Almost every faculty meets at the end of a significant academic term to assess the progress of its graduate students, identifying problematic students and selecting a form letter outlining the level of threat to his or her standing in the program if the problem is not remediated. While an issue may be raised on academic grounds (e.g. triggered on by a substandard grade), at many institutions students with impeccable academic performance are placed on one of several categories of conduct probation for having deviated from a departmental or professional norm. These forums support the dissemination of vague, unsubstantiated, and unscrupulous inferences violently drawn about a student's attitudes and professionalism. The discussion triggered by the charge constitutes slander, as his or her character assassination is witnessed by professors who have not yet met the student in a classroom setting.
On Psychology Graduate School: The Student Ethics & Evaluation Committee Or Something Like It
Some faculties meet so informally to evaluate its students or behind doors so closed, that the students may not even be aware they are being discussed, that is, unless there is a problem, and even THEN many embattled students are not aware their political problems originate in these meetings. Other programs assign a name to the faculty meeting, referring to it as the Student Ethics & Evaluation Committee (SEEC), for example. And then there are evaluation venues somewhere between the pomp and circumstance of an SEEC and the cloak-and-dagger of another institution. By any name, an evaluation meeting can be both insidious and ceremonious.
According to many practices, discussion commences when a department head or SEEC chair opens the floor to faculty with a request for the names of students about whom they have cause for concern. Under more structured systems, faculty are asked to submit to all relevant parties in advance of the meeting progress reports that contain some indication of what issues, if any, are likely to be raised.
In any given semester, sources for student evaluation are plentiful, including any professor with whom a student has had contact that term (e.g., course instructors, research or teaching assistantship supervisors, and dissertation advisors or committee members).
In cases where a student feels besmirched, the advisor may agree to collaborate with the student on a repudiation of the charges, but in most cases, an advisor is reluctant to defend a student for strategic or self-serving political reasons.
Many students are harassed or traumatized by an SEEC, some of whom are asked to withdraw from the program but the vast majority are discouraged from continuing by the gloomy outlook and learned helplessness. Like children who are punished for every little impropriety, beleaguered students are often resigned to the fact that there is no way to predict or prevent a complaint. Rather than using the forum as a means to provide feedback about specific habits, the committee is often co-opted by certain professors for the purposes of waging psychological warfare on students they do not like or do not think belong in the field due to some opposing point of view. The constant evaluation apprehension, coupled with the knowledge that a critical mass of red flags will just as effectively disqualify the student as so many poor grades, is often sufficient motive for the withdrawal of any student coping with the usual but high number of variables affecting his or her future (e.g., publishing). The prospect of being unable to meet a loan burden with doctoral-level earning potential is too great a risk to endure, even without the nebulous and free-floating hostility, the venom clouds that waft through the halls disguised as a concern for public welfare, professional development, and scientific standards.
Faculty want to make sure their students comport themselves like professionals, and so each faculty brings his or her interpretation of professionalism to bare on the student body. My withdrawl from a program in response to my first referral to the SEEC was dubbed 'precipitous.' But what I deemed precipitous was their first-semester flogging of a student for violation of some arbitrary norm in which he had not yet been trained. While disputing accusations is generally regarded as political suicide (because it publicly questions at least one department professor), perhaps the most obvious reason not to engage the committee is its evasive logic.
"And when you question a professor about this, he or she usually responds by saying something to the effect of, 'well, none of the other students in your class made this choice,' recounted Ehrenfels. "I was fortunate enough at one school to have an advisor to took it upon himself to defend when my professionalism was questioned. He pushed the issue to its limit, but our adversaries ultimately settled on the argument that a pattern (two or more) atypical choices qualified me as 'unconventional,' and to be 'unconventional is to be unprofessional.' This argument revealed the essentially social or lodge-like nature of professionalism."
Personal insecurities and an ever-widening and, in my opinion, strictly ornamental nucleus of vaunted norms, which do not leave much to latitude, account for much of the hypervigilance and hypersensitivity. But institutional priorities (e.g., solidarity, perceived legitimacy and reputation) also instigate accusations of deviation and complicate due process. Ehrenfels cites a 1996 JPSP article by Thompson, Petersen, and Brodt discussing the tendency of discussion in groups to thwart the goal of accuracy to preserve group harmony. (I mean, it was not specifically about end-of-semester evaluation meetings, but you'd think they'd be able to take a concept and apply it across analogous instances. No, I guess not). The most surprising fact surrounding the issue of the evaluation meeting is the hypocrisy, the violation by psychology professors of such coveted norms of ethics, evidence, and empathy and the paroxysmal amnesia for such ingrained concepts as groupthink, self-fulfilling prophecy, and independence of observations.
