To all of you guys and gals with Ph. D's, Ed. D's, Ed. S's, etc.

[Samsa]

My only advice is to do what makes you happiest, not the one that might bring you extra $ and only the promise of being happier...

Excellent advice, and precisely why I dropped out of law school.

 

[Harp]

I hated law school. Marbury vs Madison too. lol

 

[Dr Doran]

Perhaps my most personal post of all time

This goes not only to the originator of this thread but to anyone else in grad school or contemplating it.

Remember that the longer you stick it out, the more incentive THEY have to make sure that you get the PhD. They don't want a reputation as a school that permitted a bright person to go away just because he felt sort of (or very) burnt out. They have already spent money and attention on you for years and they want you to be a good product.

I am fairly annoyed with my program. I came in wanting to do Greek history of the classical period (Persian Wars until Alexander) and the only person doing that was ready to retire. The world's greatest expert on the SUBSEQUENT period (the Hellenistic period, from Alexander to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC) was still active here, and remained so, but I was interested in earlier developments. To make it worse, the professor who specialized in the Classical period was somewhat difficult to deal with; plus, like most Berkeley professors, he was less concerned with shepherding his graduate students and more concerned with securing funding to be able to take semesters off. Two YEARS later, they hired a bright young woman, marvelous, and now I work with her. It still is not optimal as she has been on sabbatical or leave of some sort for literally half the time she has been there. I am in my 5th year now (I got the Master's in my second) and I will take all my exams now and then write the dissertation. If there is one thing I know, it is that when I am a professor, and I have bright grad students wanting to learn from me, I am going to spend a lot more attention on them than was spent on me and I am going to help them a lot more than I was helped. However, my time in the program is a help to me. At this point I think that if I said, "Hey guys, Hoop X that you are making me jump through right now is really really annoying" they might just loosen the hoop for me. I'm not sure, and I am not going to test them. But the mere fact of having stuck it out this long gives me a little bit of auctoritas. They simply figure, "well, he's stuck it out THIS long, he cannot be all bad, besides the fedoras, suits, old ties, opposition to PC, and weird tattoos."

 

[artful dodgette]

i dream of being able to do my masters in footwear. i did my degree in footwear making and design, and i'd love to do a masters so i can learn more about hand making and the business side. id love a little shop!

 

[Harp]

Doran: I thought you were a Homburg man....
Viel gluck mit Berkeley herr doktor.

 

[Dr Doran]

Doran: I thought you were a Homburg man....
Viel gluck mit Berkeley herr doktor.

I do have a gorgeous German suede homburg, 'tis true, and I wear it often; but I also have fedoras by Knox (beige), Lucien de Brabant (grey, utterly gorgeous), and Stetson (brown). Once in a while an 8-piece cap, too, or a herringbone cap. Sometimes a straw hat.

Thank you. I will need it.

 

[Harp]

Thank you. I will need it.

...and you are carrying the Torch toward the future with respect to the
seeming demise of classical education, old boy! Well done. :eusa_clap

 

[Dr Doran]

...and you are carrying the Torch toward the future with respect to the
seeming demise of classical education, old boy! Well done. :eusa_clap

UNITE
FIGHT
TOGETHER
WE CAN REACH THE LIGHT

-Oi Polloi (Scottish skinhead oi band, anti-Nazi before anyone asks; their name is tattooed on my right shoulder from 1988 or so)

 

[surely]

Doran et al

"Remember that the longer you stick it out, the more incentive THEY have to make sure that you get the PhD." (Doran)

That's true at times, BUT at other times THEY act as gatekeepers, and if one is taking too long or doesn't meet unspoken criteria, THEY can make it very very difficult and unpleasant.

 

[Harp]

That's true at times, BUT at other times THEY act as gatekeepers, and if one... doesn't meet unspoken criteria, THEY can make it very very difficult and unpleasant.

Especially if one is not liberal....

 

[Dr Doran]

Especially if one is not liberal....

Gotta choose your commmittee carefully. As few "fellow travelers" as possible.

Also, check out the "National Association of Scholars." Some bigwigs, including in my field, who believe (correctly says I) that higher education in the USA is biased too far toward the left. I say this AS a (moderate) liberal who is freaked out by the radical Marxist assumptions I hear every day. The NAS also thinks postmodernism is hooey and I could not agree more.

According to a (wonderfully apolitical, or at least moderate) teacher I have, the pendulum is swinging back and postmodernism is on its way out ... I hope this is true.

 

[surely]

"Some bigwigs, including in my field, who believe (correctly says I) that higher education in the USA is biased too far toward the left." thus sayest Doran


Do you think business & law schools are too far to the left?

 

[Dr Doran]

"Some bigwigs, including in my field, who believe (correctly says I) that higher education in the USA is biased too far toward the left." thus sayest Doran


Do you think business & law schools are too far to the left?

Nope, I'm talking about graduate school in the humanities. Certain social sciences, namely sociology and (cultural) anthropology, are taught this way too. Ostracism is often the result if you have different opinions even if you have come to these opinions from a great deal of study.

Law is pretty freak left at Berkeley, though.

Keep in mind I am NOT talking about moderate sensible left. I am talking about screaming radical left, combined with intolerance toward anything that is not screaming radical left. If you have not seen it, and thus cannot imagine it going on, you need to exercise your imagination more, because the phenomenon I am talking about can get extremely hairy. Look at Larry Summers getting fired, an example of the worst kind of political correctness there is. I have seen it and I have many many many anecdotes that I have personally witnessed as well as things reported to me. I am talking about the grossest form of bias, not mild things like writing assignments in which students are asked to support the argument that Bush is a war criminal. The latter is nothing more than an excercise in rhetoric.

