That's Doctor Breva the Axe, to You!

[dr_pretentious]

I love dissertation defenses.

The dissertation itself is a form of torture, cruel albeit not sufficiently unusual to be banned by the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions. One day while I was working on mine, I was flipping channels on tv and found a PBS documentary that featured footage of a tribal initiation in the Amazon basin. The candidate for the rite of passage had to put his hand into a pouch of fire ants and keep it there for a whole day, after which the hand was swollen up and permanently scarred, etc. The candidate's cries of distress were suitably harrowing. And my first thought on seeing this initiatory spectacle was, Bring on the fire ants! I can do anything for twelve hours, but I cannot do one more year of this. Anyone who did time in my graduate program or Breva's would know exactly what I mean.

The dissertation is an evil genre, but dissertation defenses are, in my experience and observation, universally good, even when members of the committee do last-minute Stupid Faculty Tricks. No adviser, no committee, would allow the date for a defense to be set if they were not all in agreement already that they intended to sign off on it. I've seen several friends in to their defenses, and waited for them to emerge again, and it's like the day monsoon season breaks and the sun comes out for the first time in you can't remember how long. It's like watching the spring's first crocus come up. Only it's not like either of those things, really, because dissertations in the various branches of literary studies can rarely be completed in less than three years. Those of you who've been reading George Martin's series might be trained up to imagine now a winter five years long, eight years long. Like the first crocus after that.

You promise yourself all kinds of crazy things when your right hand is sewn into a pouch full of fire ants and you're determined not to take it out until the day's done. You tell yourself all kinds of fables about spring, when you can't remember what it was like to open your front door without your overcoat already buttoned. While Dan and I were finishing my dissertation and his master's thesis, we came up with long lists of the dumbest, most frivolous ways to waste time that we could imagine, to remind each other that one day we'd be free to do frivolous things again. The only one we still wanted to do after graduating was run a GURPS campaign together.

Breva the Axe used to tell us all that when her dissertation defense was over, she would host a week-long open house full of drinking and baking. Mostly baking. After years of working on food writing (the magisterial M.F.K. Fisher beats Immanuel Kant for number of footnotes), culinary autobiographies, culinary travel writing and ethnographies, and culinary popular mystery novels (middle-aged Mary Sue bakes, caters, and fights crime!), Breva the Axe had a big collection of recipes from the books she'd been writing about, and she meant to cook every blessed dish among them. I wasn't sure she'd still want that, once the papers were all signed, but lo and behold! A chocolate almond tart!

Have I mentioned recently how fortunate I am in my friends?

When she'd despair, I used to tell her that I was absolutely certain she'd be Dr. Abbey before the trees flowered again. A couple of times, I had a little Freudian slip and assured her she'd be Dr. Avery. Well, um, no. To which she said, "Look, that part of yourself you had to bludgeon to death to escape academia? I'm going to go do all the things she thought she wanted to do. You don't have to regret leaving."

Very fortunate in my friends, and not just because of the orange marmalade cake.

Comments

[seimaisin.livejournal.com]

I'm so sending a link to this post to my best friend, who is currently neck-deep in preparing her defense of her master's thesis. I think she could use the thoughts ... :)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Good luck to her!

I could tell a lot of defense stories that feature Stupid Faculty Tricks and assorted misfortunes that were nobody's fault, but every single one of those stories has the happy ending, "And they signed anyway."

[dragonlaire.livejournal.com]

I thought about taking a doctorate in mathematics for a time, but eventually dismissed the idea once I became acquainted with the publish or perish syndrome. I used to think academic life idyllic, the profound professor surrounded by young, inquiring minds, but the reality I encountered paralleled everything I hated about the corporate world. The sleazy people running the conglomerates were of character similar to those running academia; they were just better at it.

But the real clincher for was the story I heard from Alan, a high school math teacher. He was a brilliant graduate student in mathematics at Princeton; his mentor was Norman Steenrod, a recognized world authority in fiber bundles, a branch of topology. Alan worked for three years on his dissertation. Steenrod was notorious for providing minimal guidance for his students. His credo, apparently, was that students will never develop independence if an established mathematician must constantly nurse them through the process.

Finally, Alan was nearly finished. Even the great Steenrod thought the work was approaching completion. Then Steenrod became mortally ill quite abruptly and died in hospital. At this point, Alan had to find another sponsor for this thesis. Everyone turned him down. He was offered a time extension by the department chair to begin anew with a new adviser. Naturally, that would imply starting a new dissertation. Not surprisingly, Alan decided to withdraw from the university rather work for years more without any assurance of receiving a doctorate at the end of the process.