On Psychology Graduate School: Comparisons to Basic Training
Most of the psychology graduate students I have met enter their first year with a proper attitude, asking -- no, demanding -- that their professors subject them to a rigorous and protocol-driven training process. "Just tell me what to do!" they snarl under their breath when a professor digresses onto a theoretical or historical tangent. The psychology graduate student has wrung their bloated sponge, freeing themselves to absorb as much as possible. These tightly wound wind-up dolls are in a state of readiness, eager to imitate the behaviors of their supervisors. For every professor anxious to avoid the more menial interactions with undergraduates (i.e. collecting data, lecture, office hours), there are five graduate students waiting to serve as a surrogate. With drill & ceremony comes pomp & circumstance, and like any 20th Century Communist military, graduate students in psychology enjoy rolling out their armaments like floats in a Rose Bowl parade. My undergraduate psychology professors often searched for ways other than ape sign language to convey the secret mystical knowledge of graduate school life to their favorite undergrads. And when they tire of the 'dog-eat-dog' metaphor, they move effortlessly to a slightly less hackneyed expression in 'sink-or-swim.' But it was not until I actually started my graduate career that I learned they were referring to synchronized swimming, at which point I realized that, having been voted 'least likely to impress superiors with my obedience' by my high school yearbook committee, that I would surely drown. (I find my hydrophobia a rather astonishing coincidence). What is it about cadence, and for that matter, about keeping ourselves buoyant and superficial, that impresses us? For what they call 'drowning' I call a disposition to depth.
If you happen to be original, you will likely commit a foul for 'uncoventional thinking,' which is a 5-yard penalty, or if it was deemed the unconventional act was premeditated (i.e. you intended to think or act that way), you would draw a flagrant foul (the 15-yard variety) for 'pattern of poor judgment.' I am being facetious, but it is important to bear in mind that there are many other considerations for the sake of which you may run afoul of the faculty's top priority: the social norms. Of these pitfalls, the pursuit of truth is probably the biggest. The single greatest cause of death among the careers of graduate students in Psychology is the thinking that this or that is the most effective way to learn about something. The most effective way for you to learn about the phenomenon your researching. The most effective way for your students to learn from you. The most effective way for you to learn how much your students have learned. Chances are, if this is how you're thinking, you are going to do something other than what is expected or dictated by conventional practice. And once you've crossed this line, there's no turning back, because you've already emitted a signal (which is amplified one-hundred-fold in the acoustic arena of the SEEC meeting) that you are not like them, do not like them, that you're not a team player, or fit to be a professional. The process of training graduate students for membership in an academic and professional community, in the words of author Jeff Schmidt, about disciplining minds. Call it what you will. Indoctrination. Socialization. Cloning. But know that all other considerations are not only secondary, but often subversive. Do not put anything before (or ahead of) the inculcation, imitation, and celebration of the department's social norms.
And that you have all those individual battles/skirmishes where you have to adjust to the subjective judgment of the individual psychology professor. Suffice it to say that if the faculty -- or even one professor -- has an axe to grind with Sigmund Freud, that person or persons will do all they can to cast aspersions on the professionalism of a student about whom they can in the very least construe/detect trace elements of Freudian leanings. The only question that remains is whether they will directly attack the Freudian orientation of the student and make the case that it is unprofessional or whether they will bypass the appearance of politics and accuse the Freudian student of other unsavory qualities. I use Freud as an example here, but the possibilities are unbounded. The psychology professor may muddy up the situation with some pretexts. But it is not always as obvious as theoretical alignment. A professor may be distressed by a student who did not attend a colloquium at which his assistant is speaking. While attendance at colloquia may be non-mandatory or suggested, the professor may supplement his case against the student by citing the absence as evidence that the student is not committed to the broader department or profession beyond his or her own research interests. Some faculty may look favorably upon the assignment of a non-mandatory label to department functions like colloquia because it enables them to entrap students. If the functions were mandatory, and all students participated, how would faculty know who is really one of them. How would they tell the professionals from the imposters?
