DISCIPLINED MINDS A CRITICAL LOOK AT SALARIED PROFESSIONALS AND THE SOUL-BATTERING SYSTEM THAT SHAPES THEIR LIVES JEFF SCHMIDT ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Oxford For my daughter, Joshua Rose ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people helped to create this book. The always-inspiring Stanley Aronowitz, an extraordinarily insightful social critic whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for many years, did a great deal to make the book a reality. His comments on the manuscript helped to improve the book’s content, and his generosity and principled solidarity played a crucial role in getting it published. My parents, Esther and Jerry Schmidt, gave me more than moral support. My mother has been a lifelong role model for treating people decently, and the values inherent in her example helped shape this book. My father’s longstanding activism taught me that action is the bottom line. His spirited suggestions on all facets of the book project always reminded me to keep the big picture in mind. Jean Kumagai made important contributions to the book on all levels, from the basic ideas to the subtle details of how they are expressed. Her insight into today’s society and culture was invaluable. Matt Siegel also made invaluable contributions to all aspects of the project. His independent thinking often led me to rethink ideas or to present them more clearly. Chris Mohr gave me scores of good editing suggestions and shared his knowledge of the publishing industry. Bill Sweet read the manuscript with a sharp eye and offered many thoughtful suggestions, both broad and detailed. I first met my friends Jean, Matt, Chris and Bill when they were hired at Physics Today magazine and thus became my coworkers. Our many fruitful discussions about topics in the book, and about their own projects, made our workdays more interesting and more satisfying. Others who contributed generously of their time and who offered support and valuable suggestions include Charlotte Miller, Daniel Gladstone (another friend from the Physics Today workplace), William DiFazio, Michael Berube, Noam Chomsky, Liane Scott, Michael Balter, Eric Chase, Maude Covalt, Sam Ma, Cecily Stewart, Margaret Boeringer, Frank Potter, Pat Kerig, Ted Werntz, Robin Hanson, Robert N. Proctor, Fred Dolan, Alak Ray, Keith Skotnes, Marlowe Hood (another friend from the magazine), Shawna Vogel, Michael Neuschatz and Barbara Dixon. The Education and Employment Statistics division of the American Institute of Physics, just down the hall from the Physics Today offices, provided lots of useful data. Phil Mattera of the National Writers Union set an example for all unionists, and indeed for all workers, by looking critically not only at the terms of production, but also at what was being produced: He helped me get a great book production, but also at what was being produced: He helped me get a great book contract and gave me excellent suggestions for improving the manuscript. Dean Birkenkamp, my editor at Rowinan & Littlefield, is even thing a writer could want. He has maintained his own social vision and high standards of personal conduct within an increasingly corporate publishing industry that sees such priorities as inefficient at best. Dean was enthusiastic about the book and signed it up promptly. He offered wise global and detailed suggestions and worked closely with me at each step in the publishing process. It was not easy. … It needed … a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain. George Orwell, 1984 INTRODUCTION This book is stolen. Written in part on stolen time, that is. I felt I had no choice but to do it that way. Like millions of others who work for a living, I was giving most of my prime time to my employer. My job simply didn’t leave me enough energy for a major project of my own, and no one was about to hire me y to pursue m own vision, especially given my irreverent attitude toward employers. I was working in New York City as an editor at a glossy science magazine, but my job, like most professional jobs, was not intellectually challenging and allowed only the most constrained creativity. I knew that if I were not contending with real intellectual challenges and exercising real creativity—and if I were not doing anything to shape the world according to my own ideals—life would be unsatisfying, not to mention stressful and unexciting. The thought of just accepting my situation seemed insane. So I began spending some office time on my own work, dumped my TV to reappropriate some of my time at home, and wrote this book. Not coincidentally, it is about professionals, their role in society, and the hidden battle over personal identity that rages in professional education and employment. The predicament I was in will sound painfully familiar to many professionals. Indeed, generally speaking, professionals today are not happy campers. After years of worshiping work, many seemingly successful professionals are disheartened and burned out, not because of their 70-hour workweeks, but because their salaries are all they have to show for their life-consuming efforts. They long for psychic rewards, but their employers’ emphasis on control