As mentioned in our last post, the medieval system of apprenticeship employed in academia can give dissertation advisors a truly terrifying degree of control of the lives of their advisees.

There are many good people in academia who do not abuse this power. There are many good people in academia who seek to subvert these hierarchal power dynamics.

But there are also too damn many people in academia who do use the almost-unchecked power advisors have over their doctoral students for ill ends.

If you’ve been following #MeTooPhD or #MeTooPoliSci or any of the other academic #MeToo tags then you will know that sometimes advisors, often but not exclusively, male advisors, use their power over their advisees to sexually harass them.

The #MeToo movement and the toxic culture it calls out is similar in many ways to the toxic culture of academia. Both are about hierarchies in which power over many is concentrated in the hands of a few and, largely, unchecked. Both have to do with status–high-status individuals tormenting low-status individuals. And, in both, it is the bad cases that stick out far more than the more numerous good ones.

The best statistics we have indicate that 1 in 10 men are a danger to womyn. There are two corollaries of this figure, however, and both of them are true in academia as well. The first is that there is no way of knowing with certainty whether or not someone is the dangerous one or one of the nine safe ones. The second is that the bad ones get away with their behavior because not enough of the good ones are willing to check them.

Personally, I think it’s a serious flaw in most graduate student programs which I’ve encountered that they make students pick a committee so soon. There are many problems with the emphasis on moving students through programs quickly via the many iterations of “fast-track” or MA and PhD programs. There are the concerns of quality, both in research and writing, but there is also the concern of the human cost. If a student is to be done with their PhD in 5 years (the stated goal of my college at my former institution) then they need to be done with their prelims and prospectus at the end of their third year (assuming it takes a year to research and a year to write). This means that a student will have a more or less fixed committee by the end of their coursework. Because of the various peccadilloes of academic scheduling 4 semesters, or two years, of courses will give you enough time to, maybe, take one class with every professor you think you want on your committee. That is sixteen weeks (14 after breaks and whatnot) of one week encounters and a couple of small papers or one big one to determine whether or not to give this person an immense amount of control and influence over your life.

It is not, in short, a lot of time to make a well-reasoned decision and, this being academia, there are a million other things that go into it. You probably picked this program because of the scholars you could work with here. You know these people by reputation. Now that you are in the program you know people who have worked or are working with these people. That one class is not your only information about them but it is your best source of information on how the two of you might work together.

Yet, just as abusers can be infinitely charming in public, I have personally witnessed several abusive advisors who are wonderful at teaching a class. So wonderful, in fact, that other folks who knew all the details of how abusive this person was to their advisees, still ranked her class as one of their favorites.

Once again for the people in the back: ABSUERS ARE CHARMING AF WHEN THEY WANT TO BE.

All of this means it can be nearly impossible to tell whether or not someone who seems like a decent professor will be a good advisor. I have at least three close friends who took a gamble on a good professor who turned out to be a truly atrocious advisor. I want to be very clear here. When I say “atrocious” I don’t mean “annoying” or “old-fashioned.” I mean almost career-destroying. For one person it was genuine malice in which their advisor actively sought to destroy their career both in and after graduate school. For others it was negligence. For still others, it was a little of column A and a little of column B.

Most importantly, however, none of these toxic advisors would have been in a position to advise students had their colleagues, or the university system, ensured that their bad behavior was punished early on.

So, what’s the point of this long, rambling post? I mean, besides the fact that it’s kind of therapeutic for me to write, even obliquely, about all the horrible advisors I experienced, directly or indirectly, during grad school?

The points are as follows:

1. Toxic advisors are real.
2. Toxic advisors are a systemic problem and academia, as an institution, needs to change.
3. You didn’t cause this behavior.
   1. No. Seriously. You didn’t. It’s not because you missed a deadline or because your writing wasn’t perfect (no writing ever is).
   2. It’s probably not even about you. Honestly. Most toxic people are just trying to exorcise their own trauma. It doesn’t make their behavior right. It doesn’t excuse it, but whatever they’re doing to you probably has very, very little to do with you and 98% to do with them.
   3. Really. You didn’t.
4. You. Are. Not. Alone. Even though we don’t talk about it, even though there are a lot of incentives to not talk about it, you are not alone.
5. You can ge through this if you want to.
6. But you don’t have to. It’s okay to quit if you want.
7. I’m here for you. If we were betting, I would put all my money on you being better than fine.

Later this week (no, guys! I really mean it!) we’ll be back and talking about how to handle advisors of all types.

