On Delusions.

Happy First Day of Summer, folks. We all know what that means…

Heh. Seriously, though. This business about who’s responsible for the false hopes of people who don’t stand a snowball’s chance of ever working in the profession deserves further comment.

I have to confess, I’m kind of torn here. On the one hand, as I mentioned in comments yesterday, I think there’s really only so much responsibility it’s fair to lay on the profession. And the APA has been pretty good about issuing statements intended to scare off the faint of heart.* But, on the other hand, as NS points out in comments today, sometimes actions speak louder than words. And a lot of departments are perfectly willing to feed people’s delusions by putting their own interests in having a grad program (no matter how mediocre) ahead of the interests of the people who are actually in the program.

So I dunno. What I do know is that there’s a patio with cheap beer and Mexican food calling my name. Ta ta.

* On second thought, I'm not so sure about this. 15 minutes of poking around on the APA's website has failed to come up with any statement to this effect. So maybe I'm wrong here. But I think I remember reading something like this somewhere. Hmm. I'll keep looking, and get back to y'all.