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[archman]

The OP said he initially contacted the committee with his concerns, and did not have them satisfactorily addressed. This strikes me a problem with the committee at this point. Responsible deans *should* be at least superficially screening anything they sign off on. The OP appeared to do so, found what he/she considered a blatant omission, and never received a satisfactory explanation from the committee about it. Instead, it reads like the committee went into knee-jerk defensive mode, right or wrong.

In this day and age, educational quality is eroding from all sides. I'm sure everyone here has heard many, many stories of passed dissertations that never should have been, or encountered such dissertations personally. Hearing the OP's side of his tale certainly does not help our quest to maintain academic rigour.

I don't understand how anyone can defend a *passed* dissertation that is missing chunks of it that were stated by the author to be there. I expect that a dean in the same general discipline as the committee *should* be certainly competent to at least check off major components of a dissertation, and verify that the basics are covered. If the dean finds simple problems with this screening (I assume the OP is describing a basic but fundamental omission), it is his/her duty to get clarity from the committee. If they get pissy about it... well the first thing that comes to MY head is that committee *did* in fact drop the ball.

Yes, dissertation committees do screw up. Sometimes they screw up big time. If the faculty aren't going to police themselves, it's the department chair and the dean's job to step in. If a graduate program would like to put absolute faith in the hands of the search committee, by all means do so. But don't ask the department head or dean to endorse any old dissertaion that graces their desk, without at least skimming it first.

[merce]

I just want to add a note here.
Yesterday I was reading a study of a text I know well.
The scholar claimed the author of the text claimed to fully discuss and explain X and did not even address X.
And yet, in my view the author did do address and completely explain, in his way, X.
Indeed I am not the only one to disagree with the scholar on this point.

[msparticularity]

I went to a top university for my Phd and I never heard of any Dean looking over a dissertation. They trusted the committee and the supervisor. Is this practice common?

I think it is becoming more common. Accreditors will look at dissertations to see if the quality is up to snuff.

I agree that doing as Zharkov suggests and pointing out issues to the committee and the student, with the suggestion  that they should be corrected in order not to embarrass anyone in future years, can be important and perfectly appropriate. Actually disqualifying a dissertation that has been accepted by the committee is a very different matter.

I guess we'll have to disagree on that. As long as the process is transparent and well-bounded, I think it's a reasonable exercise of oversight.

But this one wasn't. Per my point above, it is perfectly legitimate to have any number of levels of review, just as you say, as long as the process is transparent and well-bounded--which means, as I have been arguing, as long as the denial after a successful defense is not the very first sign that there might be a problem. This can be avoided in any number of ways--including having the dean review and approve prospectuses and then the dissertation drafts prior to defense, so the dean can either object to the draft or submit questions for the defense if s/he cannot actually attend.

What I am arguing here is that having an administrator suddenly (and apparently for the first time at this institution) sweep in and disqualify a dissertation is not legit. 

Is that the scenario, though? Be careful not to make up details that didn't exist in the OP's description.

The OP reports having read a dissertation before signing off on it, and realizing that there was a discontinuity, then contacting the committee to report this and request changes.  The committee was unresponsive, and at that point the OP demanded changes as the price for signing off, and then the committee complied.

The post, as written, makes it pretty clear to me that the OP was not engaged in a process that met your standards or mine: transparency and well-bounded procedures. I do confess to inferring that there was neither a precedent nor a procedure in place for doing this, since  1) OP was posting here to ask if this were acceptable and if so how it ought to be done; and 2) the committee's original response was to ignore the request as irrelevant.

[madhatter]

The post, as written, makes it pretty clear to me that the OP was not engaged in a process that met your standards or mine: transparency and well-bounded procedures. I do confess to inferring that there was neither a precedent nor a procedure in place for doing this, since  1) OP was posting here to ask if this were acceptable and if so how it ought to be done; and 2) the committee's original response was to ignore the request as irrelevant.

It does seem that someone wasn't playing by the rules or, as you suspect, there really weren't any rules. Even when there is a procedure in place, if someone chooses to ignore or defy it, there's often no official redress. So it becomes a question of how to deal with someone breaking the implicit contract.

