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Your mistake seems to be in doing all that research. It goes much faster if you fake it. I know. Don’t ask how. Daddy
:D
Perhaps it’s best that I don’t ask. Y’see, though…I never figured out how to fake it. Seems like that would be more work than just doing the research and learning something.
So in other news, Mich is doing her thesis on race relations in the COC during the Civil Rights movement, and spent several days reading a dissertation written in 1980. It was presumably by an ex-COC preacher who had individually interviewed something like 60 people about their official position toward racism etc during that period, and they’d replied that they’d agreed to remain silent in the church regarding racism. She thought this was suspicious, really, because (for starters) there was no appendix with a interview questions or anything, and it just seemed odd that that many people would readily admit they had decided to fade into the woodwork and not take a stand just ten years (or so) after it all went down. Also (oddly), he provided no quotes of any of the interviews. Every one of them were paraphrased. Presumably.
He also made a point that the leading COC periodicals had colluded and decided not to print a thing about the racism problems until 1968…but she noticed he had overlooked the “Christian Chronicle.” Upon inspecting this resource, she figured out why: it didn’t support his thesis.
Oh yeah…another clue that something wasn’t right was that he referred to COC preachers as “Rev.”
So Mich emailed Richard Hughes, a prof at Pepperdine and the author of a quite readable and scholarly history of the COC to ask why he hadn’t used the dissertation in his research. He wrote back in a timely fashion and said that he hadn’t used it because it was unsound. He pointed out that there was also an interview with him in the dissertation–which Mich has since read–that had never taken place. The doctoral student had also lifted an entire chapter of someone else’s dissertation whole cloth, as it turns out. That doctoral student is Dr. Someone now.
She plans to include a castigation of him in her thesis, of course. The nerve of him, making her spend several hours reading his dissertation when it was all just made up.
d
I’m saying!
That was the most annoying part. All those hours taking notes on a made-up dissertation. Mr so-and-so is going to be very throughly spanked when I get through writing my thesis. I just hope he doesn’t sue me or something. Although, I’m not sure what he’d take.
Diana,
One wonders where Dr. Someone is working now. As a journalist? Or in public education perhaps.
A school district near here has been in the news a lot lately. The heir apparent to their soon-to-retire superintendent has been revealed as a charlatan. His Ph.D. is from a diploma mill and one of his other degrees is completely fake. He’s also facing criminal charges for billing the district $2k for a seminar he never attended. Residents aren’t just angry because he was chosen to be the next super without the normal search process; they want to know how he even got hired in the first place. (He’s been with the district for several years now.)
But what can you expect in a state that would elect a lawyer from Arkansas as their Senator.
Dave
Also, he said he conducted 93 interviews of “leaders” in the Church of Christ in the course of 6 months and also sent out questionaires to the largest churches in the brotherhood asking them to rank the most prominent members of the CoC.
His dissertation was on “Power” in the CoC.
I don’t know where is is now. I tried to google him but found nothing. He got a doctorate in Philosophy in Religion and Ethics with that dissertation, as far as I can tell.
What a joke.
Has your wife heard anything yet, Dave? They’d have had time to run some tests by now, I imagine.
d
Diana,
Nothing yet. They rescheduled her biopsy from last Friday to tomorrow afternoon. Since I had Friday off, I asked her what she wanted to do and she said “get a tattoo.” So I took her to get a tattoo.
You -did- say to spoil her, right? (Grin)
Dave
They seem to lack the sense of urgency I’d expect if they thought there was a serious problem. One can only hope.
A tattoo? You do go the extra mile.
d