The Grad School Diaries: The Kingsfield Principle

Had I been expecting to have an easy, simple passage through the doctoral program, my hopes would have been dashed on the first week of classes, when I had my first quantitative class. As it happens, I had actually been listening when the literally dozens of scholars told me about the process, and thus I was not even mildly surprised at the life-or-death struggle into which I had fallen – but on that first class meeting there were a number of events that confirmed that things were as bad as I had anticipated they would be. Beginning with meeting our instructor in a professional setting for the first time…

Older readers and any film students reading this post will probably remember a 1973 movie called “The Paper Chase” , but for anyone who doesn’t, the film is the story of a first-year law student, ostensibly at Harvard, who is attempting to survive what was at the time still considered to be the best – and the toughest – law program in the world. While the protagonist suffers from some classic callow youth issues, and is actually up against a course of study that has defeated a lot of good people, his single largest problem isn’t a class or a concept, but rather the legendary Professor Kingsfield, in whose class he is floundering…

Although there are a number of sub-plots( and even a romantic sub-plot) in the film, it’s really more of a coming-of-age story than anything else. Over the course of the movie, it becomes clear that while the professor can be sardonic, acerbic, and occasionally over-the-top, he can’t really be seen as evil or malevolent, even by the young man who is having a difficult year in his class. Kingsfield’s function is to make sure that the standards of the school are upheld – that everyone who receives a law degree from his institution, and profits from the reputations of all of those who have gone before, is actually deserving of that reputation and likely to contribute to it in the future…

Students of business will recognize this as part of what we usually call branding – the process of establishing the reputation of your product and the company that produces it. What you may not realize (I didn’t until a certain highly-ranked academic explained it to me) is that all professional schools and most doctoral programs have such a person. And while this individual is sometimes dismissed as a sadist, an egomaniac, or an ivory-tower egghead with no connection to the real world, his or her job is actually to make sure that all of the new candidates for a doctorate are actually good enough to make it through the program, take up a position in the world of academia, and carry on the work being done in the field without embarrassing the school that awarded their degrees…

Because while no one will actually say so, the truth is that this is an apprenticeship as much as it is a professional school, and that means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to make the judgment call about every one of us: do we really have what it takes? And the professor who takes on that responsibility is usually one of the most experienced members of the faculty; someone who really can tell the poseurs from the real thing, and the bright young hopefuls who aren’t worth the price of an e-mail telling them to quit from the ones who might, one day, actually contribute to the discipline we are attempting to join. It’s an impossible job that has absolutely no upside. Do it right and people will think terrible things about you; do it wrong, and your program’s reputation will go right down the drain, followed by your school and eventually the entire University. But the cost of NOT doing it at all is too horrible even to consider. It’s the Kingsfield Principle, and it’s what makes all of us who we are – or at least who we are trying to be…

And this week we met our own school's answer to Kingsfield in class for the first time. We are only 5 days into this odyssey so far, but if this class was any indication of things to come, I can honestly say that any of us who survive to be called "Professor" ourselves will have earned that honor...