A Story
Last evening, I had a long chat with a good friend from my program. She regularly calls me whenever she's facing a big decision regarding her academic career and future. Last night, it was about the possibility of not finishing her dissertation and just leaving with a master's degree. Of course, she is not the first person in our program to do this; others have left even without the master's. But she has already written so much of her dissertation and has been very focused on what she wants to write. She has had to deal with an abusive chair for the past couple of years, and even though she has been incredibly disciplined about writing, the chair now wants her to start from scratch despite having signed off on the dissertation proposal a year and a half ago and having read and basically approved drafts of at least one chapter. (Moreover, the chair takes far too long to return comments on drafts; my friend had to wait half a year for comments on one draft!)
Like most of us grad students, my friend cannot afford to stay in school indefinitely, yet her chair seems oblivious, insensitive, to this fact. At this point in her career, my friend has decided that she may not want, in any case, to run the rat race to get a tenure-track job in some much less hospitable region; she has particular needs that must be accommodated properly, and where she lives now is the best place in the country for those needs. If she cannot resolve this problem with her chair by, say, switching to a different one, she thinks she should look for a full-time job locally and wash her hands of academe.
Our talk made me sad and angry. She and I always joked that we would ride the other's coattails to academic stardom. After all, my friend was able to get a very famous gender studies/queer studies professor on her committee. And her prospectus meeting went forward, with the document signed at the end of it. It seemed all she needed to do after that was write steadily, and she is fulfilling her end of the bargain, so to speak. (A devil's bargain, perhaps.) Now it is unclear if she will even finish with the degree she originally wanted, let alone get a job as a professor, because of one person who is acting irrationally and abusing their power.
I confess that, while I am much more sanguine about my chairs, I can't help but feel anxious that I may not end up with a PhD, either, if one of them suddenly decides that my project needs to be scrapped. I doubt this would happen, or that it would happen so abruptly, but one never knows. And my friend has to be so careful about not offending her chair as she attempts to resolve this impasse. Rather like a beaten child who must then come back and say sorry. Sometimes graduate school really sucks.
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