Monday, October 22
Advisors' incentives to stifle creativity
The next concept that you need is not so fun. This is the incentive that thesis advisors have to stifle the creativity of their students. It's an insidious phenomenon, and it is not entirely the advisors' fault. Here is how it works. Your advisor will organize seminars, or otherwise recommend reading, and the reading lists that result will derive from the advisor's own voice -- from an intellectual map of the world that reflects the advisor's own effort to define a research program and situate it within an existing network of professional relationships. If you confine your reading to your thesis advisor's recommendations -- or, even worse, if you feel so overwhelmed with work that you accept your advisor's interpretations of those readings rather than engaging with them afresh yourself -- then your thinking will be organized and bounded by your advisor's thinking. You will talk the way your advisor talks, cite the same work, address the same audience, and so on. Of course, this needn't be a disaster. If you are smart, and if your advisor has chosen an expanding disciplinary universe, then you will write a good dissertation within that universe. You will get a good job, and you will take your place in a hierarchy. When the people in your advisor's cohort finally retire, then you will be in charge. It is not such a bad life. But it is not the life that you were meant to live -- the life that you would create
The next concept that you need is not so fun. This is the incentive that thesis advisors have to stifle the creativity of their students. It's an insidious phenomenon, and it is not entirely the advisors' fault. Here is how it works. Your advisor will organize seminars, or otherwise recommend reading, and the reading lists that result will derive from the advisor's own voice -- from an intellectual map of the world that reflects the advisor's own effort to define a research program and situate it within an existing network of professional relationships. If you confine your reading to your thesis advisor's recommendations -- or, even worse, if you feel so overwhelmed with work that you accept your advisor's interpretations of those readings rather than engaging with them afresh yourself -- then your thinking will be organized and bounded by your advisor's thinking. You will talk the way your advisor talks, cite the same work, address the same audience, and so on. Of course, this needn't be a disaster. If you are smart, and if your advisor has chosen an expanding disciplinary universe, then you will write a good dissertation within that universe. You will get a good job, and you will take your place in a hierarchy. When the people in your advisor's cohort finally retire, then you will be in charge. It is not such a bad life. But it is not the life that you were meant to live -- the life that you would create
