I love the prescription. I buy the case for ending the reserve clause.
I mostly buy the description.
My skeptical question is: is it really the case in 2024 that entering PhD students know so little about the politics of the department they are entering? That is the one thing I find questionable about your account.
If this were 2015, I wouldn’t doubt it much at all. But what kind of bubble himself/herself is the prospective student living in now to be unaware of such things going in?
Absolutely accurate in 2024. Take my own case. At Columbia, there was a congenial professor whose class I had enjoyed and who lived across the hall from me. It was only when I began working on the dissertation that I realized he was a lazy, self-centered asshole. Took months to read even short pieces I submitted, provided no useful feedback, quit the university without telling me or his other advisees. Other profs were great writers who turned out to be twisted, intolerant weirdos. While I was dealing with my negligent advisor, the department fractured over a petty disagreement between two professors, and a slew of profs left. 30+ students were stranded with no one available to oversee their dissertations. While it never affected me adversely, I arrived at Columbia as center-left and, within a year or two, had migrated over to be center-right libertarian. In today’s environment, I might have been forced to write a left-leaning dissertation. And as I noted, students arrive with a vague sense of their research interests. Three years later, you may have developed a powerful subject interest for which no one in the department is qualified to oversee a dissertation. I advise PhD students all the time these days, and these problems are alive and well.
I’m confused. Your own case is from a long time ago, no?
And I get that students who come in as leftists and later realize they aren’t have a big problem.
And remember, I buy the goodness of the prescription, regardless.
But my question was how many entering PhD students in 2024 are unaware of the political ideological leanings of their faculty? Especially in the social sciences and economics. The above doesn’t seem to me to address that question.
Apologies if you thought I was referring to internal department politics; I agree no one coming in is likely to know much about that.
It's not just the political leanings. It's the tolerance of students with different leanings. The work habits of the professors. Whether there are any faculty qualified to supervise the topic that the student has developed over three years of coursework. Whether the department is in a state of meltdown. The professor's views on a minute, tiny sliver of subject matter. Personal conflicts. Countless dissertations are never completed because, unbeknownst to the student, two committee members hate each other. ... The advisor who sponsored my successful dissertation was on the left. She was an advisor to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. She knew I wasn't. But our relationship was spectacular. She encouraged me at every step. So knowing the political leanings is almost a trivial point. It's the personalities and ranges of knowledge and work habits--and your own needs--that you cannot know till you have finished coursework, and maybe not even then.
My advice to grad colleagues was first to make damn sure two of the people on your committee didn't hate each other. Don't trust your own eyes, ask other grad students, and maybe even friendly profs. Read the tea leaves. If a Prof tells you something like "I don't think Prof X is a good pick for your topic" you're being given a wink and a nod.
In my case I was a much older than average grad student and was personally known (in a student body of nearly 30,000) by the President as a "trouble maker." The dean's representative refused to show up for my defense. LOL
And I agree that it is nearly impossible to really know the profs you will work with for at least several semesters. And by then it may be too late.
I would have been a few weeks shy of 8 years old at the time and lived not that far away from what is detailed here. I have no recollection of this tragedy, but I reference it because I believe it relates to a passing phrase you mentioned in your piece. If this happened today, and it certainly is possible, one can only guess how many "experts" would feel the need to unequivocally attribute the outbreak to climate change. The pressure to do that would be quite high in meteorological circles.
Finally, The Onion video was just superb. Franz Kafka Airport!!
An earlier draft mentioned Curt, but he ended up on the cutting-room floor. :) I think I remember those Indiana storms. And yes, I'm sure climate change would be a part of any dissertation relating to that outbreak. I really love the Franz Kafka Airport video. I must have watched it 100 times over the years.
Thanks for this very appropriate essay, best wishes of the season to you. I was expected to go to college, my dad did, my mother never graduated from high school. I couldn't wait to get out, actually started working full time what should have been my senior year. Finally graduated one quarter late. For some reason, probably because I am somewhat entrepreneurial, went to one of the Big Ten universities to get a part time MBA. Wrote a thesis on the marketing success of Ford Motor when they went after demographic niches. My adviser said do you want to get a PhD degree, it only took 10 seconds to say "no". Took awhile but got my own business going, and then went to work for someone as I transitioned into retirement. Meanwhile, both of my children became English majors and were offered graduate assistantships, and an opportunity to get on the PhD track. Mercifully they saw how it was and didn't pursue that dream anymore, but they did get their degree and they are gainfully employed. Both ended up going to my undergraduate alma mater, but they had no interest in going to a Big Ten university. Here and there are individuals shaking up the status quo, and of course we have "online" instruction now.
