oiy!! i know people who were at it 10 years when i started and that was 7 yrs ago. i can't recall, right now, but the avg yrs of completion is something like 10 yrs in the social sciences. it was in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and if i were so lazy I'd dig it out. I had to use it in a custody battle and when putting together documents to force the ex to pay child he tried to claim that he could withhold support because i hadn't yet finished the phud. he, of course, seems to think that he's supporting me and i'm not contributing my fair share to the raising of our son by doing the adjunct thang.
>The real reason I finished was the pull of my D. It was on marxian
>secular crisis theories. So it was unalienated labor, in contrast to
>much of the other alienated labor I expended. So is your book, Doug,
>and, I hope, your D Yoshie. That means prospects look good.
altho, on the other hand, taking care of your children and family is similarly unalienated labor, if you ask me. so the pull of that seems to butt up against the pull of the dissertation. as the prospect of sending them off to college starts to loom and you start calculating how much you should save to pay for it, the willingness to live on adjunct salaries or part time work declines rapidly.
i think rob understands that chronic non-finishing isn't simply a psychological issue, since he has kids and probably feels burdened with the need to raise them, as well.
>Moral of the story? Doug should find an Engels and keep writing.
yeah, doug! become a wife and eat bon bons and write books all day!
>Rob Schaap wrote:
>
> > So I'm inviting Doug (and Yoshie and Kelley and all the other chronic
> > non-finishers out there) into the phalanstery. Sure, geography prevents
> > the expression of those Fourierist passions with due bodily commitment, but
> > at least we can make a game of the fraught business of finishing books and
> > dissertations. To the first to finish, I selflessly commit that bottle of
> > Scotch Daniel owes me, and woebetide the one who hasn't finished before
> > Barbara Cartland Perelman finishes his next book!
now the bottle of scotch is actually pretty tempting, more even than the lure of the dissertation, at the mo'!! :)
kelley