Herr Professor Daddy? I didn’t think so.

Weird presents; I would agree that they are reflecting gender norms and seriously confusing a mentor and authority figure with the only other “women’s role” they are accustomed to identifying with these characteristics. On top of that they are infantilizing themselves as well!

However I would be careful with the empirical claim that female profs/advisors more often have to field ‘life issues’/ do emotional work. I am a male and would say that for the majority of my students these things come up, which was a bit of a surprise for me.

In junior high school I once, in a Freudian slip, addressed my science teacher (whom I liked and whose class I was quite into) as “Mom.”

For many students, it may be that the specific case “mother” is simply an extraordinarily salient archetype that frames the general category “female authority figure.” Lack of familiarity with other variants of this category may be to blame; childhood upbringing could turn out to be a predictive factor.

As a grad student myself, I’m mystified and a little creeped out by the sentiment—sure, I’ve always thought of my faculty advisers as mentors and colleagues, but parents? That’s taking things a bit too far IMO . . .

Hands up all on this board who think of Eszter as a mother figure.

I agree it’s weird and unsettling. I concede (without data) it may be gender-assymmetric. Beyond that, I’m not sure what it means. Maybe the undergrads are getting less excited about being independent members of society and are trying to extend their childhoods? Maybe all their parents are divorced and they hardly see their fathers any more? Maybe for them “daddy” is the dialectical partner of “bitch,” and that’s why you don’t see those cards? Who knows what “mommy” means to them anyway? I see Urban Dictionary offers:
2) Used as a adjective for a female who is superior to someone; used by females to infer superior status over another, particularly a male.
Mommyyyy, can I go out and play?

I’m your mommy, boy, respect this shit.
Tutelary!

Many universities plow resources into getting female students and female professors to develop personal rapports as a way to make women feel comfortable in the academy (or something), and many female professors treat this as one of the more satisfying parts of their jobs, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise when female students expect emotional relationships with their female professors.

In n=1 land, my girlfriend always referred to my advisor as my “[academic field] daddy”, but she meant it more in the daddy/bitch sense that Richard alludes to than in the paternal sense.

Hmm. Isn’t your thesis adviser your “Doktorvater” auf Deutsch?
(Disclaimer- not intended as a serious comment!)

I’m willing to bet that #1 is dead on with the point that male professors who send the right signals will also be looked to for emotional support, and that any particular reasons why this doesn’t happen more in certain contexts is not talked about a whole lot, though I’m sure all of this varies considerably across disciplines, departments, &c., as well.

IMO the more interesting issue raised by this post is whether a female professor who doesn’t signal such openness typically suffers more disapproval than a male professor who doesn’t. I would bet this also varies a lot across disciplines.

I get the emotional stuff, but I also get bottles of whisky. Single malt [g].

I assume you mean “professor” in the US sense of “anybody on the faculty”. I don’t think British professors have as much personal interaction with undergraduate students as their junior colleagues do.

I would reiterate Nick’s point at #11 that you seem to have missed the joke with My Beautiful Mommy. Also, I don’t know enough about the context of “I love my mommy” to understand what the joke was supposed to be, but I’m willing to give the students the benefit of the doubt about knowing the difference between their female professors and their mommies. This could be a generation gap issue. For example, when I was in college, I would have thought it was funny to get my best friend a birthday card which said it was for “my special grandson,” or something like that. I’m not saying this actually would have been funny–just that this is probably the sort of humor the students in your friend’s class were making a (failed) attempt at.

I think there is something about the relationship between PhD students and their supervisor that’s a bit like that between an (adult) child and their parent. I notice it when the supervisor is male, as well.

Undegraduates are different. In undergraduate teaching, you have more students, you see less of them and the relationship doesn’t continue for as long (PhD candidates submitting after 3 years – we live in hope!). The relationship is qualitatively different.

An additional complication for female advisors with female students is when the student is pregnant. (PhD students are, after all, often at a suitable age for starting a family, and university maternity leave is better than a lot of employers).

“An additional complication for female advisors with female students is when the student is pregnant.”

Not sure what this is suggesting but I fear I am not going to like it…

In our pedagogy classes in my PhD program, our professors blatantly tell us that female adjuncts and female TAs will be treated differently than their male counterparts. This runs the gamut from inappropriate comments to lack of respect in the classroom, judging their sartorial choices and being more willing to question their judgment/expertise on class material that goes beyond a critical spirit.

Having sat in on female colleagues’ classes, our instructors were entirely correct.