I have steered many a prospective student away from Columbia over the decades and many more away from the idea of getting a PhD. Funny thing--in 1979, I dated a woman who was working on her dissertation. I told her, "I will NEVER put myself through what you're going through." In 1980, I started my PhD studies at Columbia, and many was the time that I asked myself, "Didn't I tell her I'd never do this?" In hindsight, I'm glad I did and glad I got the degree. It worked out just fine, but it's a problematic institution.
Mr. Graboyes, I think your diagnosis is bang right, But I have considerable doubts about your prescription with its analogy ot baseball's reserve clause:
1. Depending on the field of study, isn't it so that there's a great deal of homogeneity across universities? :Using the Kung Flu analogy, I have a hard time imagining ANY campus being receptive to a lab leak hypothesis. Perhaps I am wrong and there are some 'lab leak' universities out there. So under the reciprocal acceptance of course work scheme, our student can go elsewhere and get a 'lab leak' PhD.
Then what? The zoosis universities aren't likely to hire a new 'lab leak' PhD, which cuts down career paths.
2. Again, depending on the field, there's a huge excess supply of PhD grads versus tenure track openings. The subject English,, comes to mind here. In that case it's a buyer's market, which turns out to be just as vicious as the reserve clause.
3. Some of the other proposals out there, e.g. limiting the size of endowments, breaking up schools altogether are going to reinforce the 'buyer's market'
I have no answer short of waiting for the Lefty fossils to die off. That could take a long time.
Lagniappe
The problem your essay addresses has been around for quite a while. There was an American writer, Kenneth Millar, who wanted desperately to become a tenured professor of English in a good school. To that end, he worked his way up through the bachelor's degree to a PhD. Along the way, he supported himself by high school teaching, a WWII stint in the Navy, and writing crime novels on the side. He completed his dissertation on Coleridge, but he could never turn the PhD into a professorship, even at a cow college. Couldn't even get his dissertation published. He finally gave up and continued to write crime novels, this time under the pseudonym for which he is best known, Ross Macdonald. it was a living, and after 20 years of grinding them out, he got big enough sales to get the attention he craved as a serious writer who just happened to write mystery novels. It helped a great deal that Eudora Welty went googly eyed over his novels(and was also envious of his productivity, Welty being a ''book-every-three-years' sort of writer.) The sales and Welty's vouching for him finally got Macdonald the attention he craved, which he enjoyed for about a year before Alzheimer's got him. It was enough to get his works collected by the Library of America, another liberally bigoted enterprise. To my mind Macdonald was a competent hack who knew enough higher criticism to inject into his novels so the intelligentsia could praise his work without any "Oh, that's your guilty pleasure," flareback.
Giving Macdonald any sort of prestigious award/billing, would be akin to giving Huey Long, who after all had a lot of thoughts on economics, the Nobel Prize in Econ.
You may have missed a crucial passage: “Alter accreditation requirements and appoint new accreditors to oversee them—thereby enabling new institutions to challenge long-established schools.”
Read the Max Eden article I cited on JD Vance’s call for reform. Part of it is that the accreditation monopoly makes it nearly impossible to create new universities to challenge the old ones. The article suggested breaking that monopoly.
Imagine Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, etc. founding universities who primary purpose is to pilfer promising but rightfully disgruntled doctoral students from established universities, guide them through their dissertations, and award them doctorates, overseen by top-flight scholars.
That handles the first problem I mentioned. But the second part is still biting: where do the newly minted PhDs go? The lab leakers are not likely to be welcome at any zoosis university. I know that sometimes there are other markets, particularly in the physcial sciences or business or engineering. But what's the job market for the PhD in English? I was fortunate to have an English PhD teach me in high school, but I think that's going to a rare case.
"2. Again, depending on the field, there's a huge excess supply of PhD grads versus tenure track openings. The subject English,, comes to mind here. In that case it's a buyer's market, which turns out to be just as vicious as the reserve clause."
