Moreover, the student reported that none of the proposals displayed in the library as models included a literature review. Her cause for concern was bolstered by a follow-up discussion with the Human Subjects Committee, in which she learned the committee required only Methods and References sections to begin reviewing the proposal.

But the coup de gras came during the training director's annual address to students about internship. The only student not to receive a file folder from a stack distributed during the meeting, she realized she was ineligible for internship. When she inquired into the state of affairs, the student tumbled further down the rabbit hole. Apparently, the student's dissertation was not submitted to the library by a deadline of which the student was unaware. The student was also unaware that failure to meet this deadline resulted in being remanded to a 3-credit dissertation lab. She was unable to afford the $1,200 class of dubious value owing to the fact financial aid would not be available until the end of September, leaving her and handful of other students with only 2-3 weeks to come up with the money. Upon voicing her concerns, the training director responded by stating: "that's why I'm telling you this now so you have time to make arrangements." Describing the class as a "waste of time and money," the student noted that she had already completed every section in her proposal, as she continued to assemble a group of volunteers for her research.

Nevertheless, in the hopes of putting the class to use, the student requested feedback from her chair on her completed proposal, which she delivered in both hard copy and electronic file form to the school and the clinic. "I did not get my proposal back from my chair until the seventh of October," she remarked, citing "consistently missed appointments" and "unreturned emails and phone messages." Having heard from other students that her dissertation chair is "incompetent and notorious for losing paperwork," the student began to build a case by leaving a paper trail of requests for appointments with the school and clinic.

One bleak September day, she was greeted by the covert aggression for which Psychology's academic communities are well-known. As you will read in her own words below, the student would learn she'd been placed on probation for failing to complete her dissertation:

"I received an email that I was to meet with a professor and the Dean pertaining to some concerns. I had no idea what would be addressed at the meeting. The Dean did not show for the meeting and the professor and I discussed the fact that I was placed on probation for my dissertation not being completed...However, as I read the paper from a faculty meeting and the derogatory remarks concerning me that had nothing to do with the dissertation, I asked what that was about. I was informed that the remarks were made in an annual review meeting and this procedure had just been started. When I asked for an explanation so I could understand the remarks, this professor responded that she did not sit in on every student's review. Therefore, she did not know who said it and in what context. She told me to just respond to the late dissertation concern and outline when it would be completed."

The student had her first encounter with the results of an end-of-academic-term student evaluation meeting, where faculty meet to ostensibly review the progress and evaluate the academic performance of its graduate students, but as my closing remarks will later make clear, these meetings are often vague, unscrupulous, and unsubstantiated assessments of personality designed to build a case against a student's lack of fit or professionalism. (Also read my report on these gatekeeping meetings by clicking here).

Despite efforts to recruit participants for her research, the student fell short of the eleventh hour requirement (minimum 30 students) brusquely imposed by the chair. How short was she? The chair, who delegated responsibility for participant recruitment to the clinics (taking it out of the student's hands), informed the student that she had only been able to recruit 8 participants despite working closely with Department of Family Services (DFS) and the parenting groups for which DFS furnished referrals. Though the student planned to enroll new participants on a rolling basis while she collected data, the chair surprised her by prohibiting her from gathering any data until the required number of participants had volunteered.

While the project eventually moved forward, the chair continued to create new ways of causing trouble for the student, interrupting the study participants while they were completing a questionnaire and accusing the student of misleading DFS.

"While the participants were taking the Parenting Stress Index as part of the study, the chair popped her head in the door and asked if I was about finished as she needed to get started. Anyone who knows anything about research knows you do not interrupt testing as this may bias the results."

And with respect to misleading DFS, "the chair accused me of telling DFS that this $25 special would be ongoing for foster care parents and that daycare would be provided...[All] I informed this person [was] that the clinic was running a fall special for the parenting program for the cost of $25.00 when the usual cost is $50.00."

The chair quibbled over the student's account.

