On Friday, I wrote in my post about the perceived preference for Ph.Ds at the community college:
I’m glad I have my Ph.D. (My diplomas are all in a box somewhere, mind you. Our Kind of People never put degrees on the wall, after all; it seems showy and aggressive.)
I’ve been thinking about this issue of not putting the diploma on the wall. One of my senior colleagues here is a woman from, as she describes it, “an Irish working-class family where no one went to college.” One of six children, she was the first in her family to receive a B.A., and after years of hard work, a Ph.D. Her undergraduate and graduate diplomas are framed and hang on the wall in her office. She does insist that her students address her as “Dr. Sullivan” (not her real name).
Dr. S and I are good friends, and after I got my Ph.D. in 1999, she said to me “Now you can hang a new diploma on your wall.” I told her I didn’t think that was going to happen. “Why not?”, she asked.
I told Dr. S (who, among other things, has expertise in sociology) that “in my culture”, “my people” tend to see the display of diplomas as “showing off.” Both my parents had Ph.Ds. from Berkeley; I have no idea where either one of their diplomas is hiding. For them, putting a diploma up in the office would have been like hanging a marriage license on the wall after getting home from the honeymoon! It’s one thing, I told Dr. S, to be privately proud of an accomplishment; it’s another thing to wave the proof of that accomplishment around.
I don’t know which football coach it was who said it, but some grizzled old veteran who counseled against exuberant celebration after a score always said “Act like you’ve done it before and intend to do it again very soon.” In other words, drawing attention to one’s academic accomplishments (and hanging diplomas on the office walll is certainly drawing attention) suggests that one views the acquisition of the doctorate as vaguely miraculous. It also, I told Dr. S, seemed to be inviting admiration. OKOP, I told her, are trained to downplay “that sort of thing.”
Dr. S and I were and are good enough friends to have this sort of “cross-cultural dialogue.” Dr. S wasn’t in the least offended by my reluctance to hang my various diplomas, or by my willingness to confess to her my reasons for keeping the damn things tucked in a drawer. But she also offered her own perspective:
“Hugo”, she said, “I don’t display the diploma to show off for myself. My mother and father worked terribly hard to put me through school. My husband sacrificed enormously so that I could work on my doctorate while our kids were small. No one in my family or my husband’s had ever gotten a Ph.D. before. And after all that collective effort, if I act as you do — as if a Ph.D. is ultimately not important — it makes it seem as if I don’t appreciate all that they did to help me achieve this goal. When my eighty-year old mother comes to my office, she gets to see that diploma and it makes her feel incredibly proud. Your mother, Hugo, already has a Ph.D, and though I’m sure she’s proud of you, she doesn’t need to see it the way mine does.”
Dr. S reminded me that the “OKOP dislike of ostentation” is in part a manifestation of privilege. When everyone in the family goes to college, and lots of people get Ph.Ds, and parents don’t have to work double shifts at the factory to pay for graduate school for the kids — then the newly dissertated and hooded ones can afford to be nonchalant and self-deprecating. Dr. S argued that in her case, as a woman from a working-class Irish Catholic background, she was both entitled to a greater degree of display and indeed required to “show off”. To do any less would be to disrespect the extraordinary sacrifice of her loved ones.
I’m also aware of something that Dr. S didn’t mention. We teach on a campus that has a high percentage of non-white students, as well as a majority of folks who are first-generation college students. These students need reminders that a Ph.D. is possible for them too. Those professors who hold the doctorate — and are themselves members of ethnic minorities or were, like Dr. S, first-generation college students — thus have, perhaps, an obligation to display the diploma in order to inspire the young.
I have another colleague in another department; like me, he holds a Ph.D from UCLA. He is also African-American, and he began his academic career right here at PCC. On the wall in his office, he has diplomas from each stage of his career in higher education, starting with the associate’s degree from Pasadena all the way up to the doctorate itself. Those diplomas, which hang behind his desk and stare his visitors in the face are not just there to swell his head — they are there, I suspect, to send a message to those students who look like him (but not like me) that academic success is possible for everyone if they work hard enough. Though I’ve never discussed it with this man, I suspect that this is his reason for displaying the evidence of his academic prowess so boldly. What OKOP sees as aggressive and vulgar showiness, others may see as much-needed inspiration for the next generation.