True. No doubt, the number of PhDs is bloated by megatons of explicit and implicit subsidies drawing students in. I have hammered that point home to a multi-decade conga line of would-be PhDs. Some have secured the degrees and done well. Others wisely chose alternative paths. I have suggested to many that a certificate in plumbing or HVAC would be a superior career path--and stressed that I was not necessarily joking with them.
On the other hand, if you break the accreditation cartel, Mark Andreessen University and Elon Musk Institute of Technology and Ackman-Oxman College could hire a load of PhDs--full-time or part-time to oversee dissertations. And I think it would be healthier if lots of those advisors were merely part-time academicians who also, say, work for a tech platform or bio lab or do plumbing or HVAC. The great Talmudic rabbis also worked as vintners and lumberjacks and such. The great poets of the early 20th century were farmers and soldiers and insurance salesmen and such.
Professor, in view of the huge excess supply of PhD grads versus tenure track openings, why do people seek PhD's? Is it wishful thinking? Do colleges encourage this in academics as they do in athletics? An NCAA survey in 2015 reported that half of Division I college football players believe they will play in the professional leagues but in fact only 1.6% ever do.
Also, now it will be clear to you why I have always held that all academic officers—including thesis committee members, but without limitation—should be strangled at birth.
Talk about naivete about graduate school; color me guilty. What you say about courses and dissertation are spot on, as they say, in my case. I earned my Ph.D. in an outstanding agricultural economics program built solidly and well on statistics and econometrics. Turns out I should have gone to Virginia Tech and studied with James Buchanan, learned what I truly love about economics (not econometrics), but by the time I learned enough to know that fact, it was impossible.
In my opinion, academia has become a caricature. As such, it's beginning to reap its just rewards.
BTW, David Friedman's 'stack has an excellent post and analysis about the origin of covid that's based on Bayesian analysis that I find utterly persuasive. The probability that covid did not come from a Wuhan lab leak is vanishingly small. I know that this point is completely off the point of your excellent essay. 😊
Excellent comments. As I noted in my 2017 article (link in this article):
"In 'The Wealth of Nations' (1776), Adam Smith railed against the social costs of insulating universities from market forces. He celebrated the idea of mobile, dissatisfied students departing somnolent professors, thus forcing universities to better meet the needs of their students."
Adam Smith was a smart guy. Organizations of all kinds that do not or cannot pass the market test come up with other tests, which they hope will convince buyers that the organization is succeeding to deliver value to consumers.
The entire accreditation movement (and industry) is an excellent example of my hypothesis.
Another brilliant takedown! I especially liked the re-retitled thesis, I am boggled by the creeping use of the phrases “at the intersection of…”. And “through the lens of…” in abstracts ranging from literature to economics to medicine and even engineering. A solid indication of rigidity and groupthink.
It's a good idea, but the bigger problem is the thought-control censoring institution known as the Institutional Review Board, or IRB. Granted some are worse than others, but they all police the dissertation process, ensuring that nothing unacceptable gets explored or revealed
Full disclosure: I don't have a Ph.D. I started coursework, but was offered what I thought was a good gig, so I took that. Glad I did -- not just because of what you have described, but because I was happy with the career I set off on.
But I would like to make a suggestion about your otherwise good column: don't take the roof off Columbia. For one thing, it only affects the top floors of buildings. For another, it is not couched in terms of saving the Earth.
I propose that we go to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, and use their own rules against them. Convince the faculty and students that Gaia is suffering because of the amount of heat and air conditioning they are using and they need to give up heating and cooling to save the planet. That should settle their hash.
I never pursued a Ph. D., in great part because my Masters program exhibited many of the same characteristics noted in this essay. I came in not knowing the landscape of my committee and boy did I find out the hard way.
I love the prescription. I buy the case for ending the reserve clause.
I mostly buy the description.
My skeptical question is: is it really the case in 2024 that entering PhD students know so little about the politics of the department they are entering? That is the one thing I find questionable about your account.
If this were 2015, I wouldn’t doubt it much at all. But what kind of bubble himself/herself is the prospective student living in now to be unaware of such things going in?
