The Grad School Diaries: The USO Protocol

It’s probably a good thing that we already had our improvised, home-made, self-directed study group set up and meeting regularly before we found out about the department’s annual Holiday Party, and the traditional entertainment that is slated to go on there. Because, you see, the primary entertainment is us. If you thought we looked like a flock of sheep before…

Well, actually, we probably look more like deer at the moment – staring into the headlights of an oncoming truck, of course. None of us are exactly shy – we’re training for a career that involves standing at the front of a classroom or lecture hall every day for the rest of our lives with dozens (or possibly hundreds) of eyes fixed on us. But let’s face it: if we had wanted to be entertainers we’d have studied drama, music or dance, not management…

No one has been willing to explain WHY this is a requirement, either; they all just seem to regard it as one of those quaint school traditions, like the all-male productions of Gilbert and Sullivan light opera the Ivy-League schools were so notorious for a generation ago. I’ve never grasped what, exactly, was the point of requiring undergraduate men (who aren’t drama majors either) to dress up in drag and sing falsetto, but at least in our case you could imagine that the whole thing is supposed to be a team-building exercise. Although, if you want the truth, I can’t help thinking that it’s a better example of how team-building exercises can annoy the crap out of your employees than anything else…

So why am I being such a grouch about this? Well, partly it’s because I’m already weeks behind where I should be in my studies, and even the best of our cohort are feeling the pressure as our first semester closes in on Midterm. This exercise is going to suck down time I don’t have for an exercise that has already been rendered redundant by the very meetings in which we are going to plan out our program. And I kind of resent the implication that we’d be simple-minded enough to fail to understand the need to work together as a cohort for our mutual benefit…

Part of it is just that as a team-building exercise, it’s pretty weak; I could name you a dozen other possibilities that would have the same (or better!) effect for much less investment of time and effort, not to mention potential public embarrassment. But all of them would require the expenditure of time, effort, or at least money on the part of the powers that be; this at least has the advantage of being something you can just order the incoming doctoral students to do and forget about until the party. Which makes it weak from a leadership standard as well…

But mostly, I think, it’s because making people do something and refusing to offer a single word of explanation offends me on a professional level. Making a bunch of insanely busy people give up time from their studies, take time away from their families, lose sleep, and devote their energies to serving as your own personal USO troop is poor management practice, plain and simple. Even with the best intentions in the world (and we can only hope that this has been ordered with the best intentions in the world) it’s a poor choice; if this wasn’t intended as a team-building exercise, then it’s something far worse…

Power imbalances exist anywhere hierarchical organizations do; even the best managers in the world enjoy a certain amount of special advantage because of their position, and the really good ones try to keep in mind that no matter how hard you try to just be "one of the guys" you can't have an equal relationship with people you can fire at will. Most states have laws to prevent the more disgusting abuses of power, and most employees can at least exercise their traditional right to "vote with their feet" and go get another job. Once of the last places left where those rules do not apply, strangely enough, is inside the very institutions where people study power imbalances and social justice issues: schools just like this one. None of us can refuse this assignment without facing a very real chance of being pitched out of the doctoral program, and none of can walk away without facing a near certainty of never getting another job in academia...

Unless that's the whole point, of course. As I've said before, this program is as much an apprenticeship as anything else, and there are some things you can only teach people by example. If we're going to have to deal with this same mentality in our future lives as professors - and we will; I've heard our own faculty speaking of "hazing" practices that extend all the way up to full professors and department heads - then our teachers would be remiss indeed if they didn't incorporate such an element into our training. It's a subtle point - and I doubt if all of the people who are looking gleefully forward to our performance at the holiday party grasp it - but this, too, is something we will have to master if we want to make it in our new profession...

It's another reminder that being a Ph.D. is not like being an MBA - or the manager of a business. In a business school program you'd never do such a thing, and in an actual business there would be a very real chance of lawsuits, discrimination complaints, and loss/non-retention of critical personnel. For us, this is just another part of the process. In my future career as a management professor, two of the things I want to do are show people a better way to lead a team and build better cohesion - and make sure they never run this sort of risk just because they think it sounds like fun. And I will...

But first we've got to come up with something to do at the Holiday Party this year...