Chapter 1 of "Just Don't Do It!"

(c) 2010 by Gary M. Grobman
All Rights Reserved.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am Gary Grobman. Dr. Gary Grobman. In 1996, I enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Penn State University’s Middletown campus in the field of public administration. Five years later, I had successfully completed my coursework, written and defended my doctoral dissertation, and had the opportunity, twice, to attend my graduation ceremonies held four months apart respectively at the main campus in State College and the branch campus in Middletown.

I did not attend either ceremony. In August 2002, I remember participating in a Saturday morning 12-mile marathon training run with my regular running group, and mentioning to my running partners that my graduation ceremony was being held at just about the time I was planning to finish this run. I don’t remember what I was doing when my second graduation ceremony was being held. But if asked if I planned to attend, it wouldn’t have been out of character for me to respond that I had other plans—I needed to wash my hair.

My diploma, bound up in a handsome, simulated leather display case provided by the university at no additional charge, languishes in a drawer.

To the Penn State academic community, I have to be considered a success story. In less than five years, I had navigated a rigorous academic program that is a planned, seven-year, part-time program. I had a grade point average of 3.92 on a scale of 4.0, the result of getting a single “B.” I had academic journal articles accepted for publication in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals. Several full-length books I had written during my doctoral career are being used as graduate and undergraduate textbooks. I had agreed to serve as a peer reviewer for two academic journals. And I had attended and presented papers annually at academic conferences. I now teach as an adjunct professor at both the Master’s and Ph.D. levels.

I attribute much of my academic success to the following factors, the last being the most important:

1.     I debriefed those who had successfully maneuvered through my program and who were rewarded for their persistence, forbearance, and tolerance by having the right to add those coveted three letters after their names.
2.     I meticulously planned how to take enough “courses” when no courses were offered, doing my “residency” without being a resident, and selecting a “safe” dissertation topic that would hold the interest of my committee rather than focusing on my burgeoning interest in nonlinear dynamic theory.
3.     I didn’t get any offers to do something better, which in my case could have included being a bodyguard for an Iraqi government official in Baghdad, the photo editor for the Wall Street Journal, the IT Director for the National Luddite Association, or the publicist for Britney Spears.
4.     I did what I was told to do by my academic advisors and doctoral committee, regardless of how outrageous, silly, meaningless, and appalling it appeared to be at the time.

But despite the apparent triumph of having a Ph.D. in hand, I was bitter about my experience. I watched peers in my program “disappear.” Many, if not most, were more talented and worked harder. Unlike the “disappeared” in Pinochet’s brutal regime in Chile, these colleagues of mine usually had time to say “goodbye.” But they disappeared nonetheless, victims of a brutal academic culture, which I later discovered was not just an aspect of the particular doctoral program in which I was enrolled, but a systemic part of social science doctoral programs almost everywhere.

As the saying goes, silence is complicity, and I should not have remained silent. I continually kvetched to the Penn State Administration against the salient injustices I saw firsthand. But I should have been writing Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, the United Nations, and the human rights desk of the U.S. State Department pointing out the human rights violations in my Ph.D. program. Maybe I should have filed habeas corpus motions on behalf of my colleagues who were ABD (“all but dissertation”), hoping to get court relief for those trapped in a cycle of despair, with little hope of ever being released from the state of purgatory that, in many respects, is the lowest form of the human condition on this planet.

In June 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even enemy combatants could not be held indefinitely without at least some due process. To date, the Court has yet to consider whether an ABD student could likewise be held in that state by his or her dissertation committee indefinitely, or whether the same due process and civil rights protection provisions of the Constitution and statutes apply to ABD students. Apparently, the 13th Amendment prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude does not apply to graduate students, because they agree to be slaves—and often pay handsomely for the privilege. I raised this issue once with an attorney, who unsympathetically snapped back at me, “If you think ABD students are being abused, maybe you should try law school for a year or two!”

According to the Council on Graduate Schools, there were 402,708 doctoral students in the United States, 197,036 of them men and 205,672 of them women.1 Most of them lead happy, productive lives, akin to kindergarteners who are oblivious to what awaits them once their educational experience turns from sandboxes and fingerpainting to calculus and quantum physics. It is at the ABD stage when the Ph.D. program really begins, and takes its toll.

Suffering abject misery, despondency, and feelings of utter abandonment, the U.S. population of ABDs, numbering in the thousands, has no champion for them. You won’t find Labor Day telethons chaired by celebrities publicizing their plight. There are no laboratories feverishly seeking cures, or even sympathetic missionaries providing sustenance. There are no halfway houses for those who have successfully left their Ph.D. programs. No intensive services are provided in the community rather than in institutions to make the readjustment back to civilian life. ABDs are an at-risk population, unlikely to ever be able to make productive, independent contributions to society following years of unabated emotional dependence on a committee that may have taken delight in persecuting them.

What you do find is these lost souls wandering around campus libraries in a state of limbo, half human, half cyborg, clutching their unfinished dissertations, cut off from friends and family, typically in a catatonic state that makes victims disconnected from the world we know.  They are in denial that the “system” likes it this way, and that no matter how much additional work they put into their dissertations, they will likely be no closer to being finished than before they started. Perhaps this has been inspired by the story of the gods’ punishment of Sisyphus, condemned to push a rock up a hill only to see it fall down the hill each time, for eternity. One difference, though—when Sisyphus’s rock started falling down the hill, it didn’t roll directly over the head of the poor S.O.B. each time.

It really didn’t have to be that way if reform of the academic culture had taken hold, but the voices of change were muted by the interests that benefited from the plantation mentality of institutions of higher learning. It wasn’t as if the shortcomings and injustices were not well-known for decades, if not centuries (see Chapter 3).

My student colleagues in the program had complaints about their egregiously shabby treatment, which they shared with anyone who would listen. In fairness, I have to admit the program administrators were willing to listen, although I can’t say any substantive changes were made in the program during the five years I was there or in the years since I graduated.

My colleagues who were black students felt persecuted, exploited, and abused, and concluded that the program was racist. My colleagues who were women felt persecuted, exploited, and abused, and concluded that the program was sexist. My colleagues who were Jewish felt persecuted, exploited, and abused, and concluded that the program was anti-Semitic. My colleagues who came here to study from other countries felt persecuted, exploited, and abused, and concluded that the program was xenophobic. My colleagues who were homosexual felt persecuted, exploited, and abused, and concluded that the program was homophobic.

My colleagues who were albino, male, not adherents of any organized religion, or were born in the United States without identifying with any ethnic community had trouble placing the blame on their situation, but they complained just as loudly. But their complaints made no sounds, just as the tree that falls in the forest technically does not make a sound because there is no receiver to hear it fall.

Why did I put so much of my emotional and financial (including opportunity cost) eggs in a single basket only to become a basket case? In the next chapter, I will critique some of the most compelling reasons for doing so. You might want to take notes.

Notes

1.     Bell, Nathan W. (2009). Graduate Enrollment and Degrees: 1998 to 2008, Council on Graduate Schools. http://www.cgsnet.org/portals/0/pdf/R_ED2008.pdf

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