Are you a graduate student who’s fed up with working nights and weekends?
The Ph.D. Challenge could be your path out of academic drudgery and into a life free of meager stipends and pesky footnotes, allowing you to pursue your dreams while sleeping on your parents’ couch.
Participants are asked to perform a task “that the average graduate student is too timid to perform,” namely, to deftly insert the phrase “I smoke crack rocks” into the final, camera-ready version of a peer-reviewed academic paper using whatever creative means necessary.
Prizes are as follows:
* 1 box of Maruchan ramen noodle soup (your choice of flavor)
* 1 autographed 8×10 photograph of Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman (tentative)
* 1 pack of leather elbow patches
Deadline for submissions is “November 31th, 2010 11:59 PST” (Wait a minute: “Thirty days hath September …”), and winners will be announced on December 15th.
Tweed interviewed one of the the anonymous founders of the Ph.D. Challenge via email:
Q. Who are you, and why all the secrecy? You suggest that the average grad student is “timid,” yet you won’t give your own name.
A. I just got off probation so I am wary of causing any more trouble for myself. It’s amazing they still let me show up every day at my office and keep paying my stipend!
Q. Are you acting alone?
A. It’s a team effort.
Q. Are you male or female?
A. I pee standing up, the others urinate with varying methods.
Q. What’s your field?
A. Science.
Q. Where are you located?
A. The Ivy League.
Q. How did you conceive the Ph.D. Challenge?
A. My beautiful adviser told me a story about when he was getting his Ph.D. Another student put in their thesis (somewhere in the back) the sentence “If you read this line, I owe you $100.” Nobody every collected on it. Inspired by this tale, I decided to take it one step further. But it wasn’t until after a night of brandy on the California coastline with a Canadian friend that we decided to start the organization.
Q. How did you go about publicizing it and what has arc of interest been like?
A. I made the Web site in my underwear one Saturday morning. A few weeks later I posted a few fliers at some schools that I may or may or not attend. I guess somebody found it on Twitter or Facebook about a week ago, and I got about +25k hits on the Web site recently.
Q. How many entries so far?
A. So far there have been zero submissions, but there have been a few requests to allow faculty to participate. We are not going to budge on that rule; the Challenge is for grad students only.
Q. What point are you trying to make about academe?
A. As a former class clown, I guess I’m trying to prove that being funny and doing research are not mutually exclusive.
Q. Why “I smoke crack rocks”?
A. We wanted something risky, but we were very careful to avoid anything sexual.
Q. Have you ever smoked crack rocks?
A. Please define “smoked.”
Q. Does anyone outside of the fields of substance-abuse studies (or perhaps geology) stand a chance of completing this task successfully?
A. I believe any field can do it if they are clever enough.
Q. How do you plan to get Krugman on board with this? As an economics rock star, he surely knows the value of an autographed 8×10 of his bearded self, right?
A. Paul Krugman has the best beard in academia right now and that’s why we picked him. Although somebody like Noam Chomsky would be great too, he just doesn’t match Krugman’s hirsute prowess. Although I don’t know him personally, he seems like he’s friendly enough to go along with the fun. (I have a Princeton friend who assures me he can score a Paul Krugman 8×10.)
Q. The blog Recursivity mentioned the Ph.D. Challenge in May. In the comments, “Miranda” asks: “Are commas allowed? Ex: ‘I get such a headache when I smoke, crack rocks, or change my baby’s diaper.’” And in a thread on Reddit, one BluthBanana appears to have already won: “This should be a breeze in my paper, The Nocebo Effect in First Time Drug Users. On page 4, the quote from Stacey K. reads: ‘THE FLOOR IS MADE OF TINY PIECES! I SMOKE CRACK ROCKS.’”
A. We expect to get multiple submissions of varying quality. We will judge submissions based on various properties: (1) How close the words are together, (2) Whether there is any punctuation between letters/words, (3) Whether the words are printed horizontally or vertically, (4) How large the print is for the Challenge phrase, and (5) The type of publication it is (e.g., substance abuse would be weighted less than string theory).
Q. Why would any scholar risk upsetting his or her intellectual elders by doing this?
A. We went back and forth trying to decide the best way to announce the winner. … In the end, we decided that just publishing the paper name without instructions on how to find the phrase could cause a buzz that in the end will have more people reading somebody’s paper than otherwise would have happened. The truly clever writer will be able to hide the phrase in manner that doesn’t detract from the meaning or significance of their work.
There are also a lot of people getting Ph.D.s who have no plans on staying in academia. These folk will go off and form companies or do something where the papers they published while in grad school won’t matter. —Don Troop
(Photo illustration by Bob McGrath)
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