Forgiving My Advisor (Part II)

(Part I)

I do not think it was a coincidence, that it was precisely when I started dating Miriam in 2011 that I made my major breakthrough that messianism, with its contradictory political and spiritual elements, is the product of a dialectic between what I had come to think of as the military, esoteric, and missionary models of religion. Military model messianism is fulfilled through the success of a political state. The esoteric and missionary models of messianism look forward to the elimination of this very political state that the military model clings to. Messianism, as we find it in Judaism, is a marriage between these different sides with the different parties wanting contrary things and simply talking past each other. This has allowed Judaism to function as a united religion. Granted, the topic I was working on was still not something that I was qualified to work on but at least I had a coherent argument to make.

Even though I was now living in California, I remained in regular correspondence with my advisor and sent him drafts of the chapters I was writing. He eventually agreed to allow me to drop the parts about Christianity and Islam to focus on Judaism. Furthermore, recognizing that what I had written was now significantly longer than a conventional dissertation, he allowed me to hand in only the first four chapters of my project. Chapter one laid out my general theoretical framework for the different models of religion and how they relate to messianism. Chapter two dealt with the biblical period and the fact that the messianism of the prophets required the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Chapter three dealt with the Second Temple Period and focused heavily on the Dead Sea Sect and its messianic rejection of the political establishment. Chapter four dealt with the post-Temple rabbis and their development of a spiritual messianism that took political activity off the table in the present by placing it in the forever-distant future.

While my advisor had his criticisms, particularly when it came to how my arguments were organized, he strongly praised my work. He was impressed with my research and found my arguments to be brilliant. He made it clear that he was on board with what I was doing and wanted to make sure that everyone else who read my work was as impressed as he was. Judging by his comments, his favorite section was the Second Temple chapter. For the Rabbinic chapter, he expressed some reservations as to whether I was really writing about messianism, but he made it clear that he thought that I was doing fantastic work. 

Spurred on by my advisor's support, I put my heart and soul into improving the dissertation to make my arguments clear to anyone reading them for the first time. By May of 2013, I had a coherent dissertation that came in around three hundred pages. My advisor now felt that what I had produced was good enough to start showing it to other scholars who might wish to serve on my committee. It was here that disaster struck. Readers started to respond that this was not a dissertation.

The right thing for my advisor would have been to go to the department and acknowledge that this was his fault and I deserved the doctorate. I was in this mess precisely because I had listened to him and did my best to do what he told me. Either I should be given an honorary doctorate, or I should be given funding to write a new dissertation, with him agreeing to pay any penalty to make that happen. Instead, my advisor decided to pretend that, for all of these years, I had simply been going off on my own instead of doing my best to follow his specific instructions. When emailing me, he pretended to still be on my side, telling me that he would speak to people who might be able to help me while bad-mouthing me behind my back, giving them every excuse to dismiss my work without giving it serious thought. This included the Second Temple chapter. As far as I can tell, he did not show them what he had written in praise of that chapter. If he had done so, those scholars might have had to rethink their dismissal or acknowledge that my youthful failure to write a successful dissertation paled in the face of my advisor's professional malpractice. Ultimately, my advisor made the decision to sacrifice my hoped-for career as an academic in order to protect his reputation.

His actions clearly involved falsehood. I am uncertain whether he actively lied about me to members of the department or if he simply allowed them to assume that I had gotten into this mess on my own. It is even possible that it was understood that he was the one at fault but, as there was no formal mechanism for penalizing advisors who failed in their duties to their students, the other members of the department protected their own and took the stance that this was my fault as a convenient belief that allowed the whole affair to be tied up in the most convenient fashion for them.

The final nail in my dissertation's coffin came in an email that reached me while I was at the Fuller Theological Seminary Library. By then I knew that the dissertation was likely not going to be accepted but I wanted to keep fighting for it as long as there was any hope. I had put so much of my emotional self into the dissertation that it felt to me almost like my child. One does not give up on a child no matter the odds. I was so focused on my work that I did not see the email for several hours until I stopped for lunch. My advisor forwarded me an email from a professor who dismissed my work while clearly not having read it carefully. From his response, it was clear that my advisor had been speaking ill of me to this professor. 

One would have thought that something like this deserved at least a phone call. My advisor knew that I had a history of depression and that the dissertation situation had put me in a bad place. What sort of person sends information that he knows would negatively affect someone he cares about without following up to find out how they are doing? Clearly, by this point, my well-being was no longer his priority.   

If I were to be charitable to my advisor, I can imagine that, from his perspective, he had been doing me a favor by agreeing to take me on as his student in the first place. As such, any advice that he offered me should have been taken with a buyer-beware attitude, much as if I were to take advice from any other academic I might have spoken to. From this perspective, the fact that my dissertation failed after years spent following his bad advice was really my fault. I should have known better than to listen to him.