYER: “They don’t read the whole packet.”

EHRENFELS: “No way they read these from cover to cover – not at first. To be fully heard, you have to make at least a couple of cuts. You have to survive the initial screens.”

MOYER: “What do you think they look at?”

EHRENFELS: “They want to see that you are published first. If you are not published, they will toss your folder into the wastebasket. But since the vast majority of applicants will be published, they will also look at how frequently and recently you were published, and whether you were first author or fifth man on a research team.”

MOYER: “Fifth man?”

EHRENFELS: “Oh, I have seen one article co-authored by 10 people. I have seen another single-page article co-authored by 2 people. These people hardly ever work alone anymore. These papers are monuments to strategic alliances and to personal laziness. And I think it is another one of the many symptoms that have come to define Psychology as a profession comprised of people who are afraid to be alone. But anyway – the search committee may also look at the journals in which you were published. Since they are not likely to read what you have published at the outset, they will judge the quality and relevance of your work by the perceived status and relevance of the journal in which you published. The faculty has its favorites, and there are some journals all faculty members can agree on. For example, I would not want to compete with an applicant who has been published in an APA journal like the American Psychologist or in a journal like the JOURNAL OF SOCIAL AND PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY, which is widely read and appreciated for its scientific standard.”

MOYER: “Anything else?”

The Grant Machine

EHRENFELS: “Yes. They will look to see whether you bring in any external funding with you – whether your research is being funded by a grant. It is a source of reputation for the department, and also a potential source of additional cash. Some State Governments or universities financially reward departments with external funding sources. They may ‘match funds.’ And that could translate into new department computers and multimedia equipment. An applicant who receives external funds, or expects to receive external funds, has an enormous advantage. It is more appropriate in these cases to say that applicants do not compete for universities but that universities compete for applicants. They may even suspend their faculty search indefinitely, planning to resume only if the grant machine turns them down. In the meantime, operations shift from reviewing applications to contemplating incentive packages and the faculty meeting room is adapted from a conference room into a sales office. Man – if you ever wanted to see university professors suck up and kiss ass – this may be your only chance.”

MOYER: “What kind of incentives?”

EHRENFELS: “I will confine my list to what happens AFTER the faculty professors fall over themselves vying for the opportunity to greet the applicant at the airport. And I won’t even mention the reception the professors will ask some faculty spouse to arrange for the applicant…well – except to say that there was shrimp.”

MOYER: “That’s very big of you.”

EHRENFELS: “But – as concerns the daily affairs of a professor – the faculty may promise to pay multiple graduate students to serve as assistants in the applicant’s research. They may offer the applicant a research lab and some equipment, which may or may not include pagers for the assistants. Even if a portion of the external funds is already earmarked for lab equipment and assistants, the department may feel that an offer of supplemental resources will attract the applicant. If you are a psychology professor, I have learned you can never have enough resources. At this one university – where course requirements replaced term papers with grant proposals – it seemed every professor was seeking a grant to fund his or her research and supplement his or her income. And some of these professors requested millions of dollars for their proposed research.”

MOYER: “Did the research really warrant millions?”

EHRENFELS: “Does psychological research ever warrant millions? Come on. The faculty often tries to justify its obscene requests by designing a study, which WOULD require millions – a study which may involve compensating subjects for their participation or which may involve activities in multiple cities to insure a sample that is representative of the population. For external validity, of course.”

MOYER: “Of course.”

EHRENFELS: “Some of these drones actually have scientific formality on the brain, but many are also thinking about what a huge grant could do for their career. The money is less often a means to the science as the science is a means to the money. And – quite frankly – the numbers of applicants who seek and acquire grant money is on the rise. Some universities are even training their students to write grant proposals, and some faculty search committees are starting to limit their search to externally funded applicants. I can refer you to the website of one Psychology department – which starts out incidentally with the statement – ‘the psychology department has been targeted for enhancement.’ Their faculty was neither shy nor apologetic about advertising that external funding would be a basis for priority consideration. So professors have an additional incentive to ask for the huge grants – because bigger is better. But you can see how it affects research and shapes departments.