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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Booting PhD Students for Lack of “Talent”

Brian Leiter

A PhD student in philosophy at Harvard writes:

“I wonder if you could tell me anything about whether it is a common or accepted practice at philosophy departments in this country to ‘kick out’ students who are deemed insufficiently talented. I ask because it does seem to be a common practice in my department and I’m concerned because it creates an extremely uncomfortable working environment. Everyone is worried that they might be next and that, of course, makes it very hard to concentrate on an already difficult subject.

“I should emphasize that the students who were recently asked to leave my program were not so asked because they weren’t taking their work seriously or otherwise ‘slacking off.’ In at least two of those cases I know personally that the students involved were highly dedicated students. Their dedication notwithstanding, someone on the faculty decided that they were not sufficiently talented in philosophy and they were asked to leave the program. So again, my question is simply whether this is common practice or whether these ‘untalented’ students are generally allowed to finish their programs and then just not supported on the job market.”

My impression is that this is not common–it was not true at Michigan, and it is not true at Texas, but perhaps these schools have “standards” not as high as Harvard’s–but I’m opening comments on this one. I will permit anonymous comments from students, given the delicate nature of this topic, but I may of course edit comments for reasons of propriety (not to mention defamation). If you are going to post anonymously, please be sure to do so from a university computer that corresponds to the university you are reporting on!

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25 responses to “Booting PhD Students for Lack of “Talent””

  1. Gary Kemp

    First we need to know whether students in a given program are being asked to leave on the basis of unsatisfactory performance – which would not in itself be objectionable – or whether the program is doing so on the basis of some other kind of judgement about talent. Of course no on thinks that dedication and diligence alone should be sufficient for the awared of a graduate degree.

    Reply
  2. Michael Otsuka

    I suppose it's worth distinguishing between:

    1. Cases in which students are asked to leave after having failed to meet certain formal requirements: e.g., an oral defense of a dissertation proposal was deemed inadequate, they failed to receive passing marks on qualifying exams or essays, or their graded work in seminars was deemed too low.

    2. Cases in which students are asked to leave even though they've met all formal requirements.

    The latter is obviously much more problematic than the former.

    Reply
  3. Ann O'Nymous

    Unfortunately I can only confirm what the Harvard-PhD student laments. At my school ('not quite a Harvard,' but top-40) several students had their funding withdrawn this past year for exactly the same reasons – a perceived lack of talent, lack of motivation, a perceived inability to secure a tenure-track job at a 4-year college, etc. In my program's case, many lost their funding in spite of having completed all formal requirements and being sufficiently motivated and talented, at least to a degree acceptable to many of the faculty (and more importantly, those faculty whom the students would work with). On the other hand, people who weren't acceptably motivated or who hadn't completed formal requirements were kept on, bypassing the same restrictions that kept some out.

    Worse yet (aside from the insistence that securing a tenure-track position at a 4-year college is the only reason students should be enrolled in the program), the faculty have not explicitly stated what these standards are which the students should be living up to, nor do they sufficiently warn students that they are in danger of being booted (In one case, a student was told exactly what to do to stay in, and upon meeting those requirements, was still booted, with no explanation or justification given). This past year some students were not warned that their status was questionable until almost the last day of classes. No living in fear, then, but certainly a shock when it comes. Not even 2 weeks' notice!

    Reply
  4. ben wolfson

    One might not be enrolled in a Ph.D. course intending to get a tt job at a four-year college, but surely that's what most people who apply to the programs want. And if placement records become more open, then it might make sense (from the university's or department's point of view) to dump those who don't seem to be headed that way before they can sully the record. (If that's really the reason they're being asked to leave.)

    Reply
  5. C Schuyler

    I can't make a comment directly a propos here, because I never majored in philosophy (I got degrees in Ancient History and Classics instead); but lately I'm finding the anecdotal temptation overwhelming, so here I go again.

    I suspect that academic departments (and individual professors) all over the place employ a variety of methods (official and unofficial) for pressuring those students they don't think are up to snuff to move on and move out. At the University of Chicago, where I got my B.A., it started at the undergraduate level. One Classics professor, whose name would be immediately recognized by Classics people if I mentioned it, gave us a speech at the beginning of a course he taught on the Philoctetes of Sophocles. Its gist: if you weren't consistently earning A's, you were wasting your time in Classics. Not a big deal, we thought. Much more disturbing was his subsequent behavior: hounding out of the course a young woman who pretty clearly wasn't doing very well. I cannot forget the day she stumbled through a translation, at the end of which he hissed: "That's . . . not . . . even . . . close!" I had to agree with his assessment of her abilities; but the gratuitous cruelty of humiliating her in front of her peers was something else altogether. Loathsome behavior to be sure, but it did have its intended effect: she changed majors not long afterward.

