It's a _rite de passage_. It's a sociopolitical filter in the
pipeline to power and influence. It's a rehearsal. It's an
obstacle that makes the goal seem more wonderful ... from the other
side, looking back.
The _research_ can be valuable scholarship, but the writing up
of it is ceremonial. A lot of the writing activities of various
cultures in history has been ceremonial, ritualized, and part of
the allocation of status and power.
How many people _read_ a dissertation? Not many. But you may not
want to know how few people read the average journal article
either! (the statistics are available, but not widely publicized
-- ask a good librarian). Ask a publisher what they do with all
the unsold copies of academic books. Thank God for doctoral students
doing their Survey of the Literature for their dissertation, or
probably almost no one would read most of this stuff!
In my department as a student (Physics at U of Chicago) it was
required that your dissertation be published _before_ they would
award the degree, usually as a journal article. Mine was published
that way in its (short) entirety. There is no maroon bound volume
of my dissertation on a shelf in the library with gold-lettered
spine gathering dust. I never asked how many people read the
article, or checked Citation Index for references to it.
But I did wear a funny floppy hat with a gold tassel and a big
maroon and black academic gown (very hot that day) to receive
a small and nicely printed and hand-lettered certificate from
the President of the University. That is gathering dust somewhere.
The President said, " ... and all the rights and privileges
appertaining thereto." Those I still have, and they do come in
handy.
Publish the highlights of your dissertation in a journal as
soon as you can. When you do, you will notice that you also have
to re-write almost everything for a different genre, a genre of
(optimistically) communication. That makes dissertations a
different sort of genre, not communicative, but perhaps ...
archival?
Plan to put the unpublishable details of your work, and even
maybe some of your data, on a computer server one day soon.
Electonic archives are at least accessible, and the new ones
will even count how many 'hits' they/you get ... if you care
to look.
It's not quite Christmas yet. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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