In the current Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Hart Benton asks a probing question: "Is Grad School a Cult?" Benton is, not coincidentally, an English professor, and his question arises from his inside observation of the rigidly conformist culture that one so often finds, paradoxically, in programs aimed at training aspiring scholars. You'd think that graduate education for people who plan to be originators of ideas, posers of problems, askers of questions, and producers of new knowledge would emphasize qualities such as responsible creativity, intellectual independence, informed skepticism, and categorical refusal to be pressured--on any level--to adhere to the prefabricated intellectual and ideological tenets of any group. But Benton has noticed that this is not so, that graduate education (and I assume he is speaking most particularly about the humanities, where qualitative evaluation reigns supreme) often works by very different means, to very different ends.

Benton acknowledges that professionalization requires conformity to the procedural and analytical norms of a given field, and he acknowledges, too, via a series of sidelong smirks at his own idea, that there is something excessive about comparing grad school to a cult. At the same time, he finds the comparison useful enough to play it out at length:

For all its claims to the contrary, graduate education does not seem to enhance the mental freedom of many students, some of whom are psychologically damaged by the experience. ...Ýgraduate school these days seems to have a lot in common with mind-control cults.

It's not difficult for a casual researcher to gain entry into the bizarre world of cults and anticult activists. A quick Internet search will inevitably lead one to Steven Alan Hassan's online Freedom of Mind Center (see http://www.freedomofmind.com). Hassan was a member of the Unification Church, and he has become "America's leading expert on cults."
For anyone who has been in graduate school, numerous portions of Hassan's outline of the mind-control practices of cults will seem weirdly familiar. Reading through it, your initial tendency may be to laugh out loud. But proceed down the list and the parallels between cults and the experiences of many graduate students can become mildly disturbing.

Hassan calls his outline the "BITE Model," which stands for behavior, information, thought, and emotional control. Let's review a few of the traits of each category and see if any of them ring a bell.

Behavior control: "major time commitment required for indoctrination sessions and group rituals"; "need to ask permission for major decisions"; "need to report thoughts, feelings, and activities to superiors."

Information control: "access to non-cult sources of information minimized or discouraged (keep members so busy they don't have time to think)" and "extensive use of cult-generated information (newsletters, magazines, journals, audio tapes, videotapes, etc.)."

Thought control: "need to internalize the group's doctrine as 'Truth' (black and white thinking; good vs. evil; us vs. them; inside vs. outside)" and "no critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy seen as legitimate."

Emotional control: "excessive use of guilt (identity guilt: not living up to your potential; social guilt; historical guilt)"; "phobia indoctrination (irrational fears of ever leaving the group or even questioning the leader's authority; cannot visualize a positive, fulfilled future without being in the group; shunning of leave takers; never a legitimate reason to leave)"; and "from the group's perspective, people who leave are 'weak,' 'undisciplined.'"

Are you experiencing some shock of recognition? I was particularly startled when I learned that recent college graduates are one of the groups most frequently targeted by cult recruiters.

In any case, I don't mean to claim seriously that the average graduate program in the humanities is a mind-control cult like the Raeleans (though many academics also aspire to clone themselves). You could just as easily apply Hassan's outline to the Marine Corps, the Mormons, or Microsoft.
Nevertheless, understanding the varied social experiences of graduate school (student culture as well as formal instruction) as a kind of cult helps to explain why so many people cannot be dissuaded from staying in school --Ýor working, year after year, as underpaid adjuncts --Ýwhen it is manifestly against their interests to do so, when they sincerely want to get out the academy but feel impeded by irrational fears.

[...]

Maybe thinking of graduate school as a "cult" is silly. What's the difference between indoctrination and professionalization, anyway?

Still, the semantic game seems worth playing when I talk with idealistic, vulnerable humanities majors who are about to complete their B.A.'s and have no idea what they are going to do with their lives. They have been flattered and encouraged by faculty members whom they respect, and who believe (as cult members do) that they are doing a good thing by recruiting young people for graduate school: "You're too smart to go into business, my child."

These students are reassured by the possibility of continuing life as they know it. They think it's easy to leave graduate school if they don't like it or the job market improves; they do not yet understand how their minds will be changed by the experience, how leaving grad school after two or more years can be at least as hard as leaving a cult. Undergraduate humanities majors need to know that they have other options. There are jobs out there for smart, creative people that don't expect you to sell your soul.

