His son submitted his PhD a couple of years ago, something about the recovery of northern grasslands after drought.

I believe he is trying to find the month he needs to complete all the changes suggested by the examiners, which isn’t helped by the loss of some computer files.

All this makes me realise that (personally for me) I made the right decision back in 1979 when a lecturer tried to encourage me into a post-grad program.

For some reason getting to work as a casual academic for 5+ years just doesn’t have the same ‘incentivating’ qualities.

Good luck with the rest of it!

You probably don’t want to hear this but those loose ends drove me insane. If you want my advice I’d try to stay in panic mode as long as possible. It is truly amazing how quickly a thesis can be finished if one is sufficiently focussed!

Oh and rest assured that this does actually come to an end and the world seems sooooo much easier afterwards!

I’ve always liked to keep an orderly desk - at least since I got my first office job at age 16 -each to their own I guess, but I find it a very useful working tool.

Graham at 44, hold your horses, mate! I’ve just returned from a walk to wind down, having knocked off for the night at 1am. Having said that, I had a real collapse in my energy levels today and didn’t really get back into gear until about 9pm, leaving short of where I wanted to be. But that’s alright. All the heavy lifting has been done, and a few ends can be tied in a more leisurely fashion over the next few days - at any rate something resembling a complete draft has been duly emailed. But the thing is no means over, though a large hurdle has been leapt, and therefore the stress levels should return to manageable!

Is there are celebratory bottle of whiskey close to the desk?

Lemon juice in soda water perks me up. And lemon juice in cranberry herbal tea.

Don’t keep us in suspense …. good or bad, how did you go today??
David Rubie [32], David [33], Antonio [37] and Brian [38]:

I heard Professor Peter Saunders on ABC Radio National “Counterpoint” - twice. He is certainly very intelligent, entertaining and well-spoken. It must be some measure of my anger that it has taken me more than a week to leave a comment on the Counterpoint website! He was free-and-easy with his glib comments about welfare recipients; his ignorance would be laughable …. except that impressionable inexperienced young officials might rely on his opinions and his prestige in their own implementation of government or corporate policy towards welfare recipients ….

That guilt is an inherent feature of relaxation.

Unless, I suppose, you enjoy ordering piles of books and alphabeticising photocopies. I too am struck by the neatness of your desk.

Would you bemoan Mark taking an academic job in a private Left-wing thinktank post-PhD as some kind of academic failure??? I certainly wouldn’t.

Wouldn’t care either way.

Antonio - you need to read the linked article, although the most relevent bit is this:

That conclusion [IQ as a predictor of earnings], he says, was simply unacceptable in sociology. Research grants became hard to get, he had difficulty getting articles published in academic journals, and he was no longer asked to talk at conferences, sit on editorial boards or examine PhD theses. “Eventually people washed their hands of me,” he says, “They said, ‘He’s really lost it.’ I found that as an academic it was no longer possible to do my job.”

No mention at all that IQ as a test is regarded incredibly dubiously by most researchers, so his conclusion was tenuous at best. He’s a failure: couldn’t attract funding or grants via normal means, made unsupportable and ideological conclusions from his own academic work, could not supervise students worth a damn, fundamentally couldn’t do his job. He then quit before he was fired like most of the chip-on-shoulder types.

I’m only relaying his point of view - that a grand left wing conspiracy robbed him of a flourishing academic career, so he left for greener pastures (i.e. the job of telling right wingers what they want to hear).

Brian, there isn’t a thread for a bit of Saunders bashing but there should be one.

Would you bemoan Mark taking an academic job in a private Left-wing thinktank post-PhD as some kind of academic failure??? I certainly wouldn’t.

Anyway I guess this is not the thread to be discussing this on.

He said he was going back to England because he had a grandkid whose parents had the Guardian delivered through the letterbox. So he had to save the kid from the and presumably from the kid’s parents. Since one of them was his progeny and he failed there I’d say he’s got no chance.

They were all rather up themselves and mildly offensive if you bothered to take them seriously.

As long as the research output is rigorous, critical and somewhat innovative then it has my respect regardless of the ideological hue.

He doesn’t seem to be able to get over his perception that teh Grand Left Conspiracy had nobbled his academic career in the same way as it does with climate change deniers.

Exactly. Michael Duffys SMH piece is this: Suppress gag reflex before clicking.

How they love a whinge - they’d all be mega successful and influential if those pesky facts would just get out of the way.

That, I understand from Mr Mark, can be blamed on an over-active smoke alarm going off every time he tries to make proper coffee in a pot!

Don’t let the door hit you in the arse Saunders.