Absolutely accurate in 2024. Take my own case. At Columbia, there was a congenial professor whose class I had enjoyed and who lived across the hall from me. It was only when I began working on the dissertation that I realized he was a lazy, self-centered asshole. Took months to read even short pieces I submitted, provided no useful feedback, quit the university without telling me or his other advisees. Other profs were great writers who turned out to be twisted, intolerant weirdos. While I was dealing with my negligent advisor, the department fractured over a petty disagreement between two professors, and a slew of profs left. 30+ students were stranded with no one available to oversee their dissertations. While it never affected me adversely, I arrived at Columbia as center-left and, within a year or two, had migrated over to be center-right libertarian. In today’s environment, I might have been forced to write a left-leaning dissertation. And as I noted, students arrive with a vague sense of their research interests. Three years later, you may have developed a powerful subject interest for which no one in the department is qualified to oversee a dissertation. I advise PhD students all the time these days, and these problems are alive and well.
I’m confused. Your own case is from a long time ago, no?
And I get that students who come in as leftists and later realize they aren’t have a big problem.
And remember, I buy the goodness of the prescription, regardless.
But my question was how many entering PhD students in 2024 are unaware of the political ideological leanings of their faculty? Especially in the social sciences and economics. The above doesn’t seem to me to address that question.
Apologies if you thought I was referring to internal department politics; I agree no one coming in is likely to know much about that.
It's not just the political leanings. It's the tolerance of students with different leanings. The work habits of the professors. Whether there are any faculty qualified to supervise the topic that the student has developed over three years of coursework. Whether the department is in a state of meltdown. The professor's views on a minute, tiny sliver of subject matter. Personal conflicts. Countless dissertations are never completed because, unbeknownst to the student, two committee members hate each other. ... The advisor who sponsored my successful dissertation was on the left. She was an advisor to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. She knew I wasn't. But our relationship was spectacular. She encouraged me at every step. So knowing the political leanings is almost a trivial point. It's the personalities and ranges of knowledge and work habits--and your own needs--that you cannot know till you have finished coursework, and maybe not even then.
My advice to grad colleagues was first to make damn sure two of the people on your committee didn't hate each other. Don't trust your own eyes, ask other grad students, and maybe even friendly profs. Read the tea leaves. If a Prof tells you something like "I don't think Prof X is a good pick for your topic" you're being given a wink and a nod.
In my case I was a much older than average grad student and was personally known (in a student body of nearly 30,000) by the President as a "trouble maker." The dean's representative refused to show up for my defense. LOL
And I agree that it is nearly impossible to really know the profs you will work with for at least several semesters. And by then it may be too late.
Curt Flood is smiling from above at this post. Well done.
You've reminded me of a passing thought I had recently. While wasting time on YouTube, I managed to stumble upon this video:
https://youtu.be/2SzLsHlB5BI?si=pDQKUTEIJWffaKOP
Here's a quick summary from the NWS:
https://www.weather.gov/ind/palmsuntor#:~:text=On%20Palm%20Sunday%2C%20April%2011,deadliest%20of%20all%20Indiana%20outbreaks
I would have been a few weeks shy of 8 years old at the time and lived not that far away from what is detailed here. I have no recollection of this tragedy, but I reference it because I believe it relates to a passing phrase you mentioned in your piece. If this happened today, and it certainly is possible, one can only guess how many "experts" would feel the need to unequivocally attribute the outbreak to climate change. The pressure to do that would be quite high in meteorological circles.
Finally, The Onion video was just superb. Franz Kafka Airport!!
An earlier draft mentioned Curt, but he ended up on the cutting-room floor. :) I think I remember those Indiana storms. And yes, I'm sure climate change would be a part of any dissertation relating to that outbreak. I really love the Franz Kafka Airport video. I must have watched it 100 times over the years.
Boy howdy, as they say ...
Love the In This University sign!