Anyone who has made even a minor career of criticizing academe from within will be intimately familiar with the psychology I am describing here: If you say what you think in a public forum, you may encounter others of like mind, and you may even help people frame inchoate impressions into structured thoughts, but you are not at all likely to change anyone's mind, or to convince the people you really want to reach--the apologists and defenders and deniers who resolutely refuse to see--of anything at all. Those people will discount you as crazy, or manipulative, or dishonest (ad hominem being a proven, if unethical, method of disarming the academic enemy), and will dismiss your analyses as symptoms of your illness. The mind of the insider academic critic does not help things when it responds to this sort of dismissal by generating ever more shrill and shaky ideas. One might say that intellectual petulance is the hobgoblin of belittled minds.

Thomas Hart Benton knows his comparison is off the mark--that's why he satirizes it throughout his essay:

And hey, maybe treating graduate school as a kind of cult from which one needs help to escape might give rise to some unconventional new positions for all the unemployed Ph.D.'s.

Let's say a mother finds an application to Duke University's Ph.D. program in English under her daughter's mattress. Obviously the mother is devastated. If she does nothing, in a year her daughter will be dressed in black and sneering in obscure jargon at the Thanksgiving turkey and Aunt Sally's cranberry Jell-O mold. Where can a concerned parent turn for help?

To serve this need, former academics could reinvent themselves as counselors; they could coordinate interventions with the friends and loved ones of people who are flirting with graduate school, or who have been enrolled for several years but lack the will to leave, or who are trapped in dead-end adjunct positions. These "academic exit counselors" could foster the kind of loving, supportive environments that "academic captives" need to return to a normal life.

Of course, in some cases, tough love may be the only solution. And former graduate students and adjuncts could put together a traveling program for kids who still have time to turn themselves around. They could even make a documentary. It could be a nerdy version of Scared Straight: "You fancy-ass punks think you're so smart? You think you know something about hegemony? I got a Ph.D., 50 grand in student loans, and I clocked 20 years as an adjunct. Now I'm here to tell the truth to suckers like you."

Comments are welcome.

Not really. The 5% that's useful, the criticism that there is some demand for ideological conformity, is outweighed by the 95% that's patently silly. The rubrics for cults can't be applied simpliciter to grad school, and once qualified, aren't true anymore. For instance, "need to ask permission for major decisions" -- well, no, just decisions about your education, not about what car to buy or whom to date, and even then, it's not "asking permission," it's discussing and seeking advice. The other rubrics fail to apply in any meaningful way for similar reasons. Even the part about demands for ideological conformity need qualification: 1, that's less so in different disciplines; perhaps English is worse than history or philosophy or chemistry, and 2, it's not like you get deprived of food or beaten if you disagree. Grad students can and should resist the urge to be conformists, and all the good ones do.

Grad school isn't so much a cult as it is a pyramid scheme. A prof who's sunk a small fortune into getting advanced degree is forced, for survival, to lure others into following the same path. Can't make tenure without a full cadre of eager followers.

I suspect that this phenomenon occurs more often in the humanities than in the hard sciences, and may be related to something I have observed in business: the less quantitative the measurements, the more political the environment.
An individual who has a clear measurement of his results--whether he is a sales rep measured on quota or a division executive measured on P&L--will generally display a certain independence, even toward his organizational superiors ("yeah, well, I'm at 140 percent, so I must be doing something right--your opinions are noted, but I don't like them much"). People with no such clear measurement tend to be much more concerned with doing things that are politically correct in their particular environment ("the CEO likes ISO 9000 so I'd better get behind it")

It may also be that people with a strong need for independence *choose* professions with clear measurement criteria, exactly for the above reasons, whereas those with submissive tendencies do the opposite.

I recall a good deal of public discussion of whom people were dating and what kind of cars they were driving. I recall a few grad students who changed their sexual orientation in order to avoid the taint of heterosexism (I think they changed back after grad school). I recall a student being denounced in a seminar for driving an SUV. I recall being rebuked at a public dinner by a wild-eyed fellow graduate student for ordering meat. Maybe you don't have to formally "ask permission," but there is a student culture in many grad programs that demands that one conform or be subjected to public criticism or shunning. It's definitely not a culture of open dialogue. Non-conformists, unless they are doggedly determined and live their lives away from the program, are usually driven away. Maybe it's more like institutional racism or sexism than it is like cults: people are coerced into a certain view of themselves by a thousand subtle (or not-so-cubtle) acts of social and intellectual violence.

On the other hand, there aren't many cults that actually beat people into compliance these days. They hire PR firms and create flashy, happy brochures written in the language of therapy. Insiders who question the rules, after a few rounds of mild public criticism, are looked at with pity and offered counseling.

