Sour grapes
While I was at Mum and Dad's for dinner on Sunday night, I picked up both copies of my MPhil thesis. I wanted that personal history around me if I were going to revive my interest in some of my work from that time. The philosophy department clearly agreed that I deserved the MPhil, although the external reviewer actually failed me on the thesis. His comments were not entirely unhelpful. The department, however, did not generally take the review seriously due to its obvious lack of objectivity, stemming from marked personal bias:
Thereby resulting in:
The review reads with such ferocity that it undermines its own credibility before one has even read the thesis it concerns. One must always be wary of religious fervour, for or against anything, in all its manifestations. On top of this, the reviewer delayed reviewing the thesis for a full six months before I ever received his comments. It seems that in order to get the thing over with so my university would stop harassing him for his review, he threw it together in an hour based on a bare skim of the material.
Fortunately, I felt rather distanced from the whole thing at the time because I had already chosen to give up philosophy. The department, however, was shocked. The postgraduate coordinator explained the scandal by saying that this person had an axe to grind because he used to teach at this university and they didn't renew his contract last year. The job he ended up with was at a less prestigious university in a regional area. He therefore seems to have taken this thesis as an opportunity to produce a personal expression of sour grapes towards the university that shunned him. I suppose that it was a safe forum for him to have a vent, secure in the knowledge that no consequence would attach itself to him--except that my supervisor will never use him as a referee again. In the meantime, in order to comply with the university by-laws, my university had to accept a token resubmission of my thesis with only minor emendations. Because of the nature of the resubmission, however, I still regard its original version as definitive. This version received a glowing review from the internal reviewer, including claims that were the polar opposite of what the external reviewer eventually said. I was awarded my MPhil in late 1996, and graduated in a ceremony in the main hall in early 1997. Nevertheless, the whole affair was an insight into academic politics that I did not soon forget, and I am not sorry that I chose not to become an academic.
- Against the university of origin;
- Against the basic project; and
- In favour of certain parochial lines of philosophical inquiry;
Thereby resulting in:
- Constant, often fundamental misrepresentations of what I actually said;
- Highly selective conclusions about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the thesis; and
- Extreme animosity and unhelpfulness of tone and language.
The review reads with such ferocity that it undermines its own credibility before one has even read the thesis it concerns. One must always be wary of religious fervour, for or against anything, in all its manifestations. On top of this, the reviewer delayed reviewing the thesis for a full six months before I ever received his comments. It seems that in order to get the thing over with so my university would stop harassing him for his review, he threw it together in an hour based on a bare skim of the material.
Fortunately, I felt rather distanced from the whole thing at the time because I had already chosen to give up philosophy. The department, however, was shocked. The postgraduate coordinator explained the scandal by saying that this person had an axe to grind because he used to teach at this university and they didn't renew his contract last year. The job he ended up with was at a less prestigious university in a regional area. He therefore seems to have taken this thesis as an opportunity to produce a personal expression of sour grapes towards the university that shunned him. I suppose that it was a safe forum for him to have a vent, secure in the knowledge that no consequence would attach itself to him--except that my supervisor will never use him as a referee again. In the meantime, in order to comply with the university by-laws, my university had to accept a token resubmission of my thesis with only minor emendations. Because of the nature of the resubmission, however, I still regard its original version as definitive. This version received a glowing review from the internal reviewer, including claims that were the polar opposite of what the external reviewer eventually said. I was awarded my MPhil in late 1996, and graduated in a ceremony in the main hall in early 1997. Nevertheless, the whole affair was an insight into academic politics that I did not soon forget, and I am not sorry that I chose not to become an academic.
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