I know my diplomas are somewhere in a box in the garage. I last saw them in 2002, when I was packing up after my divorce. I have no intention of throwing them out, of course. But in all honesty, I’m not really sure what to do with them. I don’t want them on the wall in my home, or on the wall in my campus office. Perhaps I’ll just keep them tucked away forever, in the same sort of place where I keep old tax returns and insurance papers. But let me be clear that I no longer cast aspersions on those who choose to hang the evidence of their achievements for all to see. For some, perhaps, it isn’t ostentation or insecurity that drives such display: it’s the desire to honor all those who made the achievement possible. And it’s the desire to inspire a new generation to achieve similar goals. In the end, there’s nothing vulgar or showy about that.
Thank you for writing this.
I was trying to comprehend why you would bury your doctorate in a box.
In my family, high school diplomas and valedictorian awards sit over the fireplace.
And what Dr. S said holds in my family too.
To not put them up dishonors the community that helped you get there.
I’m glad you realize that it doesn’t have the same meaning for everyone. I get your perspective a bit more too.
Here’s what I see as ostentatious, aggressive, vulgar, and showy: to congratulate oneself repeatedly on the blog for not displaying diplomas and gloating about how “OKOP” would never, ever, do such a pedestrian thing like hanging their diplomas on the wall. Oh, the horror! Surely only the unwashed masses do that!
Jon, if you actually bothered to read the post it would be fairly clear that I’m not doing any self-congratulating. Rather, I’m explaining one particular cultural choice that is no more and no less valid than any other.
Thank you for writing this, Hugo. I must admit, I still don’t fully understand why it could ever be considered ostentatious to hang one’s diplomas on the wall, but then in my extended family, it’s not expected that we get advanced degrees. My dad was the first in his family to go to college, and it’s only now in his late 40s that he’s working on his MBA. (He just started classes this weekend, and will be spending all his Saturdays for the next two years in school.) My mom only has an associates degree. There’s one lawyer way back in the family on my mom’s side (a woman! my great-great-aunt Bernice, one of the first female lawyers in WI, in the 1930s) and a few BAs, but no more. I’m applying to law schools right now, and I can guarantee that my diplomas will be hanging on the wall proudly, as a testament to my parents who have worked hard to put me through school.
I guess I just don’t understand why it could be considered showy to hang one’s diplomas, period. (Unless one is pointing to them on the wall, going “Look where I went to school! Look!”) I see them more as a reminder of personal achievement, a “Look how much work I put into this. If I can do this, I can do a lot more,” than anything else. I’m glad you can admit your privilege, though. That’s really tough to do. And, I mean, it is privilege to come from a whole family of PhDs. I would bet there’s not too many people out there who can say that. Thank you for recognizing that.
And for me, on a visceral level, putting up your diploma might be like putting up your first paycheck or the tax return that reflects your first million — it’s taken me a long time to see it as something other than grandiosity and posturing, but as I tried to indicate here, I do see it differently now.
In my office, I have pictures of my wife and copies of favorite poems, old postcards, bumperstickers, and little inspirational slogans. But I don’t put up my running medals (even from the one race I won, once, a long time ago). The running medals live in a similar location to the diplomas, now that I think about it. In a lovely cardboard box, for my future children to play with.
Hugo, I did bother to read the post and it was quite clear that you were nearly breaking your arm by patting yourself on the back praising yourself for your pedigree. Note, too, that I wrote “posts” (plural) rather than “post” (singular). I was considering Friday’s post, too.
Putting running medals in the office can be simply a nonverbal way of telling your visitors a bit more about yourself. Genuine humility comes from the heart rather than what “OKOP” do or might think; it’s not evinced by posting blog entries that say little more than, “Look at me. Look at me! I am one of OKOP, not one of ‘them’.”
Sometimes it is better to be silent.
That’d make for some blog, eh, Jon? Just a big white expanse of…nothing. I’d really love to see your blog. Bet it’s a quick read.
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
-Al Einstein
(Though aspiring to mediocrity would really up your ambition.)
Well, I’m a lot like Dr. S’s Kind of People (my mother is Irish working class, never graduated high school because she joined the convent, later got her GED and nursing degrees; father immigrated from the Philippines when he joined the US Navy.) I’m the baby of the family, but the first among my siblings to go to college and to get my law degree from a top law school. All my diplomas? Somewhere in boxes, where I never even think about them. This is not meant as any disrespect to my family (who didn’t pay my way anyway, I had to), and I don’t think they take it as such. In fact, I think both my parents would consider hanging the diplomas in my office a showy act. We are mostly just low-key folk.
So I’m not sure any of this degree-hanging has much to do with being any particular Kind of Socioeconomic or Cultural People. I think some people are just more private about their accomplishments than others.
