In which the proffies shut up for a moment, and let the grad students talk

[NOTE: COMMENTS CLOSED. GO HERE FOR FOLLOW-UP]

So, you may have noticed that I have opinions.

You may have further noticed that some of them concern graduate education. Those opinions tend to draw some strong reactions from my grad student readers, principally those that advocate a sink-or-swim approach to grad school, and a harsh dose of the new reality for anyone considering it. I like to think in terms of that story about St. Benedict's early rules for admission: when the candidate comes, tell them to get lost. Several times. If, after three strong rebuffs, they continue to insist, and if they're qualified, let them in for a year, and see if it's a good fit for both parties. Either party should be able to opt out for any reason at the end of this year -- it's not for everyone. It is not meant to be a soft life.

You may have further noticed that I appear to be talking primarily to other faculty members on this blog -- a pose that I've recently realized may alienate my grad student readers. And the content of those conversations is likely to piss them off sometimes.

So you know what? For the next couple of days, I'm going to temporarily back off, and ask my proffie readers to do the same. I'll moderate, but I'm going to turn this over to the grad students. What do you wish we were doing/not doing with respect to our grad students? Should we let in more grad students, or fewer? Should we give second, third, and fourth chances, or is it better to cut the agony short? Should we be nurturing you like parents, or toughening you up like drill sergeants? Is there a difference between what we should expect of a terminal M.A. and someone who's Ph.D.-bound? Do gender and/or age play a role in what you expect of your grad faculty?

Maybe let us know a little about yourself -- M.A. student? PhD? ABD? Ditched it all and decided to do something else? ONE POST PER PERSON, AND KEEP IT BRIEF. Otherwise, people will just skip over it.

Ad hominem attacks will be summarily deleted. Praise or criticize (or both!), but please be constructive.

We're listening.


(There will be a follow-up post for profs to give their point of view -- also constructive, I hope.)

Archives and Interpretation

::pooof!::

I just poofed the post, though I'm leaving the comments (strange, huh?) -- Squadratomagico makes an excellent point about overgeneralizing, and in retrospect, the post was written from a place of frustration. My apologies to any I offended.

In lieu of the original post, let me ask a question, in case people want to keep the discussion going: how do we, as researchers, weigh the relative value of years of work in the archives versus creative interpretation of the sources -- perhaps fewer sources, or perhaps working only from published sources? If you feel comfortable doing so, perhaps add the country you received your historical training in.

And I know many of my readers are stateside Americanists, so: do you think you work differently than your colleagues who study other countries? Do we medievalists just need to get over ourselves, already?

UPDATE: Fellow Blogger Tenthmedieval has left a very nice response (his second response, comment #17, I believe) in the comments -- I think it's well worth reading, so make sure to take a look.

Living Conditions (research trip edition)

"I'm really impressed at the things you do in the name of research."

This remark was made by my first visitor while here in Exotic Research City, and it was in reaction to my living conditions here. So I thought I'd reflect, and maybe see if my experience was typical.

I should preface this by saying that, in Grit City, I live in a fairly nice 500 sq. ft. 1 BR bungalow, which I rent, in a walkable neighborhood about 4 miles from campus. I have wood floors. I have sunlight. I don't share walls. It's nothing fancy, but it's certainly pleasant.

Here in Exotic Research City, I rent an apartment. I say "apartment," but I really think what I have is a 19th c. New York immigrant coldwater flat. It's a 5th-floor walkup, in the rear of the building, so almost no light whatsoever, 150 square feet or so, only cold water in the sink taps. There's a heater for the shower, so if I want to wash my dishes in hot water, I fill a shallow plastic tub from the tap in the shower, then carry it to the sink and mix it with the cold.** Downstairs there is a couple with a three year-old and a baby, living in the same sized space. Next door my single male neighbor, about my age, has a constant, deep, troubling cough that sounds like he's choking and makes me glad of my decision to quit smoking (again) a couple months ago. The apartment comes equipped with a washing machine, but I hang my laundry on the roof (which I'm right under). For this, I pay about $1000 a month. Exotic Research City ain't cheap.

my delightful downstairs neighbor, who always greets me when I arrive home for lunch

I also walk to all my archives within 15 minutes. My neighborhood is a mix of young, mostly male immigrants, and hipster/hippies. One of the city's major markets is down the stairs and 3 minutes away, so I can get there before the ladies with their shopping trolleys do. The neighborhood is gritty in places, but there is also History – the second-oldest church in the city is around the corner and two minutes away. From my rooftop, I can see the cathedral (and its attendant cranes) in one direction, and a monument of modern architecture in the other, while listening to the sound of kids playing soccer and young tough teenagers giving each other shit in the park below.

It's neither glamorous nor tranquil. But here, it's home.


**This was what prompted my visitor's incredulity.

Smart but Slow Students

[based on some of the comments this post is getting, I think I'll do a full-blown follow-up where the grad students talk back to the proffies... stay tuned for more info]

My forever-student in the M.A. program (seriously, folks: he started in fall 2004, vanished off the face of the earth for ages at a time on more than one occasion) not only finished an excellent thesis right before I left on sabbatical; he just won our college's "best thesis" award.

Whoo hoo!

I don't think he's going on to a Ph.D. program -- getting through even the M.A. proved to be a challenge, and I'd have to mention it in any letter I wrote. And it's a shame, because he's obviously got the intellectual firepower to do it.

