There's No Crying in Graduate School
June 7, 2015 3:29 PM   Subscribe

The dark side to academia's "suck it up" culture. Rachel Vorona Cote discusses the harm in academia's stoic ethos.
posted by chainsofreedom (42 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
Like so many other fields, academia operates under the tacit and toxic misconception that to be “professional” means to suppress any spontaneous distress.

If we're going to take the concept of "emotional labor" seriously, then I'm not getting paid to deal with your emotions at work--in academia or otherwise. It's not "toxic," it's having the consideration to not dump your problems on people who aren't equipped or obliged to deal with them.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 3:52 PM on June 7, 2015 [24 favorites]


If you're supervising someone and pushing them to their physical and emotional limits without care or concern for their well-being, and for starvation wages at that, then sorry Charlie, you earned dealing with the breakdown that you caused.
posted by 1adam12 at 3:54 PM on June 7, 2015 [30 favorites]


OK, I haven't had THAT many jobs, but I really have a hard time believing that academia falls very far along the 'stoic' end of the cultural spectrum. The card exists because pretty much everybody has cried in front of their advisers; everyone I know in academia is in therapy and open about it; everyone in academia talks about how miserable and stressed out they are all! of! the! time!

Offering better mental health support for graduate students? Sure. Lessening the stigma around mental health issues? Absolutely! Doing what we can to forestall the wholesale economic implosion of the profession? Yes! But seriously - the culture of academia is the opposite of stoic. If an academic has a problem, believe me, you will know it.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 3:57 PM on June 7, 2015 [34 favorites]


If we're going to take the concept of "emotional labor" seriously, then I'm not getting paid to deal with your emotions at work--in academia or otherwise. It's not "toxic," it's having the consideration to not dump your problems on people who aren't equipped or obliged to deal with them.

These two sentences embed a fallacy of begging the question. Any skilled academic would have caught this.
posted by polymodus at 3:59 PM on June 7, 2015 [8 favorites]


I think this article has a lot of flaws - no one is going to be arguing that having sobbing breakdowns in front of your supervisors and superiors is a good thing. But this isn't just limited to grad school - my younger sister did her undergrad at a very competitive music school and she and the other students in her studio would have the equivalent of pissing contests over who had and had not cried during private lessons that week.

It's definitely not unique to academia either. But I wonder where we got the idea that accepting more work and more stress and struggling not to have a breakdown in public was something to be admired for.
posted by chainsofreedom at 4:00 PM on June 7, 2015 [6 favorites]


Mixed thoughts on the article. There is to some degree an expected amount of emotional durability required in academia, or really any job at that. You can't expect to work at a place if you're permanently suffering from anxiety attacks and depression and unable to do your duties. That's not an indication of some "suck it up" culture.

Beyond that, sure, there's perhaps some additional emotional stability required by academia given the difficulties involved. Everyone I've ever met, including myself, suffer from some degree of imposter syndrome, at times too heavy workloads, and other such issues. But we've all been there, and generally everyone, peers and faculty, are well accommodating both emotionally and institutionally. There may be some programs that have toxic environments, but in my experience it is in no way endemic to the profession. This is one of the purposes of having visits to places you've been accepted, having talks with people who are at and who have attended the program, and asking the people you know. You find out whether there's any sort of history of culture of toxicity at the department you're interested in attending.
posted by Dalby at 4:06 PM on June 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


These two sentences embed a fallacy of begging the question. Any skilled academic would have caught this.

not sure if /hamburger
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 4:06 PM on June 7, 2015


This seems to distill a difficulty with the lefty/academic attitudes surrounding identity politics and subjectivities that I've given some little thought to in the past. We want to avoid victim-blaming and respect people's emotional experiences, of course. But at the same time, if identities are performative and socially constructed and learned and all that, does a complete lack of "suck-it-up" type advice do people a disservice by socializing them to be even more emotionally vulnerable and thus putting them in a position to be more easily victimized?

It seems an impossible catch-22, since you're incontrovertibly an asshole if your response to someone telling you that they've been victimized or are suffering emotionally is any variant of "deal with it," yet to treat such experiences as insurmountable and crippling seems to merely empower abusers and victimizers by making their bullshit that much more effective.
posted by Krawczak at 4:13 PM on June 7, 2015 [6 favorites]


If we're going to take the concept of "emotional labor" seriously, then I'm not getting paid to deal with your emotions at work--in academia or otherwise. It's not "toxic," it's having the consideration to not dump your problems on people who aren't equipped or obliged to deal with them.

