So I had naively thought that the bloggosphere would be like the camino. Thinking that 'the bloggosphere' would be a place without prejudice and that the hierarchy which existed in the real academic world would somehow be absent in this virtual one. In my ideal, the virtual world was a more level playing field where an individual's position (PhD student, postdoc, faculty) was irrelevant and all that mattered was that you walked in the academic world.
Much discussion has been written about young female scientist (YFS) and her experience. I use the word “about” because in these discussions, often taking place in the comments section of another’s blog, her actual voice is absent. I recognize that YFS cannot always present but the representation of her experience is noticeably absent.
Second, I have also noticed that during this discussion a number of disparging remarks are written largely (but not always) by faculty bloggers. Usually it comes in this form,
Once again, you're blaming "the system" for your shitty situation. You're also generalizing, again, that your situation automatically means that all postdoc experiences completely suck and that those people who move on to faculty positions did so at your expense.
This kind of comment invalidates young female scientist’s direct experience of the academic camino. It does so because it inverts the power dynamic inherent in the academic hierarchy by suggesting that the individual is to blame for their current circumstance. In a fair and just system, based on a meritocracy, each person receives an equitable lot. That the system is fair and just is implicitly assumed by the commentator. By asserting that young female scientist is speaking on behalf of all postdocs, the commentator deflects any consideration away from what aspects of the system led to this experience. Lastly, the author suggests that there is a generalized experience of the academic camino, but that this is not it.
The concern that this one voice, identified as “marginal” will become the authority of the postdoctoral experience, is expressed repeatedly both in comments and in blog posts on the topic. In protecting the clear and distinct rules of the road, much effort is expended to ensure that this experience is seen as a singular experience.
"I too worry about forgetting what it was like. That's why I read MsPHD and company. It is a reminder, even if some of it skirts the far edges of the distribution. Personally I am helped in my reading of MsPHD's more extreme ranting because I do in fact know a lab quite well that could produce a situation much as she perceives it.”
Here, the author emphasizes the “otherness” of young female scientist’s experience. Although prefacing the comments by suggesting that s/he doesn't want to forget what the postdoc experience can be, the author immediately uses language to describe MsPhD and company's posts as "extreme ranting" and comments that "skirts the far edges of the distribution." Because these experiences originate from what is a decidedly emotional space, they are deemed not real or valid. Lastly, the author of this comment revokes any validity to YFS's voice by suggesting that if YFS just changed her filter she might have a different experience. Hers is a perceived injustice not a real one.
Finally let’s look at a more recent exchange at PLT’s blog between largely faculty bloggers:
“Ooooooh boy.... Here comes the rain.
Whatever you do, don't mention the tattoos.
Well, the fact that the commenter believes that TT faculty suddenly develop amnesia about their postdoc experiences the moment they become Asst. Profs suggests that nothing any TT faculty member says will make any difference to her. This is fundamentally not a position that can be reasoned with.
From what I've observed, it seems to me that the relationship between a senior postdoc and her advisor is similar in some ways to that between a 17-year-old ready to get the hell out of her parents' house and the parents. Perhaps it takes becoming a parent to see things from the other side.
...exactly. Great analogy!
…makes the point that postdocs need to work within the system too, and I couldn't agree more.
It's been known for a long time the system was in trouble (COSEPUP, 2000). But it takes a long time and lot of effort to make changes.
happy or sad, all postdocs (and ex-postdocs!) should have the druthers to work the NPA, their local Postdoc Office, call your local reps. DO SOMETHING instead of just moaning.
Sack up or get out (of science or your shitty lab). Either way stop wasting your life- there's fuck all of it and it doesn't come with a recharge cord.”
Again I draw attention to the quality of the language used by the commentators. It is paternalistic and condescending. The commentators employ a language that reminds postdocs or “children” that they can only participate in the academic camino because they, the faculty/parents allow it. But in the above exchange, postdocs are clearly told that they are not equals and that they will not be treated as equals even though a “senior” postdoc may be days or months away from being in a tenure track position.
These types of verbal exchanges, described above, use language in a way that sets the faculty blogger in the role where they decide what experiences are authentic and what should be dismissed as merely “emotional.” As was the case with black women during much of the feminist movement, if black women dared to criticize the white feminist movement, their voices were tuned out, dismissed, and silenced. Only those whose experiences echoed the sentiments of the dominant discourse were heard (Bell Hooks From Margin to Center).
