Controversy at the AAAS: to ABD or not to ABD?

Leslie Berlowitz, who is the head of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is stepping aside temporarily after (apparently) claiming on some federal grants that she had a doctorate when in fact she did not.    An inquiry will follow. The AAAS is not a household name but within academia it’s a big deal – selection as a fellow of the AAAS is restricted to a small fraction of scholars in a particular field, and the presidential salary is nearly $600,000 annually, plus perks.    Ms. Berlowitz was a doctoral student at NYU from 1967 to 1978, so presumably was relatively close to completion and was an ABD (all but dissertation) student.   But that was 30 years ago.   Apparently the claim being made is that some anonymous staffer wrongly put the information on some grants, which is plausible but suggests a serious administrative failure.

I don’t know the details of this case beyond what’s been reported in the news, though, so we obviously need to let the inquiry take its course.  I will say that I’ve seen similar situations with senior PhD students describing themselves on their CV or cards or grant applications as  John Doe, PhD (ABD) or John Doe, PhD(c) – c for ‘candidate’, or even, on a CV or biosketch, with a PhD in hand but with a date of the current year, in cases where they expect to defend in that year.   I don’t like any of these practices, for the simple reason that they are potentially ambiguous or deceptive even when there is no ill intent.    Simply the fact that there are such different practices in different disciplines and countries – I, for one, had never heard of PhD(c) until a couple years ago, and if asked might have thought it stood for ‘clinical’ or something else.  I don’t think it’s an ethical lapse, but it could lead someone else to wrongly think that you do have the PhD, and this is never to your advantage, and potentially to your detriment.   I understand how, after six or eight or eleven years of work, it’s tempting to want to claim *something* on your business card beyond an MA or whatever other degree you earned, but putting those three letters after your name means something (out there in the world) that you don’t want to falsely claim, even innocuously.    It is fair, of course, on your CV to put under your dissertation title, something like ‘defense expected August 2013’ or some such thing.    I have no idea whether anything like this happened in the Berlowitz case, or something more pernicious, or something more innocuous.  But let’s all just exercise some common sense and use ‘PhD’ only when it’s earned.

Revisiting some old favourites

For whatever reason, I have a fairly large number of newly arrived readers here at Glossographia.    The blog has in fact been around for nearly five years; I started it when I was newly arrived on the tenure track at Wayne State and now I’m just about to go up for tenure in the coming academic year.  How the time flies.  Anyway, for those of you who may be new around here, I’ve put together a list of my top ten favourite posts from the past half-decade (in no particular order):

– In A feisty embuggerance, I highlighted one of the most ridiculous automatic citation difficulties imaginable, direct from Google Scholar (and still uncorrected!) (2009/10/21)

– In A typology of quotation marks, I showed that “what” we do with “quotation marks” is both complicated and “linguistic”. (2009/09/26)

– In Is the Phaistos Disk a phony?, I evaluate a controversial hypothesis while showing how experts in writing systems go about evaluating new hypotheses. (2008/09/14)

– In To grad or not to grad, I enter the growing discussion about how students should decide whether to go to grad school in the humanities and social sciences. (2009/03/27)

– Anthropology’s thumb: is linguistic anthropology vestigial or opposable? was written as a lecture to senior WSU undergraduates as part of their capstone course in four-field anthropology. (2010/01/25)

– In Hyperdiffusionist Civil War history, I dissect the transatlantic long-range diffusion arguments of one archaeologist, and (apparently) annoy the essayist Errol Morris who wrote the article I criticize. (2009/04/05)

– ‘Chairperson’ and English lexiculture started as a student exercise in my undergraduate linguistic anthropology class and turned into an excursion into the history of gendered terms of authority. (2010/06/28)

– In Reference letters: a letter-writer’s views, I discuss my process for writing (and reading) reference letters for students applying to postgraduate programs. (2009/02/09)

– In Pseudo-writing at the zoo, I turn a family outing into an opportunity to think comparatively about texts that have the appearance of writing without any linguistic content. (2011/03/18)

– Juvenile ethnopaleography is a satirical analysis of one of my son Arthur’s earliest and more interesting written productions, with insights from the history of number systems. (2010/02/06)

 

Visualization of American English dialect data

Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at NC State, has put together a great set of visualizations based on data from Bert Vaux’s Harvard Dialect Survey, and using an algorithm that weights responses by location to produce multicoloured visualizations of variability in individual linguistic features in American English.  If you’ve ever wondered at the diversity of American lexical and phonological variation – for instance, crawfish vs. crayfish vs. crawdad, or whether mayonnaise is pronounced with two syllables or three – you’ll want to check it out.  The full set of maps seems not to be loading right now (possibly due to server / bandwidth issues, if its popularity on my Facebook and Twitter feeds is any guide) but the smaller set is still visible on the Business Insider site.

Maya Decipherment blog / research tool

Last week, a nice article came out about Mayan epigraphy and specifically about David Stuart’s Maya Decipherment blog.    Don’t be fooled by the title – this isn’t about Zooniverse-style crowdsourced science (which has its own merits and challenges), but about the way that the blog is being used for early discussion and review of new ideas by very prominent scholars (which Stuart clearly is) – not supplanting peer review but in parallel to it.  I particularly like the article’s emphasis on the ongoing and collaborative nature of Maya epigraphy (while acknowledging that it can be an incredibly contentious field at times).    I would, however, like to propose a moratorium on the journalistic use of the word ‘mysteries’ in reference to archaeological findings.

Unsprachlosigkeit

Good news, German speakers!  Despite numerous news stories to the contrary (though apparently none in German?), it is not actually possible to deprive a language of a word just by passing a law!    As it turns out, just because some bureaucrats in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern made the (very sensible) decision to abandon the word Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, you don’t have to stop using it.  What’s that?  You never did use it?  Oh, that’s right, it was made up by bureaucrats in the first place.

Oh, I am sure that someone will mourn this now-abandoned word of 63 letters, 65 if you count the two übers as uebers.  Surely somewhere out there lies a secret society of those dark souls ensnared by the agglutinatavistic splendors of Bandwurmwörter (tapeworm words), the evocative-yet-disgusting (or should I say evocativeyetdisgusting) German term for such morphological monstrosities.    But no sensible people.  And for those who prefer the unpronounceable complexity of its acronym, RkReÜAÜG, which is clearly taken straight from the Acronomicon, truly, you are more dauntless than those benighted souls who insist on pronouncing Cthulhu with not one but two voiceless alveolar lateral fricatives, as Lovecraft himself intended.

In conclusion, as it turns out, the equation “Language = Dictionary + Grammar” is ridiculous, and no one can make or unmake a word by fiat – a metalinguistic assumption that seems to mostly be held by journalists with no major Turkish populist demonstrations to report.