Teaching

I have just finished reading a dissertation of a doctoral student who attends, shall we say, Behemoth State U (BSU), which is not the school where I teach.

By way of background, my editing specialty is taking dissertations of people who are in some kind of trouble (often poor writing skills) and editing them so that these people can pass. Often the people have good ideas--they just don't know how to get those down on paper. And a dissertation offers special writing challenges because of its complexity.

In this case, there were some writing issues, but there were also many issues that could have been prevented, had someone helped this student out--someone on the committee.

Because BSU has as its focus the desire to stay highly ranked in the US News and World Reports college issue, faculty at BSU have as their focus the need to get something--anything--even a grocery list--published in peer-reviewed journals. This focus takes up most of a faculty member's waking hours, those that are not devoted to various kinds of meetings (e.g., the committee to determine whether it would be a good idea to make "The" part of BSU's official, copyrighted name--so it would be The Behemoth State University and all the old stationery would have to be junked). (Okay, I graduated from BSU and I think my dissertation is probably the only one that left out the "The").

Therefore, because professors' time is taken up with research and committee meetings, they have no time to teach, either their classes or their graduate students. So, even though a graduate student provides multiple copies of her proposal and drafts of her work over a couple of years (as this student did), all that paper rarely gets read until the night before the defense. As a result, the defense becomes a nasty surprise and a disheartening and overwhelming experience.

Add to that a defense that falls near the end of the term. If the student does not produce a passable dissertation in a matter of a couple of weeks, the student will have to pay $$$$ for tuition for the following term. Tuition many students don't have, but the professors remain blissfully ignorant of this. Or they have forgotten this stage in their own lives.

There are professors who use the conceptualization and writing of a dissertation as an opportunity to teach how research goes. This is what needs to be done consistently. What saddens me is that the number of doctoral students one has contributes to one's ability to get a promotion, and yet, all too often the number does not reflect the quality of the dissertation adviser or committee member's actual participation in the project.