Sunday, October 14, 2007

Stupid Ph.D. credentialism

The never-ending process of inflating the qualifications that people need in order to get a good job is getting really absurd. We read a plaintive story below about how many Ph.D. students have great difficulty in completing the dissertation that is (so far) essential to getting that degree. All it shows is that the students concerned are not really Ph.D. material and should never have been encouraged to try for a Ph.D. If you are a born academic -- as I am -- there is no problem. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in six weeks towards the end of the first year of my Ph.D. program and then had to wait another year to submit it because the rules said "Two-year minimum program". Stupid rules and stupid credentialism! And, unlike many dissertations, most of mine was eventually published as a series of academic journal articles. All men are NOT equal. Abilities DO differ

Many of us have known this scholar: The hair is well-streaked with gray, the chin has begun to sag, but still our tortured friend slaves away at a masterwork intended to change the course of civilization that everyone else just hopes will finally get a career under way.

We even have a name for this sometimes pitied species — the A.B.D. — All But Dissertation. But in academia these days, that person is less a subject of ridicule than of soul-searching about what can done to shorten the time, sometimes much of a lifetime, it takes for so many graduate students to, well, graduate. The Council of Graduate Schools, representing 480 universities in the United States and Canada, is halfway through a seven-year project to explore ways of speeding up the ordeal.

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. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.

These statistics, compiled by the National Science Foundation and other government agencies by studying the 43,354 doctoral recipients of 2005, were even worse a few years ago. Now, universities are setting stricter timelines and demanding that faculty advisers meet regularly with protégés. Most science programs allow students to submit three research papers rather than a single grand work. More universities find ways to ease financial burdens, providing better paid teaching assistantships as well as tuition waivers. And more universities are setting up writing groups so that students feel less alone cobbling together a thesis.

More here






Until Proven Innocent

By Thomas Sowell

Some of the most depressing e-mails received over the past year and a half have been those that asked why I was worrying myself about three rich white guys at Duke University. Neither those three students accused of rape nor the District Attorney who accused them are the ultimate issue.

If all District Attorneys in this country were like Michael Nifong, the United States of America would become the world's largest banana republic. Such levels of corruption in the law itself would make the American standard of living impossible. A steady diet of the racial polarization that Nifong promoted would make it only a matter of time before we would see in America the kind of violence seen between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad. The "rule of law" is not just a pat phrase. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.

Nor is "innocent until proven guilty" just a throwaway line. The opposite notion -- guilty until proven innocent -- is a more poisonous import from the totalitarian world than the toys with lead paint imported from China.

"Until Proven Innocent" is the title of a devastating new book by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson about the rape charges against the Duke lacrosse players -- and about so many in the media and academia who treated them as guilty until they were proven innocent. Even those of us who followed the case from the beginning will learn a lot more about what went on, both on the surface and behind the scenes, from this outstanding book.

More important, we will learn some chilling facts about how deep the moral dry rot goes in some of the fundamental institutions of this nation that we depend on, including its leading universities and its leading media.

"Until Proven Innocent" also tells us about one of the forgotten victims of the Duke rape case -- the African cab driver who cast the first doubt on the indictment, by saying publicly that one of the accused young men was with him in his taxi at the time the rape was supposedly happening. A flimsy charge against that cab driver from three years earlier was suddenly resurrected, and District Attorney Michael Nifong had him picked up by the police, indicted and put on trial -- where he was quickly acquitted by the judge. Could this country survive as a free nation if every District Attorney used the power of that office to intimidate any witness whose testimony undermined the prosecution's case?

How long will we in fact survive as a free nation when our leading universities are annually graduating thousands of students each, steeped in the notion that you can decide issues of right and wrong, guilt or innocence, by the "race, class and gender" of those involved? That is what a large chunk of the Duke University faculty did, while few of the other faculty members dared to say anything against them or against the Duke administration's surrender to the lynch mob atmosphere whipped up on campus.

In much of the media as well, the students were treated as guilty until proven innocent, and those who said otherwise were often savaged. Members of the women's lacrosse team at Duke who expressed their belief that the male lacrosse players were innocent were viciously attacked in the sports section of the New York Times. Nor was that the only place where the guilt of the players was virtually taken for granted, on either the sports pages of the Times or in other places there or in other newspapers.

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