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It is an awkward situation. A graduate student asks me to serve on their graduate committee, and I must refuse. The refusal is awkward because the request is a compliment. Something in your interaction had struck a chord with the student and they are asking you to become, at least, a semi-mentor. My reasons for refusing - and I almost always do so - are complicated. First, I am deeply immersed in undergraduate teaching, and find that quite rewarding. So, my reasons for saying no to graduate students are not always selfish reasons. As a matter-of-fact the primary reason is usually in the student’s best interest: I simply do not possess the information necessary to the task. The next reason, though, is selfish: I have no interest in obtaining that missing information. Both reasons deserve further explication.
Communication is a discipline in continual evolution. I teach a course in communication technology, and on the first day of class I announce, “In this course, you will wake up everyday out of date; that is both inevitable and OK.” It doesn’t take profound insight to grasp that concept. “Tech Stuff changes, everyday.” Best Buy is running a series of ads right now pushing their “BuyBack Policy.” When your old gizmo gets outdated, they will buy it back so you can get the new one.
What is less obvious is that the intellectual underpinnings of the discipline are driven by those same winds of change. The Economist reports that 64,000 PhDs were awarded in the US last year – a few thousand of those were in communication. Here’s the tricky part. To get a Ph.D. you are required to make an original contribution to the field, you are required to “change” the discipline somehow. To continue to advance in your career you do research and publish – and again an important criterion is presenting something new, continuing the cycle of change. This is, for the most part, a good thing. I cannot think of an instance when it has been a good idea to draw a line in the sand of human curiosity and say: “Go no further! This way be dragons!” Were there such a line, graduate students and young faculty would be required to cross that line, to seek out the dragons and tame them in service to the discipline. Change is mandatory.
Yet, there is a difference between intellectual curiosity and mandated change. In my world that difference is more complex than it appears at first blush. No one enters the academy without intellectual curiosity – it is a fundamental prerequisite. I’m sure there are exceptions, just as there are probably linemen in the NFL who weigh less than 280 lbs., but they would be both uncommon and disadvantaged. The curious come to the academy because they are accepted, understood and advantaged. To a point. Most often intellectual curiosity, the advancement of knowledge, and the evolution of the discipline go hand-in-hand. I would go so far as to say that, as broad social variables, intellectual curiosity and the advancement of knowledge always go hand-in-hand, just as the laws of classical physics are always adequate to describe to world outside our window.
But when we observe intellectual curiosity on an individual level, it shows an increasingly common tendency to diverge from the prescribed course of mandated change. Physics found quantum mechanics to describe this fascinating world that operates beneath the radar of ordinary reality. Perhaps we need a quantum mechanics of the mind, if you will, for the academy to recognize and benefit from the individualized curiosity that percolates, largely invisible, beneath the unified surface of discipline-mandated change.
And that is my next reason for saying no to graduate students. My individualized curiosity has led me away from the “hot ticket items” of the discipline where graduate students must focus their efforts. Hence, in my own mind, I become a bad choice to teach the novitiates this particular catechism. The other reason, the fact that I no longer find the center of my discipline’s intellectual life interesting, requires a deeper dip into the quantum mechanics of the mind – both metaphorically and literally.
Change is both a physical and existential mandate. To live is to change. To steal a notion from Heraclitus, you cannot draw breath twice in the same universe. First because you are different with every breath you take, molecules rush about, cells die and are born, electric impulses drive thoughts and movement. We are constructed by change. Secondly, the universe is in continuous flux around us. Galaxies, solar systems, stars and planets shift as swiftly as the change within us. The edge of the universe recedes with incomprehensible rapidity. The only constant in existence is change. I change, therefore I exist. That being said, not all change is worthy of our consideration, and thankfully so, as we are often hard pressed to consider the change that is worthy of our attention.
