Although I can’t really speak to the ability of doctoral education requirements to assist someone seeking a nonacademic job, most of what I was required to do in grad school, in order to earn my Ph.D., neither adequately prepared me to be a scholar, nor a professor.
Sure, I enrolled in and completed graduate seminars, submitted term papers, finished my written and oral exams, and wrote and defended a dissertation. I also served as a teaching assistant and helped the departmental secretaries register undergraduates each semester.
But I wasn’t really taught how to conduct scholarly research, teach a class, and engage in departmental, college, university and professional service. I had to learn these three pillars of a traditional academic career on my own, and primarily on the job.
I know I’m not unique. Now that I have been a full professor for some years, and having talked to numerous colleagues, I’m convinced that the graduate school requirements that most Canadian and American graduate students were subjected to were primarily poorly thought-out exercises, which graduate students had to do to leave the school with a Ph.D. in their hands.
Yet, there is still a widely held belief that the majority of tasks that graduate students are required to complete, somehow, perhaps by osmosis, helps them become scholars, instructors, or even service minded individuals.
There are probably four arguments that support the traditional practices: these methods are the only way we know how to best train graduate students to best prepare them for life beyond the protective shield of graduate school (aka we don’t have anything better to replace it); these practices were good enough for us and our contemporaries when we did our Ph.D., so you just have to buckle down, and grin and bear it too; and we are too busy, uncreative, etc. and thus we are going to continue to do as we’ve always done.
I would argue, on the other hand that, in general, the big four requirements (i.e., graduate seminars, term papers, comprehensive examinations, and writing dissertations) are a complete waste of time.
Graduate seminars, the ones that were in the catalogue, that appeared to interest me were rarely offered. And the ones that we were required to take or were available were mostly dull exercises. Few of the students who attended did the reading, and over time the instructors were about as bored of the process as the majority of students. I learned next to nothing. And what I was required to know, bore little resemblance to what I needed for my comprehensive examinations.
Sure, sometimes you can flip a term paper and after considerable revision submit it to a journal, hope that it will not incur a bench reject, and benefit from unbiased feedback, that allows you to dig deeper into your subject matter, and maybe even get the paper published.
Comprehensive exams were the ultimate garbage in garbage out process. It really doesn’t actually teach you how to read broadly in a way that is useful for your own future research and teaching. Despite focusing on three areas and learning the major literature in these fields, most of the jobs that I interviewed for asked me to teach subjects unrelated to this preparation.
Although I was able to successfully “publish out of my dissertation” and later get it published as a book, this does not always happen. Most people who complete the dissertation are by the end totally bored with the subject, only chose the subject for expediency sake, or the topic is too narrow to interest a book publisher.
Instead, we should seriously rethink our current model, subject the requirements, as some other graduate schools have, to empirical analysis, ditch or modify the ones that don’t produce the desired outcomes, and experiment with others.
Perhaps requiring our grad students to write grant proposals, get them funded, and then publish three or more articles in highly ranked peer review journals is better. (In fact, some places say three published articles – or documentation from editors indicating that the papers have been accepted for publication- equals a dissertation or something like that). After all, you need to do those things if you want to have any chance at a dwindling academic market that is hyper-competitive.
Hopefully this approach will minimize the hazing aspects of graduate education and have candidates better suited to a life as a scholar and professor.
Photo credit: Keith Lam
Graduation Ceremony
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/149584188_88af9f4c09_o-scaled.jpg19202560Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2021-07-22 02:48:092021-07-28 03:27:13Why most graduate school requirements do not adequately prepare doctoral students for the academic job market and what can be done about it?
Every day, across the United States, a percentage of people who are suspected of committing crimes, and know that they are wanted by law enforcement, (or have been released on bail or on their own recognizance) attempt to evade arrest, or delay proceedings, by relocating to other cities, counties, states, or countries.
Individuals who have fled may enter another country undetected, or be nabbed at the border by customs and immigration agents of the foreign state. If the suspect manages to bypass detection at the border, they may engage in another crime (typically a petty one like shoplifting), get arrested, and after their name (including other identifying details) is run through on or more appropriate databases (e.g., Interpol), the local police notice that there is an outstanding warrant for them back in the United States.