Are you giving people enough time to make and maintain friendships and relationships such that there's anyone else for them to go to?

No?

What did you think was going to happen?
posted by effugas at 4:14 PM on June 7, 2015 [6 favorites]


If we're going to take the concept of "emotional labor" seriously, then I'm not getting paid to deal with your emotions at work--in academia or otherwise. It's not "toxic," it's having the consideration to not dump your problems on people who aren't equipped or obliged to deal with them.

Wow, I really disagree with this. Equating exposure to someone's spontaneous emotions at work with emotional labor is like equating having to hold the door for someone with unpaid physical labor.

I actively maintain a bit of distancing my coworkers from my outside-of-work life, and I definitely act differently at work than in my personal time, but that is not inherently in conflict with cultivating a workplace environment based on mutual caring. I care about my coworkers as people and I know they care about me. I've worked places where that's not the case and man, those places fucking sucked.
posted by threeants at 4:14 PM on June 7, 2015 [13 favorites]


The idea here is not to fairly or usefully equate expression of emotion at work with emotional labour. It's to jump in at any possible opportunity to try and use the language of progressive ideas against people espousing those ideas, and it's gross.
posted by ominous_paws at 4:20 PM on June 7, 2015 [19 favorites]


Like so many other fields, academia operates under the tacit and toxic misconception that to be “professional” means to suppress any spontaneous distress.

Speaking as somone in "other fields" who has happily mentored people for 30+ years, mosly female professionals because that is the gender balance in my field, yes, you sometimes need to suppress spontaneous distress. That is part of being a professional.

You shouldn't as a professional in any field:

Get angry and speak rudely.
Cry.
Call someone an idiot.

Unless you are doing it consciously and are ready to deal with the consequences.

It's OK to leave the setting to be concious in your actions before returning.

I have left meetings/other situations before crying, or calling someone an idiot or telling someone I would gladly kick their ass into the next county. In those same situations I have also cried, told someone that I think they are in idiot and also offered the chance to, "Go outside and settle this shit." But I did that as a professional, non-spontaneous choice.

Life is hard, work life is harder because you can't be spontaneous in certain ways. But if you are going to be considered professional, you have to be in control of yourself.
posted by ITravelMontana at 4:29 PM on June 7, 2015 [17 favorites]


As an academic that has been struggling with mental health issues, I have thoughts about this. Luckily I have a pretty supportive boss and colleagues, but it can be pretty stressful when you are a young academic struggling to build a research profile and nothing seems to be going your way re: publishing. And yeah, feeling like a total impostor more or less all the time isn't exactly great for the old self confidence and suddenly you find yourself sitting at your desk feeling like shit about everything and not sure how to find your way back.
posted by Hello, I'm David McGahan at 4:30 PM on June 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


The idea here is not to fairly or usefully equate expression of emotion at work with emotional labour. It's to jump in at any possible opportunity to try and use the language of progressive ideas against people espousing those ideas, and it's gross.

You have no idea what you are talking about. I am certainly no fan of the so-called stoicism of American workplace culture (and I'll bet compared to lots of places in that culture such as restaurants, construction sites, etc., academia is on the gentler end of things), but this article isn't about academic culture in any meaningful sense that I can see (she even says point blank that her adviser "only ever treated [her] with compassion and devoted mentorship"), but about her emotional circumstances that were almost entirely unrelated to her academic work. It's like those NYT style pieces that extrapolate a trend from a data point of one.

But, back to the stoicism thing. I hate the "eat shit and grin" attitude that American workers are expected to adopt with increasing frequency, but crying is the nuclear option, along with yelling. Both have he potential to make your colleagues extremely uncomfortable and negatively impact their ability to go about their day. Neither belong in the workplace. On the other hand, he adviser/advisee relationship is different from your average colleague relationship, but again that doesn't seem to have had anything to do with why this was written. In fact,I'm not actually sure why it was written!
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 4:35 PM on June 7, 2015 [7 favorites]


Speaking as somone in "other fields" who has happily mentored people for 30+ years, mosly female professionals because that is the gender balance in my field, yes, you sometimes need to suppress spontaneous distress. That is part of being a professional.

You shouldn't as a professional in any field:

Get angry and speak rudely.
Cry.
Call someone an idiot.