In the darkest depths of my dissertation, when I was so close to done writing but totally done emotionally, my mom asked me why this process had to be so damn hard. Because I am who I am (i.e. obnoxious and long-winded), I went on a long ramble about academia as an apprenticeship model wherein the PhD candidate is an apprentice scholar to the professor, etcetera, etcetera.

My mother, who has worked for various unions most of her life, said, “But other apprenticeship professions, like machinists or pipefitters don’t work that way.” And that’s the moment I realized that, perhaps alone in the modern world, academia clings to a truly medieval model of apprenticeship and professionalism.

Within this model, the figure of one’s dissertation chair/advisor is crucial. Your dissertation advisor has an immense amount of power of your life. They can play a crucial role in whether or not you get funding from your institution, in your professionalization, and in your chances on the job market. That, of course, is all above and beyond the process of them actually helping you get your dissertation written.

In theory, we have dissertation committees to lessen what would be the advisor’s totalitarian grip over their advisees’ lives. The committee is there to provide other feedback and, if necessary, challenge the advisor on the student’s behalf from their more equal footing as fellow faculty.

In reality, some committees work this way and some don’t. I’ve had at least one faculty member tell me that, when she’s on a dissertation committee, she always votes the way that the chair votes because she figures the chair knows the project, and the field, best. On the other hand, I know of one person whose advisor developed a personal vendetta against them and tried to tank their career. The only thing that got that person through their defense was an outside committee member standing up to the chair.

I bring up this seeming aside on the power of committee chairs, and the varying efficacy of committee’s, because many of us go into academia thinking we will find a dissertation chair who will be a mentor to us. They will be the ultimate teacher and we their ultimate student. But that’s just not how it works the majority of the time. I, personally, have never seen that idealized type of relationship in person which isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist, just that it’s not as normal as movies would make you think.

In reality, your dissertation advisor may be a good fit for the subject matter of your thesis but not for you personally. The inverse is equally likely. I know of more than one case where a person went into a program and had a fabulous year working with their dream advisor when that person got a better job and left leaving their students with whoever was left in the department to pick up the pieces. The long and the short of it is that your dissertation advisor is, at the end of the day, every bit as human as you are. It’s unfair to expect any one person to be all the things we need–especially in a project as vast and varied as a dissertation.

I’ve become convinced that no one gets through their dissertation without having a balance of three types of support: mentors, sponsors, and fans.

In an ideal world you would have all three of these represented on your committee. But the world is often less than ideal.

Never fear!

Just because you don’t have all three types of support on your committee doesn’t mean you won’t have all three types of support.

So, just what are these types of support?

The mentor is the figure we’re all most familiar with. The mentor is someone we listen to and learn from. They’ve been where we want to go and they know how to get there. In my dissertation process my chair was an exceptional writing mentor. She never judged my progress, or lack thereof. She freely shared her own frustrations with the writing process and the tools she used to work around them.

It is likely, in your journey from ABD to PhD that you will need several mentors for different parts of the profession. For instance, during my MA I had an amazing teaching mentor. Because of what I learned from her I went into my PhD program prepared to teach and didn’t suffer a significant loss of productivity due to teaching while dissertating.

As important as mentors are, you will also need sponsors.

Sponsors are the folks who open doors for you. I had two significant sponsors throughout my PhD. One was the head of the program at the time I was admitted. Without her, I would never have secured funding to attend the program. She leveraged her personal relationships at the institution to help me find funding and make my dream of getting a PhD a reality.

The second sponsor was my undergraduate mentor who went out of her way to connect me to people and opportunities she knew would benefit my research.

Sponsors are harder to find than mentors but they are worth it. I’d love to give you advice here about how to find sponsors but I really don’t know. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have the sponsors I have and I sort of stumbled into them. All I can really say is work hard, follow your interests, be kind and someone will take notice and try to help you out. If anyone has a better idea of how to recruit sponsors please share in the comments below.

Finally, there are fans. Well, I call them fans, I think mentorship literature more commonly calls them “cheerleaders.” These are the people who celebrate your work and give you the strength to keep going when shit gets rough.

Throughout most of my PhD program the fans of my work were not professional academics but were, most often, my students and people in the community outside of campus. When I would share my work in-class with my students, or when I would share it at an event like 3MT, the encouraging comments I received helped me remember that my work was worth something to people outside of academia. Without that I think I would have walked away much sooner.

You’ll notice, in the above examples, that I found two out of three of these types of mentors outside of my PhD program. While I’m convinced that everyone needs to have some mentors, sponors, and fans, they don’t all have to be on your committee, or even in a PhD program.