7 ms·
The PhD Octopus (1903)
- arcanus 10y agoIn modern times, I've found much the same with jobs and the requirement for a "B.S. in CS" (three magical letter holder here)
- macsj200 10y agoIn my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, this requirement is often flexible. I tend to read it as "B.S. in CS, or sufficiently impressive relevant experience."
- chias 10y agoAmusingly, I have a "B.A. in CS". Given the subject, most people assume a B.S. if you just say "bachelors'", but in my particular case, they'd be wrong ;) I imagine this is somewhat like how you can get a doctorate in nursing. (just wrapping up my own three magical letters too!)
- ams6110 10y agoI've seen this in many job descriptions, but in 30+ working years I've never seen an employer actually verify that a candidate had the credentials he claimed to have.
- qntty 10y agoSee also: http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2007/04/value-of-harvard-ph-d.html http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2007/04/value-of-harvard...
- master_yoda_1 10y agoSame kind of shit is still going on in silicon valley.
- dnautics 10y agoYou think it's bad here? If you ever take the DC metro, look out the window at the Pentagon metro station (but others are often bad too). You will see exclusively two ad buys over all of the signs. The first is for some large defense contractor, usually Northrop, advertising weapons systems or IT services. The other half of the ads are for "Graduate School" which is some sort of organization that confers masters and phds. Perfect for the aspiring bureaucrat that needs to check that qualification off the list. I had a friend pulled in to one of these "health policy PhD" (she wasn't in the DC area) and she was excited to be in a degree program with high ranking bureaucrats in the HHS. Edit: found a link to the organization, apparently they don't give out masters and phds... How confusing! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_School_USA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_School_USA
- cafard 10y agoI never heard that this school (which used, I think, to be the Department of Agriculture Graduate School) gave out any degrees. Having said that, you are correct about Washington, DC. Part of it, I think, is the rules around government contracting: if I can bill John Doe, B.A., for $x/hour, I can probably bill Richard Roe, M.S. for $(x+y)/hour or John O'Nokes, Ph.D. for $(x+y+z)/hour. The government contractors also can offer tuition reimbursement for their employees, untaxed, if the classes "maintain and improve" skills for the job then held.
- acobster 10y agoTangential question: > It seems to me high time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency. Other nations suffer terribly from the Mandarin disease. Does anyone know what this use of "Mandarin" is supposed to suggest? It sounds like a sort of Orientalist fear of exotic diseases, but seems like it could refer to something more specific. Just curious.
- ihm 10y agoSee here: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/mandarin http://www.dictionary.com/browse/mandarin The relevant definitions are 1. (in the Chinese Empire) a member of any of the nine ranks of public officials, each distinguished by a particular kind of button worn on the cap. 6. an influential or powerful government official or bureaucrat. It connotes a kind of bureaucratic meritocracy.
- knome 10y agohttp://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mandarin&allowed_in_frame=0 http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mandarin&allowed_in... Judging by the etymology presented here, meaning officials, "mandarin chinese" being then "chinese as spoken by officials", I would take it as simply a rewording of his condemnation of the tendency for admiration of title in place of admiration of the title holder, which he otherwise goes on about. A disease of officiality. I don't know if an overtone suggesting a cultural judgement over some perceived chinese tendency for admiration of title is intended or not.
- eudox 10y agoMandarin as in Mandarinate, not as in the language.
- zamfi 10y agoI believe it's meant to disparage a bureaucratic, technocratic academy, in the sense of "you must jump through these hoops and pass these examinations to join the leadership / professoriate, regardless of your actual abilities." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat)
- tomrod 10y agoThis is an excellent support to the thought that, once provided with a standard metric, people tend to focus only on satisfying that metric.
- kazinator 10y agoIt's kind of understandable. In some professions we have accreditation and licenses; others sometimes clamor for the same thing. That fellow's Ph. D. diploma on the wall was the effective equivalent of "licensed practitioner of teaching the Liberal Arts" or something like that. That's why the employer insisted on it. Would we say that a dentist's license had nothing to do with whether they can do dentistry and cheerfully go to one that doesn't have one? Fact is that by getting the Ph. D., the guy did prove that he was "good" in some way; he had the academic "muscle" and that is relevant to the teaching, even if the subject isn't the same. You absolutely cannot say that philosophy is irrelevant to literature. That is to say if we examine the statement "[w]e wrote again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little anyhow as to one's ability to teach literature" it doesn't really hold up. That fellow simply doesn't cast aside his philosophy background when he gets up in front of the literature class! The way we analyze literature all has philosophical underpinnings. Literature can carry philosphical points of view, and consciously so, even. Fictional literature has been used to transmit philosophical thought, from Socratic dialogues of ancient greece to works like the novels of Ayn Rand.
- cafard 10y agoConsidering that he was a professor of philosophy and brother to a novelist, I don't think that William James supposed philosophy to be irrelevant to literature. "Casting one's philosophy background aside" is one thing, neglecting to get a Ph.D. in it quite another.