"While I was assisting her in setting the group room before the group started, she again accused me of telling DFS daycare would be provided and future groups would continue at a $25 fee for them. My response was that I explicitly stated this was a Fall special the clinic was providing and childcare was never mentioned."

The student learned upon a subsequent visit to retrieve the completed questionnaires from the chair's office that the chair reported being unable to find them.

"I had to make three trips to the clinic before I was finally able to obtain them from her."

Unclear to this author however is just how explicitly the chair expressed her opinion that the student's dissertation would be disqualified due to an insufficient number of research participants. The student's account of her "roller coaster ride" is laced with references to the chair "implying," "insinuating," and "alluding." According to program rules, a student is ineligible to begin internship if the dissertation is not completed prior to the October 13 date marking the first day of internship. Under mounting financial pressure, the student agitated over a decision to accept an offer for employment or continue as a full-time student, turning down the position after the financial aid department assigned a specific date to the availability of her student loan check. However, when the student phoned the department on the specified date, she learned the training director decided to withhold the check until the student started internship. Further straining her finances, the clinic advised the student to purchase the computer software required to score the questionnaires and, when the student reported a lack of funds, the school loaned the student the money. The student reports having had to use the loan for food and expenses, and had to rely on the beneficence of a former practicum site to process her questionnaires. As the deadline loomed, the student expressed her interest in defending on the 8th of October, but the dissertation would be visited by the ghosts of missed appointments past and future. On the 27th of September, the student reminded the chair that due to missed appointments in August, she had never received any editorial comments on an earlier draft. The reminder prompted a verbal commitment from the chair to e-mail editorial comments over the weekend.

"She had not emailed the dissertation over the weekend with any corrections she wanted as she stated she would."

A week after scheduling a meeting for the 2nd of October, the chair phoned the morning of the 2nd, and left a message with the student's brother that she was canceling the afternoon appointment.

"She was well aware that I needed to have this paper completed and defended no later than October 10th, as I was to start my internship on the 13th."

After a spate of phone calls to locate the chair, the student was able to wrangle a rescheduled appointment for the evening of October 7. Phone message requests for an earlier Saturday meeting at the clinic were not returned. The student then petitioned the training director to release the student loan check, and this time the director claimed he would not release the check until the dissertation was defended.

"The afternoon of October 7th, I went to the professor who assisted me with the statistical analysis. I explained I wasn't trying to criticize my chair, but that I was down to the wire on completing this and if she missed the appointment set that evening, I asked what I should do. I did the same with the training director and he replied he would contact her and inquire as to my status and remind her I needed to get this completed."

The events that followed are recounted by the student:

"When I went to the clinic on October 7th, for our appointment, the chair was with another student. The student inquired if I had an appointment and when dismissed by this chair asked in bewilderment, 'so we're finished?' This chair informed me that I ran the wrong data for my statistical analysis and there's no way I was going to get my dissertation done on time. She stated she didn't know what I'd been doing but it wasn't working on the dissertation as I didn't take the time to know what data needed to be analyzed and what statistical test to use. She also stated the professor who assisted me with the statistics reported my results section sucked. If this were the case, I did not understand why the professor did not say so to me and expressed this to my chair. Furthermore, this is why she wanted to meet with me on Saturday before last she stated. Now I realize I should have agreed and let her no show again. I did not know why she was doing this to me or had jacked me around for months. To run an analysis on the correct data only takes about 20 minutes and then you type them in the result section and describe them in the discussion. That does not take a lot to complete and was definitely doable. At this point I just started crying and explained it wasn't just about going on internship, but the site waited and was counting on me. Furthermore, I reported I owed people money, counting on getting paid when my loan check was released. And that I was broke and had no means of living, as I did not take my old job back in order to finish the dissertation and go on internship. She reported 20 students were not going on internship next year due to not meeting regulations, etc. However she again gave me false hope, instructing me to just focus on the data and results and not even worry about the discussion section. The dissertation does not have to be perfect, but adequate to present as you have a month to then make any corrections the Committee and chair recommend."