"I recall being rebuked at a public dinner by a wild-eyed fellow graduate student for ordering meat."
By a fellow student? You should have told him or her to go f*** him- or herself.
"there is a student culture in many grad programs that demands that one conform or be subjected to public criticism or shunning."
For the cult analogy to work, it needs to be a demand made by your advisors. What do you care what other students think? If they disagree with you, you argue with them. That's the life of the mind.
"people are coerced into a certain view of themselves"
No would-be academic should allow this to happen to him- or herself via peer pressure. "Coercion" seems hyperbolic in this context.

"I recall a few grad students who changed their sexual orientation in order to avoid the taint of heterosexism (I think they changed back after grad school)."

Hmm, maybe a better analogy is prison!

I think the cult comparison occurs as a matter of course to people who have thought critically about academic culture from within it. I've certainly contemplated it often enough.

This is because college, grad-school, the military, and a cult are all "Total Institutions." They completley dominate the lives of those involved and, people being herd-animals, eventually what they think as much as how they think.

This is why it is pointless to talk about a values-free education--"let them make up their own minds" is nonsense. There will be a philosophy of life imposed no matter what the intent of those running the program.

Here are the important questions academics (profess) to ignore: (A) What should that philosophy be? and (B) Who should decide what that philosophy will be?

The reality is that many professors know exactly what philosophy they are trying to instill and merely use the idea of freedom to silence anybody who broaches the issue, let alone challanges their philosphy.

aeon skoble:

For the cult analogy to work, it needs to be a demand made by your advisors.

No, it doesn't; at least, not directly. Does it make a difference if the leader expounds on the morality of a particular action, and let his/her acolytes connect the dots, as opposed to a direct order?

Indeed, this is often used by cults to generate plausible deniability when scrutinized.

Me:For the cult analogy to work, it needs to be a demand made by your advisors.

Jeff Licquia: No, it doesn't; at least, not directly. Does it make a difference if the leader expounds on the morality of a particular action, and let his/her acolytes connect the dots, as opposed to a direct order?

"Leader"? "Acolytes"? When I was in grad school (mid-to-late 80s), none of the professors were "leaders" who "issued direct orders." While we jokingly used the term "acolyte" on occasion if we thought one of our number was obsequious or insufficiently independent-minded, no grad student had any authority over any other in any way, formal or informal. There were some orthodoxies, and some dissent, and that gave us lots to argue about over beers. The cult analogy doesn't even come remotely close to describing the experience.

AB: --"let them make up their own minds" is nonsense. There will be a philosophy of life imposed no matter what the intent of those running the program.

I have no recollection of a philosophy of life being imposed. Such was barely even ever suggested, let alone imposed. I think one would have to be both hypersensitive and incapable of articulating reasons for a view in order to see grad school this way. I didn't know a single person in grad school whose life was "completely dominated" in this fashion, and I didn't know a single prof who "merely use[d] the idea of freedom to silence anybody who broaches the issue, let alone challanges their philosphy."
No one in grad school told me or anyone I knew "what to think." They taught us how to conduct research, how to construct arguments in prose, and how to articulate and defend a thesis.

If one applies this to graduate school in particular, one should also apply it to all schooling, from kindergarten on. The parallels are just as strong. For illustration, I include the BITE model from above, with my own annotations in square brackets.

Behavior control: "major time commitment required for indoctrination sessions and group rituals"; "need to ask permission for major decisions" [and even minor ones like going to the bathroom]; "need to report thoughts, feelings, and activities to superiors."



Information control: "access to non-cult sources of information minimized or discouraged (keep members so busy they don't have time to think)" and "extensive use of cult-generated information." [school books and handouts; accessing external sources of information is suppressed and punished during school hours]



Thought control: "need to internalize the group's doctrine as 'Truth' (black and white thinking; good vs. evil; us vs. them; inside vs. outside)" and "no critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy seen as legitimate." [no education should be like this, but primary education focused on "teaching to the test" too often is, and apparently, secondary education in the humanities can be as well]



Emotional control: "excessive use of guilt (identity guilt: not living up to your potential; social guilt; historical guilt)"; "phobia indoctrination (irrational fears of ever leaving the group or even questioning the leader's authority; cannot visualize a positive, fulfilled future without being in the group; shunning of leave takers; never a legitimate reason to leave)"; and "from the group's perspective, people who leave are 'weak,' 'undisciplined.'"

Benton's essay pretty much acknowledges the slippery-slope quality of the argument (e.g., this is true also of the Marines, Microsoft and the Mormons). On the other hand, these organizations do not claim to exist to support the disinterested persuit of truth.

