After Tyson finished his master’s thesis, his advisers dissolved his dissertation committee—essentially flunking him. “I still don’t talk about it much,” he says, “because it was a failed experiment, and I’ve moved on from that chapter of my life.”
…
As for his relationship with UT, Tyson claims he’s moved on. “I don’t hold a grudge, and I don’t blame the department for kicking me out. I might have done the same thing in their position,” he says.But at other moments, it’s clear that he’s still raw about Texas, almost 30 years later. “When I get mail from the Texas Exes, it goes straight in the trash. Why should I believe in an institution that didn’t believe in me?”
That’s the way Tyson sees it: UT didn’t believe in him, while Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton did. “When I look at my life, the tracks of my success take a detour around Texas,” he says. “It’s the only place where I didn’t succeed, and I’m still figuring out what that means.”
So is the University. Astronomy professor Craig Wheeler remembers Tyson: “Research was not his strength. He was never going to solve any major scientific problems. But I knew he was going to do something big, because he had charisma. He’s warm and funny, but he also has serious backbone, ambition, confidence—and that’s taken him far.”
And so it has. But for Texas, he’ll always be the one who got away.
From an article about Neil deGrasse Tyson in the University of Texas alumni magazine.
It’s so easy to see people like Tyson who have had great success in life, and forget they may have had great failure as well.
Attrition from doctoral programs is high, with about 50 percent of doctoral students leaving without completing their program (NYTimes). For many of these students, this may be the first time they experience failure.
Ultimately what determines success is not the absence of failure, but how a person respond to it.
Citation Obsession? Get Over It!
Bibliographic citation has apparently eclipsed perfect grammar and the five-paragraph theme as the preoccupation of persnickety professors.
What a colossal waste. Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers.
—Kurt Schick
The Cult of Dullness
“It was as a candidate for the Ph.D. at Harvard that I first encountered the Cult of Dullness. Since boyhood I had aspired to be a writer. So with my first graduate research paper I tried to write as well as I could. My professor warned me gently that although he himself did not object to a well-written paper, his colleagues might be put off. They might suspect that I was not really committed to dull writing and thus not a suitable candidate for the Ph.D.
“I encountered the problem again when I sent my doctoral dissertation to a typist to have it type up for presentation to my readers, who would approve or disapprove it. The typist called shortly to express her concern. It did not read like a Ph.D. Was I sure it would be acceptable? What was the problem, I asked. Well, she was enjoying reading it, and that made her uneasy on my account. She was concerned that it might not be accepted. It was not as dull as she felt it ought to be.
“The Cult of Dullness not only survives; it flourishes.”
(Ziolkowski, 1990, in Hinchey & Kimmel, 2000, p. 92.)
Hinchey, P.H., & Kimmel, I. (2000). The graduate grind: a critical look at graduate education. New York: Taylor and Francis. http://books.google.com/books?id=fm0iG0OCsYQC