And so starts a long involved judicial process. The United States government is contacted, and an extradition warrant is issued. This situation is framed by the following facts.
It’s in the best interests of the foreign government to return the person to the United States to face trial as soon as possible, as it’s costing them resources (i.e., a prison cell, feeding the person, time for their legal department to process paperwork, etc.).
But they are not going to immediately ship the suspect back home if there is a possibility that the individual is going receive the death penalty or that the prison conditions in the state or federal bureau of prisons violate national, regional and international human rights standards that they are signatories to.
Most foreign nationals, who are in this situation, try to block their extradition back to the United States. If they are not able to do this themselves, which is usually the case, it’s primarily their loved ones (typically parents or spouses) who hire private attorneys, or legal aid lawyers in the guest country who do this work.
The loved ones, (who are formally known clients), in the United States, usually have little experience in these matters and few economic resources try to find an interested and competent lawyer/law firm. Few lawyers/law firms, however, have experience in international extradition matters and the ones that do can be quite pricey. This can set up lots of frustrating dynamics for the suspects, loved ones and the lawyers. In general, in these matters, you get what you pay for. If the law firm that is chosen lacks expertise it will mean a lot of wasted resources (i.e., time, money, emotional anguish, etc.).
Once the client makes a decision about which legal counsel to use, the lawyer/law firm takes a retainer, and then starts gathering evidence and filing forms. During this process, they may partner with a lawyer or law firm in the foreign country. They may also subcontract with a number of experts (i.e., death penalty, corrections, psychologists/psychiatrists, doctors, etc.)
One of the ways that legal council fight extradition is by delaying the process as much as legally possible. In this situation, delay is your friend. It gives the defense more time to put on a spirited defense.
The passage of time also increases the possibility that memory of witnesses to the alleged crime/s will fade, and they may forget important details of the case; they may even pass away or in the case of law enforcement, may change jobs, quit policing, or be convicted of a crime and thus their reliability as a witness may be jeopardized. All this typically works to the accused benefit.
If there is a possibility that the suspect may be sentenced to the death penalty, then the competent lawyer may also be able to negotiate this off the table.
On the other hand, clients sometimes hire a legal professional who is not a good fit to assist them. This scenario often leads to bad advice, poor legal strategy, considerable confusion, unnecessary emotional turmoil, and wasted resources.
On rare occasions the defense can prevent the extradition of an individuals who is wanted for extradition from being sent back to the United States.
But the reality is that sooner or later the person under whose name the extradition has been issued, will most likely be returned to the United States to face trial. A competent lawyer/law firm, with the assistance of appropriate subcontracted expertise, however, can manage the process in order to minimize the legal consequences that the accused will eventually face.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2021-07-15-at-12.59.12-PM.png617772Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2021-07-16 02:41:022023-05-05 15:49:25Fighting extradition back to the United States: The basics
When it comes to crime, journalists are typically interested in answering three logical questions:
• Is the crime rate increasing or decreasing? (This is usually framed as “Is crime out of control insert jurisdiction here?”)
• What can we realistically do about it?
• And are the police or politicians doing enough to address this challenge?
But in the process of answering these questions, both reporters and sometimes those asked to comment, often neglect (and fail to mention and explain) a handful of contextual issues.
The first concerns the reliability of crime statistics. Most experts understand that not all crime that occurs is reported to law enforcement. There are lots of reasons why, but it’s widely accepted that the types of crimes that we have the best data on are homicides when there is a dead body, and car thefts where the owners usually file a claim with an insurance agency.
So when reporters, police, or politicians talk about non-fatal/non-lethal shootings, for example, in general these are undercounted. More importantly drawing conclusions about them, is primarily speculation. For example, just because a person is shot does not mean that they are going to die. A number of things can happen to save that persons’ life so the event is not classified as a non-fatal shooting (i.e., very good and improved emergency room procedures, quicker response times by emergency medical personnel, and first responders have improved their ability to sustain life). Alternatively high rates of non-fatal shootings, may be the result of a higher than average number of shooters who are unskilled and thus bad shooters. Also maybe the guns they are using are lousy and are not accurate?
Second, and more recently, there have been claims that bail reforms are leading to an increase in crime. Yes we can point to individuals who while out on bail have engage in crimes, some of them quite horrific, and thus it would be a seductive to make this kind of relationship. But the there no clear empirical evidence that bail reform is leading to increase in violent crime.
