I guess so, but it was the "communications skills" thing that rang the bias alarm bell. Communications skills are extraordinarily valuable to a Ph.D.: you have

I guess so, but it was the "communications skills" thing that rang the bias alarm bell. Communications skills are extraordinarily valuable to a Ph.D.: you have to be able to write, to present, to defend a thesis, and so on. Absolutely everyone knows this. And yet multiple schools told him communications skills were a negative?