Trenchwork

I’m passionate about many things.

I have an entire set of soapboxes about animals and what should be done with people who abandon, neglect, abuse, or mill-breed them—but I’ll save that for another day.

I believe that family and friends need a higher priority than we (I) tend to give them.

I believe that adding coffee to chocolate is little short of sacrilege, but adding chocolate to coffee is an attempt at redemption. (Those of you who like coffee, forgive me.)

I’ve found that knitting and crocheting can be a zen-like experience—as long as I’m not ripping out mohair.

I’m passionate about NOT mixing cooking tools and utensils when I handle meat or meat dishes. In other words, the spoon which I’m using to stir-fry a meat dish never crosses over into the neighboring pot of rice or veggies, and the chopping board and knife which I used to cut the chicken into pieces goes straight into the heavy-duty, super-hot wash of the dishwasher.

I believe that words have power, and that I have the right to choose my own words and therefore define my own power.

I believe that higher degrees such as the Ph.D. are less examples of intelligence and brilliance than they are demonstrations of persistence and sheer stubborn determination.

I passionately believe in training and mentoring. And, I’m unshakably convinced that academia does far too little of both.

Somehow, academia has decided that a terminal degree is sufficient qualification for supervising another employee or a student, and the failed logic in that perception confounds me. The academic environment should be no different than any other sector, and should take its example from those industries which have strong mentoring and training programs. Proper supervision consists of a whole host of positive aspects when it’s done correctly, and both supervisor and supervised come away from the experience enriched by it. Done incorrectly, it is the stuff of nightmares and ulcers.

I recognize that part of my passion about this subject is the result of my own military background, and that much of the rest is simply because I have more experience than “just” high school and college. But, somehow, this seems to be a real no-brainer—a matter of the most straight-forward common sense. We do not expect people to perform in technical tasks or teach without proper training; why would we be so foolish as to presume that they can supervise without having been taught those skills?

Nevertheless, we do. As a result, we have an entire population of students and scholars who have dropped out of the process and given up on a dream, or who, if they finished the process, rank their experience about on par with having major surgery without anesthesia—a surgery which lasts several years. I’ve heard more of those tales in the past several months than I naively believed possible, and the party-line response which infuriates me is the one which says that “it’s just a rite of passage; mine was bad, too.”

That’s nonsense. There is no earthly reason for a student to suffer during the process. Be challenged? Heck yes. Be in such a personal struggle that he seriously considers dropping out just to remove the stress generated by a single individual or organizational process? Never. If a student reaches that point—regardless of whether he actually decides that a career as county dog catcher is infinitely better than that in academia or not—we have failed. We have broken both faith and trust, and all because we thought ourselves so educated or intelligent that we did not need to train ourselves to accomplish a task properly.

The truly depressing part of all this is that it will take a radical shift in attitude for there to be a change, and until academia considers itself a part of a larger community rather than outside (and perhaps above) other communities, I fear it will not happen.