:) Yeah, I enjoyed making that sign, too. :)
Thanks for this very appropriate essay, best wishes of the season to you. I was expected to go to college, my dad did, my mother never graduated from high school. I couldn't wait to get out, actually started working full time what should have been my senior year. Finally graduated one quarter late. For some reason, probably because I am somewhat entrepreneurial, went to one of the Big Ten universities to get a part time MBA. Wrote a thesis on the marketing success of Ford Motor when they went after demographic niches. My adviser said do you want to get a PhD degree, it only took 10 seconds to say "no". Took awhile but got my own business going, and then went to work for someone as I transitioned into retirement. Meanwhile, both of my children became English majors and were offered graduate assistantships, and an opportunity to get on the PhD track. Mercifully they saw how it was and didn't pursue that dream anymore, but they did get their degree and they are gainfully employed. Both ended up going to my undergraduate alma mater, but they had no interest in going to a Big Ten university. Here and there are individuals shaking up the status quo, and of course we have "online" instruction now.
I have steered many a prospective student away from Columbia over the decades and many more away from the idea of getting a PhD. Funny thing--in 1979, I dated a woman who was working on her dissertation. I told her, "I will NEVER put myself through what you're going through." In 1980, I started my PhD studies at Columbia, and many was the time that I asked myself, "Didn't I tell her I'd never do this?" In hindsight, I'm glad I did and glad I got the degree. It worked out just fine, but it's a problematic institution.
Mr. Graboyes, I think your diagnosis is bang right, But I have considerable doubts about your prescription with its analogy ot baseball's reserve clause:
1. Depending on the field of study, isn't it so that there's a great deal of homogeneity across universities? :Using the Kung Flu analogy, I have a hard time imagining ANY campus being receptive to a lab leak hypothesis. Perhaps I am wrong and there are some 'lab leak' universities out there. So under the reciprocal acceptance of course work scheme, our student can go elsewhere and get a 'lab leak' PhD.
Then what? The zoosis universities aren't likely to hire a new 'lab leak' PhD, which cuts down career paths.
2. Again, depending on the field, there's a huge excess supply of PhD grads versus tenure track openings. The subject English,, comes to mind here. In that case it's a buyer's market, which turns out to be just as vicious as the reserve clause.
3. Some of the other proposals out there, e.g. limiting the size of endowments, breaking up schools altogether are going to reinforce the 'buyer's market'
I have no answer short of waiting for the Lefty fossils to die off. That could take a long time.
Lagniappe
The problem your essay addresses has been around for quite a while. There was an American writer, Kenneth Millar, who wanted desperately to become a tenured professor of English in a good school. To that end, he worked his way up through the bachelor's degree to a PhD. Along the way, he supported himself by high school teaching, a WWII stint in the Navy, and writing crime novels on the side. He completed his dissertation on Coleridge, but he could never turn the PhD into a professorship, even at a cow college. Couldn't even get his dissertation published. He finally gave up and continued to write crime novels, this time under the pseudonym for which he is best known, Ross Macdonald. it was a living, and after 20 years of grinding them out, he got big enough sales to get the attention he craved as a serious writer who just happened to write mystery novels. It helped a great deal that Eudora Welty went googly eyed over his novels(and was also envious of his productivity, Welty being a ''book-every-three-years' sort of writer.) The sales and Welty's vouching for him finally got Macdonald the attention he craved, which he enjoyed for about a year before Alzheimer's got him. It was enough to get his works collected by the Library of America, another liberally bigoted enterprise. To my mind Macdonald was a competent hack who knew enough higher criticism to inject into his novels so the intelligentsia could praise his work without any "Oh, that's your guilty pleasure," flareback.
Giving Macdonald any sort of prestigious award/billing, would be akin to giving Huey Long, who after all had a lot of thoughts on economics, the Nobel Prize in Econ.
Many thanks.
You may have missed a crucial passage: “Alter accreditation requirements and appoint new accreditors to oversee them—thereby enabling new institutions to challenge long-established schools.”
Read the Max Eden article I cited on JD Vance’s call for reform. Part of it is that the accreditation monopoly makes it nearly impossible to create new universities to challenge the old ones. The article suggested breaking that monopoly.
I did miss that passage, which would certainly help.
Imagine Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, etc. founding universities who primary purpose is to pilfer promising but rightfully disgruntled doctoral students from established universities, guide them through their dissertations, and award them doctorates, overseen by top-flight scholars.
That handles the first problem I mentioned. But the second part is still biting: where do the newly minted PhDs go? The lab leakers are not likely to be welcome at any zoosis university. I know that sometimes there are other markets, particularly in the physcial sciences or business or engineering. But what's the job market for the PhD in English? I was fortunate to have an English PhD teach me in high school, but I think that's going to a rare case.
