A mentor's new book

BOOK REVIEW: "Red Guards: A political history of China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," (Mao's Last Revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals), by Judith Shapiro, New York Times Book Review, 8 October 2006, p. 28.

Rod MacFarquhar is probably the preeminent non-Chinese scholar on the Cultural Revolution, from which today's China has not distanced itself as much as many assume (in disastrous scope, it's more like our Civil War than any other catastrophe we've experienced, and that took a good 50 years to recover from--demographically and politically--and another 50 years to finally rectify and complete via the Civil Rights movement).

Rod was my faculty adviser at Harvard during my second year in the Gov Department, a very crucial turning point for me because I almost left Harvard to go to DC and start working with the hope of completing my dissertation (I was ABD then, or all-but-dissertation) "on the side" (that old chestnut).

Rod was kind enough to talk me out of that plan, advising me strongly to stay at Harvard three more years (I had just passed my comps in the first year due to my advanced standing with my MA in Sov studies) and get it all done before setting out. He told me he had far too many students try this and fail, primarily for reasons of family (you get a kid or two and the dream gets tossed out with the diaper pail).

He said, "Get your union card. You never know how long that whole Soviet thing is going to last and this will guarantee you a job under any conditions."

Rod was so very right. He told me that in the spring of 1987.

I only met with him one-on-one that one time, although I took his class and later taught some Chinese communist history myself in another survey course for undergrads. It was a very important meeting for me, obviously, and I often think back to how important it was for me to hear his words at exactly that time.

I think long and hard on the mentoring issue as I contemplate Vol. III, trying to imagine the book I would have always wanted to read but never found during those grad school years: one that said in practical terms, "this is how you become a strategic thinker about the future."

I never found that book, of course. I read many books that deal with the content of strategy but none on how to think strategically. I read many books that deal with the future but none (this was before Peter Schwartz's book "Long View") on how to think systematically about the future. In short, I read a lot of "what," but no "how?"

And I think that a book with a lot of "how" would be a very good thing.

At least I know I would have bought one and read it--if given the chance back then. Why? That fear of the unknown career path that lay ahead was pretty profound back then, as I'm sure it remains for a lot of people as they contemplate the transition from grad school to the work life, especially since this sort of work life is so poorly understood by anybody outside the field.

I mean, I never took anything at Harvard that gave me the slightest hint of what my career would end up looking like. In vocational terms, it was a far more useless education than I ever could have imagined. Other than a few key concepts I've taken with me throughout my career, the imprint was far lighter than I imagined.

Sure, it would have been different if I had stayed in academia (and no, I wasn't in academic when at the Naval War College, as I was on the research side of the house), but I never considered that as an option. Just too weird

Comments

[Michael]

I'm currently in that Unknown Career Path phase myself; right now, thinking stragically about it seems to consist of recognizing things I should have done when I had the chance. :^(