mamamusings: March 3, 2003

timeless evil

Credits:

• Quote from Telemanage

• Photograph #14134, captioned “Defendant Hermann Goering consults with his lawyer, Dr. Otto Stahmer, in the Nuremberg prison at the International Military Tribunal trial of war criminals,” from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

• Typeface Book Antiqua

• Composite created in Macromedia Fireworks MX

why bother?

I’ve avoided responding to Dorothea’s continuing self-described “rampage” against academia, because I suspect that nothing I write will change her well-entrenched negative view of academia. Clearly, Dorothea’s got some “issues” on this topic—not just her grad school experience, but her experiences with her father, as well.

But hey, I’m an extrovert. I think out loud. So I’ll respond, but not in a point-by-point attempt to rebut each of her assertions. You see, I don’t disagree that her view is in some ways accurate. I just don’t think it’s complete. Academia, like every other human-constructed environment I’ve ever seen (from the nuclear family to the nation-state) can be ugly or beautiful, depending on your own context and experience.

I feel particularly compelled to counter Dorothea’s assertion that “survivorship bias” is tainting my view. In fact, she might want to consider reading my dissertation. The topic? A qualitative (“Sense-Making”) inquiry into attrition in doctoral programs in my field. (And what field might that be? Library & Information Science—the same field in which Dorothea has recently been accepted into a graduate program. Which makes me wonder how she can say things like “Deeply sick and sad system. IÌm so glad IÌm out of it for good I couldnÌt begin to tell you,” with a straight face…).

I went into the project fully expecting to hear angst-ridden tales of woe from those who’d left their doctoral programs. In fact, that was the exception rather than the rule. Most of the people I interviewed had few regrets about their departure from doctoral work. They’d tried it, found it not to be what they wanted, and moved on.

It was necessary for me to do a great deal of related reading and research into graduate and doctoral attrition, and one of things that really became clear during this process was how very different the environments were from field to field. The experiences of a doctoral student (or a professor) in biophysics are extremely different from those of a sociologist, or a library scientist, or a literary theorist. And beyond that, the experiences of a student in any of those fields will vary significantly based on the country in which they study.

All of which by way of saying, it’s not the specifics of Dorothea’s complaints that I question. It’s the broad brush she uses to paint an entire world of teachers, students, and scholars—based solely on personal anecdotal experience.

do not adjust your browser

I’m experimenting with some changes to my trackback functionality. If you’re trying to ping an entry, and get an error, let me know.

an extrovert speaks (quelle surprise!)

Now that exams are over and the tenure decision is in, I’m able to pull out some ideas that have been back-burnered for a while and give them some thought.

Since I’m an extrovert, however, thought is synonymous with talking out loud. And, not coincidentally, the topic I’m thinking and talking about today is the extrovert/introvert divide.

(Caution: this is quite lengthy. I wrote it Sunday while sitting in the “parent’s corner” of the local gaming store during my son’s Yu-Gi-Oh tournament, but couldn’t post it ‘til today because I was waiting for permission to use material from private e-mail.)

I am almost a textbook example of a Jungian/MBTI extrovert. When I take personality tests, my “E” is generally off the scale (as is my “intuitive” score). One of the reasons I love teaching is that it regularly puts me in the center of a group of people, and that’s where I draw my energy from. While I enjoy spending time alone, I can only do it in small bursts—I’d almost always rather have friends with me. (I read about Dervala’s travels with a mixture of envy and astonishment—I could never, never do what’s she’s doing. Not because I’d be afraid to travel to those places, but because I couldn’t possibly spend weeks at a time traveling anywhere without one or more close friends to share the experience with.) When I fantasize about “time away,” the fantasies always involve other people as a part of the escape.

My husband and my best friend*, however, are classic introverts. Both are wonderfully warm, caring, likable people. But both find themselves exhausted and drained after prolonged social interaction, and torn between amusement and frustration with what to them is my constant babbling—but to me is the normal process of working through thoughts and ideas.

Over the past year, Elouise and I have had a couple of interesting “talks” about our differences in personality type. Most of the substance of these talks, however, has occurred in e-mail or IM. I didn’t give that much thought until last night, when Gerald and I were having coffee with AKMA and his wife Margaret. She was talking about how useful IM is for parents communicating with children at college—particularly when one or both tend toward introversion, since the IM process allows a slower unfolding of the conversation.

It was an illuminating moment for me. It made it clear why my friend Elouise and I have been able to have these conversations about different approaches so much more easily in electronic media. The playing field is leveled by the nature of the medium. I can’t fill all the available bandwidth with my excited ramblings—and she can carefully choose her words, making sure that what she says is exactly what she means.