Speaking as someone who was in grad school for 9 years, the main reasons grad students cry have to do with their advisors not obeying your rules.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:36 PM on June 7, 2015 [19 favorites]


To be fair, I should really expand that to graduate faculty in general and thesis committees in particular. And add that, like internet trolls everywhere, many faculty are expert in the withering insult that belittles the intelligence and indeed human value of the student yet does not cross any of those lines, followed immediately by "why are you getting so upset?"

Others actively impede students' progress, refusing to fund work that must get done or even just sign papers that must be signed. And still others simply fail to do their jobs as mentors in dozens of ways, ranging from offering bad advice to not offering any advice at all.

All of these things are not "professional". But they are the culture of every graduate program I know of.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:01 PM on June 7, 2015 [10 favorites]


yes, you sometimes need to suppress spontaneous distress. That is part of being a professional.

Okay, so I have a serious question for you.

I have very good control of my behavior, but almost no control over whether my eyes water up when I'm talking about a stressful topic. You might as well tell someone who blushes easily that it's unprofessional. Maybe so, but there's very little that we can do about it.

Why should the fact that I'm having a common physiological response to distress mean I'm "unprofessional," even though I don't let my distress affect how I behave? Do I need to get my tear ducts lasered shut in order to be considered a "professional"?

crying is the nuclear option, along with yelling

The way that you call crying an "option" and equate it with yelling just really says a lot. These two things are not the same.

(No one has missed that crying is gendered behavior, right? And that our dismissal of public displays of certain kinds of emotion is probably also gendered?)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:06 PM on June 7, 2015 [26 favorites]


I detest emotional policing. I don't care where you work. If you or the situation does something to piss someone off, you deserve to have a pissed-off person on your hands. The same goes for sad, happy, desperate, dejected, or any other coordinate in emotional space.

You do not get to detail what emotions are and are not allowed at work or anywhere else. What the fuck is wrong with people.

and this:

it's having the consideration to not dump your problems on people who aren't equipped or obliged to deal with them.

I'm not sure what you mean here - because it sounds like you want to hide behind a 'professional' veneer from the repercussions of creating a toxic work environment. Or maybe you don't want to deal with the fact that other people handle stress differently from you. Or maybe you don't feel like people who come from different backgrounds or have different coping mechanisms should be welcome where you work.

No matter what, it sounds like I wouldn't like you and I certainly wouldn't want to work with you.
posted by Fuka at 5:19 PM on June 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


I don't know that I think that academia is worse than any other part of society on this particular issue, but I think we'd all be better off if we were better able to tolerate public displays of strong emotion. There is no reason that witnessing crying has to be some sort of national emergency. If someone cries in your office, hand them some tissues. It will be ok. You will not melt or turn into stone. People cry in my office a couple of times a week, and I have developed the internal resources to deal with it. Hand them tissues. Ask a couple of questions to find out if there's a big problem or if it's just a momentary response to stress. If it's the former, refer them to resources, which I promise you exist. If it's the latter, assure them that crying is not a big deal and that they will be ok. It's not a huge fucking deal.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:21 PM on June 7, 2015 [13 favorites]


I came back from a leave of absence with the intention of finishing my law degree, just so I could say I'd finished it, and then lost two close family members in the same semester. I had one guy give me more excused absences than I even asked for--because he told me not to come back to class until I could sit through three hours of estate tax without crying. I missed like five weeks of class. I didn't expect him to be my therapist. I did expect him to be able to cope with the fact that I might have to dab at my eyes occasionally while talking about people dying and drama among their kids, right while I was dealing with people dying and drama.

I passed, I graduated, but I doubt law school is the only place where "unprofessionally emotional" often means "showing any sign of feelings or unhappiness whatsoever". Snarky insulting people? That was fine. But no grief, frustration, discontentment. There was a real problem, as far as I was concerned, with the idea that a "Socratic" haranguing and insulting of a student who was already lost and exhausted was professional behavior, but that student's emotional response was not. "Professional" and "sociopath" should not be synonyms.
posted by Sequence at 5:29 PM on June 7, 2015 [12 favorites]


I found her article more a rationalization of her NOT working with her advisor. After reading her article, I felt that her issues could have been dealt with if she had actually talked to her adviser, who had "showed nothing but kindness." Two members of her committee intervened, properly, to have her delay her exams because of her evidenced anxiety.

