“Credentials in a Credential-Obsessed Society”

Like any ambitious college student with lofty visions of changing the world, I’ve been thinking about applying to prestigious national scholarships like the Rhodes, the Fulbright, the Truman, the Marshall, the Udall, insert-more-names-of-old-white-guys, et cetera. So I was stunned when I mentioned to a mentor that I had thought about applying for the Rhodes Scholarship,  and he said, “Don’t waste your time. You won’t get it.”

In my head I could do anything, and it was something that had been echoed by friends, professors, and university administration. But friends and professors have nothing to lose in doling out encouragement, and university administration certainly doesn’t mind having more students attempt to win national scholarships. No one looks at the statistics of the percentage of failed applications, yet it makes headlines when a student wins a Fulbright and garners plenty of good press.

For an hour or so after my ego had been demolished, I scoured the internet for something to lift my spirits. I first looked for scholars that I thought I might resemble to a scholarship committee. When this was unsatisfying (I’ve won only 1 local award for community service and leadership, and have yet to start a foundation to save African orphans or do major scientific research with an internationally acclaimed institute), I turned my efforts to looking for blemishes in their academic records. Nothing of course. Only the occasional “black belt in judo” or the mention of someone being “an avid belly dancer,” and even these were tacked on to the ends of long lists of accomplishments to demonstrate the scholar’s well-roundedness.

And then I stumbled upon this gem:

“..Michael Kinsley has stated that the Rhodes Scholarship ‘is a credential in a credential-obsessed society.’ The result, he says, is that it has a self-fulfilling character, choosing those who are embarked for success and giving them an extra boost.”

This is a quote from Thomas and Kathleen Schaeper’s book Cowboys into Gentlemen: Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite, first published in 1998. In it, they delineate the history of the Rhodes Scholarship and its namesake, its effect on other national scholarships like the Fulbright as well as on major academic institutions, and the lives Rhodes Scholars lead after completing their studies. You can imagine my delight — at last, a blemish!

This delight didn’t last, however, as I continued to read. In fact, it was replaced by a mild case of Now-I-Feel-Stupid. The excerpt I’d read was merely one of many views of the scholarship that the authors noted, and the conclusion is much less satisfying to the person who is looking to belittle the winners of these competitions in an attempt to regain a sense of worth.

“‘You share this dirty little secret with other Rhodes Scholars, which you know and they know but no one else knows: that it doesn’t really mean much at all.’

..What he was referring to is society’s exaggerated opinions of Rhodes Scholars. Isaacson [a Rhodes Scholar] said that Rhodes Scholars themselves know that winning the scholarship does not mean that they are smart or that they will revolutionize the world. ..Isaacson was too modest.. but he was right in indicating that most Rhodes Scholars are not some combination of Albert Einstein and Indiana Jones who will transform science, government, and education while also bringing permanent peace to the world. The great majority of Rhodes Scholars are well adjusted enough to know that they do not fit that mold.”

Luckily for me, whatever exaggerated opinions of Rhodes Scholars I may have had are less the product of Rhodes Scholars being superhuman beings than they are of my own attempt to fetishize a label that will neither prove that I am an exceptional human being nor make me one.

So much for the easy way out.

This isn’t to say, however, that society isn’t credential-based and highly judgmental. That universities announce scholarship winners like mothers announcing pregnancies (of the wanted kind) and that Rhodes Scholars are not imbued with divine capabilities is an opportunity for us to look at the ways in which we are characterized by a culture of judging, labeling, and ranking.

That would be interesting, but it still doesn’t solve my immediate problem of trying to figure out what the hell I should do with my life. Back to the drawing table.

Susan Sontag

“None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.”

– Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966)

“The method [of taking pictures as you travel] especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic – Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”

– Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)

Susan Sontag really resonates with me. Specifically her discussions on the high versus the low, the line between theory and immediate human experience, thought and the visceral. The easy question to ask is, “Is the visceral more valid or more real than the theoretical?” But the fluidity and contextuality of “reality” renders this question moot.

If there was a Victim of Work Ethics Anonymous group, I’d join it. My mentality vacillates between a stifling sense of responsibility and guilt. The sense of responsibility comes from my feeling that I need to have something to show for each and every experience. And even though this anxiety is strong, it is forgotten in the moment of the experience, only to be replaced later by guilt. And then once in a while the guilt is instead replaced with satisfaction; for instance, when I bring back 300 photos taken on a trip abroad. I’m more than self-satisfied — I’m grateful. Grateful that I’ve spared myself guilt — a mere third step in the manifestation of a work driven mentality.

Sontag specifically refers to interpretation as a search for meaning, which reductively obscures the beauty of a work. Sontag’s point in Against Interpretation is not that interpretation is “bad,” but that “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” But I read her rebellion against interpretation as a rejection of the anxiety and guilt-inducing work ethic. Interpretation is work. It is symptomatic of our need to understand and to analyze, in order to feel that we’ve done something productive with a given piece of work.

An exercise in thought, “The Economics of Gender and Mental Illness”

The title of this periodical intrigued me. Since the periodical includes a number of studies and it’s not particularly light reading (i.e. I’m lazy and don’t know enough on this topic to read  easily), I decided to just focus on one article, entitled “Gender Differences in Mental Disorders in the US national Comorbidity Survey,” by Ronald C Kessler. 

Going in, at the most basic level, I was curious as to how mental illnesses differed between the male and female sexes and how much of this was attributed to some sort of genetic “real” difference between the genders and how much of it would be attributed to more socially/culturally contextualized reasons for differences in gender. 

The study begins by defining its terms: diagnoses of mental illnesses of participants in the study were based on the definitions and critera in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or, for short, the DSM — the 3rd edition, revised was used, so the study refers to this version as “DSM-III-R”).

The most interesting assessment that the study made was this: previous data had showed that women are more likely than men to seek treatment for mental health problems, and this was due to women having a higher “perceived need”  — that is, women are more likely than men to perceive themselves as needing help, even when the severity of the mental illness for both men and women is the same. A study on “perceived need” demonstrated that this was indeed the case — women having a higher “perceived need” score than men. The study also notes that it is interesting that there is, however, no difference in the likelihood of actually seeking treatment given that the perceived need score is the same for men and women. 

 My thought was: perhaps it’s not that women have a higher perceived need, but that conventions of masculinity discourage men from conceptualizing their emotional problems as mental health issues requiring treatment. The flip side: that women are more comfortable seeing themselves as needing treatment.  Or a combination of both of these.

In the conclusion, Kessler outlines major theories that have been proposed as an explanation for the higher perceived need in women. The first theory was that women have more serious bodily symptoms than men. Kessler notes that the “empirical evidence fails to document a strong difference of this sort.” The second theory, which is the same as the one I proposed, is summed up eloquently by Kessler as the idea that “women are socialized to more readily adopt the sick role than men.” Kessler says that, while this has not been fully substantiated, further studies have at least been consistent with this idea.

The crux of this study is that, even given that women seek and receive more treatment than men, they do not have a “less persistent or severe course of mental illness than men.” Kessler points to the plausibility that women receive less adequate teatment because they are more likely to be seen by primary health care doctors rather than mental health specialists.” He doesn’t explain why this may occur, but it’s disturbing to think that there could be bias against women receiving the mental health treatments they need. 

Source: “The Economics of Gender and Mental Illness”, Research in Human Capital and Development Vol. 15, Ed. by Virginia Wilcox-Gok & Dave E. Marcott, 2004