I freely admit that women face many challenges in the academy, but I’m with #20 (and #2, strangely): There’s always a bit of a parent-child relationship to any supervisory situation, though it’s usually quite minor. In graduate school this is orders of magnitude more present because of the inordinate power that graduate advisors hold over their students, the vastly greater amount of time they spend together, and the fact that the advisor is now the student’s primary source of information and advice about what they will do with their lives. I, like aaron_m, was quite surprised by how often it occurs amongst my students.

Agreed and, I might say, pretty obvious. Having just spent a week travelling with friends, leaving my girlfriend at home I can say there are some pretty obvious differences between how men interact with men versus how they interact with women, and I hear the same goes for the other two permutations.

This is a situation where I feel like the discussion of equality comes dangerously close to discussions of sameness. Men and women are different and you have to expect they’ll be treated differently. It’s very easy for a man expressing too much intimacy to come off as creepy and its very easy for a woman expressing too much authority or anger to come off as bitchy or whiny. Is that fair? Probably not. Should it be that way? Maybe. Given the genetic and biological differences between the two sexes, I wouldn’t be surprised if certain behaviors that we see as unfair are actually a part of what got humanity as far as we’ve come, a necessary precondition of our evolution to this point.

This is just anecdotal, but your post is anecdotal too. My thesis adviser is a woman and tho she provides me with plenty of intellectual stimulation, I wouldn’t dream of buying her a “mommy” book. We have a traditional student/professor relationship. And though we are friendly, I certainly wouldn’t go to her for emotional nourishment. Maybe the difference is that I have a wife.

Matthew I am soooooo interested to hear how women being unfairly perceived as bitchy or whiny is ‘part of what got humanity as far as we’ve come, a necessary precondition of our evolution to this point.’

Also, I should note that the bitch/little girl Catch-22 for women in all supervisory positions is quite real. It’s unfair and it’s something that will take a major sea change in the way we view authority to change it, so I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.

“…putting the female prof in a mothering role, a role that certainly isn’t emphasizing her academic strengths and credentials.”

Surely, it doesn’t diminish them! Attaching something emotional to the teacher-student diad should only help learning.

Seamus’s experience: maybe it’s because i didn’t head into grad school right after college, maybe it’s my personality, or maybe something else entirely, but i’ve never really thought of my grad profs (or undergrad, now that i think of it) as anything other than professors: people who had thought about subject x a hell of a lot more than me, are probably smarter than me, and are willing to engage me in something resembling a conversation between equals.

exactly describes my undergrad experience. I would have been horrified to think of my instructors as parental figures, and I was all of 17 when I started. Probably that is partially because of being a private person, but in general I did not look for, expect, or want parenting or nurturing from them. My classmates who did seemed to be doing so as a manipulative tactic at least as often as anything else.

I’ve read and heard enough here and elsewhere not to doubt that many professors are swamped with emotional demands and assumptions by students. I also don’t doubt that (broadly speaking) it differs by the professor’s gender. Given the coldhearted/mommy dichotomy, I wonder what the effective ways are to combat it, for women. All I can think of is to be publicly explict, right from the beginning in every class, about not being willing to do it. I am quite sure that would earn the coldhearted moniker in a heartbeat, though.

Eszter is entirely right. Certainly every advisor-advisee relation is different and people have considerable room to shape it in different ways, but that’s part of the underlying point: it’s because of the leeway, and the fact that the advisor has to bring the advisee’s work up to standards that the advisee may not fully understand at the start, that the relationship is in certain ways constantly under renegotiation. Being a man gives you more ability to set boundaries, more ways to be firm at key junctures, to ask for more work. Some of the Mommy stuff noted above, in addition to its overall creepiness, looks like emotional blackmail.

Vivian’s above comment is right on. Couldn’t agree more. Why assume that emotional rapport and intellectual/professional respect must be mutually exclusive? Admittedly, it’s not easy to find the right balance when combining the two; but it can — and ideally ought to — be done, no matter whether the people involved are female or male. Instead of castigating students who seek emotional support in female professors, we should bemoan the fact that they don’t feel comfortable seeking it in their male teachers, and think what can be done to change that.

I never heard any of this mommy rhetoric when I was an undergrad (which, other than a few one-off lecturing gigs over the years, is as far as my college experience extended), but I’ve recently noticed it cropping up between women in my field, where one is a recent college grad and the other has some career experience. For most people these days, their immediate post-collegiate career is much more stressful and disorienting than their undergrad experience; I think grad school is probably the same way.

This post made me think about why, when I was younger, I found I overall preferred to work for women, not that I didn’t have some great male bosses (my field is one where you tend to move around a lot, so you experience a lot of different supervisors). I think in some ways it was because I’d be more comfortable discussing interpersonal and emotional issues which might affect my work, without being judged as weak or unreliable. I’m male, BTW, and as everyone knows there are still strong social taboos about guys discussing emotional subjects with each other.