I think this also depends on the sort of degree one acquires. I threw my undergrad diploma in a desk drawer for several reasons. I didn’t work very hard to get it, the only thing I came to enjoy about my undergrad institution was the friends I met there in my fraternity and outside of it, and lastly that my BA is philosophy is fairly useless and a subject of outright derision among some people.
When I graduate from law school, on the other hand (knock on wood), I will definetly be framing that diploma and hanging it up in my place of business. As a lawyer, simply presenting it for inspection seems like some sort of standard practice, in the same way that you might like to see the diploma of the guy who will be performing surgery on you. You just want that little bit of extra assurance. Also, while my GPA is fairly poor (only a 2.9, sadly) I have been working much harder here than undergrad. And, I can’t deny that lawyers, even ambulance-chasing personal-injury shysters, do get a fair amount of prestige in society. If I were pursuing a MA in philosophy, I would likely feel differently.
I can’t deny that my family’s views on higher education has something to do with it, as well. Among both sides of my family getting an undergrad degree was seen as practically mandatory, and on Dad’s side the overwhelming majority have some form of graduate degree (and some doctorates). I’ve always felt somewhat inferior to a lot of my relatives, so just to pump up my own self esteem I plan on hanging my degree. When I get that, I’ll know I have “arrived”, so to speak.
That’d make for some blog, eh, Jon? Just a big white expanse of…nothing.
When someone makes an unseemly display of hypocrisy, he can expect to be called on it, as I did with Hugo.
I’m sitting here laughing at your petty, juvenile attempts at insults.
Gentlemen, leave it be. I skipped Ibod’s comment the first time, and probably ought to have deleted it, but there it is.
Jon, in all seriousness, I guess I’m not doing as good a job as I’d like to do of making the case that I’m keenly aware of privilege here. In my OKOP posts, I do my damndest to make it clear that I don’t confuse upper-middle class WASP privilege and luck with genuine virtue. I seem to have failed to do that here.
I’m getting the impression, from a year or so of reading your blog, that your “OKOP” may be a smaller group than you think…
Carlavii, it is indeed a small, small group. But if you read the Preppy Handbook, you’ll find — even in satire — that our numbers are not infinitesimal!
To the extent that I think about framing and hanging diplomas, it’s more as a display of a professional qualification than as a personal accomplishment. If I see a framed diploma on the wall of a professional’s (doctor, dentist, lawyer, professor) office, I see it as a proxy for that person’s training and work-related competency. It can certainly be argued that diplomas aren’t very good proxies for these things - prestige doesn’t always indicate quality, and an individual’s abilities and accomplishments may exceed or not live up to those of the institution. Still, it may be reassuring for a patient or student or client to see the diploma and other professional certificates on the wall, even if it feels like showing off to the person who earned the degree.
Great, you have discovered that we all deploy diverse cultural resources to make meaning of things like a Ph.D. sheepskin. You are quite the semiotician! Oh no, I should be careful. I’m starting to sound like one of those Ed.D. people. (Can you be modest about not displaying your Ph.D. diploma while disparaging those whose doctoral degrees use different letters of the alphabet?)
I enjoyed your blog. Keep up the good work.
Can you be modest about not displaying your Ph.D. diploma while disparaging those whose doctoral degrees use different letters of the alphabet?
Hah! Caught red-handed am I!
Is this the point in the whole discussion where I get to say, “but some of my best friends are Ed.Ds or hang their diplomas on the wall”?
No?
Oh.
I think it can be really important, in some cases, to display. There are real problems with, for example, people pretending to be lawyers or notary publics or what have you, for the purpose of ripping people off. I suppose it’s easy enough to get a fake diploma, but I think there’s still value in making it easy for people to check that the qualifications are in order.
See for example this article, I thought it was interesting:
http://www.nationalnotary.org/news/index.cfm?Text=newsNotary&newsID=652
“The problem of unscrupulous Notaries pretending to be “Notarios Publicos” remains a major threat to immigrants residing in the United States, as a settlement of a class action suit in Chicago, Illinois, recently showed.”
if I act as you do — as if a Ph.D. is ultimately not important
Sounds like Dr. S is doing a bit of cultural imposition herself. She sees failing to display a diploma as treating the status of having a Ph.D. as “ultimately not important”.
I understand you’re talking about privilege and perspective, Hugo, but I think Dr. S. has sold you a bit of a bill of goods. Plenty of people from wealthy, educated families proudly spread their degrees all over the wall. Plenty of people from humble backgrounds feel that the achievement and showing it off are not synonymous.