Skoble's point about only being taught to do research and craft a thesis suggests that these are skills and, as such, are not subject to ideological manipulation. Of course, this is a common understanding for those who represent entrenched power: THEIR methods are objective truths and anyone who disagrees with them is "hypersensitive," in need of counseling, etc. To what topics, I wonder, were students permitted to apply these skills without suffering serious professional and personal consequences?

"Skoble's point about only being taught to do research and craft a thesis suggests that these are skills and, as such, are not subject to ideological manipulation. Of course, this is a common understanding for those who represent entrenched power"

It's literally hilarious to suggest that any philosopher represents entrenched power - we're lucky if we're not being given the hemlock - and in my case it's especially silly, since almost all of my views are seriously unpopular.
"To what topics, I wonder, were students permitted to apply these skills without suffering serious professional and personal consequences?"
As far as I could discern, all topics. If anything, my grad school cohort bordered on the disrespectful -- and I mean that in a good way and to apply to myself as well, the socratic sense in which one doesn't take at face value what the authority figure says.
Perhaps the cult analogy, with leaders and acolytes and punishment and thought control, works in some disciplines, but I see no evidence of it among philosophers, historians, economists, mathematicians, chemists, physicists, biologists, or poli sci.

I think the comparison to a cult is far-fetched--what seems more true to me is that graduate students have absorbed the ideology of their oppressors. In my memory (English ph.d at Ivy league school), it was not a great time of mental freedom, although in a different way then people might think. I could have taken _any_ position I wanted on Foucault or Daniel Deronda and been fine, but voicing thoughts (not even criticism) about the department (teaching assignments, the teaching load graduate students had to bear) would have been extremely dicey. Advisors have great power over graduate students and many professors have extremely thin skin and/or mental problems that prevent them from acting like normal people. I felt like a courtier in the time of Louis XVI--I had to behave in a certain way, defer graciously to elderly professors' bizarre whims, not offend people, in some cases suck up to professors (I was teaching for a professor who asked me if I thought she was the best teacher in the department--the answer I was expected to give was clearly yes). After a while, a graduate student's ability to recognize the difference between normal behavior and jerky behavior is impaired. At the end of six years, if someone was mean/rude/took advantage of me, I would not automatically think "what a jerk", but rather "what had I done wrong to make this person mad at me"

Aeron...when you say "almost all of my views are seriously unpopular" I have to ask "unpopular with whom?" Are they unpopular among the membership of the local Rotary Club (the members of which probably have very little impact on your life), or are they unpopular among the senior professors who actually had an impact on your academic situation?

It's Aeon, no r, rhymes with Ian.
To answer your question, both. 4 of my committee members were entirely unsympathetic to the conclusions I ultimately reached, and in some cases even to the underlying assumptions. I did have an external reader who was largely in agreement with me, and he was helpful, but I was ABD and mid-draft before I had even met him. While his help was invaluable, it's not the case that I wouldn't have been permitted to submit m dissertation. Most of my professors in grad school (and most of my colleagues now) disagreed with my view, but I was rewarded for the objective merits of the work: presenting a cogent argument that was well researched, etc. And this isn't just anecdote, it's true of many people I knew in grad school. And to the extent that it _is_ anecdotal, so is the original piece Erin quoted from where the analogy to cults was made. I stand by my original claim, that it's a silly analogy, the limited effetiveness of which is far outweighed by its inappropriateness.

"Inappropiate" is such a scary word. One simply does not speak things that are "inappropriate," even as a joke (which Benton's piece largely is, as I take it--he even calls the comparison "silly" and follows it with a series of satiric exaggerations). In relation to my experiences in grad school, Aeon's opinions capture that sickening feeling of telling a joke in a seminar, only to find everyone falling silent until one person says, in a sneerly little voice, "I think that was inappropriate." Meaning, of course, you should leave now because WE do not welcome even indirect and good-humored criticism of our beliefs. Aeon's final comment distills, almost perfectly, the crabbed, petty nastiness of academic discourse today.

"Aeon's opinions capture that sickening feeling of telling a joke in a seminar, only to find everyone falling silent until one person says, in a sneerly little voice, 'I think that was inappropriate.'"

Or maybe he was just using the word "inappropriate" in the sense that "cults are an inappropriate analogy for grad school," or "random networks are an inappropriate model for the internet," or "millimeters are inappropriate units for measuring truck tire size."

Aeon...good. You get credit for guts.

Too often, people claim great courage for offending those who it costs them absolutely nothing to offend while )placating those whose opinions really matter to them).

"millimeters are inappropriate units for measuring truck tire size."

Well put. I jumped to my conclusion about what Aeon meant, and I apologize. Experience of the sort I described has made me hypervigilant.