    I soon realized that public humiliation was a common tactic of professors at Chicago. Though an undergrad, I took some graduate seminars, two of them with the man who was Chicago's main Ancient History prof from the late sixties until his death in 1981. In one seminar, on Alexander the Great, an unlucky comp lit major named Brick gave a presentation and did a pretty poor job of it. The professor paused for emphasis, then said more or less the following: although no reputable academic journal would ever publish such a thing, if by some fantastic chance a journal ever did, Mr. Brick's colleagues would descend on his effort, tear it to pieces, and force him to wear it about his neck like an albatross for the rest of his professional career. Never have I seen anyone so devastated by a mixed metaphor. And I won't soon forget how the professor concluded his evisceration: "Do you understand me . . . Mr. Brick?" (I should add: Brick's next presentation was much, much better, and the professor generously made note of that fact.)

    I had the chance to pursue graduate studies at Chicago; but perhaps in part because of this–how to describe it?–"red in tooth and claw" quality, I elected to get my Ph.D. at Brown, a somewhat friendlier place. And many years after that, I fled the brutality of academia entirely for the practice of law.

    If some sort of culling mechanisms exist just about everywhere (and I think they must), the important questions (aside from that of whether needless cruelty is involved) are these: are the methods fair, and are they rationally related to actual student performance? I don't really think much else matters. There are other things I could say to the Harvard student: "you're not alone" comes to mind; and also "stop whining; you're at Harvard."

    Reply
  6. E

    My own view is that more departments should be doing much more to push all but the most talented and dedicated graduate students out the door as early as possible in their graduate careers. We know that only one in four PhDs in philosophy will earn a tenure track job. This doesn't even count, furthermore, the large number who will spend 6 or 7 years in graduate school and never even earn a PhD and have the "priveledge" of being in that unfortunate 75%.

    This means that far too many young people are spending a large portion of their young lives building themselves up for the grief, anxiety and psychic damage of a failed job search or a failed graduate career. Given the cultlike qualities of graduate school, in which success in philosophy is often seen as the end-all be-all of life, it's simply unrealistic to expect many of these students to to act in their own interests and leave on their own. Hence I think we owe it to many of them to push them out the door for their own sake.

    Of course, one would hope that the process by which the graduate students being asked to leave are chosen is fair rather than arbitrary. And we should stive to achieve this.

    But since I am feeling particularly cynical today, I will wonder outloud whether, in this particular case, an unfair process might be better than no process at all. In other words: would it be better for all graduate studnets to be allowed to stay then it would be for the occasional graduate student to be forced out unfairly?

    It's certainly a core part of the "liberal ideal" to answer questions like the above in the affirmative. But in this case I wonder. What makes me wonder is the suspicion, given the curent state of philosophy, and of academia more generally, that in this case the "punishment" is a better fate than the "reward."

    Reply
  7. Barry

    There is no such practice at Princeton, for good reason.

    Reply
  8. Brian Weatherson

    We know that only one in four PhDs in philosophy will earn a tenure track job.

    Do we know this? At a lot of schools I looked at the numbers are closer to 3 in 4. Maybe only 1 in 4 gets a tt job in a top 40 school, but that's hardly what is claimed.

    Reply
  9. E

    I based that remark on our host's article from the CHE:

    "But even these figures paint too rosy a picture. For not all the jobs advertised are for rookie job seekers (some seek tenured associate and full professors); and not all those for rookie job seekers are for tenure-track jobs. In 1995-96, for example, it looks like the ratio of rookie job seekers to tenure-track jobs was more like 4 to 1."

    If indeed every year there are four times as many rookie job seekers as there are TT jobs being offered, then AT BEST 1/4 PhD's is getting such a job. The number getting jobs in top 40 departments must be much much lower.

    Reply
  10. no one

    I wonder what is the "good reason" for not having this practice at Princeton. Is it that Princeton (naturally) doesn't have a problem with "untalented" students? Well, I take it the issue up in the air is precisely whether Harvard is plagued by untalented students, or whether these students are underperforming for some other reason. (if, indeed, they are underperforming at all.)

