Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives [Paperback]

Jeff Schmidt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 4, 2001

"This book is stolen. Written in part on stolen time, that is. Because like millions of others who work for a living, I was giving most of my prime time to my employer..."
So begins Jeff Schmidt in this riveting book about the world of professional work. Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations, and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker, showing how an honest reassessment of what it means to be a professional in today's corporate society can be remarkably liberating. After reading this book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Disciplined Minds is a witty, incisive, original analysis of the politics of professionalism—especially with respect to those fields in which 'professional training' involves an education in how to become oblivious to the political role of one’s profession. (Michael Berube, University of Illinois )

A blistering critique of how knowledge workers have been subordinated in America. Finally, a book that tells it like it is. (Stanley Aronowitz, author of The Jobless Future )

I have been waiting a long time for someone to write this book, and Jeff Schmidt has done it. He exposes, in crystal-clear prose, the inevitably political nature of the professional in our society, and, most importantly, suggests a strategy for resistance. This is an extraordinary and valuable piece of writing. (Howard Zinn, Author of A People's History of the United States and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Boston University )

Schmidt has hit the bull's-eye. (Texas Observer )

Schmidt analyzes the true meaning of being a professional and the sacrifices that professionals make to achieve their career goals. He challenges them to think outside the box, use their intuition and their attitude to provide for a better society. (Carrie Crystal Van Driel In The Public Citizen )

There is much that is thought provoking and illuminating in Disciplined Minds. (Business & Society )

This book should be read by anyone thinking about embarking on a professional education in any field, as well as by those who wonder why their dream job doesn't seem so dreamy after all. (Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C. )

Disciplined Minds is a radical, disturbing, and provocative look at professional life. It offers a profound analysis of the personal struggles for identity and meaning in the lives of today's 21 million professionals. The book will shake up the readers. (Education Review )

Just after publication of this book Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt was fired after 19 years as a staff writer for Physics Today magazine. In his book Schmidt argues that a hierarchical organization's structure almost guarantees that its workers cannot devote their full energy to the job; he was terminated after a supervisor learned that in his foreword to the book, he playfully wrote that he had completed it partly on 'stolen time'. (The Washington Post )

Schmidt is a very good writer, and particularly skilled at constructing his case through example and anecdote. His thesis is compelling. (Interchange )

In this book Jeff Schmidt gives us a remarkably insightful political analysis of the process of inculcating graduate school initiates into a discipline, and how this process of 'disciplining' contributes to the making and perpetuating of unfree minds in the professions. (Social Anarchism Thirty-One )

Schmidt offers a provocative critique of how scientists, engineers, and other professionals are groomed to fulfill a specific function in society—that of maintaining the status quo—and, in the process, end up sidelining their own goals and ideals. The book is both well-researched and highly readable. Some readers may disagree with its conclusions, but everyone will recognize its descriptions of the often wrenching choices that today's professionals must make. (Ieee Spectrum )

I found Disciplined Minds while planning a course that will deal with the social role and moral responsibility of intellectuals, and after I finished reading it I whooped with joy. It is the perfect book to engage students on these issues — well researched, powerfully argued, and clearly written. Even conservative students with politics at odds with Schmidt's find the book valuable because of its (sometimes painful) honesty and clarity. In addition to using it in my course, I wish I could make Disciplined Minds required reading for my faculty colleagues. (Robert Jensen, School of Journalism, University of Texas at Austin )

This book comes from the heart...a rallying cry to dissatisfied professionals and disillusioned students to organize and reshape the system that is stifling them. (Review of Radical Political Economics )

Disciplined Minds is a freewheeling, thought-provoking examination of the way ideological control is exercised over an increasingly important section of the working class- the professionals. (John Pappademos Nature, Society, and Thought )

About the Author

Jeff Schmidt was an editor at Physics Today magazine for 19 years, until he was fired for writing this provocative book. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Irvine, and has taught in the United States, Central America, and Africa. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he now lives in Washington, D.C. You may write to him at [e-mail].

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (December 4, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0742516857
• ISBN-13: 978-0742516854
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.7 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #156,044 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #75 in Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Teams

More About the Author

Jeff Schmidt lives in Washington, D.C. He has been focusing his attention recently on K-12 schooling, particularly science and math. In 2012, Disciplined Minds was published in Hindi (ISBN 9788192095714) and Korean (ISBN 9788994340098). Lots of reviews of the book are posted at the disciplinedminds website.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

146 of 148 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A new way of seeing what you should have known all along. April 3, 2000

By Matthew Siegel

Format:Hardcover

In a way it's obvious. In an industrial society, large organizations need some technically skilled people who can be relied upon to look after the organization's interests. Whether you're a lawyer, accountant, teacher, or whatever else -- to the extent that your work is unsupervised, information-intensive, and varied in its details, your employer counts on you not just to follow his direct orders, but to give yourself the orders he would have given had he been there on the scene, and to carry them out with technical skill.

It's also obvious that to act in accordance with the values of a large organization -- for instance, the value of "profit maximization" so common to the large corporation -- one must suppress one's natural values, the values one has held since childhood. (How many of us, as teenagers, got lumps in our throats at the thought of devoting our lives to profit maximization?) And, it only stands to reason that the institutions of higher learning that are most successful at producing people who are skilled at adopting "values to order" are the ones that select and train people who are good at suppressing their own values.

Somehow, though, what's not obvious is the logical consequence of these observations: that Harvard Law School, NYU Medical School, and just about every PhD program in the country are really, at their core, ideological boot-camps, where people are carefully winnowed and shaped into able servants of another person's ideology -- and where their own ideologies that might conflict with those of most employers are, to the extent any remain within them, mercilessly beaten out, so that upon graduation they all emerge pristine and ready to accept whatever goals their new employer assigns them....

