This post is interesting but hard to take too seriously. First, I don't understand the author's hostility to the idea of graduates taking courses. Grad course

This post is interesting but hard to take too seriously. First, I don't understand the author's hostility to the idea of graduates taking courses. Grad courses supply general knowledge not acquired in undergrad and in-depth knowledge to prepare the student for research. There are reasons why these courses follow the format they do - certain disciplines are best learned by an approach closer to 'lecture than to 'project (Real analysis? Lambda calculus?). The author claims: "You pick up all that needed stuff by doing real work. When you find a gap in your knowledge, you fix it. The instructor might give you an exercise to help you fix it." But this is not always feasible in abstract disciplines - try to pick up real analysis in this way, and you'll probably end up doing a lot of proofs that look very much like the standard real analysis sequence but seem a lot more frustrating. This isn't to say we need to sit in classrooms for six hours a week, but teaching certain subjects (but not all) via projects is a waste of time. The call for 2-week sessions instead of semesters seems to be based -- like several other suggestions -- on the peculiar preferences of the author rather than on sound argument. It's easy to come up with one's own wish list of how graduate school should operate, and the author is rightfully cautious about the implementation. But it seems to me the problems raised aren't fundamental to graduate school. Maybe the classroom lecture is becoming obsolete; it arguably helps demoralize students by removing from them responsibility for their own edification. But this doesn't demand top-down reform of everything but the thesis. We should save that for the undergrad programs.