Third, another assumption is that if we only had more or better police then crimes would fall. Again, Criminology 101 (and most human services classes) will tell you that crime is not as closely connected to police practices as most people think, but instead, is the result of numerous things happening in families, streets, communities, and the economy in general. The police are only one aspect of crime control. This means that they can only have a minor effect on large macro social processes like crime, and in turn crime rates. Thus, contrary to Eric Adams, the recently elected Democratic electoral candidate, more police does not necessarily mean less crime. In fact, it can have the opposite effect because more police on the street means that each one has a vested interest in detecting crime, criminals, etc. and thus this in turn will boost crime statistics.
Fourth, another frequent assertion is if we only had more and better paying jobs we would see less crime. This might be true if all crimes were financially motivated, but jealous lovers rarely physically hurt or kill their loved ones (i.e., domestic violence) because of disputes over money.
Fifth, there is a popular belief that if one type of crime is increasing in frequency, then there is a tendency to assume that all categories of crime are also going up. Reporters and those who are asked to comment on these trends sometimes fail to disaggregate all crime versus violent crime versus homicides. This is when it is important to realize that almost every type of crime has a different causal dynamic.
Finally, there’s a tendency to see what happens in one city in terms of crime, must be occurring throughout the country. We know that in some jurisdictions violent crime is up and others it is down. There are micro level processes going on in neighborhoods and by extension cities that just don’t translate in a national manner.
Some parting thoughts. Over the past 15 months COVID-19 has significantly changed human interactions, and by necessity it has had an effect on patterns of social interaction, use of public space, and thus individuals proclivity to engage in crime and also be victims of this activity. We have also seen gun purchases soar over this time, but the patterns of use are not completely understood.
Thus what we are seeing, in terms of crime, may be an aberration. The point is both reporters and experts must exercise care in interpreting crime and crime rates, and avoid the tendency to easy to generalize from anecdotal or incomplete evidence.
Photo Credit: Neil Moralee
Is that actually a crime
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/47871127441_081d47bd4c_c.jpg784800Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2021-07-09 15:37:162021-07-09 15:37:16Crime rates, reporters, and experts. A cautionary tale
Why most graduate school requirements do not adequately prepare doctoral students for the academic job market and what can be done about it?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossAlthough I can’t really speak to the ability of doctoral education requirements to assist someone seeking a nonacademic job, most of what I was required to do in grad school, in order to earn my Ph.D., neither adequately prepared me to be a scholar, nor a professor.
Sure, I enrolled in and completed graduate seminars, submitted term papers, finished my written and oral exams, and wrote and defended a dissertation. I also served as a teaching assistant and helped the departmental secretaries register undergraduates each semester.
But I wasn’t really taught how to conduct scholarly research, teach a class, and engage in departmental, college, university and professional service. I had to learn these three pillars of a traditional academic career on my own, and primarily on the job.
I know I’m not unique. Now that I have been a full professor for some years, and having talked to numerous colleagues, I’m convinced that the graduate school requirements that most Canadian and American graduate students were subjected to were primarily poorly thought-out exercises, which graduate students had to do to leave the school with a Ph.D. in their hands.
Yet, there is still a widely held belief that the majority of tasks that graduate students are required to complete, somehow, perhaps by osmosis, helps them become scholars, instructors, or even service minded individuals.
There are probably four arguments that support the traditional practices: these methods are the only way we know how to best train graduate students to best prepare them for life beyond the protective shield of graduate school (aka we don’t have anything better to replace it); these practices were good enough for us and our contemporaries when we did our Ph.D., so you just have to buckle down, and grin and bear it too; and we are too busy, uncreative, etc. and thus we are going to continue to do as we’ve always done.
I would argue, on the other hand that, in general, the big four requirements (i.e., graduate seminars, term papers, comprehensive examinations, and writing dissertations) are a complete waste of time.
Graduate seminars, the ones that were in the catalogue, that appeared to interest me were rarely offered. And the ones that we were required to take or were available were mostly dull exercises. Few of the students who attended did the reading, and over time the instructors were about as bored of the process as the majority of students. I learned next to nothing. And what I was required to know, bore little resemblance to what I needed for my comprehensive examinations.
