Why I'll Be Limiting My Academic Advice From Here On In
A few musings a few days after the Day of Atonement
This past Monday was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement for Members of the Tribe. This mostly involves fasting and praying at the synagogue.1
Surprisingly, it was a good day! As someone who was never a fan of going to the synagogue in my youth, I have been surprised at how much more I get from it as a mature adult. Perhaps I am just part of the larger demographic trend of older people finding faith where it was previously absent. That is possible. I suspect, however, that for me the great thing about praying in a synagogue is that it’s the one of the few remaining places where multi-tasking is an impossibility. Focusing on the prayers, the rabbi’s sermons, and the Torah readings brings a centeredness that is all too frequently lacking in modern life.
What I am saying is that Yom Kippur was an altogether perfect day to reflect on how to be a better person, a better scholar, and a better mentor in my field. It’s that last one that has been nagging me as of late, and I think I have come to a conclusion: the way for me to be a better mentor is to stop publicly advising most folks what to do when they are graduate students or when they are junior faculty. In other words, the way for me to be a better mentor is to restrict my mentoring.
[Whoa, that sounds pretty convenient, Drezner! You’ve engaged in some introspection and decided to do less?!—ed. While it’s true that I am suggesting my mentoring will be more selective, it’s not as simple as you suggest. Okay, good luck landing this plane!—ed.]
Mentoring students and junior scholars is an important part of any senior academic’s job. Heck, it’s an important part of the mature phase of anyone’s career arc. Only last month I talked about how much I was enjoying the mentoring phase of my career. But for my money the first rule of giving advice is making sure that advice is grounded in more than one’s own life experience. Way, way too many senior academics — hell, way too many senior folks in general — extrapolate lessons from their own personal experiences and distill them into maxims that turn out to be extremely limited in their useful scope.2 Times change, systems evolve, and what might have been good advice in the past no longer applies in the present.
I have written my fair share of advice regarding graduate school and the academic job market. I think that advice worked at the time it was written, and some of it still has merit. But I have been at this for more than a quarter-century now, and my past experiences as a graduate student/senior scholar are likely pretty different from today’s younglings.3 While I am obviously able and willing to mentor my own graduate students and junior colleagues, advising such cohorts more generally is fraught with peril the further one is removed from their station.
Furthermore, there are now plenty of folks out there using Substack, BlueSky, Wordpress, Good Authority, and other outlets to proffer good advice. And there’s a lot of good advice bring proffered! For instance, this Mirya Holman post offers some excellent advice for junior faculty about how to avoid obligations that will distract you from getting tenure:4
There’s also Rachel Meager’s sage counsel to grad students and junior scholars: you’ll never publish any of the papers you never submit, so maybe submit them somewhere?
Paul Musgrave has made major contributions to the public good that is quality advice. This post on the benefits of teaching just outside one’s area of specialty is particularly trenchant:5
This is all great stuff. There are plenty of mentors out there for the junior folks. I do not think my advice in this area will have much value-added.
No, where I might be a better mentor now is focusing on those who have cleared the tenure hurdle and are now contemplating next steps. What does one do after devoting 10-15 years to achieve the most important careerist goal an academic has? To the extent that Drezner’s World proffers pearls of wisdom about navigating academia and policymaking, that might be where I can offer a useful roadmap.
For example: Mirya Holman’s post is spot on for junior scholars. For tenured scholars? Not so much! Telling this crop of faculty to tune out during faculty meetings or ignore bad administrative moves? Not great, Bob! One of the curses and blessings of being tenured is having the capacity to weigh in when someone is behaving badly in a faculty meeting or committee meeting. Because what are they gonna do if you object to something, fire you? That’s not how tenure works! Plus, if you don’t, I guarantee that your junior colleagues will bear the brunt of the bad decision-making.
This will mean, upon achieving tenure, a conscious shift in one’s habits. Saying “yes” on occasion is a good thing. Bear that in mind as you reach the more senior rungs of the academic ladder.
So, for graduate student and junior scholar readers of Drezner’s World, do not expect a lot of friendly advice about how to survive and thrive in the world of political science. Read the likes of Holman or Musgrave instead. I will continue to have thoughts on these matters, but those dubious pearls of wisdom are a rapidly depreciating asset.
Also a mid-afternoon nap because not eating or drinking anything for 24 hours will take its toll.
An example: the single-best professional decision I made in my graduate school career was to spend a year as a Civic Education Project lecturer in Donetsk, Ukraine. That posting opened up a series of professional, personal, and intellectual doors that launched my career. Would I recommend graduate students taking a similar path? Nope! While that worked out quite well for me, it worked out less well for others. Your mileage most definitely may vary.
For example, the publication expectations for newly-minted Ph.D.s do not even remotely resemble what they were when I was a newly-minted Ph.D.
One caveat I might offer: your first year as a tenure-track faculty member is also the one year you should strongly prioritize your teaching above all else. If you focus on your teaching and polish up your syllabus and lecture notes to a high sheen, congratulations, you’ve surmounted the massive fixed costs of developing new courses. Better to do that in the beginning of your tenure track than at the end.
Musgrave’s points are true even for one’s own area of specialty. I know a lot about economic statecraft, but developing a course and lecture notes about it revealed certain pockets of ignorance that needed to be addressed through lots and lots of reading. Even staying abreast of one’s area of specialty can be a moderate lift — particularly when everyone and their mother decides that’s the new hot dissertation topic.