In academic publishing too, there was scope to be savagely biting. In battles over theories of mind, one might find Colin McGinn feuding bloodily in the reviews section with Ted Honderich: “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad”, began one notorious review...
I also come out of the more spirited tradition of creative destruction in philosophy, which remains in force in some schools. It was once thought crucial to get over the distress of having your ideas savaged by professors with keen wits and tongues alike; you would learn to make better arguments by seeing what was weak in what you already thought. I remember one distraught young woman being approached after such a savaging by the professor, who asked, "If you had argued the other side, I'd have come at you just as hard." It's nothing personal; it was the job.
I recommend her article for its insight; also this one of hers, which addresses a question we used to argue over quite a lot back in the early days. That question was whether or not there was a 'female brain,' appreciably distinct from a 'male brain,' and what it might mean if there were. Those of you who remember the grand feuds we used to have at Cassandra's place will find that the two pieces line up: she and I used to go hammer-and-tongs at each other's ideas, without ever failing to respect and honor each other personally. That was the spirit of the thing, back in the old days when this blog was headed by a quote from Chesterton's "The Last Hero":
How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose, --You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes.
Perhaps there was wisdom in that.
12 comments:
I love a spirited argument, but I can do without the insults. I don't need to know that an aggrieved professor thinks his colleague is bad, mediocre, and ludicrous--that's just name-calling. I do need to know which arguments he thinks are faulty, and why. It undermines credibility to rest a logical argument on personal animus, both because our bias is showing and because we're wasting time we could be spending on facts and logic.
The most devastating critiques are delivered politely and dispassionately. Logically devastating, I mean, not emotionally devastating. I'm assuming that the idea is to elevate good ideas, not wreak psychic violence.
I think she might be making the argument that a little more violence would be healthy. It used to be that you would be careful not to advance ideas that weren’t carefully crafted; now people argue that men are women and sex is mutable, while sexuality and race are set in stone. There’s no fear of looking stupid when you say things like that. After all, it’s just “your truth.”
When I was in architecture school in the nineties, they had started to move away from the classically ruthless critiques where professors might literally tear apart your lovingly crafted model and rearrange it crudely to make a point, or question your work ethic quite directly. It still happened on occasion though, and we all knew it was possible at any time. By the time I was teaching in the 2000s, you'd get fired for something like that. The work of students did not improve in that time, in my opinion. 'Surviving' architecture school that was a trial at times taught many lessons no professor could teach you, at least not without them.
I was in architecture school in the 70s, and critiques could be pretty merciless. I don't really mind the mercilessness, but I think people have a tendency to make arguments personal when it's not needed. Work ethic is a boundary territory: it may make sense to criticize work as lazy if it's objectively lazy, even though that's also a personal attack. I still think it's better to focus on the objective reasons for finding a work lazy than to indulge in attacking the designer's personality.
I had one grad school professor who was of the "clinical shredding of lousy work" school. Once we all realized that it wasn't personal, it was one of the most useful courses I remember taking.
I caught a bit of that approach in Landscape Architecture - "Precisely what are the fish going to do while you fill in the stream before you restore it, Mr. Doe?" Ouch. I got dinged for failing to take into account changes in spring flow after rain (and I knew better!). We were a lot more careful and precise about our analyses and reports after that session.
LittleRed1
I once saw a professor of history destroy a grad student's (lazy frat-boy) work, and then toss him a quarter and tell him to "Go call your mother to come pick you up; you have no business in graduate school."
Either he learned from that experience or he didn't. If he learned, he might have become useful. If he didn't, well, we were no worse off than we were to start with.
The TV watching public apparently loved watching old man professor Kingsfield demolish student James Hart for mushy legal reasoning in the series "Paper Chase".
Likely, I suppose, because the demolition was not directed at the public.
The writer makes a good point about sloppy thinking, but I tend to agree with Tex on the details of how to disincentivize it. "You're an idiot" sounds pretty personal, even if it isn't.
I think expectations play a big role in this as well. I've heard that the British education system from bottom to top was pretty brutal in the past, so by the time one hit university the brutality was expected and everyone understood it wasn't personal. (CS Lewis wrote or talked about this some.)
In the US, in more recent times teachers have been taught to focus on giving positive feedback, praising the good in their students' work rather than criticizing the bad. The corrections come gently. I don't know when that started, but I suspect it was common by the 1980s and it seems ubiquitous now. I'm sure there were and are exceptions, but that seems to have been the trend. So, I don't think many American students today would understand how to take that kind of criticism. I'm not sure they would even understand the difference between the personal and the professional on any meaningful level.
I'm not so sure about the "gentle" part, though people who can give gentle constructive criticism that actually is heard and acted on are skilled and valuable. In instruction, I think it's more important to be effective than to be gentle, if one or the other must be sacrificed.
But even if we must be harsh in instruction, we don't have to make it personal, beyond the irreducible personal nature of the message that the trainee can and must do better. "This argument doesn't hold water; I expect better of you" is true and can even be brutally honest, enough to melt down a weak, vain person. But "You're an idiot" is asking for trouble even in the case of a student who's neither vain nor weak, unless there's a pretty good bond between teacher and student. Luckily, many good students will take a gratuitous insult in stride and try harder, but that doesn't make it less an unforced error. The student will be doing well in spite of the teacher's error rather than because of the teacher's skill.
In other words, I think we can be stringent in our demands for performance, without being snide or personal. If someone really needs the ice bucket thrown in his face, we might have to resort to a sarcastic way of suggesting that he call his mother and get her to drive him home, but that should be emergency live-saving surgery, not the first tool out of the box.
Of course, the recent tendency has been more to praise whatever is done rather than to communicate to the student whether he has or has not mastered the topic. No excuse for that, either.
I'm not so sure about the "gentle" part,
Well, I was just saying I think that's been the trend, and that that trend has led away from the vigorous intellectual discussion (or 'brutality') that is under discussion. Also, I think that trend has gone into what you talk about, praising the student indiscriminately w/o regard for achievement or performance.
I agree with you that effectiveness is the priority; method has to follow that.
Like Tex, I enjoy a spirited argument, and I think we've gone way too far away from that, so much so that it isn't possible in many contexts, which is a great loss.
However, on the other side, the hazard of the kind of brutality we're talking about is a loss of trust, with all the follow on effects of that. A teacher who savages a student, even for genuinely rotten work, motivates students who don't understand the social context involved to play everything safe: do reasonable work to avoid getting savaged, but don't ask questions, don't take risks.
There's a balance to be struck here, and too much either way is detrimental to learning.
I think this is related to trends in tipping as well. Schools are, probably unintentionally, teaching kids to be fragile instead of resilient, and they grow up expecting to get the best positive feedback whether from teachers or customers.
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