Sunday e-mail 22nd June
Psychology and how it got that way
The cloakroom pegs are empty now, and locked the classroom door. The hollow desks are lined with dust and so on. That’s not me, I fear, that’s Philip Larkin, whose slightly-melancholy sentiments all academics are sharing right about now. The students are gone for the summer, the tourists have not yet arrived, the university town feels a bit too big suddenly, a bit too spacious…
Or it would, at any rate, if we ever got to go outside. There are so many exams to mark! We mark all morning, we mark all afternoon, we complain to our spouses in the evening about all the marking we’ve done in the morning and the afternoon…and yet the pile becomes no smaller.
Marking is the curse of the academic life, as any academic will tell you. Well, they might do. More likely, they will tell you that admin is the curse of the academic life. What they mean by that is what the rest of the world calls paperwork. That’s a curse, too.
And yet…and yet I still get asked on a monthly basis how a person goes about becoming a psychologist. ‘By all means,’ I like to say, ‘give it a try. But do you honestly look at me and think, “Not there’s a guy who’s living the dream?”’
No they don’t. They hardly look at me at all. They can’t. I’m too busy in my office, marking exams and doing paperwork. That tan I got in France last month…whatever happened to that?
Every autumn, they come back, the faithful, the starry-eyed, new clothes, new attitudes, new music. Every one of them wants to be a psychologist. Some are so keen, they seem to want to become two psychologists (they must love marking). Two years ago, I estimated that, of all the undergraduates I had met, 107% were studying Psychology. Clearly there was an error of arithmetic. I calculated the statistic again, using a different system. The true number was 170%.
Psychology has become the ‘default degree’ – the one students take if they don’t take something else. In a way, of course, the subject’s popularity is gratifying (all the psychologists I know like to think they were personally responsible) but in another way, well, it’s a bit disturbing. That’s partly, I suspect, because so few know what to expect from a degree in Psychology. Few studied the subject at school, and far too many think Psychology is something it’s not.
MORE FROM CRIME & PSYCHOLOGY:
TWENTIETH-CENTURY CRIME FICTION
WHY DOING PSYCHOLOGY IS LIKE BEING IN DUBROVNIK
There is more of the library than the carnival to academic psychology, and more of the office than either. We psychologists are far tamer and more somber than anyone expects. Some are delighted to discover this: some less so.
This week’s newsletter takes a direction that may surprise you. The next academic year creeps up on us already and many young people are contemplating their degree. What subject will they study and why will it be Psychology? I’m going to take 1500 words or so to give you some idea of what to expect. After all, a scientist’s job is, partly, to sort the facts from the fiction.
Not planning to study Psychology this year? No problem. There’s still plenty in the newsletter to interest, fascinate, and astound you. It’s all about Psychology, after all. Impress your friends! Confound your enemies! Check on Wednesday’s peerless publication! Meanwhile, please bang a blue button below. It’ll make the waiting go faster.
Very interesting point here! When I've taught, my experience with marking has varied widely. Sometimes, when I had a particularly talented bunch of students, it was a way to engage in dialogue with them, and it was rather enjoyable. Most of the time, even with open-ended assignments, students tend to produce remarkably similar work. And it does become tedious. In many ways, I have found marking in the humanities more rewarding than, say, marking in science or maths, but I am uncertain why that is: maybe it's something about the discipline, maybe it is something about me, maybe it is about what students are being asked to do.
I wonder what degrees are for... I did four as an undergraduate and ended up doing less "impressive" things than many of my peers. I do not regret the decision to take lots of classes. The university seemed to me to be the last chance to interact with really smart people who had devoted years of their lives to trying to understand a narrow set of topics. How could one pass on that opportunity?
Yet, most of my peers seemed to attend university, only to obtain a piece of paper that would enable them to progress to the next stage. A stage that, in many cases, included much more repetitive work, much more structure, and a lot less opportunity to think deeply and share ideas with a wide set of interesting people.
Having said that, I do think that finishing a University degree does mean a person has specific soft skills. Or at least it should mean that. It seems increasingly difficult for students not to pass. In the past, at a graduate school in the US, we were instructed to grade easily because the department needed undergraduate students to continue choosing courses in the department, thereby ensuring continued funding. What a lesson to teach the professionals you are supposed to be educating, and what a way to erode standards. I hear the situation is not as dire in the UK.