and the bottom line is giving them only increased workloads, closer scrutiny by management and unprecedented anxiety about job security. In this way the cold reality of employer priorities has led to personal crises for many of this country’s 21 million professionals. Burned-out professionals may not be immediately obvious to the casual observer, because typically they stay on the job and maintain their usual high level of output. But thev feel like they are just going through the motions. They have less genuine curiosity about their work, feel less motivated to do it and get less pleasure from it. The emotional numbness inevitably spreads from their work lives into their personal lives. According to Herbert J. Frendenberger, the New York psychologist who coined the term burnout in the mid-1970s, the personal consequences are wide-ranging and profound: cynicism, disconnection, loss of vitality and authenticity, decreased enjoyment of family life, anger, strained relationship with spouse or partner, divorce, obsessive behavior such as strained relationship with spouse or partner, divorce, obsessive behavior such as “workaholism,” chronic fatigue, poor eating habits, neglect of friends, social isolation, loneliness—and the list of symptoms goes on. Freudenberger tells me he has seen a big increase in career burnout among professionals in the past twenty years. Ironically, such depression is most likely to hit the most devoted professionals—those who have been the most deeply involved in their work. You can’t burn out if you’ve never been on fire. The problem shows no sign of easing. In fact, the ranks of troubled professionals are swelling as members of Generation X finish school and rack up a few years in the workforce. Many Xers, having observed the unfulfilling work ethic of their baby boom predecessors, want their own working lives to be fun and meaningful from the get-go. Starting out with priorities that took boomers a decade to figure out, but in no better position to act on those priorities, Xers are simply having career crises at an earlier age. Clearly, there is an urgent need to understand why career work so often fails to fulfill its promise. I argue that the hidden root of much career dissatisfaction is the professionals lack of control over the “political” component of his or her creative work. Explaining this component is a major focus of this book. Today’s disillusioned professionals entered their fields expecting to do work that would “make a difference” in the world and add meaning to their lives. In this book I show that, in fact, professional education and employment push people to accept a role in which they do not make a significant difference, a politically subordinate role. I describe how the intellectual boot camp known as graduate or professional school, with its cold-blooded expulsions and creeping indoctrination, systematically grinds down the student’s spirit and ultimately produces obedient thinkers—highly educated employees who do their assigned work without questioning its goals. I call upon students and professionals to engage in just such questioning, not only for their own happiness, but for society’s sake as well. This book shows that professional education is a battle for the very identity of the individual, as is professional employment. It shows how students and working professionals face intense pressure to compromise their ideals and sideline their commitment to work for a better world. And it explores what individuals can do to resist this pressure, hold on to their values and pursue their social visions. People usually don’t think of school and work in terms of such a high-stakes struggle. But if they did, they would be able to explain why so many professional training programs seem more abusive than enlightening, and why so many jobs seem more frustrating than fulfilling. I decided to write this book when I was in graduate school myself, getting a PhD in physics, and was upset to see many of the best people dropping out or PhD in physics, and was upset to see many of the best people dropping out or being kicked out. Simply put, those students most concerned about others were the most likely to disappear, whereas their self-centered, narrowly focused peers were set for success. The most friendly, sympathetic and loyal individuals, those who stubbornly continued to value human contact, were handicapped in the competition. They were at a disadvantage not only because their attention was divided, but also because their beliefs about big-picture issues such as justice and social impact caused them to stop, think and question. Their hesitation and contemplation slowed them down, tempered their enthusiasm and drew attention to their deviant priorities, putting them at a disadvantage relative to their unquestioning, gung-ho classmates. Employers, too, I realized, favored people who kept their concerns about the big picture nicely under control, always in a position of secondary importance relative to the assigned work at hand. Thus I saw education and employment as a self-consistent, but deeply flawed, system. I wrote this book in the hope of exposing the problem more completely and thereby forcing change.