The Dark Side of Advising Dissertations

I have an incredibly vague recollection of a movie about Marilyn Monroe or at least about some Marilyn Monroe-like character.  I saw it when I was a teen, I believe.  There was a scene in the movie where she is humbly thanking her agent.  He tells her that a time will come when she will resent him.  Predictably, the actress becomes hugely famous and does, in fact, have a nasty scene with the agent that fulfills his prediction. 

 

I’ve thought about that movie a good bit lately – particularly when I am at that critical point of advising a dissertation.  It’s that time when the student is ready to present – mentally and emotionally ready, that is.  He or she has worked very hard to get it done and has responded to all of my comments and suggestions.  But, then it comes down to that last push.  Inevitably the last push centers on chapter five.  Often the problem emerges because the student has summarized his findings from chapter four and has not really abstracted – hasn’t achieved higher levels of judgment, significant “so whats.”  It is most often at that time that the advisee – at times unconsciously and at other times quite explicitly – begins to resent me. She gets angry because she has internalized my comments to reflect my relationship with her.    He thinks I’m trying to create roadblocks for whatever reason.  These are hard times.  They are times when that old familiar phrase “This hurts me more than it hurts you” that our parents used on us when we were little begins to haunt me.  As a professor, I am incredibly invested in the success of my students.  I think about them often – not just about their research, but also about how they are doing, how they are handling life’s challenges, etc.  Knowing that our relationship as advisor/student has been necessarily assaulted by virtue of the circumstances at the very end of the process is painful.  Not knowing whether it will ever be reconciled is even more so. 

 

Of course, this does not always happen.  When things go well and a student pushes herself as much as I push her, it is remarkable.  When a student has the capacity to see feedback as feedback on her work, not on her, and when that same student is pushing herself to make her work even more significant, that’s when the eleventh and twelfth hours of the dissertation process become incredibly exciting for the student and for me. 

 

At this point I have no way of predicting how the advisor/student relationships will end for my students and me.  I cannot look to my advisees who are still taking classes and, like the agent in the movie, say, “You know, some day you are really going to resent me.”  I can only hope that it won’t happen.  We all know love means taking risks – and caring for our students is truly a form of love in a pedagogical and moral sense.  We don’t enter those relationships expecting the worst just as couples getting married don’t enter their relationships thinking they’ll divorce.  We begin in hope and hopefully end as friends and colleagues who honor, trust, and respect one another.