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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

As someone who was a computer science grad student for a long time, this is horrifying to read. But I'm confused. If I had experienced something like this, I would have immediately spoken with my advisor; my advisor was not as invested in my successful graduation as me, but he was the second-most invested person, academically. Are art history programs different in that students do not have primary advisors?

edit: In part 2, she mentions her advisor. But clearly her advisor was not someone she thought could help her. That alone makes her experience sound awful, and her environment dysfunctional.

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They have primary advisors, but (based on experience working in an administrative position at a US university) I get the feeling humanities programs are very different from STEM subjects. The decision on whether one's work is "correct" and worthy of a phD is so subjective, and prevailing theoretical trends are so arbitrary and subject to change, that it's easy to reject a dissertation based on cliquish whims. She may have believed, plausibly given her experience, that her primary advisor would take Dr. Mao's side like everyone else. (If Dr. Mao wasn't her primary advisor, which it kind of sounds like they were, since it was their job - which they did not do - to send the dissertation to the rest of the committee?)

Based on quick Googling, it looks like humanities phD completion rates are around 50% at best - which makes it sound like no one is all that "invested" in these students' successful completion.

Former humanities grad student here. This is completely correct. One of the (many) reasons to avoid humanities grad programs is because a single person can so easily block or retard your progress: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor...

Based on those sentences, I had concluded Dr. Mao was not her advisor: "I had to email my dissertation mostly un-read by my advisor to my entire committee (a scandal in and of itself), because, as my advisor wrote in a terse email to me, they did not have time to read it. Despite the gross negligence that this brazen declaration signaled, I was relieved by this, because it meant that I would go straight into my defense with a very high chance that Dr. Mao had not discovered what I feared they would."

I took that to mean that since her advisor told her that her committee was unlikely to read her dissertation before the defense, she took comfort in believing Dr. Mao - a member of the committee but a separate person from her advisor - would also not read it.

Yes, the sentence can be read either way (as "the advisor" and "Dr. Mao" both referring to the same person, who had not read the dissertation, or two different people). Dr. Mao's role seems to be kept almost deliberately vague - possibly in response to her lawyer's advice as stated in Part III?

She does seem to state that her defense was conducted by three people - Dr. Mao, Dr. Hortense (who she did "go to" and got an unhelpful response), and "The third person in the room, another professor on my committee" who appeared surprised by the proceedings.

> kept almost deliberately vague

I think it's a mix of lawyer advice and a disavowal of Dr. Mao as her advisor -- a way to maintain some dignity. The member of the dissertation committee who is most likely to be "impossible" to remove is the chair. More evidence for the roles: "I told Dr. Hortense in this November email that I was worried about my ability to pass my defense, especially if Dr. Mao was not going to read it prior to sending it out to the entire committee."

Yes, I now agree with you and upvotinglurker. That also explains the mystery, and the hidden horror: her advisor plagiarized her.

She also mentioned that she would have been elated if Dr. Mao had just credited her in a footnote when he published her work. I imagine that this is shitty, but common in student-adviser relationships.

>The decision on whether one's work is "correct" and worthy of a phD is so subjective, and prevailing theoretical trends are so arbitrary and subject to change, that it's easy to reject a dissertation based on cliquish whims.

The other half of the double-whammy is there are a lot of humanities degrees with no marketplace value beyond "has a degree" unless you have a PhD, so anybody in the position to impede your doctorate has more power than he would in a STEM field.

in the humanities, it is often the case that your "advisor" is someone with whom you meet a few times a semester. this is quite unlike STEM fields, where your advisor is often also your employer (usually you're in their research group as a researcher).

Same here. I cannot believe the amount of organized dishonesty. I have a Ph.D. in CS; if anything remotely similar had happened to me, my advisor would have stepped in strongly. Also, my field is a very small world and such a behavior would have discredited the vilain almost on the spot. Maybe this kind of behavior is more common in liberal arts?

Bio is more like humanities, it seems, than CS. I've seen Primary Advisers sabotage students in defenses before, it's not fun, and it's not uncommon (~15% of them, maybe). Don't ask me why, but it happens. I even saw a PI sue a student for 'work not completed' after he graduated and the PI signed the forms. The student just went back to China and nothing came of it, but for a few months there it was pretty hairy trying to educate the student in US laws and calm him down.

> Maybe this kind of behavior is more common in liberal arts?

It isn't. I've worked in a research group that focused in a specific engineering domain, and once I've noticed that my own supervisor published a paper with the results I got from computer simulations and informally shared with him to ask for his input on the findings. Essentially he took my plots, tweaked their appearance by changing color schemes, labels and ranges, and wrote a paper around those plots.

I couldn't do anything about it because in practice the only proof I had were the plots, and the paper was on a subject that was supposedly the advisor's specialty. Furthermore, back then my tenure track depended directly on that man's say. So, even if I had irrefutable proof that he usurped my results to publish his own paper, blowing the whistle on him would end my career.

Another difference between her experience and mine outside of humanities:

defenses that revel in ripping apart at least six years’ worth of work without taking the time to acknowledge its value are shockingly common

I had annual meetings with my committee. This wasn't optional, it was a hard requirement set by the department. That way, when a committee member has a concern, they don't wait until the very end to raise it.

I'm not sure if humanities in general are horribly dysfunctional, or just her school.

If you've somehow never met someone with horror stories of interacting with their advisor, I'm impressed.

I have, of course. But I had assumed her advisor would at least by the most logical person to help her, but as others in the thread point out, it's likely her advisor was the one who plagiarized her.

> Are art history programs different

I think everything in the humanities is substantially different than anything in STEM

It was the first thought that came to me too. I was lucky enough as a PhD student (mathematics) that I never would have had any doubt that my advisor would have jumped in and fought on my (really 'our') behalf on something like this.

I feel for the author, it sounds like a terrible situation.

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