[msparticularity]

The post, as written, makes it pretty clear to me that the OP was not engaged in a process that met your standards or mine: transparency and well-bounded procedures. I do confess to inferring that there was neither a precedent nor a procedure in place for doing this, since  1) OP was posting here to ask if this were acceptable and if so how it ought to be done; and 2) the committee's original response was to ignore the request as irrelevant.

It does seem that someone wasn't playing by the rules or, as you suspect, there really weren't any rules. Even when there is a procedure in place, if someone chooses to ignore or defy it, there's often no official redress. So it becomes a question of how to deal with someone breaking the implicit contract.

Yeah, but I don't think it's clear at all here that the implicit contract was broken. Looking at it from the outside (as was the OP), we're also back into the realm of possibility as to what actually happened on that committee and in the defense. As several people pointed out above, a lot of odd things can happen near the end in an effort to appease one random committee member--and, of course, what looks like a "significant" gap to one reader can, to someone more knowledgeable in the field, look like petty nit-picking.

All of which is to say, I don't think you and I disagree about the need to reach and preserve some kinds of standards for degree quality, Madhatter. I'm just objecting to random assertions of administrative power.

[madhatter]

All of which is to say, I don't think you and I disagree about the need to reach and preserve some kinds of standards for degree quality, Madhatter. I'm just objecting to random assertions of administrative power.

Me, too.

[david_perlmutter]

Very late...just noticed this post. Not sure what complicated debate is about. In a Dean's Review the Dean has the right and duty to review. And if my name is on something I have the right and duty to refuse to sign it for good cause. Dean was right.

[dellaroux]

As long as the dean didn't seat themselves on the committee, start writing the text for the student to include and then start revising their own text in the re-reads, I can be sure this is not the obverse of the situation I described a friend at another school facing for one of her advisees....(re:

   http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,76425.0.html

I have to confess that for an instant, before some of the other details started appearing, I wondered....

Another thought might have been for the dean to pose the question to someone at another school elsewhere in the universe to find out how serious the omission was.

Some issues might crack the foundation of the whole argument, while others might just be details. Only someone in the field without an axe to grind might be (subjunctive intended) able to tell which was the case.

[losemygrip]

In this case, the omission was egregious: "In this diss I will do X" and yet, X was missing. It's one thing to get into a pi$$ing match over Gramsci versus Foucault; it's another thing to point out that the committee failed to read the diss and catch the error.

This is the real issue.  The committee was mad because they didn't do their job, and they got caught. 

It was painfully clear at my dissertation defense who had really read my work.  And NOBODY bothered reading the revisions. 

[westcoastgirl]

Just reading this title made me shiver. That is such a scary thought. My friend is about to defend and he's rushing through his final chapter (he has an absurd number of chapters, though; he should just take the last out). I'm going to tell him later today that he should think twice. (Then again, I know people far less capable than him who have defended without a problem). And it'd be a shame since I just got an invite for some super fancy grad party of his. I won't plan a party til I'm completely finished (not that I have too many friends to invite).

[zharkov]

Just reading this title made me shiver. That is such a scary thought. My friend is about to defend and he's rushing through his final chapter (he has an absurd number of chapters, though; he should just take the last out). I'm going to tell him later today that he should think twice. (Then again, I know people far less capable than him who have defended without a problem). And it'd be a shame since I just got an invite for some super fancy grad party of his. I won't plan a party til I'm completely finished (not that I have too many friends to invite).

Although schools differ, it seems pretty standard that a "close to final" dissertation be sent to the committee at least a couple of weeks before the defense, sometimes a month or more.  Then at the defense, the committee may require changes and OK it conditionally pending the changes.  The post-defense edits can take a day, a week, or a month.  Then, again depending on school, the chair OK's it being sent to the grad school, where a deanlet checks for formatting and such, then on to the dean.  Although I suspect it is not common, deans can certainly kick things back; remember their names go on the sign off sheet.

[engineer_adrift]

Very late...just noticed this post. Not sure what complicated debate is about. In a Dean's Review the Dean has the right and duty to review. And if my name is on something I have the right and duty to refuse to sign it for good cause. Dean was right.

This is the key point.    If I think there is a fatal error, I don't sign it.  If you want my signature, the error must be addressed. 

If I abuse this quality control function, then I should not be renewed.  If I fail to do quality control, I should not have been appointed.

All hands should know that I am doing quality control so there are no surprises. 

-EA