Language has the power to inspire and motivate us, as Haig Bosmajian suggests in his essays The Language of Oppression, but it can also be used to justify and maintain a hierarchy by taking possession of experience.
Academia is an institutionalized hierarchy and as such it has the potential to create a very real and lived experience of oppression. Embedded in this hierarchy is privilege and class. Chairs or Directors of Departments have power over faculty. Faculty have power over postdocs, graduate students, and undergrads. Postdocs have power over undergrads and sometimes grad students. Grad students have power over undergrads. At some level, each of us that walk along the academic road carry the weight of that privilege.
How do we ensure that dissenting voices are not ghettoized and ruthlessly critiqued? It is too easy to use language that is less than mindful because it ensures “blog traffic.” I have, in the past, hidden behind pseudoanonymity assuming that it gives me the freedom to say and write what I want. And I think many bloggers view the bloggosphere as “outside the constraints of the scientific and academic writing.”
But is it really?
Our everyday reality is informed and shaped by politics and is therefore necessarily political. Even my choices to identify myself with specific labels: girl, postdoc, Canadian, are political. I write to and about my personal experience because I believe it should be given voice. But in writing about my personal experience, should I dismiss or marginalize others? If, we cease to focus on the simplistic stance that “faculty are the enemy” or “postdocs are children,” then we have an opportunity to examine our role in the maintenance of oppressive social circumstances. A broader understanding of how our personal actions can affect the political sphere of another’s life cannot arise if those whose experiences are different are simply quieted.
The totality of the academic road includes all experiences – good and bad.
And to get to that place of a broader under-standing, it requires that we are “standing under” or “in” someone’s experience for long enough that this person’s experience penetrates and dissolves our judgements.
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the
Indian in a white poncho lies dead
by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend. Naomi Shihab Nye
22 comments:
This is a very nice and thoughtful post.
Liked this a lot. Thanks.
Great post. Should give us all something to think about.
This is wonderful.
Bravo.
A nice thoughtful post which contributes without adding to the fuss and nonsense.
Which I am now going to comment on, probably annoyingly - apologies in advance if so.
I empathise with YFS - I have had crappy experiences, and been patronised and discriminated against, and know people who've had it as bad as she seems to. She is not a singular outlier, but a representative of a particular type of post-doc experience which is symptomatic of a sick system.
I thoroughly agree with some of the points here about the language and the power-insensitivity of the way her writings have been discussed.
But to me that's only PART of what's going on. I'm female faculty, in a 'not star-studded' place, but one with solid research activity and ambitions. I read there regularly, I comment, yet often _I_ feel like _I_'m being marginalised or made invisible by the generalised comments about how unhelpful other faculty or 'the system' is. I try very hard to change how things are, and I know others do too, but because YFS and her ilk have not encountered us, we don't exist - do you see, it feels like the inverse of what the 'lalala postdoc is wonderful' people are writing.
I understand where she is coming from, and I sympathise, but often I dislike reading what she writes because the blanket statements about 'science' and 'faculty' read as offensively as the 'sack-up' type comments. BOTH are extreme and inappropriate.
"I try very hard to change how things are, and I know others do too, but because YFS and her ilk have not encountered us, we don't exist - do you see, it feels like the inverse of what the 'lalala postdoc is wonderful' people are writing."
Well said JaneB. It doesn't help the discourse on what aspects make the system is sick to make any voice disappear.
Lovely post, and it gives me something to think about. But as it was so well said & analyzed, I don't really have much to add :)
Interesting post albeit a tad condescending and odd (you really compared those comments with the black vs white feminist movement?). While you didn't identify the author of the first quote, it's mine, and you've taken it out of context. Myself and several of the bloggers who you either quote or mention have a history with each other in the blogosphere of which you may or may not be aware.
Travel the blogosphere a little more and you'll discover a rich assortment of individuals and experiences from which one can learn a lot. Using the recent series of conversations as a basis for asserting that a hierarchy exists that doesn't encourage open discourse doesn't do justice to the online scientific community.
I appreciate your comment because it's true that a blog post can't capture the full depth of the bloggosphere history.
It's not clear to me that knowing the history will change the tone of the discussions. Language used either in the past or present can be a form of oppression. PIT you clearly have some thoughts on this? What's your reasoning for thinking that knowing the history should matter to the tone of the current discussion?
While context is definitely important, the identification of the authors is not. How an individual says something tells you more about what place in the hierarchy said individual comes from.
