Shortening Ph.D. programs

Caution: bitter rant from a recent Ph.D. recipient approaching!

Here's an article in the NYT on how universities are trying to
shorten the process of writing Ph.D. dissertations.

For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun.

Very cute.

Nevertheless, education researchers like Barbara E. Lovitts, who has written a new book urging professors to clarify what they expect in dissertations; for example, to point out that professors “view the dissertation as a training exercise” and that students should stop trying for “a degree of perfection that’s unnecessary and unobtainable.”

First of all, is that a sentence? The only way I can parse that as a sentence is if "like" is a verb, giving something similar to "Education researchers approve of Barbara E. Lovitts." I don't think that's what was meant.

I remember being told that I should stop worrying about whether my dissertation was going to be perfect and just write the damn thing. "The only good thesis is a finished thesis," I think someone said, although "The only bad thesis is an unfinished thesis" would have been more helpful. I remember at least one of my graduate student colleagues reworking and reworking one chapter of his dissertation for weeks while his advisors told him in very direct terms that it didn't matter and he should leave it the way it was. So when the time finally comes for a CS graduate student to write a dissertation, yes, professors are pretty clear that it doesn't have to be a masterpiece.

But I would be very surprised to learn that professors at my graduate institution really thought of the entire process as a mere "training exercise." If they do, then they need to read Barbara E. Lovitts' book about how to make that clear to their students.

Here's how it looks from a student's point of view. Everyone knows that a Ph.D. thesis involves original research. What's a little less known to outsiders is that Ph.D. thesis projects comprise a sizable portion of the total original research that gets done in a university setting -- particularly in computer science, where there are fewer postdocs than in, say, chemistry. (The article refers to A.B.D. graduate students as a "pitied species" -- postdoc, the next stage in the academic life cycle, is actually one of the Worst Jobs in Science!) So the papers graduate students publish about their thesis work in peer-reviewed conferences and journals account for a significant percentage of the published articles those students' advisors' names are on. So professors are counting on their graduate students -- and in particular, on the Ph.D. thesis projects of their students, though admittedly not the dissertations themselves -- for exposure, reputation, tenure and funding.

It is easy to imagine that some professors -- ones I'd call "bad advisors" right to their faces if I had a chance -- make no attempt whatsoever to insulate their students from the pressure inherent in this situation. Let me just state for the record right now that I have never worked with any such people in real life. My own Ph.D. advisor certainly isn't one. Bad advisors are undoubtedly more prevalent in some fields of study than others -- in some disciplines, the pace of innovation and the pressure on faculty may even make bad advising the norm! Such professors think of graduate students as their own employees -- though they usually aren't -- and what ought to be five years of "training exercises" turn instead into five years of thankless labor. Viewing things this way, de-emphasis of the dissertation (touted as progress in this article) might actually be harmful to students' morale: naturally, the research a student does is much more important to a bad advisor than the dissertation about that research he or she produces at the end; since the dissertation itself is not published, any time spent writing it is time the student is getting paid for "nothing", and the ruthlessly efficient bad advisor tries hard to deny the student the very useful (and cathartic) exercise of writing a coherent report of his or her accomplishments. (Sure, whatever, just staple your published articles together and we can all get back to the lab where we belong.) The Ph.D. diploma is no longer a certificate of significant accomplishment you frame and hang on the wall (as I have done with mine), but more like a terse letter of reference you get when your first entry-level job lays you off. (As an aside, when I was hired at Caltech the lady who verified my credentials never saw my diploma, just a letter from my graduate department administrator stating that I had qualified for one. I imagine it's like that for a lot of folks.)

There. I feel better. Now I have to back off and clarify that I have no proof that advisors this bad actually exist. Most professors I know are Good Advisors who take their roles as mentors seriously. They encourage students to do the best work they can, helping them along and not confronting them with cold analysis of their contributions to the lab's bottom line. They see the beneficial symbiosis of the student-advisor relationship: the student is there to learn, and does so by doing brilliant work that reflects the advisor's brilliant leadership. Everybody wins. That's the way it should be.