So, what do you do with students like this: intelligent, excellent writers, creative thinkers, but inconsistent? Ones that drift in occasionally with a stack of truly superior work, then you don't hear from them for ages? I'm sure he won't be the last of this breed, and I'd love to hear some other opinions.

And yes: he was working full-time. But still: five years for an M.A.?

Happy and Sad

First, the sad: this weekend, Beloved Former Chair passed away. We're all very sad -- not only was she a pathbreaking feminist historian; she was also a kickass chair who broke up the old boys' network in the department, built the department, fostered community here, and rolled right over anyone who tried to take our department's stuff. She also compulsively fed the squirrels who learned to gather outside our department windows (to my terror when one of them tried to crawl into my office window one day!) and had a thing for Hello Kitty.

But for bad, the Powers That Be also grant good: head over to Medieval Woman's place, and read the glad tidings. A smile for her, TD, and Thing One and Thing Two.

From the Cemetery of Forgotten Projects

So, I'm technically here to work on Nifty Title Project. But I'm also poking at the corners of Shiny New Project, because it's going to take a bit of doing, in dribs and drabs. Specifially, the corner that I'm poking at is something that I reluctantly committed to giving a paper on at Kalamazoo. Why? Guilt over a ball I dropped. But that's another story. The paper is supposed to be about members of a particular profession – let's call them widgeteers – who play a small but important role in Shiny New Project. There's already a body of literature on widgeteers. But as I was browsing through the notarial archives for documents on local widgeteers during the period I work on, I came across half a dozen wills for widgeteers' wives. And so I decided that that would be my paper.

So, when I get bored with or despair about Nifty Title Project, I turn to poke the lives of widgeteers and their wives. And this weekend, for the first time, I started transcribing a the wives' wills.

And do you know what I found?

A link to Project Impossible.

Project Impossible is, as the name implies, something that I once thought would make a really neat book (with a really cool title, too). It's a study of a particular Interesting Instution. Unfortunately, although it's known that Interesting Institution was founded in the late medieval century I work on, almost all of the known references to the insitution involved are from the Early Modern era. So I remained interested, but dropped it.

And then, lo and behold, Thursday I find a reference in a secondary source to the fact that the widgeteers' guild had been the ones who agitated for Key Institution to be built.

And yesterday, as I was transcribing the first testament, I find that this widgeteer's wife has left substantial sums of money to Interesting Institution.

No, I'm not going to drop both Nifty Title Project and Shiny New Project to go on a snipe hunt. But I am going to reopen my Project Impossible file, and start adding to it.

How Fabulous Ex-Neighbor Earned a New Sobriquet

That's a lousy sobriquet, isn't it? Kinda generic and uncreative. She's needed a new one for a while, one that reflects a bit of who she is. And her visit this past week and a few subsequent e-mails provided inspiration. To wit:

I'm now over two-thirds of the way through my research trip, and I feel like I've gotten nothing done. This is largely a product of the fact that I've been mostly working with inventories, pulling and taking copies of documents to read later. The fact that I've spend very little time in the doucments, and the time I have spent in them has yielded less promising signs than the work with the inventories (for different collections) makes me feel like this trip has been unproductive.

But more than that, I feel like I was not ready for this sabbatical. I've been discussing this subject over the last few days with fabulous ex-neighbor, who is also on a sabbatical. She and I both agreed that we might have been more prepared to take advantage of these sabbaticals if they'd come a year later. As it was, we spent our year 6 on the tenure track finishing up the first project – doing revisions, doing page proofs, etcetera. Then there was the summer trip that was supposed to be reconnaissance, but fall semester was such chaos that we never really got time to process what we'd found. We were happy to have the sabbatical, but we each felt that we could have used another year before the sabbatical to do background reading and really figure out the basic lay of the land. As it was, even with the reconnaissance trip that was supposed to orient us, we still both felt that we were fumbling our way through a dark room, bumping into the furniture and barking our shins.

Of course, like many friends, we're better at calming each other down than we are ourselves. So here is a snippet from one of our exchanges, reprinted with permission.

First, Me:

I keep bouncing back and forth between one project[**] and another,[***] like a pinball. I'm trying not to worry about it, and not to listen to the voice in my head screaming THERE'S NOT ENOUGH TIME!!! HOW *DARE* YOU HAVE TAKEN TIME AWAY FROM THE ARCHIVES TO HAVE FUN!!! YOU BAD, BAD PERSON! That way lies madness.

[...]

But I keep coming back to, "Well, if I'd had my book *done* when I went up for tenure, then I could have spent year 6 working on the next project..." which is ridiculous, of course. But still.

Now, Fabulous Ex-Neighbor:

I've had all the same thoughts. And indeed, if we followed the time- honored schedule of having a book OUT in time for tenure, we'd have had that built in break. Mind you, in places that require that, we'd also probably have had a semester off in the third year or so, lower teaching load, etc etc.

I too worry about taking time away. On the other hand, last summer I found that I was really refreshed after having visitors and taking some time off. AND the time gives us ideas, familiarity with our subjects [...]

Did you know exactly how everything fit for the diss when you gathered the documents? I'm guessing this will come together. It is just irritating not to be able to see the whole picture right now. So get what you can, process it at home and then there is always January and summer to go fill the holes you identify. Or so I tell myself.

Now, to be fair, she admitted in a later e-mail that she was directing these soothing noises at herself as much as at me. But the fact that she can make them, while I can only whimper incoherently, suggests a name change: henceforth (or until something better occurs to me), Fabulous Ex-Neighbor will be known as the Voice of Reason.