    Let us not forget that to be in a top PhD program, these students must have put together a pretty stellar application. I find it quite hard to believe that they don't have the brains to finish the program. Sure, they may not have the brains to land the job at Princeton or NYU, or any top-job for that matter. But if their performance really is so dismal as to warrant expulsion, I suspect some other problem may be afoot. Bad advising perhaps?

    Also, let us not forget that most students attending graduate school do so at a very high personal cost. Many leave behind their friends and family and move halfway across the country (sometimes halfway across the world) to study philosophy at a good school. It seems to me a disgusting suggestion that it might be appropriate for a department to ask these students to leave because it doesn’t want to soil its placement record.

    Reply
  11. Brian Leiter

    It may well be that only 1 out of every 4 individuals who earns a PhD in philosophy ends up employed as a philosopher, though the stats for one year noted above wouldn't support that conclusion. I think the point Brian Weatherson was driving at, with which I agree, and about which I've written previously on this site, is that such a statistic is not very informative, since it fails to distinguish between programs of different quality: there are many programs where the figure is more like 3 out of 4 (and better), and others where it is 1 out of 10 (and probably worse).

    Reply
  12. E

    1)There are other sources of data that indicate the figure of 1/4 is in the right ballpark. Furtheremore, even if 95-96 was a particularly bad year, (and by all accounts, things are now worse, not better), the 1/4 number for that year leaves out those PhD's how didnt even seek jobs. In any case, surely, the correct number is less than 1/2, and that number is bad enough to motivate my concerns.

    And what is the attrition rate at these top schools that place 3/4? How many students invest more than, say, four years and leave without a degree?

    2)You wrote: "My impression is that this is not common…but I'm opening up comments on this one."

    Hence, I took it that we discussing what is, and what should be, common practice. Thus, the relevant number is the average one, which I still have every reason to believe is in the vacinity of 1/4.

    Reply
  13. Colin Brayton

    I have seen, and experienced, all sorts of extracurricular means employed to drive people out of academic programs. I was one of 12 admitted to my program. One year later, there were six. Two years later, four. I believe that two made it through. One found a tenure-track job within five years of filing the diss. In my case, I made the mistake of exercising my contrarian nature too freely in the seminar of a powerful professor, who thought I was denigrating his work, I guess. Ugh. This is not a happy memory. Thankfully, some of the old guard rallied behind me and I managed to hang on for a few more years of suffering, starving, and funky working conditions.

    Reply
  14. susanna

    I sympathize with the sentiment reported in Brian's initial post, that it puts grads on edge when other grads are asked to leave a program. I think the antidote to this is to give adequate feedback to grads along the way: being asked to leave the program should never be a close-by but undiscussed possibility. It may also be worth keeping in mind that if you're a grad student who witnesses another grad get kicked out of your program, it may come as a surprise to you, the observer, that such a thing could happen. But that by itself is okay. What's objectionable, I think, is for it to come as a surprise to the person who is asked to leave. So you shouldn't conclude from the fact that you're surprised and dismayed at someone else's being asked to leave that all the students are surprised and dismayed. If procedures are working as I think they should, then students who are asked to leave will at least not be surprised.

    I don't think the practice of asking people to leave the program is uncommon. When I was a graduate student at Cornell in the 90's, a few students were asked to leave the program. I've also know of people who failed their general exams at Princeton and subsequently left.

    Is this practice justified? I think in principle it is. Consider a student who consistently does very poorly. (To make the case easy, consider someone who also puts in a great deal of effort.) It doesn't do such a student any favors to let them finish their degree. Keeping them in the program sends the message that they can perform in the profession at the level that people will expect from them. If they can't succeed, why convey to them that they can — and why convey this to them for years on end? Those years could be spent pursuing a career or degree (or both) of some other sort.

    The outcome in which a student is asked to leave is socially awkward and probably painful for everyone – the faculty and grad at issue, but also, as the original post points out, for the other grads. But this discomfort isn't a good reason not to have the policy.

    Reply
  15. Anon top-10 faculty

    Some have wondered how highly competitive programs could admit students who really are not up to the task. Unfortunately, the admissions dossiers we rely on are not terribly informative. The letters are probably the most helpful items, but these are hard to read when they are written by people we don't know well. I know of several cases where I think letter-writers should be ashamed for recommending a student too highly; six years down the road they discover what should have been clear at the start—thatthey can't really make it in philosophy. Writing samples are useful, but if there's a clever idea, how do I know whether it's really the student's—did it come up in the prof's lecture? How many times has the paper been revised under the helpful eye of a prof? I agree that it is an important part of our job to make no bones about it when it becomes clear that a student will not thrive in philosophy at the level expected in our graduate program—no less important for being really hard.