"When I went to the school to register, the Dean stated I could not enroll as there had already been three classes and she wasn't going to put it on a faculty member to try and catch me up. This was the final straw for me and I called to speak to the president and his secretary stated he was busy all week. When I suggested he might want to contact me as I was seeking legal counsel, she said she would contact him and inform him of such. However, the Dean returned my call instead and informed me I have to follow the Due Process Procedure for grievances as outlined in the catalog. So I emailed the president and he restated that and I did not get another response when I stated that would be wonderful if time allowed. I also responded that I was supposed to be on my internship now and that the school broke my contract, which is the approved dissertation proposal."

Commentary by J Wyatt Ehrenfels

I am not intimately familiar with the circumstances surrounding what is likely to grow into a legal challenge to this Missouri professional school. The preceding report was compiled from an unsolicited account furnished by the student. I do not have any information as to how school officials might respond to the student's claims; however, having said that, it does not appear school officials have been forthcoming with the student. I have a history of disputes with faculty that bare a remarkable resemblance to characteristics of this imbroglio. I am passing along this story because one of my purposes in creating fireflySun.com and in writing Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun is to create a supportive environment for students who have been disenfranchised or disqualified by their graduate program faculty. Having been affiliated with a number of such programs, I understand how brutally isolating professors can be. And where professorial malfeasance skulks, there is more often than not no recourse: no grievance procedures, no appeals process. I often joke that my experiences with Psychology graduate faculty were behind nightmares in which I was pursued by a cyborg like those featured in the Terminator films. In the words of the first film's protagonist: "You cannot bargain with them. You cannot reason with them. They do not feel pity or remorse or fear. And they absolutely will not stop -- ever -- until you are dead."

Exacerbating the student's stress is the lack of support from browbeaten or brownnosing students. Once a student announces that she is having trouble, she is "marked" by her classmates as someone not to be seen with. If an embattled student does not isolate herself by keeping her problems with the faculty a secret, the classmates will isolate her by treating her like the carrier of an infectious disease. Students are afraid to appear supportive of a student in questionnable standing, as if the embattled student reflects poorly on them. This steroid-spiked self-preservation instinct and hive mentality makes sense to me now, knowing these students will eventually go on to join the ranks of their faculty. It really is the "I'm not with him" syndrome that rivals the childishness of its elementary school counterpart in which 4th graders are admonished by teachers: "he's going to drag you down." And then there are the brownnosing students, the opportunistic students who think they can get ahead by selling out an unsuspecting peer. Case in point:

"She informed me that when I talk to other students, it gets back to her."

This leads me to the second reason for posting this report on my web site. I believe we need to bring the deception, the covert aggression, the clandestine meetings and motives of academics out of the shadows and into public view. What I found most remarkable about the correspondence from the student is this haunting feeling that people were discussing her behind closed doors. The student population and the public need to know what these PhDs are capable of doing to their students. When I reviewed the student's report, I was overwhelmed by the similarities between her experiences, my own experiences as a student, and the experiences of other students. In addition to the pre-arranged order of legitimate academic hurdles, many students have to negotiate professors who manufacture "conflicts" from insignificant personal differences, even differences of which the student is oblivious. The professor may subsequently make the personal political, calling on fellow faculty behind closed doors to witness or corroborate the student's so-called unconventional tendencies, attitudes, or indiscretions, telescoped as risks to the unity of the student/faculty body, risks to the program's reputation, and/or risks to the public welfare. Only after I forced everything out in the open in my own department did professors admit to an unspecified number of meetings behind closed doors about me, meetings that transpired over the course of many months, news of which made "sudden sense" of distrustful behavior from professors I had not yet assisted and from whom I had not yet taken a course. (My own experiences are recounted in Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun). This prompted me to compose my "if only" list:

• If only the professors were forthcoming about their expectations...
  