I am going to lay it out there, maybe if you cannot handle the stress of graduate school then a re-consideration of your path may need to be undertaken. It does not get easier being a professor once you exit out of graduate school. Being a professor, especially at an R1, is brutal. The scramble to publish, teach, advise, research and fundraise does not stop even after tenure. If you join the growing population of adjunct instructors then things become even more distressing. The scramble to get teaching sessions semester to semester can be crushing. Also, let us not forget the post-doc treadmill, too.

I have dealt with graduate students under stress and my advice has always been to take care of themselves first. If you need to take a leave of absence then so be it. However, I expect the graduate student to be professional and leave their projects with a proper hand-off. Everyone undergoes stress, it is how you limit the damage. I have admired undergraduate and graduate students who have fallen (sometimes under terrible conditions), dusted themselves off, done the self-reflection and come right back with the support of the University. Time heals, give yourself time to heal, if you need it.

Crying for either gender is problematic in this sense, the weeping person will be treated with a certain amount of deference for the perception of fragility. Your advisor may decide not to give you the more prestigious project because of the stress; you may not be made part of a team because of fears of panic attacks or loss productivity; that your stress may impact others and should be isolated, like a contagion or simply you will be assumed to be offline until things stabilize for you.

Emotional control is admired for all genders. I agree that weeping is viewed in a gendered manner. It is that awareness of its gendered interpretation that makes it even more problematic for female scholars. There is a special sort of awfulness of being considered "emotional" or "hysterical" in academia and doubly so as a female scholar. Is it fair? Certainly not, but it is there, a cutting rock underneath the waves.

People assume that emotional distress is the fault of the advisor or the institution. Sometimes, hell is self-afflicted. The best you can do, as an advisor, is to provide options, paths and information. If the author had gone to her advisor and said, "I am undergoing a lot of life changes and need to stabilize", I do not know ANY academic advisor in engineering or in my humanities field who would tell them to "suck it up". Life happens, adjustments are made and that is not unusual in academia.

Long winded but tl;dr, talk to your advisor, or a member of your committee, help will happen even if it is perceived as begrudging, at the time.
posted by jadepearl at 5:37 PM on June 7, 2015 [8 favorites]


yes, you sometimes need to suppress spontaneous distress. That is part of being a professional.

"Okay, so I have a serious question for you.

I have very good control of my behavior, but almost no control over whether my eyes water up when I'm talking about a stressful topic. You might as well tell someone who blushes easily that it's unprofessional. Maybe so, but there's very little that we can do about it."

Explain it. It's OK to say, "I'm gettin a bit watery-eyed because . . . (your emotion about the situation makes you feel . .. ) People will empathize with you and respect you more because you care and because you explained.

"Watering up" is different from crying and results in a different emotional response from those around you. It would also be OK to say, "You know, this really affects me. Can you excuse me for a moment?" and step outside the situation to let you emotions come, then go back in. And if you well up again, do sentence one.

I had that happen to me this past spring. I'm an old dude from generation that doesn't cry or show those type of emotions in public. But at a conference this spring I had to get up in front of 300 people (no biggie for me) and read some testimonials and give awards to students with disabilities for their successes. I even had the chance to read the stuff about the kids beforehand so it was "just" public speaking.

As I'm reading the award paragraphs about a five-year old girl who had gone from non-verbal and crawling at age three to walking and talking at age five, her parents stood her up on the table. The cutest kid ever is now standing on the table in her leg braces and pigtails as I talk about how hard she has worked and how much everyone in her life admires her. I had tears streaming down my face and was getting choked up thinking about this kid, her parents and how much more difficult their lives are than mine or most people.

I stopped and said, " "I'm getting a bit watery-eyed because this kid has done so much more before age five than most of us will ever have to deal with. (my emotion about the situation made me feel . .. )

I don't think anyone disparaged me because of my emotions. And I finished the speech. My eyes watering and choking up were something I could not control. My finishing the speech was my professionalism.

"Why should the fact that I'm having a common physiological response to distress mean I'm "unprofessional," even though I don't let my distress affect how I behave?"