And I'll admit having merely glanced at your comment while going about some chores. Let me go back and read the rest.
"2. Again, depending on the field, there's a huge excess supply of PhD grads versus tenure track openings. The subject English,, comes to mind here. In that case it's a buyer's market, which turns out to be just as vicious as the reserve clause."
True. No doubt, the number of PhDs is bloated by megatons of explicit and implicit subsidies drawing students in. I have hammered that point home to a multi-decade conga line of would-be PhDs. Some have secured the degrees and done well. Others wisely chose alternative paths. I have suggested to many that a certificate in plumbing or HVAC would be a superior career path--and stressed that I was not necessarily joking with them.
On the other hand, if you break the accreditation cartel, Mark Andreessen University and Elon Musk Institute of Technology and Ackman-Oxman College could hire a load of PhDs--full-time or part-time to oversee dissertations. And I think it would be healthier if lots of those advisors were merely part-time academicians who also, say, work for a tech platform or bio lab or do plumbing or HVAC. The great Talmudic rabbis also worked as vintners and lumberjacks and such. The great poets of the early 20th century were farmers and soldiers and insurance salesmen and such.
Professor, in view of the huge excess supply of PhD grads versus tenure track openings, why do people seek PhD's? Is it wishful thinking? Do colleges encourage this in academics as they do in athletics? An NCAA survey in 2015 reported that half of Division I college football players believe they will play in the professional leagues but in fact only 1.6% ever do.
Bob, you left out Christians from the list of hate-objects. Unintentionally overlooked, I’m sure.
Indeed!
Also, now it will be clear to you why I have always held that all academic officers—including thesis committee members, but without limitation—should be strangled at birth.
Talk about naivete about graduate school; color me guilty. What you say about courses and dissertation are spot on, as they say, in my case. I earned my Ph.D. in an outstanding agricultural economics program built solidly and well on statistics and econometrics. Turns out I should have gone to Virginia Tech and studied with James Buchanan, learned what I truly love about economics (not econometrics), but by the time I learned enough to know that fact, it was impossible.
In my opinion, academia has become a caricature. As such, it's beginning to reap its just rewards.
BTW, David Friedman's 'stack has an excellent post and analysis about the origin of covid that's based on Bayesian analysis that I find utterly persuasive. The probability that covid did not come from a Wuhan lab leak is vanishingly small. I know that this point is completely off the point of your excellent essay. 😊
Excellent comments. As I noted in my 2017 article (link in this article):
"In 'The Wealth of Nations' (1776), Adam Smith railed against the social costs of insulating universities from market forces. He celebrated the idea of mobile, dissatisfied students departing somnolent professors, thus forcing universities to better meet the needs of their students."
Adam Smith was a smart guy. Organizations of all kinds that do not or cannot pass the market test come up with other tests, which they hope will convince buyers that the organization is succeeding to deliver value to consumers.
The entire accreditation movement (and industry) is an excellent example of my hypothesis.
Another brilliant takedown! I especially liked the re-retitled thesis, I am boggled by the creeping use of the phrases “at the intersection of…”. And “through the lens of…” in abstracts ranging from literature to economics to medicine and even engineering. A solid indication of rigidity and groupthink.
They do get tiring, don't they?
It's a good idea, but the bigger problem is the thought-control censoring institution known as the Institutional Review Board, or IRB. Granted some are worse than others, but they all police the dissertation process, ensuring that nothing unacceptable gets explored or revealed
Full disclosure: I don't have a Ph.D. I started coursework, but was offered what I thought was a good gig, so I took that. Glad I did -- not just because of what you have described, but because I was happy with the career I set off on.
But I would like to make a suggestion about your otherwise good column: don't take the roof off Columbia. For one thing, it only affects the top floors of buildings. For another, it is not couched in terms of saving the Earth.
I propose that we go to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, and use their own rules against them. Convince the faculty and students that Gaia is suffering because of the amount of heat and air conditioning they are using and they need to give up heating and cooling to save the planet. That should settle their hash.
I never pursued a Ph. D., in great part because my Masters program exhibited many of the same characteristics noted in this essay. I came in not knowing the landscape of my committee and boy did I find out the hard way.