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TIL a mathematics professor at Stanford University was murdered by his doctoral student who had been trying to get a PhD for 19 years.
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My math prof in college visited as a prospective grad student the week after this happened. He said everyone was super twitchy and he couldn’t figure out why nobody would talk to him. And then an admin took him aside and explained what had happened and why people were on edge. He did end up at Stanford, but said they made a new rule that all grad students had to finish in six years (10 years? I heard the story 25 years ago...). And no hammers allowed in the department
they made a new rule that all grad students had to finish in six years. And no hammers allowed in the department
Sounds like at least some good came out of it then.
The guy was strung along for nearly 2 decades, was belittled in front of his “peers” and denied support when he requested it.
If someone keeps kicking a dog, and finally one day it snaps and kills an abuser, it would be seen as completely justified.
Perhaps nobody did anything illegal to this guy prior to the murder, that doesn’t make their behavior ok.
For real. There is zero circumstances where anyone should be in grad school for almost two decades. That’s a huge part of someone’s life wasted.
Any decent supervisor would sit down with a candidate, and either make a roadmap for how to get the candidate to completing their thesis (with actionable goals, or if they felt the candidate wasn’t suitable, politely encourage them to move on with their lives or find a new supervisor).
After two decades I’m sure a professor is getting a power trip out of withholding the title from the prospective candidate. In my faculty at university, there were some professors who helped their understudies do their research, write and defend their thesis, and publish, like clockwork, and all their candidates would cycle through every 2-3 years. Then other unlucky candidates would get tied to a professor (often because that’s who would take them on) and these professors would string them on 5-7 years until they either quit and went to work elsewhere, or found a new supervisor. One guy had like 6 candidates under him earn their PhDs in almost 30 years.
Obviously it doesn’t justify their murder (especially in this case, as it seems that the victim wasn’t the candidate’s supervisor for the entire time), but others in the department should have taken action before it came to this. You can’t expect people to spend their entire lives fighting for a sheet of paper.
My gf got her masters, and her sister got her PhD: many professors abuse the fuck out of grad students in a myriad of ways and delay their academic progress while exploiting them.
This shit still happens…I’m not saying it’s 2-decades long, but that’s insane: he already served a prison sentence in academia. If his entire aspiration was to be a PhD student, I’m sure it would have been fine, but that was clearly purgatory.