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The Chronicle of Higher Education: Colloquy

COLLOQUY
THE QUESTION
RESPONSES
BACKGROUND


In my Ph.D. program, the mean time to graduation was 7 years. Of my entering class of 12, 2 finished the program. The following class showed similar attrition. Faculty attitudes and treatment of students, on average (there were exceptions), reminded me of the "jail keepers" in the Stanford prison experiments. The faculty made it clear that they felt we were at fault. My advisor during my 3 years of (deliberately aborted) graduate work said that current grads are slow to finish and have trouble landing faculty positions because we're not of the quality that he and his peers acquired at our ages.

I note that many comments in the current discussion objecting to accusations of faculty abuse come from tenured professors and deans - those who gained academic positions long before the current Ph.D. glut (in sciences). Please, look around and see that Ph.D. students today face a world greatly changed from that which granted you the keys to the jail. The incentives in today's academic sciences are all wrong; advisors must acquire and keep as many grad. students as possible, as cheap labor to write and fulfill their research grants. It's a matter of their own career advancement, sometimes survival. But I believe it leads to mistreatment of graduate students and post-docs, and a glut of Ph.D.'s on the job market.

-- Shawne Neeper, Scientific Writer, Pharsight Corporation (posted 11/13, 10:13 a.m., E.S.T.)
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