Date: Tue, 09 Dec 1997 20:41:34 -0500
From: tombrown@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu (Thomas F Brown)
Subject: Re: SOCGRAD digest 135
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
Message-id: <199712100141.UAA21430@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>
Linda wrote:
>I believe you mentioned 5 years to complete the Ph.D.  

Yes, I mentioned this as the average time *at my department*. You
and the other posters to this thread have mistakenly assumed that
I was generalizing to all other departments.

>In this sense, your comment that, "Most of the folks who
>take longer around her [at J.H.U., I take it] really didn't have their
>acts together..." is not only insensitive and out of touch with the very
>large percentage of graduate students out there literally working their
>tails off despite the odds, it is WRONG.

I have seen a number of students reach dissertating time
with no idea of what their research topic will be. Then they flirt
with various topics, usually resisting the necessity of developing
a working hypothesis. Often they will take up two, three, or more
topics before they finally settle on one.

This is what I mean by not having your act together. I am always
astonished that anyone would even apply to grad school without
already having research interests. And what were they thinking
about during the two or three years of classes, knowing what
lay before them? How can you arrive at dissertating time with no 
clue? These are not necessarily incompetent individuals at all.
In fact, many of them are very talented, but they clearly don't 
have their acts together.

>You claim that, "If you can't work the system at the
>lower levels then you probably won't be able to at the career level
>either" is interesting.  Perhaps you can provide some useful advice on
>this count to those of us who have been surviving on the lower levels of
>the American social class hierarchy for some time now.  Or, is it that,
>according to the "evolutionary perspective" you apparently adopt, except
>in the case of higher education, knowledge on how to *work the system* is
>something that people like myself should already be familiar enough with?? 

You have taken some of my words out of context and woven them into 
a straw man. However, I will respond.

I don't particularly like the prestige system. I was merely pointing
out that it is rational to make use of it, and that in a limited sense 
it is univeralistic and meritocratic. How you have connected this observation
to the american class hierarchy is unclear. When I used the word "levels", 
I was referring to the academic career ladder, not class hierarchies.

The ability to "work the system" in academia is predicated on understanding
how the system works and doing what you have to to make it work in
your favor. Figuring out how the system works is not that difficult.
You do it by observing the social system around you, locating key
informants, and asking them questions. 

If someone can't figure out the academic career system they're embedded
in, my guess is that they won't be very good at understanding other
kinds of social systems either. And that's what sociologists *do*.

Of course, just knowing how the system works doesn't necessarily
mean you'll be able to work it in your favor. Of course it could
be made more rational and more universalistic. But this is probably
the stuff of a new thread.