Your distress and the level of it affects how others perceive you. I don't have easy answers to that - our work culture dictates how we can act. A carpenter might drop the F bomb in every sentence, a lawyer who did that would be fired.
posted by ITravelMontana at 5:45 PM on June 7, 2015 [5 favorites]


JFC. The vitriol in this thread reserved for people having an involuntary reaction to pain and stress is appalling. Do you give your coworkers a speech about not dumping their problems on you when they get a papercut and yell OUCH! too?
posted by almostmanda at 5:47 PM on June 7, 2015 [8 favorites]


It might be helpful to realize that graduate faculty were once graduate students themselves, and bear their own unresolved issues and not yet-yet healed emotional scars. The last thing that a drowning person wants to meet is another drowning person. Why has academia evolved to be so burdensome?
posted by rankfreudlite at 5:47 PM on June 7, 2015 [8 favorites]


Work culture is not like the weather. It doesn't just exist. We create work culture. People on this thread, especially those who are in positions of power, create a work culture where crying is the worst thing in the world. We can change that if we want to, and I think we should.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:49 PM on June 7, 2015 [16 favorites]


does a complete lack of "suck-it-up" type advice do people a disservice

My experience of graduate school was that there was no shortage of "suck-it-up" advice. In fact it was pretty much the default advice from all sides, and people who needed extra support or help had to either luck into good advice or figure the support options out on their own.

But at the same time, graduate schools are replete with students with such severe anxiety and other mental health issues as to impede their functioning as independent academics, and I am not sure that schools always hit the right balance between supporting people and being honest about who is likely to have a successful academic progression.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:01 PM on June 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


I find Cote's argument confusing. She raises the problem of "ubiquitous emotional policing in academia," but the autobiographical evidence she cites doesn't back up this claim at all. Her advisor and another professor not only agree to postpone her quals, but it sounds as if they suggested it. She admits directly that they were not the problem: "The pressure I felt to keep up appearances came from within; my adviser only ever treated me with compassion and devoted mentorship." The emotional policing wasn't institutional, but stemmed from her personal shame about expressing fragility. She experiences no consequences for crying in front of her advisor except a sense of shame that wasn't born of anything he did.

As a fellow ABD graduate student in English, I know well what an emotional burden this particular line of work can be. It's a job that makes almost everyone feel crappy. There's plenty of ambient pressure to make "being an academic" one's identity, and so the million inevitable frustrations and setbacks seem more personally damning than failure does at many other jobs. It's a field that attracts gluttons for shame. At the same time, I think a few years in grad school has a tendency to give people a sense that there's something really exceptional and exceptionally painful about the emotional work of this profession, and that production should always be subordinate to emotional work. Some of it stems from the narcissism that's the inevitable counterpart to the shame.

When Cote discusses her quals, she says that she "was fundamentally unprepared for the task ahead." Well, sure, quals are intimidating, but it's literally your job. Unlike most jobs, if you can't hack it at the moment you can usually take medical leave and then come back later. If she's incapable of doing her job, what does she think should happen? Should she be allowed to putter on as a grad student out of empathy? It probably should cease to astound me given how many times I've heard the argument made, but I can't get over the incredible narcissism of grad students speaking as if professional work needs to take a backseat to some slow-burning emotional work, and that everyone ought to just accept that. It makes one wonder what some people think the profession is or should be. To put it in the most cynical light, one imagines that these people think that studying English is meant to be a therapeutic growth experience where one occasionally gets around to reading books.

The funny thing is that there is often already a ton of leeway for this emotional work in academia. I can't think of any other profession where one could give in honestly to depression or anxiety in such a comprehensive way, for better and for worse. I've had months straight of low productivity while in depressive cycles without suffering any consequences beyond having to do what Cote argues is taboo and telling my advisor that I was in the mire. When I told my advisor that I needed to delay turning in an important draft because my life was going poorly, he responded sensitively and we discussed the importance of getting a good self-care routine going in order to make grad school workable. I turned it in nearly two months after the initial deadline we'd set, and it didn't make any difference to my good standing as a student. I can be honest with most of my grad student colleagues about my struggles and frustration with my work without having to fear that they'll think I'm some kind of dunce. I do not think that I, my advisor, my colleagues, or my institution are particularly unusual in this regard, though I know that there are plenty of people out there who've had worse experiences.

Could I cry? There's something raw about seeing someone cry that makes other people uncomfortable, so it would likely be more uncomfortable than my more articulate expressions of pain. I can pretty much guarantee that it wouldn't be an issue, though, let alone a serious one. I know plenty of people who have cried in an academic setting. Nobody marks it on their permanent record, as far as I know, or holds it against them.