So now let us consider change within an academic discipline. There is a light side and a dark side. On the dark side, the path of change is mandatory, even coerced. This path is informed by my world’s harshest possible perspective: what you think in the academy is unimportant, all that matters is that your work is published and your research is funded. If on this path, the canny graduate student or junior faculty member links his/her wagon to an established or a rising star, a publishing or grant getting machine, and hangs on for dear life. Individual curiosity be damned, direct your attention to whatever game is currently in vogue, for that way lies tenure.
On the light side, the academy in its most flattering aspect, academic change occurs quite differently. One assumes that there is a liked-minded cohort out there in the academy to encourage and support any intellectual bent. The wise novitiates read whatever fascinates him or her, and eventually they find a caring sympathetic mentor who helps them answer the questions that most fascinate them within a department that welcomes them. Both extremes exist, but the norm lies somewhere in between.
While my first four or five years in the academy were spent in places more intellectually dark than light, my professional life has been spent largely in that middle ground; often encouraged, almost always tolerated. It is therefore somewhat droll that during my “senior” years in the academy I find myself increasingly tepid as to the burning issues of the discipline. Today’s young communication scholars are often focused on issues about which I simply cannot summon the energy to care. So, does that mean I am no longer curious? No, quite the contrary as a matter of fact. I am far more curious than ever before. But my intellectual path has pulled me off the roads being explored by my colleagues. Let me share the basics with you.
Somewhere in the middle of my career I encountered – firmly in the middle of the discipline – narrative analysis. This approach to the world asserts that human beings construct stories that both contain and manifest the beliefs, attitudes and values that, for us, define reality. There’s a lot more to it than that – but that covers the main points. I wrote and published about the various aspects of that perspective for a number of years. But, like all academic tides, this one began to wane, and the change demanded by all those still unwritten Ph.D. dissertations swept on to new stories about the nature of reality in the discipline. And that was fine by me. By that time I was a full professor with tenure, able to withstand even those few bad years when the dark knights ruled my little corner of Camelot.
But I remained fascinated with the stories that we tell ourselves about the nature of truth and reality. You see, I have lived my entire academic career outside the sciences, over in the worlds constructed by story. In communication or philosophy or literature, there is no “proof” there is only “interpretation” and “belief.” Throughout most of human history the great events and precious personal moments have centered on belief. Wars are fought, empires rise and fall, lives are bound together and split asunder all on the basis of belief. Where are the data that define love? Show me the evidence for god. There is none – yet the belief endures. Fascinating.
The physicists on the other hand have been poking around for what they modestly called “the theory of everything.” Thanks to some wonderful writers and editors who could translate theoretical physics for “mathaphobics” like me, I began to read about these “theories of everything” and was soon delightfully enthralled with string theory and super symmetry, black holes and branes. I rambled there for a few years until I began to seriously build bridges between those two broad narratives: a world defined by belief and a universe revealed by data. I wrote, and published on the internet, the book that defines my conception of how those two narratives come together: The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart. The point of this essay is not to hawk that particular worldview. Rather, it is to point out that there is no home in the academy for the work. It is simply “not of interest” for formal physicists and communication scholars alike. It lacks an intellectual lineage in both disciplines. And that, of course, is the final reason I say no to graduate students. They must focus within boundaries that bore me.
From a broader perspective, I am concerned that the academy has built an efficient knowledge creation engine with tracks too rigid to accommodate at least one natural extension of an intellectual life. And when I say “one natural extension” I do not mean my personal intellectual wandering. Rather, I mean “folks like me.” I have met a cluster of them over the last few years, academics who view their lifelong disciplinary homes with ennui. We seem to share a variety of characteristics. We are usually in our late 50s through our 60s. We are established in our careers. We seem not, or no longer, tied to administrative responsibilities. And our curiosity has led us beyond the ordinary boundaries of our discipline. And, most importantly, we are thinking about strange and interesting things. It is in many ways a lovely life. Yet, somehow sad in that we are often lonely among our colleagues.
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