The bottom line is that a professor who doesn't like you personally finds a way to cast aspersions on your professionalism -- some of the dislike is motivated in punctilious demagogues by innocuous deviations of unwritten rules and some of the dislike is motivated by bias and prejudice, you know, personality conflicts and differences in views of human nature. Human nature is such a personally charged, sensitive subject, and some professors do not care to admit that they take it quite personally when he or she discovers a student who does not subscribe to his or her worldview. The student may not have verbally or explicitly communicated this worldview, or he or she may have hinted at it in a term paper, all the while unaware of the professor's own point of view, and yet out of nowhere this 'difference' balloons into a political firestorm. Other professors feel they are policing a community -- invoking such terms as public welfare, mental hygiene, and scientific standards -- and protecting the reputation of the school (with which their own identity is bound up). It could also be that the professors have such a high opinion of themselves and their program that they fear the student reflects a less-than-perfect embodiment of the standard they want to project for the community. According to this model, students are treated as ambassadors, representatives, or extensions of them.
On Psychology Graduate School: Censuring Students on Spec
A professor may even object to opinions a student keeps to him- or herself or divine in a student opinions he or she does not really have or may be likely to develop in the future or exhibit in professional settings. There is a lot of interpretation and guesswork involved and professors often react with tremendous uncertainty to impressions they have of a student who presents an ambiguous or unique personality. Often, students are unaware that they somehow remind the professors of a person in the field with whom that professor once had an unpleasant encounter. If you are a student, you can give yourself away and get on the bad side of a professor not by saying something they don't want to hear, but by failing to voice resonantly and resolutely what they DO want to hear -- by failing to allay their basic insecurities that what they are doing is right. As a student -- and for that matter colleague -- you are asked to contribute to the Professor Insecurities Fund, which is to say you are there to help them with their self-esteem problem. In any of these scenarios,
I see a lot of insecurities and delusions on the part of professors. The fact they act on them -- the fact there are consequences to others -- in my estimation makes those delusions and insecurities pathological.
Conversely, I have evidence that these professors overlook similar violations of professionalism in their favorite students -- in students they DO like personally. And I'm talking about some fairly obvious and egregious misconduct. This is all beside the fact that their favoritism has aided and abetted students who can barely write and think. The school with an SEEC program also has a remedial writing lab -- yes, you heard right -- a remedial writing course for doctoral candidates -- to which they refer students who annoy professors with substandard writing. Some students have escaped the course because of favoritism and some have graduated with PhDs despite having been required to take the course 2-3 times without noticeable improvement. They can bend over backwards to admit, train, and overlook students who cannot write, and yet they fail intellectual students who do not share in their ideology.
On Psychology Graduate School: Weeding the Garden
I have also consulted with a member of the adjunct faculty who was asked to make a special appearance at an SEEC meeting to testify about the attitude of a student a full professor was attempting to discredit. The adjunct was appalled by the atmosphere of the meeting, which she claimed alternated between one of a trial to one of a general witch-hunt. Students were chided for all sorts of characteristics, ranging from accusations of arrogance to cases where students were chastised for being too 'self-deprecating.'
Most of the professors in the meeting who witness the accusation have never interacted with the student before -- they are the student's future professors. In the case of the SEEC meeting, I have been told by my informant that the professors are actually told to 'watch out' for this student -- to 'watch out' for these same behaviors and attitudes so they can report on their progress in the next meeting. The problem with that is that they come to look for evidence of the problematic attitude and behavior, seeing it where it does not exist in many instances. They are sensitized to it. This whole thing deprives a student of the opportunity to establish his or her own relationship with that professor, to start fresh every semester. I suspect in many instances that when a student is accused for a second consecutive semester within an SEEC climate, it is usually because of the first accusation. The professor acting as the referral source is emboldened by the memory of the initial criticism.
fireflySun.com Report List
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16 Points Page: Wyatt Ehrenfels
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Popular Psychotherapy All about Controlling Chaos: Wyatt Ehrenfels
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Benjamin Willard Elected President of Wyatt Ehrenfels Fan Club: Benjamin Willard
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