My father-in-law, the son of a blacksmith, worked his way up through his education, won a Fulbright scholarship, and refused to go by “Dr.” even though he’d amply earned his Ph.D. I guess your Dr. S would have wagged her finger at him for acting all privileged and stuff.
“Act like you’ve done it before and intend to do it again very soon.”
Interesting.
That’s how I behaved during my first sit-down in the West Wing.
Rudy, here’s hoping you do get many more opportunities to do just that.
I do hear that Dr. Sullivan isn’t representative of all those from her background any more than I am of mine; interesting, though, that we both see our decisions about displaying our credentials as rooted in our upbringing rather than in our personalities.
And I do think professors are unlike notaries or dentists. We are professionals, but we don’t pass a specific licensing exam; those who do require state licensing ought perhaps to display evidence of that. The woman who cuts my hair has her cosmetology license staring me in the face, I note….
This was a hot topic of discussion at my workplace lately. As you know, I have a degree from a pretty prestigious university, and for 5.5 of the 6 years I’ve worked here, it was in a box in my spare bedroom at home. I kind of wanted to put it up in my office, but literally none of my coworkers had put up their diplomas, and I feared that putting mine up, especially with the name on it, would be sending a message to my coworkers that I thought I was better than they were.
Several office and staff moves later, I realized that every one of my coworkers now displayed diplomas in their office. So I finally went and got mine framed and brought it in.
I’m the first in my working-class family to earn a college degree, and I overcame a number of pretty serious obstacles to do it. I am immensely proud of the work I did and grateful for the sacrifices my family made to make that happen. But I didn’t want to seem braggy about it, especially when I was acutely aware that some of my coworkers already thought I came from a wealthy, privileged background (so untrue!).
But I finally don’t feel so self-conscious about it, and I’m glad it’s there. When I look at it, it reminds ME of what I’m capable of accomplishing.
interesting, though, that we both see our decisions about displaying our credentials as rooted in our upbringing rather than in our personalities
More specifically, both of you see it as rooted in your and your family’s social class, rather than in your personalities or your family’s quirks.
I just don’t have a lot of patience for people like Dr. S who like to dress up their own preferences as I’m More Righteous Than You.
So I was browsing through the lastest issue of Newsweek and found an article called, “The Way of the WASP.” The last line reads, “He might invoke another old-WASP rule: if you’ve got it, don’t flaunt it.” I thought of this post…
Love it! It’s a fine rule.
“Act like you’ve done it before and intend to do it again very soon.”
Paul Brown perhaps?
I’m thinking how to work that quote into the sex education talk with my children..
We use a variant of that quote in our youth soccer association.. doesn’t apply as well in the professional leagues.
“And I do think professors are unlike notaries or dentists. We are professionals, but we don’t pass a specific licensing exam” - Is the US system really that lax? I did pass a specific exam in which my competancies to be deemed a professional in the field were examined. This was done by other noted experts in the field. But then perhaps this is why in the UK, Ph.D.s go on to do a few to several more years of research before being allowed to teach to students (a few tutorials aside). There are no transcripts; as my crusty don (who kept demanding the viva be done in latin) stated, “You have been deemed to be an expert in your field by a panel of what are now your peers; what else is of import?”
I am glad you feel as your family does about degrees because I must confess here, I never bothered to pick up my PCC degree. Did you mail it to me perhaps or is it sitting in an office somewhere? Since the stuffy Canadian university deemed that any education given by Americans was at default inferior, I had to repeat every single course anyway. The price you pay for an A.A. I suppose. I do however like, when people are getting out the lots of letters business cards to give them the ones with all the letters ending in A.A. - since of course, no one outside the US has a clue what that means - many assume I am an architect.
Hugo - Is Doris Lessing YKOP?
Lessing? Oh, she’s wickedly good. But her world is so very different. Some of her current views on feminism are positively vile, but I love her work.
I think that if I were to ever end up with anything so exalted as a Ph.D, I’d be hard pressed not to display it, even if I perceived that the general immediate social culture said not to. Not necessarily to flaunt it to others, but to flaunt it to myself; my love / hate relationship with hard work in general and academia in specific has been such a huge part of my life for so long, I could hardly bear to stash in a storage box the proof that I had accomplished such a thing.
Hugo - My question on Lessing stemmed from her reaction to winning the Nobel.
Oh, she was charming.