I also did my undergrad at Berkeley. There is an "American Cultures" requirement here. I took a history class to fulfill it. As a historian, I was APALLED. The story the professor was selling to these 20 year old naive students was that in American history, whites were bad, non-whites good; Christians bad, non-Christians good; men bad, women good; straights bad, gays good. The family itself was a vile construct. It was exactly like watching an old Western in which the bad guys have black hats and the good guys have white hats except the hats were reversed. It was the most insanely biased and one-sided thing I have ever seen in my life. Objectivity or an attempt to tell both sides of the story went out the window.

Often people who are older, from a previous generation, will say that "this is a needed corrective to the story we were told." But these 20 year olds came largely from California high schools where I assure you, they had gotten the same story as was being told in that class. The history of the world retold as a history of Oppression and Victimization and nothing more. I got it in high school too. A highly Marxist- and postcolonialist-influenced story in which nothing was said about the hard WORK of the whites, about the whites who DIED in the civil war on the side of the north, those who died on the side of the abolition of slavery, about the the sufferings that they had faced too. This kind of "history" is at least as bad as any one-sided version that people got in the 1950s. It is not the way to teach history.

I'm a pretty liberal person. I vote Democrat and am fairly left on most issues. I have nothing against an open-minded leftism. I am not talking about that. I am talking about an extremely narrow-minded, very close-minded, intolerant, contemptuous form of thinking that occurs on both sides of the spectrum; however, all the more prestigious universities in this country at this moment except perhaps Duke, are of this ilk. Just look at the book ads in the New York Review of Books from the university presses showing all the latest publications in the humanities and social sciences. This is the dogma that is coming out, and woe betide he who contradicts it. Fairly moderate persons, disgusted by what they have seen in the universities, have reacted and turned far right because they are so horrified by it. Look at Victor Davis Hanson in my field. He was once a moderate democrat until he went to grad school at Stanford. This will not happen to me as I am politically moderate deep in my bones. But I can see why people have the temptation in grad school to turn away from it, far away, because it is so pervasive, so dogmatic, so insistent, so uniform. I have been subject to screaming matches and threats from other grad students and professors because I dared to challenge radical left orthodoxy. It is not a pretty picture and it is not a healthy environment for the circulation and testing of ideas. Even leftish professors who are not radicals have admitted to me, privately in their offices, that this sort of environment does exist at Berkeley and is universal in the humanities graduate departments in this country. And they have admitted that ideas suffer. When I asked why they did not challenge the orthodoxy, one said, "well, one does want to get along with one's colleagues." Another said, "well, it's not like this in England, and I don't want to be the fly in the ointment here in America. I want to get along." This is not a healthy situation.

One student has told another student that I am a racist because I do not favor racially based affirmative action. I came to this position after a great deal of reading, several years of teaching, and many, many, many years of thinking every single aspect of the problem through and through and through; books by Thomas Sowell and John McWhorter, both of whom are black intellectuals who think that racially based affirmative action is BAD for blacks, have greatly influenced my thinking. But in an environment like this, any opinion like the one I have is automatically branded bad, racist, and ignorant.

 

[surely]

I take it you handled yourself quite well with the screamers.
I know of whom you speak; I had many a battle with them in the 60's but they were on the street or undergrads then, they hadn't made it being profs yet. And now my son-in-law is one of them, absolutely infuriating. :rage:
But my point is that many business and law schools represent the thinking on the right and make it difficult for even moderate liberals just as the leftists make it difficult for moderates in many liberal arts and the social sciences.

 

[Dr Doran]

I take it you handled yourself quite well with the screamers.
I know of whom you speak; I had many a battle with them in the 60's but they were on the street or undergrads then, they hadn't made it being profs yet. And now my son-in-law is one of them, absolutely infuriating. :rage:
But my point is that many business and law schools represent the thinking on the right and make it difficult for even moderate liberals just as the leftists make it difficult for moderates in many liberal arts and the social sciences.

That makes sense. I see your point and I think you are correct.

I am sorry about your son in law. That must be horrid. I cannot stand my father in law. He is literally the most annoying person I have ever met in my life. It is unfortunate to have a bad in-law relationship. Luckily he is in Poland and knows he is not welcome to stay in our house. So I don't have to see him much.

 

[Harp]

Do you think...law schools are too far to the left?

A most emphatic YES!!!!!!

 

[surely]

That makes sense. I see your point and I think you are correct.

I am sorry about your son in law. That must be horrid. I cannot stand my father in law. He is literally the most annoying person I have ever met in my life. It is unfortunate to have a bad in-law relationship. Luckily he is in Poland and knows he is not welcome to stay in our house. So I don't have to see him much.

Ah, its nice to be agreed with once in awhile....

fftopic: My commiseration, in-laws can be a prbm. Poor me, I have to go to Paris yearly to visit the daughter and grandkids, and then be patient with the illogical, irritating, insomniac and opportunistic, officious, oaf of a son-in-law. Whew, that felt good.
Well, at least while there I can drown my sorrows with that un-American French wine. ... and stuff my face with bread, cheese and pate...

 

[Dr Doran]

Well, at least while there I can drown my sorrows with that un-American French wine. ... and stuff my face with bread, cheese and pate...

Fair trade-off! J'aime bien la cuisine francaise.