In a century that has seen so many instances of technical competence being exercised in service of such ghastly idiologies -- whether one is speaking of Nazi scietists or Soviet economists or lawyers for tobacco companies who use the attorney-client priviledge to bury important scientific research -- especially now, we should have no illusions that values and technical skills are necessarily linked.

Yet some of us forget. And for those need it, this book is a great reminder.

Disciplines Minds is probably not the first book to note that academia serves monied interests, that monied interests need a steady stream of technically competent and ideologically unquestioning souls, and that graduate and professional school somehow seems much more brutal than it needs to be to teach the subject matter taught in its classes. But perhaps it is the first book to line up these facts in such a way that the linkage among them is so clear.

All the while the book manages to treat these grim subjects with good humor and, ultimately, with hope -- as it concludes that those entering graduate or professional school *can* protect themselves against ideological indoctrination, using techniques borrowed from an Army manual on how to resist brainwashing by enemy captors! The analogy may seem a bit melodramatic -- much more so, though, if you've never been in grad. school yourself.

I confess an interest in the success of this book. Its author is a friend and former co-worker of mine. Yet I hadn't read most of it before it was published, and when I did finally get a copy I couldn't put it down until I'd finished it. Anyone who is a professional, knows professionals, works with professionals -- in short, just about anyone at all in a modern capitalist society -- will find this book delightful. And, whether or not you agree with all its subversive conclusions, much of it will ring true...because, clearly, much of it is.

Disciplined Minds is much more than a theory about the role of professionals and professional education in a capitalist society. It's a voyage of discovery, which takes the reader through grad-school horror stories, indoctrination procedures within religious cults, and POW resistance techniques -- all in an effort to explain this institution that has become so all-important in the U.S. economy, the institution of "the professional."

I'd definitely recommend the book to anyone.

M. Siegel Read more ›

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent - incisive and long overdue May 31, 2002

By Jonathan Armstrong

Format:Hardcover

First, Jason Hong's review must be addressed. _Disciplined Minds_ is not a "Marxist" book in any way shape or form. It is more anarchistic, but only as Noam Chomsky would describe it: something that calls into question any sort of irrational authority and questions it.

Mr. Schmidt's witty analysis of two-year "professional training schools" - which he rightfully calls "professional rip-off academies" - is far from Marxist. Rather, Jeff rightfully recognizes that those employed in non-professional jobs view "credentialied" professionals as having a degree of freedom and prestige that they strive for, even though they might actually have a higher salary. The premise behind _Disciplined Minds_ is that this perceived "freedom" professional jobs offer comes only after a series of tests are passed - successful navigation of secondary school, a four year bachelor's degree, and then proper professional credentials after that. Since professionals must operate with a high degree of autonomy, they must naturally be expected to not do anything that would upset the balance of power in their particular industry. When I was interviewing for jobs right out of college, there was little care paid to what my field of study was IN college - rather, it was whether or not I had a "four year degree". A "four-year degree" connotes a tacit acceptance of a certain worldview, a certain ability to know the consensus and abide by it.

Far from being just "objective indicators of knowledge", each rung on the ladder of professionalism carries a political component with it as well. It is those who buy into the system, and those who play by the rules, that will successfully climb this ladder. At each successive level - high school graduation, entrance into a four year college, and then a J.D./M.D./Ph....D after that, there is a successive weeding-out of those who are different, those who could pose a possible problem to maintaining the status quo.

Jeff does a superlative job at illustrating this by drawing heavily from his own area of study, physics. (Jeff has a PhD in physics and if Mr. Hong were to have actually read this book, he would've found Jeff saying that his own experience in grad school was highly rewarding - alas, he must have skipped this chapter.) The vast majority of physics grad students eventually find employment in the defense and aerospace industries, and the subtle weeding-out process that occurs is obviously going to favor individuals who do not see any consequence in building weapons of mass destruction. Such individuals are naturally going to perform better on tests that view knowledge as simply a series of reductionist hoops that have to be jumped through, devoid of any wider social or environmental context.

The only slight criticism of this book was that it could've drawn out more of a conceptual framework for its criticism, echoing a review I read of a (oh, the irony) "professional" sociologist who critiqued it for not being "sociological enough." However, this book was written for a wider audience and I am glad it didn't get relegated to the academic social science scrap-heap. In short, this is an immensely readable and convincing piece of social science in the finest C. Wright Mills tradition, destined to strike a nerve. Read more ›

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for all students January 10, 2003

By Marie Nubia-feliciano

Format:Hardcover

It took me three days to read this book. I could not put it down...I took it with me everywhere and have told everyone I know about it. The level of insight into the motivations of professional training schools is right on the mark. I am currently a graduate student as well as an employee at a major university. I can see first hand the professionalization (read indoctrination) of the graduate student. I can also see with more insight the dynamics that go on in an academic office. I now understand why those in charge of forwarding the ideology of the office are not micromanaged, and those not trusted to forward the accurate ideology are micromanaged. Dr. Schmidt also does an excellent job in describing the role industry and the military has in professional training programs. A professional schools is seen as an extention of the profession, not an extention of the educational institution in which it is housed. There are tremendous forces pushing and pulling on professional training programs to produce the "right" kind of student. Unfortunately the force that wins out is the one with the money...private industry and the military. Students have to be aware that their very futures can be determined by what kind of funding a department receives.

He is right to say that if one does not remain connected to one's values and convictions, one can succumb to the whims of those in power. After depressing you with his accurate interpretation of the role professional schools play in society, he gives instructions on how to fight the indoctrination process.

I'm buying extra copies and giving them away as graduation gifts. A MUST READ for anyone who wants to survive professional school with their conscience intact.