OPINION

Published Monday, March 7, 2005
Op-Ed: On Turning in a Dissertation 
By Kirsten Olson Lanier

March 2--As a master’s student who attends HGSE for only a year, it may feel as if you are on Appian Way for only a minute:  a brief, completely overstuffed, socially intoxicating, intellectually overflowing minute.   For some of us though, it’s as we’ve been on Appian Way most of our lives.  In fact, it seems as if most  significant aspects of our adult development (thank you Bob Kegan!) occurred in and around Longfellow, Gutman and Larsen, our memories etched into each line of the uneven brick sidewalks.  Yesterday, however, was a critical day for the eternally enrolled.    On March 1st at 4:30 p.m. as a doctoral candidate, you turned in a complete draft of the dissertation, or dropped dead.  Little marked by anyone but the desperate, frenzied HGSE inmate about to make parole, while you would not be shot or publicaly stoned if you missed this deadline--4:30 at the Committee on Degrees office, no exceptions!--you might as well have been.  Missing that moment meant a graduation delayed five months (at least), reapplying for student loans, increasing debt, rematriculating in September, and putting off practically everything else important in your life for much too long.   Although doctoral study is marked by a serious of stentorian hurdles, yesterday’s deadline was a biggie.

Poised before a copying machine at Staples like a supplicant yesterday, watching the hands of the clock while the machine collated heroically, I reflected on this important--and also utterly inconsequential--moment.    (I’ve also decided the modern prelude to all transformatory life events:  divorce, marriage, taxes, deaths, births, doctorates, is a trip to the copy shop.)    I recalled my first moments at HGSE in September 1996, when I arrived for orientation as a part-time Master’s student.   A doctoral student with long, carefully groomed dreadlocks played Stevie Wonder in the courtyard of Gutman while he ebulliently welcomed new students.   (I’m going to have fun here, I thought.)  My four little children were still in preschool or early elementary school (I frequently used their homework and class projects as grist for my own work at HGSE on the toxicity of schools), I lived in another state and commuted almost 200 miles each way to attend classes.   I was married; I had never read an educational research journal.   I was overawed, intoxicated, in love with the opportunities for learning that the Ed School and the larger university provided, and cherished the liminality of returning to graduate school in my thirties, a time for women when if they have children, it is especially difficult to engage in demanding, complicated pursuits outside the home.   Yet since the bulk of my dissertation was about the ways in which school makes people stupid, and Ivan Illich, one of the subjects of my work, observed that only the most compliant, passive, and least challenging are allowed to proceed up the university ranks, it was with decided ambivalence that I reached this milestone.

Thinking of these things—how the institution makes you and how you make the institution—I trundled down Appian Way yesterday with three copies of my dissertation overfilling my arms.  The notebooks were slippery, the weight of my tome in triplicate embarrassingly great.  It was a dark, overcast day, and one of Boston’s seventeen recent blizzards made the sidewalks on either side of Appian Way narrow and nearly impassible.  At Longfellow, a friendly young woman on the Committee on Degrees staff--who looked as if she might be the appropriate age to date my oldest son--took my dissertation in the silent, shadowy, and eerily deserted hallway.  Feeling a bit like Ernest Hemingway (what is the price of a military medal?) I asked, how many dissertations are you expecting today?  About thirty, she replied cheerily.  How many had they received so far (it was 3:05 pm)?  Ten, she said.  Either copiers were running in a frenzy all over Boston, or a lot of folks were coming back in September.  (At my first orientation meeting at HGSE, a teaching fellow joked that the school hired people to cross the stage at the school’s June doctoral graduation ceremony.)

 I have often reflected on the meaning of my learning in graduate school: all-consuming, transforming, and filled with ambivalent intensity.   What was this fearsome effort about?  Why was I, and my fellow master’s students, driven to research topics for months, to create projects that took us all over Boston interviewing and talking with people connected with schools?  (In my time at HGSE I found masters students much more interesting and intellectually adventurous than doctoral students, proving Ivan Illich’s point.)  When I became a doctoral student, why did we work in isolation on arcane projects in tiny cubicles in Gutman?  Why did we care about knowing what others, in the last decade or the last century, thought the purpose of education was?  Why did we produce mountains of thoughtful and well-written papers that would be read quickly by one professor and probably never see the light of day again, except in our own minds? 

Because we were in the process of educating ourselves, of teaching ourselves what we thought (and think) about critical issues of schooling and the spirit—trying to understand why we had such passionate feelings about education.   Certainly some professors have been central, our classes occasionally truly stimulating, but it has been our colleagues--and ourselves--who lit the way and animated the experience.  (I still think of people I met in Kay Merseth’s school reform class in 1996 who made such a powerful impression on me; I can remember where they sat in class.)   I have been transformed by my experiences at HGSE:  have grown into a more articulate and well-informed objector, I am less cowed by anyone or anything that appears to be in authority, I know why I think what I do and I’m also able to say much more clearly why many people have a vast range of other opinions.   For these things I am profoundly grateful. 

So with a thunk and a smooth thud the symbol of cumulative effort slipped from my hands onto the table at the Committee on Degrees yesterday.  Grateful, tired, estranged, connected and disconnected, I hoped I wasn’t returning in September.

Kirsten Olson Lanier hopes to graduate from HGSE in June.  Her dissertation is titled, “To Be Brave and Subversive Human Beings:  The Deschoolers of the 1960s.”