A hundred ways to alienate your student – a non-primer for tutors, advisors and disse

There have been two entertaining and informative threads how to cope with a dissertation supervisor and on choosing a disagreeable (dis-degreeable?) disertation topic. One thing to emerge was that there are dissertation supervisors
(and probably tutors and academic advisors) lurking out there.

In the academy, learning to learn from the mistakes of others is a basic survival technique. and I thought it might be useful to compile a list of ways in which students have been alienated by such mentors.

e.g. An tutor who rubbishes an assignment and in doing so demonstrates that she had actually done so because she was way out of her depth and had not even looked at the bibliography.

Moral: If your tutor is dim or narrowly focused (which may follow from the first), decide if you are looking for an unfair fight (which you might well lose) or if discretion is the better part of valour and pandering is the name of the game.

An MA dissertation supervisor, who, on learning from a malicious departmental secretary that he will not be supervising the student's PhD (the student having accepted a confidential offer from a far more senior and experienced academic), withdraws from active advising on the MA and instead actively obstructs funding applications for the PhD.

Moral: Tell your new found friend to commit your name to memory, not to paper.

 

( 1) Do not tell one you supervise, even if he is not the brightest guy around , who has three accredited grad degrees in Theology, has read several times the significant Barthian chap related to one point in the thesis and who has read a half dozen interpreters of Barth and who has had the SAME observation when made in another paper OK'd by a PhD in Theo from Westminster that:







YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT BARTH!!!

 

When I suggested that this would be non-primer, I did not realise how true that was going to be....