Schmidt
Rowman &
Littlefield, 2000
Review by Mike
Ryan
The status of
“professional” in America indicates to the masses that you have made something
of yourself. You have become one of the best and the brightest. But what sort of
Faustian deal had to be made to get there? The “best and the brightest”
Americans, as historian Howard Zinn has pointed out, are the people who have
engineered atrocities like the Vietnam War. More recently, these engineers have
been manufacturing the consent of the two biggest American historical events so
far in the 21st century: the farcical 2000 U.S. presidential election and the
ambiguous terror of the War on Terrorism. And where do these astute
professionals come from? They are products of the American education system, of
course.
In 1967, an
English professor at Cal State LA named Jerry Farber declared in his underground
classic essay “The Student as Nigger,” “Back in kindergarten you found out that
teachers only love children who stand in nice straight lines. And that’s where
it’s been at ever since. Nothing changes except to get worse. School becomes
more and more obviously like a prison.” If that’s true, then what are the
effects on the “inmates” after being there for 12, 16, or even 20 years if they
want to become professionals or attain graduate degrees? Jeff Schmidt addresses
the tail end of this question and explains what can be done about it in his book
Disciplined Minds: A critical look at salaried professionals and the
soul-battering system that shapes their lives.
Schmidt received
a PhD in physics from the University of California, Irvine, taught physics
around the world, and until May 31, 2000, was an articles editor at Physics
Today magazine. After publishers Rowman & Littlefield released his book,
Physics Today fired him, citing the book’s very existence as evidence that
he was not “fully engaged” at work. Of course, that’s the main idea within the
book. No sane employee in a hierarchical institution, Schmidt argues, can be
fully engaged in his or her work, because the company’s interests are in
conflict with the employee’s personal interests.
Management’s
abrupt termination of Schmidt also responded to the opening lines of
Disciplined Minds: “This book is stolen. Written in part on stolen time,
that is. I felt I had no choice but to do it that way. Like millions of others
who work for a living, I was giving most of my prime time to my employer. My job
simply didn’t leave me enough energy for a major project of my own, and no one
was about to hire me to pursue my own vision, especially given my irreverent
attitude toward employers.”
In Schmidt’s
defense, he worked at Physics Today for 19 years and consistently
received satisfactory or above average performance reviews as well as pay raises
and promotions. Obviously, he had been doing his job. However, Physics Today
management dismissed him because, “The employee admittedly used company time to
work on a personal project over an extended period of time” (Schmidt, “State
Rejects Physics Today’s Charge of Employee Misconduct,”disciplined-minds.com).
To put the company’s accusation in perspective, consider another time thief:
Albert Einstein. Einstein did a lot of his physics theorizing while at work at
the Swiss patent office, including his discovery of the notoriously subversive
equation, E=mc2.
However, wasting
time on the job is not why Schmidt was fired. Physics Today fired Jeff
Schmidt because he is a radical, activist professional. “The hidden root of much
career dissatisfaction is the professional’s lack of control over the
‘political’ component of his or her creative work,” he says in Disciplined
Minds. Physics Today‘s management would, of course, reject the idea
that such a political component even exists. Ironically, however, they drew
attention to it by firing Schmidt over his political expression.
While Schmidt
would agree with Farber that the education system as a whole works to create
obedient people, in Disciplined Minds he narrows his focus to graduate
and professional training, which, he says, “Ultimately produces obedient
thinkers—highly educated employees who do their assigned work without
questioning its goals. Professional education is a battle for the very identity
of the individual.”
Schmidt examines
and criticizes the professional credentialing process by recounting his own
struggles in graduate school, assailing GRE and other professional testing
results as nothing more than gauges that determine a person’s willingness to be
an obedient thinker and describing the conditions graduate and professional
students live under as amounting to something like that of cult indoctrination:
Exhaustion, isolation, humiliation, etc., over a period of years. Schmidt’s cult
indoctrination theory manifested itself after he interviewed students and found
their stories uncannily similar to this type of brainwashing process.
A totalitarian
graduate/professional school experience is not the one all students will have,
Schmidt says, but “for students who aren’t careful, it will be.” So, while
graduate school for Schmidt “amounted to getting paid to pursue [his] own
interests, for many other students in the very same program, graduate school was
unrelentingly stressful; they emerged looking and acting like broken versions of
their former selves.”
If you want to
become a professional, then, how do you maintain your individuality throughout
such a process? You become an iconoclast. You question authority.
Schmidt comes to
the brilliant conclusion that the United States Army’s Field Manual No.
21-78 is a resourceful handbook for those students who wish to maintain their
identity instead of giving it up to a totalitarian process. The manual was
written to teach U.S. soldiers how to resist brainwashing and exploitation as
prisoners of war, and Schmidt finds that it transfers over surprisingly well to
the intellectual bootcamp known as graduate or professional school.
Using points made
in the field manual and drawing on his own experiences as an activist grad
student and professional, Schmidt puts together a chapter called, “How to
Survive Professional Training with Your Values Intact.” The point of this
section is that “the student in professional training faces a tough choice:
Organize or conform; confront or be obliterated.”
In the last
section of the book, called “Now or Never,” Schmidt lists actions that anyone
can take in their workplace or educational institution to maintain their value
system. The main purpose behind all of the actions is to create a network of
like-minded individuals, which will allow its members to maintain their personal
perspectives. “People are individuals biologically,” he says, “but they are
individuals socially only if they maintain an independent perspective, and doing
this is an ongoing creative process based on critical thinking.” So, ranging
from subscribing to radical publications to whistle-blowing to organizing unions
to sabotage, Schmidt gives a wide range of actions limited only by the daring of
the activist in question and meant to help people foster independent minds
opposed to disciplined minds.
Jeff Schmidt is
still working on getting his job back, relying on public pressure, the large
amount of which has surprised even Schmidt. The book’s website has a big section
on efforts to help get his job back at disciplined- minds.com that includes
letters to Physics Today management from hundreds of people including
Noam Chomsky and Nobel Prize winning scientists. Whether or not Schmidt
succeeds, this penalty on Physics Today‘s reputation is a form of
justice, and a warning to authoritarian hierarchical structures everywhere.
Disciplined
Minds is not just for professionals. While they are the target audience, its
revelation is just as important for non-professionals, especially those who may
feel inferior to the institutional elite who influence most aspects of our
lives; from teachers to police officers, journalists to politicians, and lawyers
to doctors, just to name a few.
The difference
between the established professionals and the rest of us is that they have
indeed engaged in a Faustian deal with the education and professional system
that they have likely not resisted but have swallowed hook, line, and sinker to
become part of the highly touted professional class. But knowledge rules supreme
over nearly everyone. Understanding that the professionals’ facade of power is
just that, they don’t seem to have as much authority anymore, and those who
perhaps felt inferior could feel more confident and become more likely to
question the so-called “expert” and “authoritative” professional opinions and
the structures behind them. In doing so they will affirm their worth as a human
being, and they may find allies with more access to institutional machinery in
professionals like Jeff Schmidt, who are willing take on the higher sources of
authority and risk their livelihood and reputation while making changes from the
inside. Z