When PhDs Attack
It was such an odd thing. We pissed off a PhD on Twitter yesterday basically for being insufficiently anti-Russian. 'Why do they always have Uke flags in their bio?' we asked. Let's call this PhD Frank. Frank really let us have it, being a PhD and all. Failing to be impressed with Frank's academic credentials, we remarked that we too could throw some letters after our last name, and aren't you impressed with yourself? Then a fellow PhD came to Frank's defense, and then another.
We could turn this into a 2003 and Me Post because 20 years ago we'd finished our MA (AMU, online for those of you who like to whip out your degree and slap it on the server tray)*. A few people urged us to continue studying. We mulled it over and realized during the 3-5 years it'd take to get a doctorate we could write several novels and dozens of magazine articles. No thanks. Our life in the late 90s turned on a few bad decisions. Saying no to a PhD was our first great decision of the 21st century. We've published more in a decade than these fucking people will their entire lives.
Anyway, we learned during our professorial days, eight years ended now, that there's a certain type in the profession that must needs sign their emails: PhD, tenure track. Frank is that type.
We checked, and Frank has written a single book with 18 ratings. One of his white knight defenders, let's call her Francine, has written two books with 36 and 17 ratings. You have to put in the work, Francine told us.
Have you ever been in a situation where you were a split second away from punching someone in the mouth? Oh....how we thought about doing so, metaphorically, on Twitter, by dropping our Amazon page in Frank and Francine's mentions.
We admit to spending more time thinking about this yesterday than we should have. Out of curiosity and because knowledge is power, we scrolled Frank's twitter feed. No wonder he only has one book with 18 ratings in print. Mr. PhD spends all day sparring with people he doesn't like. I mean, all day long. And he's still at it this morning.
We've been here before. Once again we unhooked our gun belt and walked away. Don't wrestle a pig. You get dirty, and the pig likes it. Besides, why punch down?
*Reference.
A small number of Amazon ratings doesn't mean anything. People in academia commonly write for extremely specialized audiences. Publish a book on epistemic logic or *de re* modalities, no one outside your sub-sub-sub-field will ever even hear about it. And if it does get reviewed, it almost certainly won't be on Amazon. It may be some measure of success commercially and outside of academia, of course. And there *are* *some* disciplines in which people write for general audiences. So that'd be different.
Anyway--number of Amazon reviews means almost nothing. As I'm sure you realize. You're just ticked off.
(Still, coulda been fun to drop your page on him.)
Frank sounds like an asshat, as you've noted. And the fact that he wastes all his time on Twitter or whatever strengthens the evidence. (The extremely-online academician is now a type...) And, though I know more Ph.D.s than I could easily count, I don't think *any* of them put 'Ph.D.' at the end of their name--except in the rare, professional circumstances in which one is expected to "title up." In academia, anyone who insists on using 'Ph.D.' all the time will end up being the butt of jokes.
And, like numbers of Amazon reviews, Ph.D.s don't mean much...though not nothing, either. I know brilliant Ph.D.s and idiotic ones. Just like I know brilliant non-Ph.D.s and idiotic ones. The discipline matters. A Ph.D. in physics is very likely to be of [significantly] above-average intelligence. A Ph.D. in Anthropology could go either way. A Ph.D. in education or women's studies is probably a bad sign...perhaps even evidence of dumbness...
Anway. F*ck that guy Frank.
You made Instapundit! Sweet!