Fortunately, 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 Gleaso

Fortunately, 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.