The Doctoral Trail: Don't Die of Dysentery.

or,

EVOLUTION OF A DOCTORAL PROGRAM: A TIMELINE.

Years 1-2:

• As a shiny young junior faculty member, you are excited that your department finally has a doctoral program.
• You and your colleagues compete over who gets to serve on the program faculty. You are eager to work with students "at that level"!
• You and your colleagues pore over applications and champion those applicants who sound like a good fit.

Years 3-4:

• Existence of Ph.D. program proves to be excellent bait for potential new faculty hires.
• Program faculty compete to show the most commitment to their students, hoping it will help with tenure/promotion.
  
• You wind up coddling gradflakes more than necessary, even proofreading dissertations, because you "care".

Year 5:

• Existence of Ph.D. program continues to be excellent bait for new hires.
• You are becoming disillusioned, however. You realize that the applicants you've been admitting are not quite the bee's knees. You have spent much time spent helping doctoral students; not enough time left for your own research (and tenure is looming).
  
• You start deeming many current students too local/foreign/drunk/flaky/unable to understand basic instructions (either in class or, worse, when serving as teaching/research assistants) to be worth your time.
• You and your colleagues redesign the applicant selection process with these problems in mind. Just as you are wrapping up, administration reveals that service / advising in the doctoral program will have little weight in tenure decisions. WTF?!??
  

Years 6-7:

• Existence of Ph.D. program continues serving as terrific bait for potential new faculty. When they interview, you don't tell them about problems within the program.
  
• However, the newly admitted, overachieving doctoral students are the best bunch yet! Their skill sets rock.
• You and other faculty fight with one another over who will get the research assistant who can photocopy like a pro.
• You succeed in getting Karen, an apparent superstar, assigned to you as your RA. She is not a gradflake at all!
  
• You also get tenure! You are feeling smug.
  

Year 8:

• Existence of Ph.D. program would be amazing bait if a new hiring freeze were not in effect.
  
• With undergrad enrollment on the rise, department needs slave labor graduate students who can teach courses.
  
• Research assistantships reduced by administration in favor of teaching "assistantships" in which even first-year doctoral students are instructors of record.

Years 9-10:

• Hiring freeze continues. Your advising load of doctoral students and candidates increases, as numerous gradflakes from early years take their time graduating because of shitty job market.
• You also unwillingly find yourself chair of the doctoral program. Everyone wants something from you all the time; you just want time to work on your research.
  
• You become overwhelmed with sudden feelings of resentment.
  
• With too many grad students in the pipeline, there are not enough TA/RA positions to go around. Potential students offered shit-for-pay adjuncting work instead, and some foolishly accept--only to realize there is a hierarchy among the grad students, based on who gets which assignments.
  
• You and other faculty buy into this caste system, and treat the unfunded adjuncting doctoral students like second-class citizens. Oops.
  
• Advising even the overachieving doctoral students like Karen, who used to bring you such joy, proves burdensome. Their intelligent, legitimate questions were once exciting for you to answer, but now are just a drain on your energy. You wish you could stay in bed. (So do they.)
  

Years 11-12:

• Hiring freeze removed, but program is not given any new hires. Doctoral faculty frustrated and jaded. You feel burned out and pissed. Your dedication to the program decreases dramatically; unfortunately, you are still chair.
• You lash out unnecessarily against your advisees, taking your frustrations directly out on them. Minus two hundred billion points.
  
• Doctoral students, sick of being treated like crap, flee the program in record numbers--taking jobs ABD when available, or doing dissertation research out of state, going part-time, or dropping out--anything to escape the bitchy fucking doctoral faculty who don't want to help everybody, as well as the functional bankruptcy they face.

Years 13-15:

• New faculty lines given to your program annually! FINALLY. But none of those jobs could be given to the program's own graduates--that would be incestuous. (You don't want those flakes for colleagues, anyway.)
  
• New faculty VERY excited about graduate program. See that it is sucky and place blame with jaded "old guard" (dangerously ignoring higher-level administrators' culpability in the problems. Good luck with tenure!). They stage a coup and take over the program.
  
• As an old-timer, you would say good riddance, except you still want research assistants. After all, despite your protestations to the contrary, this has ALWAYS been about you.