I'm afraid i don't see why the position is cynical. It is just real. I completely agree that there are standards, and external reviewers are great. i'm not saying that some people haven't earned their ph.d. or that theirs is not equivalent. All that I am saying is that the Ph.D. must be understood as 'met the base standard' and we shouldn't assume that it necessarily did what we did, what we might expect they did, or anything else. I say this not to be cynical, but because almost everyone seems to talk that it means something more, but I have a strong suspicion that that is a form of ideological inflation, we all need it to be more, so we portray it to be more, but much like low-paying faculty jobs and the reality of the job market, it is not more, it is just a ph.d. and it only means that your committee and the institution you received it from has agreed that you earned it and met their standards for it. It isn't cynical, it is just me trying to deny us our 'magic' or ideological structure that says there is 'more value/more values' built into that degree.
On Dec 6, 2009, at 11:10 AM, Donald Norman wrote:
> Several commentators have said that, hell, what really matters is
> whether or not you convince your PhD examining committee to grant you
> your degree. Pretty cynical view, even if true.
>
> BUT. Note that most universities require that the committee include
> people from outside the candidate's department, sometimes even from
> outside the school in the university, as an attempt to try to maintain
> common standards across disciplines. Thus, not only have I
> participated in PhD evaluations in many different departments (I
> listed many of them in my original post), but I have also served as an
> external examiner for dissertations in universities other than the one
> i was teaching at. All together, i have served on the thesis
> committees at Harvard, MIT, University of California, San Diego,
> Stanford, Northwestern, and Delft (TUE). The goal is to try to have
> uniform standards. and although not always achieved, be aware that
> universities do not wish departments to have rogue definitions and
> standards: the PhD should be roughly equivalent across fields and
> Universities.
>
> Don Norman
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