    Reply
  16. tt

    I was going to ask whether it is a common or accepted practice at philosophy departments in this country to 'kick out' junior faculty who are deemed insufficiently talented. I ask because it does seem to be a common practice in my department and I'm concerned because it creates an extremely uncomfortable working environment. Everyone is worried that they might be next and that, of course, makes it very hard to concentrate on an already difficult subject.

    Reply
  17. Anderson

    Regarding the division of opinion on whether suitability for a tenure-track job should be a criterion for student retention, I see two points above:

    (1) Programs don't want to ruin their stats by granting Ph.D.'s to students who then don't get placed, or get placed poorly.

    (2) Not every student wants a tenure-track job; some poor souls are in it for personal, not economic, reasons.

    One solution would be, not to kick out these students, but to steer them to the M.Phil. or its equivalent, an "All But Dissertation" degree. Then they're not counted as Ph.D. students to mess up the stats, but they stay in the program until it's dissertation time. How many of these personal-improvement students are really dying to write a dissertation? And if they insist, then they should be taken aside and expressly warned that writing a dissertation is not an automatic Ph.D.—the dissertation has to be approved, and (for whatever reasons) that may not be terribly likely in their cases.

    This is much less cruel than some of the alternatives described above. And, who knows, some of these students might astonish their profs with their dissertations.

    Reply
  18. Barry

    When I say Princeton does not have this practice, for good reason, I mean this: 1)Faculty do not ask students to leave and 2) the reason for this is that it is a heinous practice, and 3) there is no need for this practice, since the character of the program is such that, you only advance along if you manage to write decent unit papers, choose an interesting and challenging general exam topic, pass the examination, and make steady progress toward your thesis. You don't even get credit for your "coursework" papers unless they are of decent enough quality. Not enough credit, grounds for dismissal.

    Which brings us to the real point: why should any faculty in any program feel the need to do this? Aren't PhD programs designed in such a way that the minimal requirements for completing the program coincides with retaining those of adequate "philosophical talent", whatever that means? If they aren't, they should be. Then we wouldn't need to construct pragmatic justifications for this behavior.

    Reply
  19. Bob Flynn

    Jeez, all these whining academicians! Y'all should a few nanoseconds cogitating and philosophizing in the private sector.

    You'd become better thinkers.

    Reply
  20. Ken

    From personal chairmanly experience, I doubt that any program can simply "asks students to leave" without reference to their performance on documented course and other requirements.

    Universities these days, especially elite, wealthy private universities like Harvard — the richest of them all — are extremely lawsuit averse. In order to dismiss a student from our program (which we done a couple of time in the past three years since I've been chair) we've had to go through very elaborate procedures, making sure we dot every i and cross every t and give the problematic student a fair chance to actually comply with the relevant requirments.

    I feel a moral certainty that Harvard must have to do something rather like what we have to do.

    So I just don't think that a student otherwise passing orals, earning high grades in seminars, not taking lots of incompletes, passing comps, could easily be dismissed for "lack of talent" even if that student truly and really did lack talent.

    Reply
  21. Clayton

    What isn't clear from the letter is whether these dedicated students had received adequate grades in their coursework prior to their dismissal. It doesn't seem wrong to tell dedicated students who fail to produce suitable work that they will not be receiving a degree from Harvard. What would be troubling is if these students had fulfilled the requirements stated by faculty (say by passing their coursework) only to later be cut loose.

    I do worry that there are professors who are willing to give out passing grades to students knowing that these students aren't going to be competitive on the job market and knowing that these students don't meet the faculty's expectations for degree candidates. If this is the situation at Harvard, it is unfortunate, but I doubt it is uncommon.

    Reply
  22. Richard Heck

    Obviously, confidentiality issues limit what I can say on this specific topic, but a few simple points are worth making.

    No one has ever been dismissed from the Harvard PhD program for "lack of talent" in the thirteen years I have been on the faculty. The only reason anyone has ever dismissed from our program is failure to make satisfactory progress toward the PhD. But it is important to understand what that means.