I suspect that in many fields graduate students get intellectual stimulation from a wide circle of people, not just their advisors. So perhaps they place more importance on the emotional support that their advisor can give. Perhaps rather than judging this sentiment as unprofessional, one should ask why male professors can’t be more nurturing and emotionally supportive.

I had almost all female tutors and supervisors all through my academic career, but thinking about it now, there was only one with whom I had a vaguely ‘mother-daughter’ relationship. And that was for my PhD, when I was a mature married student, not when I was a shy 18 year old doing my BA. Other than the very differing personalities of the women concerned, there were two key diferences. One was that I was at my academically most vulnerable doing the PhD (as opposed to emotionally vulnerable generally). It’s when you’re really worrying about whether you’re good enough to hack it that nuturing is so important. I remember at an early stage of my PhD my supervisor talking to me after we’d heard a conference paper and saying ‘your question at the end was a good one’ and that care and interest was a significant moral boost.

The second thing is that my PhD supervisor was very explicitly a feminist. And feminism, particular the feminist historical tradition, has a strong emphasis both on honouring foremothers and on educating ‘daughters’ in positive ways. So I think an educational ‘mother-daughter’ model is very often inherent in the way feminist scholars see their relationship towards female students.

I’ve treated my female lecturers and tutors differently from my male ones, and I think that’s inevitable and that there’s nothing wrong with it. A case that might be somewhat similar to the ones you’ve described is that my supervisor for my final-year undergrad computer science (group) project, we gave her a teddy bear at the end of the year in thanks. She’d let us know a lot about her, including that she liked teddy bears. I doubt we ever would’ve bought a teddy bear for a male in the same role, but I doubt we ever would’ve known
Then again, for my final-year undergrad psychology (group) project (with largely the same group — I did a Cognitive Science/Computer Science double degree), our supervisor was again female. I forget how we thanked her, but it was much less personal. She was a lot older than our comp. sci. tutor or any of us, so a guy liked them.

Then again, for my final-year undergrad psychology (group) project (with largely the same group — I did a Cognitive Science/Computer Science double degree), our supervisor was again female. I forget how we thanked her, but it was much less personal. She was a lot older than our comp. sci. tutor or any of us, so it would’ve been hard to relate to her as a friend. As it was, she was more like a boss. I think that worked to our (or at least, my) and her disadvantage both. Then again again, one mother is quite enough for me, thanks.

Just to add to the anecdote pile: I’m a male academic, and my students – especially female undergraduates – fairly often approach me for non-academic support. I don’t mind this, since I feel fatherly fond of them, I want to help, and I have some experience of mental health issues as patient and as carer.

The wider issue for me, here, is the tension between professional and personal which is built into the student-teacher relationship: on the one hand, I fill a bureaucratic role in which my main purpose is to credential my students; on the other, I have Socratic commitments to being a certain sort of friend to them (perhaps not the sort of friend they’d go out drinking with). My job would be easier in many ways if I stuck to the professional bit, but it’d also be much less worthwhile. My worry is that as student-teacher ratios get worse and worse (in the UK), the Socratic part of the job is going to become less and less possible.

ll I can think of is to be publicly explict, right from the beginning in every class, about not being willing to do it.

From experience, I know that I have to send explicit signals that though I am willing to give academic and career support, I am not willing to give its emotional counterpart. Apparently, some students thought that I was cold-hearter. I don’t know if that would be more of an issue if I were a woman.

Some PhD. advisers actually encourage parent/children framing of their relations with their students. Friends of mine were invited to a diner at their advisers house, and they asked them if they would accept to mark their heights with a line of paint where all their “other” children had. In France, as in Germany, advisers are also regularly called “père” or “mère”, but I never heard “papa” or “maman” .

“Some PhD. advisers actually encourage parent/children framing of their relations with their students. Friends of mine were invited to a diner at their advisers house, and they asked them if they would accept to mark their heights with a line of paint where all their “other” children had. In France, as in Germany, advisers are also regularly called “père” or “mère”, but I never heard “papa” or “maman” .!”

OK, now I’m horrified again.

Maybe it’s more about community. A PhD student is a candiate for being accepted into a community, with a community’s ties of mutual obligation, shared ethical standards, and acceptance of bizarre quasi-religious beliefs (e.g. whatever theories are current in your discipline).

In (for example) a Church group, you can ask a fellow congregationist for slightly more than just answers to questions of doctrine or biblical knowledge. To the extent that an academic community really is a community, you can ask things that go a little beyond the strict subject matter. But not too far, and don’t forget that obligations are mutual.

To compare it to the parent-child relation perhaps puts it a bit too strongly – you certainly can’t ask your supervisor to do your laundry for you, for example. (As an adult, you shouldn’t be asking your real mom that, either).

