In the Daily Nous comments thread to Eric Schwitzgebel's excellent post a last month entitled, "Seven Principles of Humane PhD Advising", Chris Surprenant writes:
If [PhD students] lack motivation to complete their work while in graduate school, they’re not cut out to be professional academics…If folks can’t cut it, the sooner they learn that the better.
I have heard this sort of thing said many times. I've even heard that some graduate programs effectively codify something like it as a program policy, pressuring students to leave the program relatively early on if they are not making "adequate progress." Although I think the intent behind attitudes and policies like these may be good–aiming to save students "not cut out" for academic philosophy from wasting valuable time in their life pursuing it–I have nevertheless always bristled at this way of thinking. Reading Michael Huemer's (Colorado) new post, "A Philosopher Squeaks By", the other day helped me to clarify why. Allow me to explain.
In his post, Huemer details how "I barely made it in the profession": how he squeaked into graduate school, how get barely got an academic job, how many of his articles "have been hated by referees", and so on. On reading Huemer's story, my initial reaction was that he seems to have fared a heck of a lot better than other people who barely made it in the profession. For example, as I reported several years ago, in her 2014 APA Dewey Lecture aptly entitled, "Accidents", Ruth Millikan detailed how she had to walk out of a grad school exam for personal reasons (p. 4), how she entered grad school at Yale as only one of two women in a class of 22 students and one of only two students without a fellowship (pp. 4-5), how her dissertation supervisor left her program before she had made any real progress on the dissertation (p. 5), how during grad school she had a serious back injury, two children, a divorce, spent a summer in mental hospital, and how her dissertation took her 5 years (!) to complete, with basically no supervision (pp. 5-6).
I've read numerous stories similar to Huemer's and Millikan's. A few years ago, I remember reading an APA address where Charles Mills detailed how he barely squeaked into the profession. Or consider Rae Langton's (Cambridge) self-confessed "career lowlights":
At Sydney, my background in Philosophy was deemed so poor I needed a remedial extra year. At Princeton, my PhD dissertation was initially failed, though (somewhat awkwardly) OUP had meanwhile decided to publish it, as Kantian Humility (see Books).
It's not just well-known philosophers like these who 'barely made it.' I've known plenty of people (myself included!) who struggled immensely during graduate school only to go on to have good careers. This, in brief, is why I have trouble with claims like Surprenant's ("If [PhD students] lack motivation to complete their work while in graduate school, they’re not cut out to be professional academics…If folks can’t cut it, the sooner they learn that the better"), as well as policies of "weeding out" students who can't cut it. Although there may be good reasons for deterring students from going to grad school in the first place (although I am also a bit skeptical about this as a standing policy), the problem I have with preemptively trying to weed out those who "can't cut it" is that I think there are general reasons to think that such judgments may be premature.
There are a few related reasons why I think faculty in grad programs should be skeptical of their ability to judge early on who can and cannot "cut it in the profession." One initial reason is just how many counterexamples there are! As I've mentioned before, I read a lot of intellectual biographies–and there are many of examples of famous academics (such as Einstein) who were basically judged incompetent by their grad school faculty before going on to have illustrious careers. I've seen many less dramatic cases of this: students on the one hand who seemed to "have it all going for them" in grad school but who (for whatever reason) never found their feet in the profession, and other grad students who by all accounts "seemed like screwups" early on who then went on to have good careers. As I noted in a response to Surprenant at Daily Nous, I suspect one reason it can be so difficult to predict "who can cut it" is that many grad students are still at a relatively early, particularly vulnerable period of their life. Grad students are often in their early to mid 20's, a time where young people are known to make a lot of stupid decisions (see below) and are in the process of figuring out how to live this thing called life. In brief, it can take time for people to mature…and often enough (or so I've seen), the maturing that grad students need can take time (and yes, some real screwing up).
None of this is to say that grad faculty should be happy when grad students screw up (by, for instance, distancing themselves from their department, not displaying a good work ethic, and other things I've seen happen). Nor is it to say that grad programs should tolerate behavior that is morally problematic. It is merely to say that programs should be wary of pushing students out for 'screwing up' a bit. Finally, there is another important thing to take into account here: the mental health strains known to afflict grad students. As the post just linked to indicates, a recent study found that 39% of grad student respondents in a sample reported experiencing moderate to severe depression (compared to just 6% in the general population). I don't mean to endorse a "medical model" of mental illness here or whatever (on the contrary, it seems increasingly clear to me that social conditions in the modern world may create conditions that otherwise healthy people struggle to handle). The point is simply that, in addition to being at a vulnerable time in their life when they are still maturing, many grad students may also be grappling with cognitive, emotional, and other difficulties that they may well be able to overcome with the right kind of support.
I want to conclude by briefly saying why this issue matters to me. It matters to me, in part, because of just how many other struggling students I have seen to go on to have good careers. It also matters to me, though, because I was a 'screw-up.' I barely squeaked into the profession because when I was a 24-year-old grad student, I didn't make some of the best decisions. I did what all too many grad students do: I struggled in all kinds of ways–personally, interpersonally, emotionally, cognitively, and physically. Although I know (or am at least pretty sure) that I tried the patience of the faculty in my grad department, I will be forever thankful that they didn't give up on me. And that, in essence, is my message here: don't give up on struggling students. They may be struggling for reasons that neither you nor anyone else in your program knows–and with the right kind of patience and support, they may do what many grad students like them have done before: find their way.
Or so say I. What say you? Also, what kinds of support (or lack thereof) are, at least in your experience, helpful or harmful? What can programs do to support students well?
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