    It seems as if the original writer believes that admission to a PhD program constitutes a promise that, so long as one is dedicated and works hard, one will get a PhD. As Gary Kemp notes in the first comment, no such promise is made. One receives a PhD only if one satisfactorily completes all of the requirements for the degree, and that includes writing a dissertation that constitutes quality independent research. To make satisfactory progress toward the degree is, therefore, not simply to take courses and pass them, or to write a qualfiying paper that meets the minimal passing standard. To make satisfactory progress is to do work, at each stage, that convinces the faculty that the student will ultimately produce an acceptable dissertation.

    Admittedly, judgements about philosophical ability are thus inevitably going to be part of judgements about whether someone is making satisfactory progress. I can therefore well understand why someone who was dismissed from Harvard's (or someone else's) program might have the sense that s'he was being dismissed for lack of talent. But, as I said, that is never the case.

    Reply
  23. Tony

    One thing I would like to note, from personal experience, is the difference between having one's funding removed, and being removed from the program. A couple of years into my own participation in a top-40 PhD program, personal events made it impossible for me to stay on any longer. Nonetheless, several years later I'm still in the program and work on my thesis when I can. Moreover, faculty there still happily discuss my work with me. Of course, for all I know they may indeed be planning to drop me from the program, but there's been no suggestion of it yet.

    I think it's perfectly reasonable to remove funding from any student that the department decides will ultimately not succeed as a philosopher, but that's a very different action than removing them from the program. The latter can have little greater motivation than protecting placement rates, and is genuinely objectionable.

    After all, to share another story from my own program, one of their students after leaving the program ended up handing in his dissertation 40 years later, and was passed. Believe it or not, while probably everyone entering a PhD program would like a teaching job, that's not all they want. Some of us also just like philosophy, and finishing a dissertation can be very important, even without a subsequent academic job.

    Reply
  24. nonone

    Prof. Heck seems very concerned to establish that no one is ever dismissed from his program because of "lack of talent" but rather because they failed to convince the faculty that they can produce an "acceptable" dissertation. Now, it is not clear to me what exactly the difference here is, but in any case, it strikes me that perhaps Prof. Heck has missed the point. After all, it sounds as if the author of the original email does not really think that anyone is indeed being kicked out for "lack of talent" –that would imply that they really did lack talent– but rather because of *perceived* lack of talent. The complaint, I take it, is that it *seems* to the relevant faculty members that certain students aren't good enough to produce acceptable dissertations and that they are dismissed from the program without any serious thought on the part of the faculty as to *why* the student is unable to produce acceptable work.

    If the rumors are to be trusted, advising at Harvard is just about as bad as it gets. As one person sugested earlier in these comments, perhaps Harvard students are anxious about getting kicked out of their program for unacceptable work and perhaps they feel incapable of producing acceptable work (indeed, perhaps even unable to judge whether their own work is acceptable) because they are not being properly advised.

    Prof. Heck may very well be right that the students who have kicked out of his program were not producing acceptable work. Is he really so sure that this is because they are incapable of doing so?

    (I should mention that I was a prospective at Harvard a couple of years ago and luckily decided not to attend. The graduate students I spoke to were pretty uniformly negative about the quality of advising there. If I were Prof. Heck or any other faculty member at Harvard, I think I would feel a little more responsible about what's happening to their students.)

    Reply
  25. josh rayman

    brian leiter wrote: "by all accounts, things are now worse, not better" than in 1995-96. yet, if he were to check the APA website, he'd see that the number of jobs advertised per year has increased by over 200 since then, if memory serves, while the number of ph.d's granted has been fairly stable. there were 655 and 621 jobs in the past two years for which there were statistics, well above the mid-1990s. they are obviously not all tt jobs, but the job market is certainly much better than in the mid-1990s. and as for the question of harvard dumping some of its students for not being "talented enough," it's obvious that we're dealing with an indeterminate metaphysical concept (there are determinate, well-defined metaphysical concepts and indeterminate, vague metaphysical concepts). indeed, the admissions process is supposed to capture talent in the first place, but there are obviously strong disagreements among professional philosophers as to how to judge this and how to rank various elements of the ratings (essays, gpa at different schools with different courses, fellowships, references, etc.). "collegiality" is clearly a major factor in judging talent at graduate schools. in any case, there is no need to worry that harvard graduates will have no opportunity to get jobs. they get a VERY substantial share of jobs among the gourmet report schools.

    Reply

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