Aaron, David - Thanks.
S.A. - I used "inappropriateness" because I thought "inapplicability" and "disanalogicity" were too infelicitous. Aaron's interpretation is the right one -I never use "inappropriate" in the sneery way you describe, and indeed, get annoyed with those who do. I just meant to reiterate that the analogy is lame, which was the question Erin had posed.

Cult members use coded expressions and stock phrases (of varying degrees of specificity) to identify either other members or people who might be receptive to the cult's beliefs (potential recruits). I was reminded of this recently when I attended a dinner at which humanities Ph.D.'s like me (I've been out of grad school for 13 years) were seated with current doctoral candidates. I noted the recurrent use of the adjective "colonial" as a means of making different sorts of invidious comparisons ("That institution isn't as _colonial_ as this one."). I also noted the ritual way in which "Bush" was repeatedly offered up verbally as a target for melodramatically unrestrained invective ("I'd like to see _Bush_ in a pile of naked men."), reminiscent of the "minute of hate" directed at Goldstein in Orwell's _1984_. Clearly, these students, who were in the presence of people who they assumed it was in their interest to impress, chose to do so in the way that grad schools program them: by being seen to affirm what the cult loves and hating what the cult hates.

I still fight the programming I received in grad school, which in me manifested itself as a tendency to suppress (for fear that they would be ridiculed) expressions of my admiration and love for the books that prompted me to go to grad school in the first place. Go to grad school, and learn to hate learning--that's the cult in a nutshell.

Sorry to give my science snobbery free rein- no, actually I'm not sorry. ;) Naturally "disciplines" that consist of cargo-cult pseudo-scholarship will run graduate departments that specialize in brainwashing rather than training in scholarly inquiry. How could it possibly be otherwise?

At first, I sort of sneered at the comparison of grad school to cults, but there is a grain of truth in it.

Other commenters have used prison as an analogy, or the military (frankly, I would describe my grad school experience as more like a tour of military service than like being in a cult; but maybe that's partly because I'm a field biologist and most summers I spent a lot of time on long walks in the heat and bugs with lots of equipment on my back), or as a pyramid scheme.

Another (irresponsible and probably inappropriate) comparison might be to Stockholm syndrome, in which you are held "captive" by someone that at first you hate (and mock, to the other "hostages" who share your office with you) but whose worldview you ultimately absorb, in part or in whole.

I do think it's different in the sciences; quantifiable data make a big difference. And I knew cases where a student's work disagreed with their advisor's preconceived notions of how it "should" come out; in at least one case the prof's response was a hearty "good on ya'" to the student for figuring out something new.

I do think the person who pointed out that our lives are fraught with situations that could be compared to cults are spot-on. Just about every part of modern life involves certain rituals and roles and behaviors that are appropriate and inappropriate.

My brother left the corporate world to go back to school (in a totally different area than he had been in) because he couldn't stand the corporate life and the attitudes of those he worked with. I don't *remember* him using the word "cultlike" to describe it, but he certainly gave me the impression he felt that way.

And I also agree on the matter of grad students (and to a lesser extent, advisors) approving or disapproving of students' behavior; I just made it a practice not to talk politics or make my political leanings known in order to avoid being approached, evangelically, by people who followed a different ideology than I did. And there was the commentary - usually behind the victim's back - about various people's choices in Signficant Others, or cars, or clothing. But then again, that happens everywhere I've been, not just in grad school.

Hmmmm...I smell a thesis: Cults and Cultic Behavior in Modern American Society. (Too bad I already have a Ph.D. But any prospective grad students are free to poach my idea).

This fall I am about to enter a graduate program in the humanities, and oddly enough, have done quite a bit of research into cults over the past year on my own; a friend of mine has been caught up in a cult. I have had ample opportunity to reflect on cult characterisitcs and tactics, to witness the manipulation and experience the heartbreak firsthand. Cultism exists at the far end of a spectrum of group behaviors. Cults (whether religious, therapeutic, political, or commercial) deliberately and systematically deceive, exploit, and manipulate their members; they are usually led by sociopathic narcissists. However, other groups or institutions may commit similar transgressions out of sheer ignorance and human weakness, especially if there is a narcissist in a position of authority. Basically, any organization or group can develop unhealthy or cult-like characteristics. A group doesn't have to be at the extreme end of the spectrum to be harmful. Cult-like dynamics are terribly pervasive and ultimately anithetical to real scholarship, creativity, and meaningful dialogue. We really must take responsibility to educate ourselves, and to resist the social pressures to conform, idolize or be idolized. In these times, intellectual honesty and independent thought are more important than ever.