And yes the academic hierarchy warrants comparison between a similar power imbalance - black women in the women's movement or even women fighting for equality. The issues of language are remarkably the same.
"t is paternalistic and condescending. The commentators employ a language that reminds postdocs or “children” that they can only participate in the academic camino because they, the faculty/parents allow it. But in the above exchange, postdocs are clearly told that they are not equals and that they will not be treated as equals even though a “senior” postdoc may be days or months away from being in a tenure track position. "
I have to disagree with you here. Your assumption of tone of voice influences your understanding of what the commenter/poster means. This is the problem with any non-direct non-verbal communication.
My, and other's, "problem" with MsPhD is nothing to do with her femaleness, and her postdoc status is only part of the discussion/debate. Her relenetless negativity and, IMO, ranting about how shitty life is, is what leads some of us to comment on this.
It seems that as soon as a counterpoint argument is made in the academic-postdoctoral blogosphere it is hijacked. And what infuriates me the most is that any discussion is impossible. This is why usually avoid it on my blog, because it rapidly becomes Them vs. Us peppered with discussions about how The Man (and in some cases just men) are keeping someone down.
However, I am os moved by this I shall try and do something on my blog, and then we'll see which side I fall on. Them or Us. Because I am actually neither.
Interesting discussion.
JaneB- I certainly have encountered people like you, and I don't mean to lump you in when I'm talking about what "faculty" in general do - but in my experience even the sympathetic faculty are either disempowered or disinclined to help postdocs in any tangible way.
re: the comment about getting involved in the NPA, etc. I did all of that. I started a postdoc association on my campus. Did that solve all my problems with my bullying advisor? No.
Anyway, this is why I decided to basically stop blogging. I think you're absolutely right that my point of view has been marginalized, dismissed, and labeled as crazy. It took me a long time to realize that was why blogging - and reading blogs - often makes me feel worse, and not better.
Some of us would have liked to think the "online community" is somehow better than the real world. Maybe at the beginning we thought we could have a persona that was the best version of pseudo-selves, or something. But if we're really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that none of us have managed the hagiography, so it's no different here than anywhere else.
It's an extension of the same science sandbox where some people just will never see eye to eye.
Virtual Academia is no more or less insightful or kind than Real Academia, it's just a slightly different sampling of people, with pseudonyms.
I have to admit that for a while, I thought I'd found a safe haven in blogging, with more sympathetic people and/or insightful advice than I would have found elsewhere.
It's disappointing to have come to realization that such a place as I had idealized for the future of the blogosphere simply does not, and will not exist. It's anarchy, so you have to have a thick skin if you want to stay in it. Just like science - basically anything goes. However nasty or judgmental you want to be - have at it. Nobody can stop you.
@tideliar
I don't think that "femaleness" matters here generally (although it might specifically). In my mind it is her "postdoc status" that is actually relevant. The asymmetry in power between a postdoc and faculty is why I made the analogy between women and men, black women and white women. In each of these groups, there is an inequity in the power relations that is reflected in the language.
I recognize there is a diversity of experience, I just have to look at myself and HippieHusband. I think a better way to deal with "relentless negativity" is to ask what aspects of a system lead to such a shitty experience. This shitty experience actually provides an opportunity for a more thoughtfully exploration of how to make the system better.
As PIT points out it is diversity of experiences and perspectives in the bloggosphere that can help contribute to solutions.
@MsPhD
We all carry our privilege/class/position in the hierarchy from the real world to the virtual world. I read how some of us describe ourselves. For example "NIH funded scientist" or "full professor" or "postdoc in the biological sciences" etc. How we think of ourselves is reflected in how we express ourselves.
And yes people aren't going to see eye to eye, but I think the discussions and comments could and should be a little more respectful. Some kindness wouldn't hurt. I like George Washington Carver's perspective on this,
"How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life, you will have been all of these."
I like that quote, GirlPostdoc. And I found nothing condescending in what you wrote, where the constant parent-child analogies made about postdocs are very condescending. I do struggle off and on with the blogosphere and whether I am contributing something meaningful, and whether I am getting anything out of it. Most days I feel good about it, and back when I was a grad student I frankly read mostly women and mostly grad students, so I was in a nice bubble of safety. As I've been reading more scienceblogs suddenly there is a shift in who I read and my readership to more senior folks and more men, which has changed my own feelings about the blogosphere (some for the better, some for the worse). As blogging becomes mainstream, all those mainstream and/or powerful folks who couldn't be bothered to blog are now getting in on it, so it's a different space.