When we had our first lengthy meta-conversation about these issues, it was touched off by an incident between me and a mutual friend. I’d been pushed a little too hard by this person on a bad day, and I’d behaved in a pretty characteristic (for me) way—I lashed out, and said something really hurtful. I’m not terribly proud of what I said that day, but I knew (and assumed that he would, too) that things said in the heat of the moment like that aren’t that meaningful—they’re like lancing a wound. Something nasty comes out, but then you can heal. But this friend was deeply hurt by my outburst, and his response was to shut down. No communication. Period. When I pushed back, I was told in no uncertain terms to back off.

So I told Elouise—via e-mail—how baffled I was by this reaction. With her permission, I’m going to quote from our dialog, because I think it’s instructive. She told me: “What helped me keep the friendships I do have, is that in the same way you grew up forgiving and expecting verbal collisions, they forgave and understood the way I’d retreat. (Like a cat licking its wounds). I am not saying either way is particularly healthy. In a perfect world there would be no conflict…but clearly, what behavior is considered appropriate or offensive in anger are opposite.”

We then went on to have a lengthy exchange about the whole “leave me alone” approach. I said that the longer I went without talking to someone after a fight or misunderstanding, the more I tended to blow things out of proportion, attribute meanings that weren’t really there, and generally create an entire (and often inaccurate) world of hurt to wallow in. She, on the other hand, said that the longer she goes without talking to someone she’s angry at, the easier it is to forget the bad and start remembering the good. Being forced to talk about the event or conflict, to her, was a lot like picking at a scar. The healing had to happen internally, with a barrier against the outside world.

The more recent conversation we had that I found enlightening happened last week after I forwarded to her Jonathan Rauch’s much-cited article on introverts from The Atlantic. She noted that she found it particularly appropriate in view of our current departmental angst over policy and leadership issues. The extroverts keep calling meetings, trying to get everyone to talk about what they think should happen. The introverts roll their eyes in disgust, and count the seconds ‘til they can escape back to their offices.

In our IM exchange on this, she said she’s always thinking to herself in meetings “Do they feel compelled to keep talking?” And I laughed, because in fact, extroverts often do feel exactly that compulsion. I know I’m at the extreme end, but I often literally don’t know what I’m thinking until after I’ve articulated it in conversation. That’s why I’m so often involved in hallway conversations about organizational politics. Not because I want to “gossip”—because the only way I know to understand something is to discuss it.

She said she felt there was a lot of “wasted effort” in the speculation that happened in and out of the meetings. But what she sees as wasted effort, I see as a process of understanding, weighing options, incorporating new ideas, etc. It’s a thought process exposed. She thought about that, then said she could see that if it was done calmly and rationally, rather than emotionally. Which goes back to that first discussion we’d had—emotion should be private, not expressed. (At which point I suggested that introverts had a lot more rules than extroverts÷something I still think is true.)

Another thing that emerged from our conversation was her use of the term self-evident. I mentioned that the person who had first pointed me toward the introvert article had an e-mail address of “self@evident…”, which she loved. But I said that the whole concept of something being “self-evident” seems to me to very specific to introverts. Where an introvert sees something as obvious based on observed actions, an extrovert is more likely to want to explore it, to triangulate views from multiple sources before forming an opinion. To be valid, for me, an opinion must include input from other sources—I don’t believe any of us can be “objective” or see a full version of what’s around us, and without asking what others see, I don’t believe I’m getting a full picture.

That’s where the conversation got particularly interesting—I told her that I thought the extrovert’s desire to discuss things endlessly was the antithesis to the belief that something is “self-evident.” She said she’d always assumed that the talk was an announcement of fully formed ideas, not a thought-forming process—that the people talking “already had their ideas, and felt a need to subject us to them.” And I replied that for me, that talk is really the only thought-forming process; the thoughts aren’t solid until they’re expressed, discussed, poked, prodded, etc. Internally, thoughts are amorphous and unformed. When “exposed to the light” through expression, you can see if they’re solid.

I could almost see the wheels turning on her side of this IM conversation now. “As things are discussed in statement form, they don’t seem to ask for counter-opinions or ask anyone for different viewpoints.” Followed immediately by “Hmm, but people do anyway.”

Now I started thinking outside my box. “My guess is that it causes another kind of disjoint, too…which would be that when you express an idea, you see it as definite—and someone like me would be likely to challenge it, treating it as though it was still in formation. The challenge is meant, oddly enough, as assistance. But it’s probably not perceived that way.”

And then, alas, our children began to demand our real-time attention, and the chat came to an end. Fascinating, stuff, though. Worth consideration, I think, by introverts and extroverts alike.

* It’s hard for me to use the phrase “best friend” without a qualifier—there are so many people I consider close friends. My “best friend in Rochester,” my “best friends from high school,” my “best friends from college”÷ I worry that labeling any as the best friend risks hurting the others. Probably an extrovert’s trait in and of itself.