• If only the professors were timely in their feedback about my compliance with expectations and did not wait to assemble a critical mass of deviations to take to a faculty meeting (This is what we call building a case against a student and as poor a practice it is to collect evidence behind the student's back, it is egregious to hold a trial without the knowledge of the accused. Only after the student has been convicted is the student informed that there was a "problem," and by that point, the student has been sentenced by the entire faculty. This alone is often sufficient to stress, scare, or sadden a student into withdrawing from a program)...
  

• If only the professors were tolerant of students who did not embody some pre-packaged epistemology on the way in the door...
  

• If only the professors were not as sensitive as to take as a personal insult some deviation from a professional norm...
  

As Connie Vaughn remarked in her essay "Why I Am Not A Psychologist", culture-building professors invent these games for qualifying/disqualifying students for membership in their clan. The explanation offered by Vaughn, me, and others for this pathological culture overlap significantly and differ only in emphasis, with Vaughn accentuating a lack of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation among professors for their work, whereas I showcase the lust for legitimacy amid an intolerance for ambiguity. Despite subtle differences in diagnoses, that the preservation and promotion of this culture requires a conformity at multiple levels to a mixture of written and unwritten rules, remains a common denominator. Some unwritten expectations are useful to help disqualify students who survive a first warning, dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's, but who cannot shake the deep and lingering resentment of faculty who persist in their perception of the student as a misfit. I am reminded of a practice whereby faculty go out of their way to inform their graduate students that attendance at weekly colloquia are not mandatory, so as to provide a true test of who is 'one of them' by noting who does -- and does not -- attend regularly. In the case of the student-at-hand, a professor may have resorted to more direct means of sabotaging her dissertation, triggering the meeting in which the professor could raise for discussion the student's more intangible attitudes and traits. The student is effectively slandered. A perception has been created that takes on a life of its own. Groupthink is a time-honored tradition in these end-of-academic-term faculty meetings.

I confess I do not know the student all that well. With additional facts one might very well be disposed to conclude that the student-at-hand is not at this time worthy of an advanced degree in psychology. However, this would not excuse the faculty. Assuming the student's account is accurate and complete...

• it is reasonable to speculate that the student suffered from a case of misleading or inadequate mentoring.
  

• We also have to consider whether the school worked to fulfill its own prophecy regarding the student's capacity to complete the program. She may have been sabotaged by an early impression as to her fitness in the program and subsequently undermined by professors enforcing that impression. In other words, she was set up to fail. She may have been denied due process in the decisions concerning her status in the program. Beyond the diagnostic value of the process in creating over-nuanced characterizations of the student's problems (and attributing them to dispositional factors), the process should have also served a therapeutic aim, helping the student to meet requirements. Judging by her grade point average, there is reason to speculate that she would have been able to do exactly what she was told. And perhaps that's why at least one professor withheld instructions. I've seen this happen before. A professor thinks, 'I can't tell her what I'd like to see from her. Or she might actually give me what I want. Then I wouldn't be able to get rid of her.' In most cases, the professor objects to the student not on behavioral grounds or on the grounds of mastery, but on personological grounds.
  

• The student may have been admitted under false pretenses by professors who had doubts when they reviewed her application, but admitted her to take her money. Many profit-driven professional schools admit more students than traditional university programs, benefiting financially from a business model in which they use the training program rather than admission requirements or academic standards to weed out students. In the words of the student, "The dissertation seems to be the levee they use when they wanted you out but couldn’t find a viable reason before that point. Then after stringing you along and placing you in this much debt you're anguished, feeling defeated, and robbed of your senses. The school knows you're broke with little-to-no resources, especially no attorney on retainer or money to hire one; you're just a hot air blower to them. This in turn only feeds the desperation and you try to hold onto the belief that you're at the least a human and worthy of being treated as such." While proponents of such a system might argue that the system gives more students a chance to get in the front door, I believe the practitioners of these programs admit students knowing full well they'll be kicked out the back. Many doctoral programs reserve the masters thesis or doctoral candidacy exam as a time to weed their garden, to enforce their better-than-20/20 vision of mental hygiene and scientific gravitas and to avoid the perception they're flooding the market or diluting the reputation of their field. The feedback/forum leading up to the involuntary withdrawl has a stinging fatefulness to it because it seems so abrupt and so arbitrary, though while other students embattled politically since day 2 endure their time remaining in the program with considerable dread, looking over their shoulder and waiting for the axe to fall (or the other shoe to drop, pick your metaphor).