It seems to me like the real issue is that we need to work through our shame and have faith in the already demonstrated ability of our colleagues to treat us with the empathy and support that we'd desire, and to do our best to express that empathy and support ourselves. There is probably already more mutual sympathy in the air in humanities academia than at nearly any other job, but standard-issue academic anxieties often prevent one from recognizing that.
posted by vathek at 6:12 PM on June 7, 2015 [21 favorites]


I'm not sure what you mean here - because it sounds like you want to hide behind a 'professional' veneer from the repercussions of creating a toxic work environment. Or maybe you don't want to deal with the fact that other people handle stress differently from you. Or maybe you don't feel like people who come from different backgrounds or have different coping mechanisms should be welcome where you work.

No matter what, it sounds like I wouldn't like you and I certainly wouldn't want to work with you.


No, the people are all welcome; certain behaviors aren't. I don't really get why this is so hard to understand. I'm glad you felt the need to point out how little you assume you would like me, though. Super necessary.

JFC. The vitriol in this thread reserved for people having an involuntary reaction to pain and stress is appalling.

Oh, please, the only vitriol in this thread is against the people who say they would rather no crying in the workplace, thanks. Saying ouch is not remotely the same thing and you know it.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 6:14 PM on June 7, 2015 [7 favorites]


The really shitty thing about the "being around other people having emotions is emotional labor" argument is that a huge amount of the emotional labor that people don't get paid for is pretending not to feel negative things. Workers in service positions are especially not supposed to react to a range of bad behavior ranging from minor annoyances and microaggressions to straight-up abuse, and they are forced to maintain a veneer of smiling helpfulness because that is their job. That can be really, really exhausting work in those positions, but there's also a lot of emotional labor in pretending to be okay when you aren't; it's almost always way, way more tiring than just expressing emotions.

That, and there's a huge gendered component in what is and isn't classified as acceptable/professional behavior. Partially it's that men get more leeway in general and partially it's that masculine-coded emotional outbursts are more socially acceptable even when they are more disruptive than feminine-coded ones.
posted by NoraReed at 6:15 PM on June 7, 2015 [22 favorites]


Your distress and the level of it affects how others perceive you.

As I said, I am actually quite emotionally tough. The fact that my eyes are watering up doesn't mean I'm more distressed than someone whose eyes aren't watering up. I am just the watery-eyed equivalent of someone who blushes easily.

But that aside, what's interesting to me is how have switched from telling me how it's unprofessional to cry, to giving me an unneeded lesson in how crying might cause others to perceive me differently. I know all this. What I want to know is why having a normal physiological response to distress is unprofessional, and if I can ever be professional.

It seems like you don't want to say "no" to my face, which is fair; I'd probably say "fuck that" right back. Now, that would be a behavior that I control.

Do you know what else causes others to perceive me differently? The fact that I'm a woman, am small and have a high voice, have large breasts, wear my hair a certain way (not that there is any "neutral" way)...

Why is it that if a perception that a particular characteristic or behavior is unprofessional is unfair, that you've decided that it's the people who are being unfairly judged who are "unprofessional" and need the lecture, instead of the people who are doing the judging?

masculine-coded emotional outbursts are more socially acceptable

yup
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:18 PM on June 7, 2015 [11 favorites]


"But that aside, what's interesting to me is how have switched from telling me how it's unprofessional to cry, to giving me an unneeded lesson in how crying might cause others to perceive me differently. I know all this."

You didn't didn't use the term "crying" in your post, you used , "watering up." I parsed those as two different things.

I didn't mean to give you an unneeded lesson. I was trying to be empathetic and talk about how I have the same difficulty of "watering up" when I don't want to.

"What I want to know is why having a normal physiological response to distress is unprofessional . . . "

Better than I could have said: " . .. masculine-coded emotional outbursts are more socially acceptable

yup"


And that sucks.


" . . . and if I can ever be professional. It seems like you don't want to say "no" to my face, which is fair; I'd probably say "fuck that" right back. Now, that would be a behavior that I control."

I don't know you. Nothing that you have written would make me think that you aren't professional. You asked a serious question. I responded.
posted by ITravelMontana at 6:46 PM on June 7, 2015


> Oh, please, the only vitriol in this thread is against the people who say they would rather no crying in the workplace, thanks. Saying ouch is not remotely the same thing and you know it.

I had a boss once who, in moment of extreme stress (he only ever did this the once, and was otherwise a good boss), screamed in my face that I was doing a terrible job about an issue that I had no control over or responsibility for. I burst into tears - of rage. Then he stormed out and went to the gym.