For a while, he was clinically depressed and seriously considered taking his own life. After years of therapy, he recovered, earned a California teaching credential and went on to teach middle and high school.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

He escaped--that's a happy ending, for all that he might have preferred to win the game he started. That's one of the more impressive Stupid Faculty Tricks I've heard of, but what happened to him at Princeton is not all that surprising. I wonder if it would have ended differently if he'd had a defense date already scheduled. At my former institution, the date might have been postponed, but someone would have been found to fill the role.

The saddest dissertation story I know is of a woman who was in the Comparative Literature department for 15 years, orphaned for all practical purposes by an ineffective dissertation director for ten years in the dissertation stage. Imagine it. No, don't imagine it, it's too awful. Then she was diagnosed with a form and stage of breast cancer that her doctors told her would finish her within six months, so her family went to her department chair to say that all she wanted was to die with her degree. (Now, at this point, if I'd been in her position and had six months to live, I would have said to hell with grad school, I'm going to Paris.) So the department chair took over, discovered that the dissertation had been in nearly defensible shape for years while the ineffective dissertation director alternately nitpicked and ignored the project. A defense was scheduled posthaste. Even then, the bureaucracy moved so slowly, the diploma barely reached the doctoral candidate before she died.

And yet, even that terrible story has the happy ending, "And they signed anyway." The bad dissertation director is almost balanced out by the righteous department chair, and the cancer was nobody's fault.

Academia does have a weird cult-like dynamic to it. For a dissertation-stage grad student, it's not unusual for the diss to become so all-consuming that the only options appear to be graduation or death. It's not true, of course, but it's rare for people trapped in the sick system to be able to see that. I couldn't see any of my other options until the degree process had been over for a year.

There are some things I still admire and miss about that world, but I'm not in any hurry to go back.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Dear. Gods.

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

"Graduation or death" -- but whose death?



There's a gentleman in California who will likely be in prison for the rest of his life.

See, he killed his dissertation advisor. He had been working on his dissertation for SEVENTEEN YEARS, and every time he showed the diss to his advisor he was told, "Just a few more changes here...."

He admitted the killing, and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Every now and then, he comes up for parole hearings. His advocates in the criminal justice system point out that he has been a model inmate, has not caused any difficulties while in jail, and that he is at low probability for similar acts in the future.

But parole is never granted. Why? He feels no remorse. He calmly tells the parole committee, as he told the jury, that anyone who hijacks a life for seventeen years -- in effect, arbitrarily and unilaterally increasing the length of indentured servitude by moving the goal indefinately farther away -- deserves to die.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

I don't blame him.

I do find myself wondering why anyone sticks it out as long as they do, and then have to remind myself that when you're enmeshed in this madness, it's not always easy to just say, "You people are utter morons. You are intellectually bright, but emotionally fucked up, and you're too stupid to do anything but wallow in your own shit. So I'm leaving." So it stays the same. And it's absolutely bizarre and insane and I am so glad I was too ill to stay on in college. I couldn't have coped.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'm having a hard time objecting to that crime, too.

I was very picky about my dissertation committee, and every persnickety moment paid off. I was lucky. It was still a ridiculous process to undergo, and nobody should do it, but the individual faculty members I worked with had their hearts in the right place.

There are a couple of profs in that department, though, who might benefit from receiving transcripts of those parole hearings.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

as the sage says, "there are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy."

this case falls between the latter two.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

The stories in the comments here are terrifying. I am deeply grateful for my freedom, and for the friends and companions that helped me achieve that freedom. It could have been different.

In that spirit of awe-tinged fear, and gratitude, and joy for evryone who has set herself or himself free in a way that did not twist them for life, I say:

All hail to Dr. Abby, Breva the Axe!

All hail to Deb Curtis! I attended her defense yesterday. She too escaped.

May both of them revel in the freedom that will now be theirs---by degrees, anyway, as there are still revisions and arcane filing tests to be braved. May they both heal fully, strongly, deeply and be better than than they ever were before the trial by long slow fire began.

[sleepymaggie.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. This sounds so much like my life its scary -- although I'm escaping at this point by switching from thesis to non-thesis. Its exactly the things that are mentioned in these comments that made me switch. Its just really not worth it to me.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

please forward my congratulations to dr. axe, phd.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

Pass on my congrats to the newly minted Dr. Fury-elect. (She doesn't officially become a Ph.D. until she gets the actual degree, right?)

I thought about trying for a phud, but I got a year into the program and realized that I was absolutely miserable. So I fled.

There was one prof at the school who apparently treated his/her star grad students like crap. So much so that they tended to leave the country to finish their dissertations.

[tokeiwakamidesu.livejournal.com]

remember how I wanted to be a phud for like two years?

That's been dead for awhile, but I just exhumed it, slapped it and buried it again. My god, that sounds harrowing.

Oh, and tell Breva that her story inspires the youth.