The therapist can be aware of this process without encouraging it too much.

A lot of therapists would say, on the contrary, that transference is essential is the therapy is going to have any value. Expertise is fine but the real value of the therapist is allowing you to experience various emotions that you’re not nortmally consicous of, in a setting where you can be.

I’m not sure this translates into the classroom but I’m not sure it doesn’t — a certain emotional attachment to the instructor is probably vital to the learning process for at least some students. There seems to be a larger issue here of whether we expect (or want!) people to be rational liberal monads, with emotional attachements limited to a few prescribed settings.

Which raises the question touched on by Susan at 54 — what is the positive model of the teacher-student relationship we’re opposing to the creepy Mommy stuff? Is it a purely professional, arms-length relationship like you would have with a lawyer or plumber or grocery-store clerk? Or is some kind of deeper personal connection in fact necessary or desirable?

I wish there were more discussion of this. I’m the nurturing type. I do push my students intellectually and I think they appreciate that as well. I don’t think my good evaluations are all about the personal relationship aspect of my teaching. However, I do know that the fact that I had a lot of experience with younger people prior to teaching and I genuinely care about and respond to their emotional needs, their fears, insecurities, personal struggles and so on makes a difference in my reputation as a teacher. I think this would be appreciated by students coming from a male professor but it would be above and beyond what they expect. I’d be a hero. As a woman professor who is kind and caring, I’m behaving according to what they feel entitled to expect from a woman.

The times when I’ve been distracted by my own research and whatnot and not been able to make it clear that my criticisms are accompanied by the willingness to help students or I forgot to couch any criticism in a great deal of reassurance I’ve ended up with students who were angry in ways that were very disconcerting. With some male students, I had this strange feeling I’d emasculated them by pointing out any flaws in their papers. Usually, I don’t wish I were a man but there have been times when teaching that it just seems like it would be so much easier to be a man.

I know that some women professors don’t have this experience but in my experience I do what I’ve learned to do in every setting, which is to present my authority and intelligence in a way that is acceptable within a sexist context. Men automatically get a level of respect that woman have to do much more to earn.

I would be amazed if no gender bias were discovered in student evaluations. One very brilliant female professor in my department who is not nurturing has been described to me by students as ‘arrogant.’ Some of them resent her tremendously. I have a hard time imagining a male professor like her being so described or being so resented.

There are these woman who have this knack of somehow rising above these dynamics and it feels like that is the challenge for women–to do that. I’d say those are the woman who rise to the top of my field. For some of us though, this is simply not something we are good at.

Is this just a reflection of the infantilization rampant in the general culture? Or is that merely my perception due my aging decrepitude. It seems to me that children these days are more… dysfunctional. Sexual relations seem to be more shallow, parents if they were present at all are either abusive or smothering. If that is true then it would seem to me that feeling emotionally dependent (transference) on the first stable authority figure to come along in your life is to be expected.

But teaching does seem to be toward the more-emotional-work end of the continuum.

Teaching what? Are student/teacher relationships creepier in the philosophy department or the entomology department? God help me, I want to know.

Novakant, I have a good friend with a small law practice who says the same thing, that he does the most good for the clients by listening to them, and that makes the paperwork parts of the job worthwhile for him.

I did once mention to my (undergrad) advisor that he was sort of an intellectual ‘father’ to me, (having truly given good advice, support, ideas and generally being interested in my ill-formed ideas.) He blandly said “Oh, is that the role I get in your psychodrama?” I replied that Freud only gave us about four template roles , which reminded him of a great book I should read… etc. (wonderful advisor, a real mensch. Died much too young.)

However, I was as likely to nurture my professors as seek reassurance from them. Frex, bought one a bike helmet when he didn’t wear one. (He still didn’t wear it.)

Some of the commenters here seem to think that the only issue here is of female academics being perceived as nurturing. Maybe people are in a hurry and haven’t clicked on the link to the second example. How can anyone not see a problem with “My Beautiful Mommy”? Unless it was an in-joke between teacher and student (and even then, hmmm) it has overtones of the teacher needs to get cosmetic surgery.

How can anyone not see a problem with “My Beautiful Mommy”?

Well it was stated in the Twitter thing that it was a gag gift. Presumably there’s some private joke behind it. Perhaps the diss. director has openly had cosmetic surgery.

” Presumably there’s some private joke behind it. Perhaps the diss. director has openly had cosmetic surgery.”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha…. I still don’t get it :(

Um, oops? (I guess it would be really inappropriate to say thanks for this original and unexpected gift, hunh.)

neat.

Do you remember the spelling?:)

Ezter Hartigay. Thanks for being her mother: she gave me the gadgetiest gadget a boy could have hoped for.