Pride, Humility, Christians in the Academy, and the Spouse of Dr. No

Remember Dr. No? Her husband is also on faculty in my department. He coordinates the departmental seminars, and he emailed two of us who were defending our dissertations in March, asking if we would please please present our findings in April. His emails were very jocular and encouraging, and so I was blindsided when he took over the Q&A time after my presentation last month.

"Are there any questions?" I asked.

"Oh," he said instantly, "I have about a BILLION questions. Did you have a hypothesis?"

If you have never been involved in a research project, it may not be immediately evident: that's a deeply obnoxious question. You can't launch a thesis project without a well-defined hypothesis. Your advisor and committee would just never permit it. My advisor told this story twice at the party she threw for me last month and both times it elicited gasps from the professors who heard it. "Do you have any manners?" one of them said indignantly, in her imagined response to the questioner.

In preparing for the seminar I heavily revised my defense presentation. Seminar attendance is mandatory for the master's students, but they have little statistical training and (in general) little interest in the fine points of research methods. My goal was to make it accessible, clinically focused, and interesting for the students who were required to be there. I sat through too many of those seminars as a master's student, wondering what exactly an omnibus F value was and why the speaker was all excited about it.

Apparently this was not what the coordinator had in mind.

It took me about five questions to figure out that his jocular encouraging side was not going to be putting in an appearance that day. When he said, "There must be a literature on this" (another highly obnoxious comment -- you can't pass the preliminary exam if you haven't reviewed the literature carefully, any more than you can embark on a dissertation study without a hypothesis), it finally clicked. I shifted out of friendly collegial mode and pulled myself up to my full height. "Of course there's a literature," I said frostily. "It tells us that [blah blah blah]. My study corroborates A and at the same time suggests B. Who else has questions?"

My advisor assures me that I handled it fine. Unflappable, she called me, though really I just hide the flapping well. Cryptoflappable, perhaps. The exchange continues to niggle at me, though.

There's this subset of academics, mostly men, who seem to esteem condescension over collegiality. Does anyone remember when I presented my early research project and that West Coast professor (he of the longstanding feud with my project director) leaned in toward me and said, "Well, you see, animals don't talk"? I mean, come on.

In hindsight I have thought of a dozen comebacks, from the informative ("Animal research allows us to manipulate early diet and environment in ways that aren't ethically feasible for human studies") to the flippant ("No! All those Disney movies can't be wrong!"). What I cannot quite figure out is a Christian response to such condescension.

I know that I am called to extirpate pride ruthlessly, to cultivate humility. At the same time, I have to wonder if being a soft-spoken woman who aims for engaging over dazzling is setting me up for encounters like these. Whom would Jesus frost?

It's on my mind today because at Saturday's graduation reception I stood in the buffet line next to Dr. No. She asked if I was presenting my dissertation results at next month's symposium. Yep, I said. Are you going to be there? She will be, along with her husband. Lovely.

Most of me hopes that his presentation is at the same time as mine, so he cannot harangue me further. A small part of me, a very small part, says "Bring it, Spouse of Dr. No." An ugly part of me imagines petty smackdowns along the lines of "So if you're so smart, why didn't you get tenure?"

I will keep sending the ugly parts of me to timeout, and I am trying to use the seminar experience to guide me as I draft my conference poster. (In large type it says "The existing literature indicates that...") I can't stop wishing, though, for a world where people didn't view brainpower as a zero-sum thing.

Comments

[mary]

DO YOU HAVE A HYPOTHESIS? Wow. The mind boggles. How dare he? Ugh ugh ugh.

WHY do people have to do that? WHY? Here's hoping he's talking at the same time you are.

[Lilian]

So, I think we all know now because he didn't get tenure, don't we? ;-)

Seriously now, this whole discussion of what would be the Christian thing to do versus what we actually need to do to survive in an academic environment is really important. I think it will become a topic that K and I will have to discuss at length over the years now that he's going to become a tt professor. Good thing we will be able to interact with you too about it!

[Jody]

Yeah, see, I think that Jesus had a lot of good things to say about how you conduct yourself in the world, and one of the things he said was, if they don't hear your message, shake the dust off your feet and move on. And I hear you doing the verbal equivalent of dust-shaking when you stand up for yourself, there.

I bet the disciples fantasized all sorts of not-Jesus comebacks as they were heading out of town, too, and it's just too bad that they weren't bloggers, leaving us with no record of those probably somewhat witty but completely unBiblical rejoinders.

That's the next Facebook/Twitter project, isn't it. Status updates from the 12 disciples, at least for the first couple of years of Jesus' ministry. Hmmm.....

[Fightingcommiesforhealthinsurance.wordpress.com]

I'm not a Christian, but I do know Jesus had his fair share of hecklers. I think the Gospels present him, generally, as challenging the premises of their questions, and sometimes doing so with more than a little edge -- e.g., Mark 12:18-25. I think the answer to "Whom would Jesus frost?" is probably "Anybody who wasn't asking in good faith." And I find it impossible to believe that this guy was asking in good faith.

Maybe you're called on to extirpate pride, but I imagine you're also called on to stand up for truth and not let people belittle the search for it.

[Kira]

Fwiw, "cryptoflappable" is my favorite thing I have read this...month. Year. I am just adoring you right now

[Maria]

I have never done anything remotely as academically strenuous as a research project like yours, and I was immediately shocked that he asked whether you had a hypothesis. Really! Very very rude. I'm so sorry.

[Melanie B]

It isn't pride to know your true place and to defend yourself and to defend the truth. It isn't humility to let people use you as a doormat.

I think temperance is the answer.

I just read this (in an unrelated blog post about modesty in breastfeeding) and it seemed apropos: "arguing with temperance avoids the extremes of timid deference nor belligerence".

I don't think you were being belligerent by any stretch of the imagination. He clearly was; but you were not.

[Renee]

It seems to me that comments such as his really put him in a bad light, and not you. Let him hang himself.

Poor man must be feeling terribly insecure =)

[Karen]

Another question you might ask yourself is "what would a man do in this situation?" I don't know how the workplace dynamic in academia is, but in my gov't engineering org the men often ask demeaning questions, and they aren't making it personal.

He may be trying to diminish a rising colleague who threatens his area of expertise or his authority. It has nothing to do with YOU, Jamie, just YOU, a smart graduate with a lot of energy and years ahead to develop a really good career.

If he asks you another insulting question, blow him away with your technical expertise. Get as detailed as you think you can - regardless of who else is in the audience. State your position firmly and with lasers boring through him.

And then go have a cup of coffee with him. But not his wife, because she'll be talking behind your back no matter what. But he won't.

[Grace]

This is my first visit to your blog and I have spent an hour looking through it. Thank you -- I feel right at home. We are a Catholic family, academics (my husband just completed his doctorate), and I'm passionate about breastfeeding -- the "Breastfeeding Makes Us Stupid" post brought me here. Thank you for such a lovely blog!