perhaps I need a department that specializes in chaos theory.

The main problem I've had with sorting out what I'd like to find in the Ideal For Me or at Least Fairly Good (IFMLFG, from now on) grad school, still, is trying to decide how much the main ideological approach matters for the professors at each school that I'd actually be working with. I used to figure that a department that had an overall emphasis on looking at everything from a marxist perspective would automatically be different for the actual experience of studying there than a department that tended to consider something else more important; I don't think that's true, really, now. The slant of the department in general would matter, somewhat, but rather less than the potential advisors' - which should be at least partly noticeable from the short keyword-summaries of their research interests that tend to appear in faculty lists, or from their own site if they've bothered to develop one. Yet some who supposedly focus on women's history or women in politics or any variation on that theme, then always have courses that seem to dwell entirely on economic or other explanations for events and motives, rather than their self-declared main research interests. Obviously departments sometimes have to demand that taught courses won't be perfect matches for a prof's true interests, simply for the sake of the students' needs/interests/future benefit (and thus for the department's reputation), but it seems a shame when someone's so unable to try to focus on the actual subject of the course that they can do nothing other than offer their own perspective on the era/nation/etc... and that's hardly rare, in most departments.

Of course there's a certain dose of self-protection and usually a nice dash of ego involved, so that emphasizing that your particular bias is the only reasonable one seems to be inseparable from many lectures, at least in the social sciences or humanities, but I really can't (or at least I don't want to) drop the idea that good teaching in general should somehow balance the checked details of names/dates/places for examples and events with the presentation of as many reasonably well-supported explanations as possible for causes or motives or the random Deeper Issues that led to the just-mentioned facts. Suggesting that every political/military/social event in Europe for centuries has really been motivated entirely by economic forces, or by the push of all of history in a single upward direction that can only lead to improvement and the rule of the working class, or by struggles based on gender and relationships, all seem about as valid, to me, as claiming quite stridently that aliens have been merrily watching the earth and prodding things along to satisfy their own curiosity or amusement - if those suggestions are never presented in combinations of possible explanations or if other possibilities are barely ever considered. And it seems some individuals or departments tend to be so focused on presenting only one root-explanation above all others that they forget or simply don't comment on other explanations, except to deny that they may actually be related.

I've been told repeatedly that the name and reputation of the advisor's what matters more, really, than the general reputation of the department; it makes sense. S'pose I need to somehow find the people who are more interested in trying to find all the possible explanations that make sense, even if they personally favor just one or two, and then trying to blend them or at least considering them all, instead of the people who have too much invested in understanding the world from a particular Accepted Perspective to ever really consider anything in different ways. I just hope that this sort of focus is possible, with at least some of the departments; there aren't so many that offer anything past an MA.

On a not-really-different note, I'm realizing more and more, in thinking about grad school, that I'm really grateful for most of the professors I dealt with in Jupiter, and especially for the two for history. Most always kept the need to consider different supportable explanations pretty high on their priorities lists, which was more helpful overall than the frustration it sometimes led to at the time. :p And if I do end up trying to stay in academia, after grad school's finished, I'd rather try to find a school that's rather similar, for there were more things that were done well, there, than not.