- kazinator 10y agoIt's the same though; if you proclaim that a Ph. D. (i.e. some more or less objective demonstration of competence) in philosophy is not relevant to teaching literature, you are in fact saying that philosphy itself is not relevant to teaching literature. If philosophy is relevant to teaching literature, then the instructor's level of achievement matters in some way. If it is relevant, then knowing next to jack squat about philosphy is objectively worse contribution of relevance than being an expert in it with a extensive background. If the level of achievement matters, then so do whatever hoops we use for measuring and accrediting it, like "Ph. D". Since the school chose an instructor with a philosphy background, they asked that he have an objective certificate of high achievement in that respective field. That was arguably better than asking for a Ph. D. in literature.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pnathan 10y agoI generally found the professors with a PhD to be more engaged, driven, and generally capable than those without. just my 2c. I would guess that the internal qualities that drove them to seek the phd were the ones that made me prefer them.
- foldr 10y agoHow long ago was this? These days the only people who are likely to be teaching you at a university who don't have PhDs are PhD students. And they're less good at it largely because they don't have years of experience.
- pnathan 10y agoI wrapped up my BS in 2006. A variety of people teaching underclass courses as the instructor of record were people with Master's degrees. A couple were ABD. I would hesitate to say that older profs were better; it seemed bimodal: either they really were significantly better, or they really were not very good teachers. I almost always preferred the people with deep knowledge and passion for the subject, regardless of actual quality of teaching, myself. YMMV.
- ams6110 10y agoA number of universities employ "lecturers" and adjunct professors who do not have PhDs, especially for undergraduate courses, summer sessions, etc.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lewis500 10y agoMakes me glad I got my Ph.D.
- morugin 10y agoNote the assumption that intellectual distinction is native. That is an assumption that is counter to the American assumption that any man can become anything he wants given the effort and desire. The people who want and try to earn a phd without the native ability are the problem James is stating the universities are creating. This is the third class of persons. The other interesting thing was how the third class of persons obtains a phd is subjective. "Thus, partiality in the favored cases; in the unfavored, blood on our hands; and in both a bad conscience,--are the results of our administration." Interesting thoughts from a man who has "distinguished intellect"
- samirillian 10y agoIn the words of Schopenhauer, "nothing in the world is so rare as a good judge."
- bitwize 10y agoDrat, I was hoping for a story about an actual cephalopod with a doctorate, like Octodad or something.
- lisper 10y agoHere's the real problem: > When the thesis came to be read by our committee, we could not pass it. Brilliancy and originality by themselves won't save a thesis for the doctorate; it must also exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of learning; and this our candidate had neglected to bring to bear. So, telling him that he was temporarily rejected, we advised him to pad out the thesis properly, and return with it next year This is not much of an exaggeration. Getting a Ph.D. is as much (maybe more) about demonstrating your ability to shmooze, defer to authority and put up with bullshit for an extended period of time as it is about learning or doing good research.
- dpkendal 10y agoDid we read the same paragraph? The problem with his first thesis was that, though he presented a brilliant and original result, he didn’t show that he’d studied enough prior research. Nothing to do with schmoozing, everything to do with scholarly integrity.
- lisper 10y agoThe actual complaint was that the thesis failed to "exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of learning." I'm not sure exactly how you get from there to "didn’t show that he’d studied enough prior research". That extrapolation notwithstanding, what exactly do you think "shmoozing" means? In academia it does not mean going to your committee's cocktail parties and letting them win at golf. It means citing their work (i.e. "demonstrating that you have studied prior research") so that they can then use the fact that they are highly referenced to advance their own careers.
- derf_ 10y agoWhen I was preparing for my oral exam, I was given something like 1,200 pages of material to read by my committee. I read it. During the exam, in addition to the expected technical questions, I was asked things like, "What lab did this work come out of? Who runs that lab?" In other words, "Do you understand the political and funding environment in which you're going to be operating if you continue working in this field?" Fortunately, I had been to a few conferences and met some of these people (also not an accident on the part of my professors), so I knew the answers to these questions. But the lesson stuck.
- CurtMonash 10y agoFortunately, what's written there is not true in all places at all times. For example, I got my PhD in math at Harvard in the 1970s. My PhD adviser, Andy Gleason, was a terrifically nice guy, yet seemed oddly unsympathetic to the stresses of the PhD process. I later realized that he didn't have a PhD himself ... when I noted that absence in his bio as he was elected to be president of the American Mathematical Society. And by the way -- while I think he sort of understood what I was working on (the theorem that came to be known as the Mertens-Neyman result for stochastic games -- they scooped me by a few months, but I got my degree anyway), I'm nearly certain that nobody else in the rest of the department did. It didn't matter. When it came to approving/disapproving theses, our department seemed quite politics-free. On the other hand, I heard horror stories from my dorm-mates about other departments, such as history and Slavic linguistics. Perhaps the "harder" subjects had better standards of objectivity. Perhaps I was just lucky. And by the way -- it also was not the case that an undergraduate degree was needed for admission to grad school. Discovering this fact on my junior year Spring break grad school trip let me greatly change the negotiating dynamics around degree requirements at my undergraduate institution. When it as all over, the dean who had originally given me the most grief politely thanked me for bothering to get my undergrad degree.