Desperate to dispel her isolation, the student insisted Ehrenfels include her name as well as the name of the institution, a professional school in Missouri, in his synopsis of her two-page complaint.

"Many also in this situation do not have family that really understand what your talking about if you were the exception going to college let alone a doctorate program."

As part of his legal advice to the student, Ehrenfels admonished her that going on the record against the school could complicate her search for representation and limit her attorney's effectiveness, who would likely advise her that an aggressive publicity campaign against the school is inconsistent with the good faith effort she will need to exhibit during the early stages of the legal tussle. "95 percent of all complaints never see the inside of a courtroom," remarked Ehrenfels from personal experience with a high-profile Chicago attorney. "Before a lawsuit is filed, the student will be expected to spend months in mediation with the school, which is to say the attorneys will help arbitrate the matter and ascertain whether it cannot be resolved outside a courtroom. It is often during these mediations that one or both parties compromise their positions by behaving badly. The school may announce it refuses to make any kind of accommodation. However, I imagine that it is likely the attorneys will work together in consultation with their clients to draft a list of conditions the student will need to meet before they award her dissertation or approve her internship. This is a step in the right direction for the student, because unlike the original relationship, which is not being monitored by attorneys, the school will have to award her degree if she meets their conditions. However, there is a good chance the school's attorney will have trouble controlling the faculty's urge to add or re-define conditions or quibble over whether the student has met them. After all, this is academia. There are no universally recognized standards and it is difficult to draft a list of conditions that is so clear as to disallow interpretation. Any attorney who has not dealt with a university is likely to be astonished by the obstinacy and eccentricity of professors who refuse to be bound by contracts or agreements. In their view, they are the authority and they would reject as heresy any hint of an egalitarian or collaborative relationship like the kind required to establish a mutually agreeable settlement. And authorities enjoy certain prerogatives, which include the right to 'change one's mind.' Academics may agree from the outset to a set of conditions but later, on reviewing the dissertation, may find themselves unable to resist the urge want additional changes they would argue they could not have anticipated wanting. And they will lay out all these reasons why they 'cannot be held to' the terms of the agreement. Any complainant should feel fortunate if this is the only opposition they receive. Professors are also likely to react irritably -- with a 'how dare you?' attitude toward the student for challenging their decisions, and the legal wrangling will proceed more smoothly and quickly if professors express this emotion at the outset of mediation, but this sentiment could go underground and sabotage any good work toward a resolution in the eleventh hour. The student has to be prepared for a roller coaster ride. The student will also be advised that because there are no laws governing standards for dissertations, she may have to accept certain conditions she is otherwise disposed to reject as excessive, arbitrary, or discriminatory. As unfairly as she has been remanded to her cicumstances, she will have to treat mediation as a new beginning and should not view the mediation process as a means to redress previous injustices. The student is not likely to appreciate the mediation process, as it does not produce the climactic vindication and crowning justice for which she probably yearns at this point. If the mediation fails, (and a smooth, amicable mediation might mean more adjustment and more work for the student), then the student can seek reparations in a trial. At that time, the attorney might tell the student-client, 'we did everything we can do, and they resisted our good faith efforts and now we have additional evidence with which to bolster our case against them.' Even then, the responsible attorney will be guarded in his or her assessment of success, reminding the client that while professors can easily be exposed as eccentric assholes in court who compromise their own defense by refusing to stick to one story or to use the phrase 'I don't know' on the stand, there is no law against being an eccentric, arrogant, and even ignorant asshole. The attorney will call upon the student to produce a meticulous record of memoranda and dated notes in the hopes of establishing a pattern of harassment.

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