Last term, I was a part of a group of faculty across multiple disciplines in the humanities @umich that thought through the problems of harassment and abuse in graduate education
@UMich One of the primary issues---and something a bit distinct from the STEM fields---is that much of graduate advising in the humanities is a one-to-one relationship
@UMich You apply to a school, or a department, but you're applying to work with one person, whose expertise and interests overlap with yours, often in ways that seem irreplaceable---or at least very difficult to replace
@UMich For example, say you come to Michigan to work on late antiquity and want to work in Syriac. That means, in our current system, that I'm your advisor. But what if you don't thrive under my type of advising? Or, worse, what if I abuse you or harass you?
@UMich That is, the social and intellectual contexts for the advisor-advisee relationship in many parts of the humanities, on top of having it be one-to-one, set it up as a *rare* relationship.
@UMich This is why I have found it useful to think about the other one-to-one, rare, difficult-to-exit relationship model that exists---marriage---as I thought about humanities grad advising.
@UMich So, let me be totally and entirely clear: advisor-advisee relationships *aren't* marriages.
@UMich But, in one aspect, they're very useful to think with, and that's the way that marriages have shifted from being legally obscure---the actions taken within them not legible to the law---to being legally transparent.
@UMich That is, wrongs within the relationship began to come into view: the concepts of "domestic assault" and "marital rape" named something that wasn't named before. Then, we just started dropping the adjectives, seeing assault as assault and rape as rape, wherever it happened
@UMich What does all this have to do with graduate advising? Think on the way that the actions in the advising relationship have traditionally been deemed the domain (!) of the advisor.
@UMich I've seen berating excused as pedagogy, harassment excused as personality differences, assault excused in the name of the advisor's "genius." Those excuses, plus the relative difficulty a student would have exiting the "rare" relationship make a troubled brew.
@UMich When you dig down, the excuses come because, in general, we don't view the advisor-advisee relationship as transparent. It has traditionally been thought of as "obscure," in the way marriages used to be legally obscure.
@UMich With the one-to-one, rare expertise model, the options for advisees in abusive situations are: stay, and accept the terms of this "rare" relationship, or go, and accept that you'll lose your invested time, money, and likely prestige. Those stakes are far too high!
@UMich Two contextual changes---or, more accurately, a change in the theory of the advisor-advisee relationship and the change in practice that must necessarily follow:
@UMich First, advising has to be a responsibility of a whole department. It can't just be that a student comes to work with one advisor, and solely that advisor.
@UMich Second, and harder for those of us in smaller humanities fields (or who are in smaller number in our institutions): we have to give up the idea that we are the only people who can train students in our field.
@UMich Once more: We have to give up the idea that we are the only people who can train students in our field.
@UMich But, it has to become normal for those of us who don't have five colleagues doing the same thing we do, or working in the same research languages we do.
@UMich So, now, a hard thing for me and probably many of us: I want to decrease the potential for harassment and abuse of graduate students---and the way I can do that beyond just acting right in my own advising, is to let go of the idea that advisors must be field-based experts.
@UMich And, a parallel reflections: A @nursingclio essay that considers the overlapping valences between unequal 'romantic' relationships and education from @yvonneseale (h/t @monicaMedHist):
nursingclio.org/2019/03/07/tea…
nursingclio.org/2019/03/07/tea…