Sure, sometimes you can flip a term paper and after considerable revision submit it to a journal, hope that it will not incur a bench reject, and benefit from unbiased feedback, that allows you to dig deeper into your subject matter, and maybe even get the paper published.
Comprehensive exams were the ultimate garbage in garbage out process. It really doesn’t actually teach you how to read broadly in a way that is useful for your own future research and teaching. Despite focusing on three areas and learning the major literature in these fields, most of the jobs that I interviewed for asked me to teach subjects unrelated to this preparation.
Although I was able to successfully “publish out of my dissertation” and later get it published as a book, this does not always happen. Most people who complete the dissertation are by the end totally bored with the subject, only chose the subject for expediency sake, or the topic is too narrow to interest a book publisher.
Instead, we should seriously rethink our current model, subject the requirements, as some other graduate schools have, to empirical analysis, ditch or modify the ones that don’t produce the desired outcomes, and experiment with others.
Perhaps requiring our grad students to write grant proposals, get them funded, and then publish three or more articles in highly ranked peer review journals is better. (In fact, some places say three published articles – or documentation from editors indicating that the papers have been accepted for publication- equals a dissertation or something like that). After all, you need to do those things if you want to have any chance at a dwindling academic market that is hyper-competitive.
Hopefully this approach will minimize the hazing aspects of graduate education and have candidates better suited to a life as a scholar and professor.
Photo credit: Keith Lam
Graduation Ceremony
Fighting extradition back to the United States: The basics
/by Jeffrey Ian RossEvery day, across the United States, a percentage of people who are suspected of committing crimes, and know that they are wanted by law enforcement, (or have been released on bail or on their own recognizance) attempt to evade arrest, or delay proceedings, by relocating to other cities, counties, states, or countries.
Individuals who have fled may enter another country undetected, or be nabbed at the border by customs and immigration agents of the foreign state. If the suspect manages to bypass detection at the border, they may engage in another crime (typically a petty one like shoplifting), get arrested, and after their name (including other identifying details) is run through on or more appropriate databases (e.g., Interpol), the local police notice that there is an outstanding warrant for them back in the United States.
And so starts a long involved judicial process. The United States government is contacted, and an extradition warrant is issued. This situation is framed by the following facts.
It’s in the best interests of the foreign government to return the person to the United States to face trial as soon as possible, as it’s costing them resources (i.e., a prison cell, feeding the person, time for their legal department to process paperwork, etc.).
But they are not going to immediately ship the suspect back home if there is a possibility that the individual is going receive the death penalty or that the prison conditions in the state or federal bureau of prisons violate national, regional and international human rights standards that they are signatories to.
Most foreign nationals, who are in this situation, try to block their extradition back to the United States. If they are not able to do this themselves, which is usually the case, it’s primarily their loved ones (typically parents or spouses) who hire private attorneys, or legal aid lawyers in the guest country who do this work.
The loved ones, (who are formally known clients), in the United States, usually have little experience in these matters and few economic resources try to find an interested and competent lawyer/law firm. Few lawyers/law firms, however, have experience in international extradition matters and the ones that do can be quite pricey. This can set up lots of frustrating dynamics for the suspects, loved ones and the lawyers. In general, in these matters, you get what you pay for. If the law firm that is chosen lacks expertise it will mean a lot of wasted resources (i.e., time, money, emotional anguish, etc.).
Once the client makes a decision about which legal counsel to use, the lawyer/law firm takes a retainer, and then starts gathering evidence and filing forms. During this process, they may partner with a lawyer or law firm in the foreign country. They may also subcontract with a number of experts (i.e., death penalty, corrections, psychologists/psychiatrists, doctors, etc.)
One of the ways that legal council fight extradition is by delaying the process as much as legally possible. In this situation, delay is your friend. It gives the defense more time to put on a spirited defense.
The passage of time also increases the possibility that memory of witnesses to the alleged crime/s will fade, and they may forget important details of the case; they may even pass away or in the case of law enforcement, may change jobs, quit policing, or be convicted of a crime and thus their reliability as a witness may be jeopardized. All this typically works to the accused benefit.
If there is a possibility that the suspect may be sentenced to the death penalty, then the competent lawyer may also be able to negotiate this off the table.