He could have chosen to storm out to the gym without screaming at me; my response was beyond my control in that moment. It was an OUCH response.
posted by rtha at 6:57 PM on June 7, 2015 [13 favorites]


I had a boss once who, in moment of extreme stress (he only ever did this the once, and was otherwise a good boss), screamed in my face that I was doing a terrible job about an issue that I had no control over or responsibility for. I burst into tears - of rage. Then he stormed out and went to the gym.

Which is why it would have been good if the boss had "sucked it up" and not spilled his emotions into his work. If he'd been a fucking professional.

Heavy emotional spillover affects the people around you. When you fucking dump your heavy shit into a room, you douse everybody around you with it. This is a simple fucking human truth. Have some motherfucking consideration before you spill out your motherfucking emotional reactions upon everyone around you. Oh, you're having a shit day? Well so am I, and thank you for making it worse by splattering me with your own bullshit because you felt the need to unburden yourself.

That said, crying is not "dumping heavy shit into a room." Tears of frustration shouldn't be a fucking problem. Explosions of rage, however, those are a fucking problem. (In rtha's case, I'm referring to the boss, not rtha.) Which is where "suck it up" is excellent advice.

Repressing the expression of emotions is not without value. There are times and places where telling a man you want to rip out his eye and make him eat it would be unwise. Even if that man should indeed have his eye removed and force-fed to him. Workplaces have to function, and they're full of people. Our spikier emotions have to be held in check or those places don't fucking function.

The only problem with the "suck it up" part of work culture is that it's mis-aimed. It's better advice for management and supervisors than those lower on the food chain.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 7:24 PM on June 7, 2015 [8 favorites]


Unfortunately, power dynamics in workplaces are super fucked up by default because our entire economic system is based on a lot of harmful ideas rooted in kyriarchy, marginalization and/or "I've got mine"; the impetus is always put on those lower on the food chain to figure out how to work around the weaknesses of their supervisors instead of making the supervisors actually do a good job of supervising. Combine that with the gendered hierarchical coding of anger displays vs crying and you get something where it's embarrassing to have a normal physiological reaction to distress, but actual behavior that you have way more control over becomes the problems of your underlings. It doesn't always play out as "it is perfectly acceptable to abuse your workers but unprofessional to have an emotional reaction to that abuse", but it does play out like that a significant portion of the time.
posted by NoraReed at 7:38 PM on June 7, 2015 [8 favorites]


I'm an academic advisor at a university - staff, not faculty. I've had students cry in my office, mostly undergrads but a few grads over the years. It has never been the end of the world, nor have I ever judged these students for being unprofessional or burdening me. I'm not their counselor, so I don't expect tears, but they're in stressful situations that are their whole world and they may not have anyone else to talk to, or at least not anyone else who is giving them advice and quietly listening.

I assume crying students are equally uncomfortable for professors, but I would also hope they can reach inside themselves and be compassionate for a few minutes, and hand the other person a tissue. Students are colleagues in academic but they’re also young people who are still learning how to be adults and developing professional skills.

All this said, we do have some faculty who are among my least favorite who only really value the students they refer to as “machines.” They mean that the student works all hours of the day and night, never complaining but I’m sure the lack of emotional affect is important to them as well. These students are usually single young men, or guys with wives who are not in academia. These machine-loving faculty are dicks in so many ways, ugh. Exploiting students is just part of it.

I've only cried in public at work once and they were tears of rage. I was incredibly angry at the shoddy way some students of mine had been treated and someone asked me at the wrong moment how everything was going. I wasn't please to burst into tears but I think it was better than calling people in admin and screaming my head off. The person I cried in front of did have some power to make changes and the bad process was improved and I think it was partly from my (unconscious) demonstration at how wrong the situation was.
posted by Squeak Attack at 7:39 PM on June 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


You're made uncomfortable by crying? Suck it up and deal.
posted by Zalzidrax at 7:57 PM on June 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


I'm having some issues with conflating graduate school and the typical workplace. In my experience, graduate school was an isolating, intense experience where I put my life on hold for seven years while I worked myself to the limit reading, writing, and teaching. I had little money, no free time, no interaction with anyone outside my department, and no confidence about the future. If I didn't succeed, these years would be wasted and my professional life would be over. Even with the academic job market as crummy as it is now (and has been since my I was in school), anything other than a tenure-track job was considered a failure. If you chose to leave academia, you were either wasting your talents, or you never had any to begin with. You're in this weird bubble, and it becomes impossible sometimes to get any perspective on the rest of the universe.

