onsidering finishing your PhD on the 30 year plan? It can be done, it seems—Miranda Irving writes about her experiences on the 30 year plan here. Her PhD. in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies was finally awarded in 2015. Embedded in this article is a nice link to what she wrote in 2006 about unfinished PhDs here.
Last month I wrote about the process of cooling out the graduate student who does not complete the PhD. The trick for the system is getting the graduate student to blame themselves for non-completion, rather than the grad school factory that is set up by professors to tolerate “non-completion rates” of 30-70%. Miranda does indeed accept responsibility for her own non-completion, and ‘fesses up and describes well how the grad student is cooled out. She has been “cooled out,” in the sense that she is willing to blame herself for failure to complete a system designed with a high non-completion rate.
Still, wouldn’t it be nice if the SOAS Chair of the Social Anthropology Department wrote up the department’s explanation for why such high non-completion rates are designed into the system of the anthropology program there? Presumably it could be printed The Guardian as well. Perhaps that Chair could answer the question of why systematically high PhD completion rates are solely product of accumulated student failures, rather than of a system designed by the professors?
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.