On the other hand, clients sometimes hire a legal professional who is not a good fit to assist them. This scenario often leads to bad advice, poor legal strategy, considerable confusion, unnecessary emotional turmoil, and wasted resources.
On rare occasions the defense can prevent the extradition of an individuals who is wanted for extradition from being sent back to the United States.
But the reality is that sooner or later the person under whose name the extradition has been issued, will most likely be returned to the United States to face trial. A competent lawyer/law firm, with the assistance of appropriate subcontracted expertise, however, can manage the process in order to minimize the legal consequences that the accused will eventually face.
Crime rates, reporters, and experts. A cautionary tale
/by Jeffrey Ian RossWhen it comes to crime, journalists are typically interested in answering three logical questions:
• Is the crime rate increasing or decreasing? (This is usually framed as “Is crime out of control insert jurisdiction here?”)
• What can we realistically do about it?
• And are the police or politicians doing enough to address this challenge?
But in the process of answering these questions, both reporters and sometimes those asked to comment, often neglect (and fail to mention and explain) a handful of contextual issues.
The first concerns the reliability of crime statistics. Most experts understand that not all crime that occurs is reported to law enforcement. There are lots of reasons why, but it’s widely accepted that the types of crimes that we have the best data on are homicides when there is a dead body, and car thefts where the owners usually file a claim with an insurance agency.
So when reporters, police, or politicians talk about non-fatal/non-lethal shootings, for example, in general these are undercounted. More importantly drawing conclusions about them, is primarily speculation. For example, just because a person is shot does not mean that they are going to die. A number of things can happen to save that persons’ life so the event is not classified as a non-fatal shooting (i.e., very good and improved emergency room procedures, quicker response times by emergency medical personnel, and first responders have improved their ability to sustain life). Alternatively high rates of non-fatal shootings, may be the result of a higher than average number of shooters who are unskilled and thus bad shooters. Also maybe the guns they are using are lousy and are not accurate?
Second, and more recently, there have been claims that bail reforms are leading to an increase in crime. Yes we can point to individuals who while out on bail have engage in crimes, some of them quite horrific, and thus it would be a seductive to make this kind of relationship. But the there no clear empirical evidence that bail reform is leading to increase in violent crime.
Third, another assumption is that if we only had more or better police then crimes would fall. Again, Criminology 101 (and most human services classes) will tell you that crime is not as closely connected to police practices as most people think, but instead, is the result of numerous things happening in families, streets, communities, and the economy in general. The police are only one aspect of crime control. This means that they can only have a minor effect on large macro social processes like crime, and in turn crime rates. Thus, contrary to Eric Adams, the recently elected Democratic electoral candidate, more police does not necessarily mean less crime. In fact, it can have the opposite effect because more police on the street means that each one has a vested interest in detecting crime, criminals, etc. and thus this in turn will boost crime statistics.
Fourth, another frequent assertion is if we only had more and better paying jobs we would see less crime. This might be true if all crimes were financially motivated, but jealous lovers rarely physically hurt or kill their loved ones (i.e., domestic violence) because of disputes over money.
Fifth, there is a popular belief that if one type of crime is increasing in frequency, then there is a tendency to assume that all categories of crime are also going up. Reporters and those who are asked to comment on these trends sometimes fail to disaggregate all crime versus violent crime versus homicides. This is when it is important to realize that almost every type of crime has a different causal dynamic.
Finally, there’s a tendency to see what happens in one city in terms of crime, must be occurring throughout the country. We know that in some jurisdictions violent crime is up and others it is down. There are micro level processes going on in neighborhoods and by extension cities that just don’t translate in a national manner.
Some parting thoughts. Over the past 15 months COVID-19 has significantly changed human interactions, and by necessity it has had an effect on patterns of social interaction, use of public space, and thus individuals proclivity to engage in crime and also be victims of this activity. We have also seen gun purchases soar over this time, but the patterns of use are not completely understood.
Thus what we are seeing, in terms of crime, may be an aberration. The point is both reporters and experts must exercise care in interpreting crime and crime rates, and avoid the tendency to easy to generalize from anecdotal or incomplete evidence.
Photo Credit: Neil Moralee
Is that actually a crime