I feel like this is something zephoria could comment on far more intelligently than I could.
"I recognize there is a diversity of experience, I just have to look at myself and HippieHusband. I think a better way to deal with "relentless negativity" is to ask what aspects of a system lead to such a shitty experience. This shitty experience actually provides an opportunity for a more thoughtfully exploration of how to make the system better."
and then to DO something about it.
And this is what a lot of us are trying to do. I am very active in trying to improve the lot of postdocs, both at my current institution and elsewhere and I work with groups in other countries to do the same. As Prof Like Substance just said over at his blog, if the people at the top don't hear about the problem, where is the incentive for change? However, along those lines, no one is going is going to act to improve life if all they hear is complaints about how unfair it is. You need to DO something to try and effect change.
Recently I've been happy to see former postdocs at my campus being promoted internally. We don't have the funding for TT positions in their disciplines, but at least they are being given some tangible reward with promotion into non-TT positions. If they do well, they can barter these for TT or move on when the economy picks up.
Can we improve the life of every postdoc stuck in a shitty abusive situation? Of course not. Can we guarantee TT jobs for those that want them? Of course not. But can we try and make some tangible, real world steps to improve training and employment prospects, money and benefits etc.? Yes, we can. That can be done at an institutional level and a national level.
However, as soon as one of us manages to get out of a postdoc into something else, we're instantly accused of betrayal, or "drinking the koolaid" or some other trite and spiteful metaphor.
@Kate I was a lurker before I started my own blog and have noticed over the years a few things change. First, I recognize that we have a limited time so the way people choose to spend it will depend on their priorities. But just out of curiousity I wondered how many faculty bloggers engage (read and comment) in PhD or postdoc blogs compared to PhD or postdocs who engage in faculty blogs. And what proportion of comments on faculty vs. PhD and postdoc blogs are anonymous. Either way it is important that the discussion is mulit-directional and hears all voices.
@tidelar
I agree doing something is important. But as with the feminist movement, much of the motivation to do something came from anger. I myself am trying to find ways that will not compromise my future careers plans that help postdocs. And you're right that comments like "drunk the koolaid" or "sac the fuck up" are also not helpful. They set up an antagonistic relationship that goes nowhere. I like PiT's blog on how to change the system - great first steps.
I read several faculty blogs FSP and Academic Ecology where the bloggers are extremely thoughtful. I get a lot of these blogs and typically the discussion, although it may get heated, is never disrespectful.
The great thing about the blogosphere is that it's free so you don't have to read blogs you don't like or that you find distasteful or disrespectful.
She said it first!
*jk!*
I agree with you, and admit it is easy to post when frustrated.
I wonder though, FSP has comment moderation on, so if anyone does push their luck they might not get posted (I have no idea of FSP's personal choices for posting comments, just making an observation). If carefully done this could be a way to keep the conversation on an even keel. You post something I feel is too inflammatory, I can block it but let you know to try again with a moderated tone...
...actaully, I can't see that working for shit. :/
As Prof Like Substance just said over at his blog, if the people at the top don't hear about the problem, where is the incentive for change?
I find the idea that the people at the top don’t know what’s going on ludicrous. Were they never postdocs? Or maybe I’m supposed to believe that they were postdocs before The Fall, back during the Garden-of-Eden times. Everyone (even grad students!) knows why the postdoc experience often sucks. The fundamental problem is that the PI should be a mentor, but the system provides little to no incentive for this. (It’s not that different in grad school, really, but by the time you’re a postdoc, you’re not that willing to put up with the same crap all the time.) The challenge is to find a way to change the PI’s behavior, without being able to address the underlying cause. I’ve yet to hear/see a concrete suggestion that would accomplish this.
Perhaps we should ask those who had a positive postdoc experience to chime in with their reasons why. Were they paid substantially more? Did they have a shot at an internal, non-TT promotion? Or access to a “postdoc office” on campus? I would be willing to bet that the number one reason is the PI – all other perks pale in comparison.
@Hope
I would be willing to bet that the number one reason is the PI – all other perks pale in comparison.
I'm sure that's part of the equation but I think having a good support system - whether it be in the form of colleagues or friends also matters. I've spoken to 3 successful and young faculty at SmallUniversity about their postdoc experiences. All came from very successful postdocs with good advisors and yet they hated (their words not mine) their postdoc experience. The reason - no support.
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