Caroline J. Walker (walkerc at CLEMSON.EDU)
> Is it my imagination or does this discussion look like a debate on hazing?
> The idea that toughening up students is a way to prepare them for the "real
> world"....give them a taste of what they are going to face so that they can
> handle it better etc. One feature of hazing is that those who went through
> it and survived are likely to advocate it as a good system and use it
> themselves. I think the number of anti hazing postings shows that there
> are many of us who don't believe in this system at all, and resent being
> subjected to it or seeing bright and able people falling through the cracks.
> Judy Stone hit the nail on the head when she said that it was a
> matter of giving students confidence - for some hazing achieves this I
> suppose, but certainly not for all. It was amusing that some posters in
> the somewhat pro-hazing side are considering themselves misinterpreted and
> at the same time posing the question of "shouldn't I tell my student when
> they are wrong or if they are lazy?". This is a classic defense of hazing
> (I live in SC so we get to hear this stuff a lot) by making it sound like
> the only alternative to hazing is to never reprimand or criticise!
I certainly do not consider myself guilty of hazing and I must say,
I quite resent the implication. I don't think my students or postdocs
consider that I haze them. (At this point, it would be nice if one of
them said so, since you are all painting me as an ogre.)
Nor do I consider that the people I have worked for have been
guilty of hazing. Obviously
most of the people participating in this thread have a different point
of view; Caroline clearly thinks that criticism is wrong and
an excuse for abuse, whereas I have tried to draw the distinction
between constructive criticsim as a tool for learning
and bloody-minded negative-for-the-heck-of it criticism.
(Do you people all fall apart when you get negative reviews??
Do you manage to learn nothing from them?? )
I will await the next thread when the same people
complain no one prepared them to face the meanies out there who
dislike women and will go out of their way to make their way more
difficult. And, you will face them because there are a lot of them.
They will try to push you till you fail and use any weakness or failure
as evidence that women don't belong at the highest levels of
science. You can't change them or anything till you
get in a position of influence, and you can't get into that position
unless you can at some level play the game. If you can't play the
game, is it that no one taught you, or that you didn't want to
learn?
You can refuse to play, but you can't then complain
that there are no women in positions of authority, no editors, no
speakers--not if you yourself abrogate any responsibility to learn the
system and get into it, but expect someone ELSE to do all the work
and improve things for you. How passive! How helpless! But
how much BETTER you feel about it.
My job is not to withold criticism and make excuses and build
self esteem; I'm educating professional scientists, not elementary school
children. Make no mistake, this is a profession, as in,
professionals, as in, grown ups. I still believe that criticism
is an important as praise (not in place of, but alongside of), and
that learning how to deal with confrontation is essential.
But, apparently that makes me a hazer, so I will now withdraw from this
thread and go beat my graduate students.
--
-susan
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Molecular Biology and Virology Lab
The Salk Institute, La Jolla CA
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Women in Biology Internet Launch Page
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