I know my advisors were good people who wanted to make sure I was producing publishable work, and I know many jobs are going to be just as demanding, if not more so. But there's something about the high-stakes limbo of grad school, especially if you don't have any other influences in your life beyond your department, that magnifies your frustrations because you can feel you have no other way to measure your worth. So crying is understandable, if not logical, and, like some of the previous posters, I can't fully control my emotions, especially with years of sleep deprivation.

I enjoyed my graduate work overall, but soon after I walked away from my dissertation, I realized that no one was making me feel like an idiot on a regular basis. And once I regained my self-confidence, I didn't find myself crying out of frustration nearly as much because I have so many other ways of defining my identity.

And I'm not 22 any more. So that might help.
posted by bibliowench at 8:12 PM on June 7, 2015 [11 favorites]


Like bibliowench says, grad school is very different from other workplaces. At least in the STEM field, it is a workplace where your entire career path depends on the whims of one person. They have complete control over whether you will be wasting your life for six years or whether you'll come out with job prospects and contacts. If you attempt to pick someone else you'll be regarded as broken by your peers and other supervisors and will have to start all over from the beginning. God forbid you want to switch programs, unlike undergrad where it is not uncommon for people to transfer to finish their degree or take a break, in graduate school taking a break is signaling that you didn't want your degree enough and trying to transfer can blackball you from educationally progressing in the entire field for the next 15-20 years. Oh, and this one person who completely determines your career path? Generally you're supposed to pick them in the first year of grad school--sometimes the first few months. You know, when you're most likely 22 or 23, fresh out of college, with all the life and workplace experience that's given you. Perhaps this is the case for some very small fields, but few other areas I've worked in have been so completely unforgiving to employees who find themselves under a bad supervisor or at a company that's a bad fit.

Also, I feel like the "there's no crying in baseball" reaction has a very gendered slant to it. Academic and workplace standards for expressing emotion have been traditionally determined by men. Men are also socialized to repress crying to a degree women are not; men are socialized to see crying as a reflection of extreme emotional disturbance and weakness. Except what a lot of guys don't realize is when you're not relentlessly sent the message that crying is for pussies and babies, then crying becomes a natural, automatic physiological expression of emotion--similar to gritting one's teeth or tensing up. For a lot of women, crying isn't indicative of crazy person who's an out-of-control, hysterical mess, it's just a thing that is happening in response to being upset. But a lot of guys think women with this reaction are "inappropriate" or "unprofessional" because they're using their own personal biases about crying to judge the behavior of their female colleagues.
posted by Anonymous at 8:48 PM on June 7, 2015


This is almost a double of the recent post about Crying in Science. http://www.metafilter.com/148537/I-was-completely-embarrassed-by-it-at-the-time

This poster just sounds like they are not cut out for academia, or has unrealistic expectations.
posted by mary8nne at 12:44 AM on June 8, 2015


men are socialized to see crying as a reflection of extreme emotional disturbance and weakness.

Or worse, a deliberate and voluntary manipulation tactic.
posted by almostmanda at 7:48 AM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


The point of emphasizing the difference between grad school and the workplace is to say grad students are generally experiencing levels of stress that go way beyond what most careers demand. It's understandable to see tears in that situation.
posted by Anonymous at 9:45 AM on June 8, 2015


The card exists because pretty much everybody has cried in front of their advisers; everyone I know in academia is in therapy and open about it; everyone in academia talks about how miserable and stressed out they are all! of! the! time!

This doesn't really align with my experience in grad school. I never cried in front of an advisor and I don't know of any of my colleagues who did (perhaps they suppressed it well or took it outside or something). People certainly talked about having a lot of work to do, or about the 'quirks' of the faculty's demands, but I can only remember one or two people mentioning having gone to a therapist, and only then in personal, one-on-one conversations (i.e. not talking openly about this). Stress existed, but people dealt with it pretty individually or with family and spouses.

YMMV, since this was an engineering department, so it may be that the demographics of the faculty and students played a part here. (80% male students, 95% male faculty. Lots of both coming from Asian cultures (China, Korea) that skew toward the "stoic" and non-demonstrative.)
posted by theorique at 10:32 AM on June 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


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