Dissertation Struggles: University of Florida 04

It took over a year of hard work to establish rapport with several of the elected officials in Kinloch, the all-black St. Louis suburb where I would do the dissertation research. It was a long year before they reached the point of maybe begining to trust that I wasn’t out to screw them and walk away. Part of that trust was gained when I turned over to the Mayor a check for $2,000 I had received for participating in a conference on all-black cities and towns in the U.S. To my delight, that money was put to good use in a Head Start program that had not been able to purchase much needed supplies for the kids. My wife thought I was stark raving mad but it worked perfectly in terms of the Kinloch officials changing their minds about me being just another whitebread, imperialist muthafuck. In mid-May 1971 I was able to hire a local community-based group to administer a questionnaire to a random sample of Kinloch households. By the end of that summer I finally had sufficient data to run various computer analyses.

But that’s about the time I had second and third thoughts about the topic I had selected. The research hadn’t been going well in many ways. I came to realize I had made a major mistake in terms of selecting the right topic and also in doing research that may not advance knowledge in a significant way. I spoke with Big Jim about my concerns on numerous occasions. He was always upbeat and pointed out that no one had taken the approach I was investigating so my point about not advancing knowledge was off the mark. The proof of the pudding is in the taste, he would say. His advice was to start filling out the detailed outline the committee had approved by writing the first three or four chapters and see what the committee thought of the direction the research was taking.

Recognizing good advice when I heard it, I buckled down, encouraged by an increasingly desperate wife who had been agonizing over me wasting all those years of grad school by not finishing the dissertation. After six months analysis and hard work I had, by my initial estimate, nearly half the outline fleshed out and submitted the completed chapters to Anderson and the committee.

That’s when the shit hit the fan. Professor Niddrie took a meat cleaver to the chapters. His criticism was absolutely brutal. The way I attempted to operationalize the problem was woefully deficient. My organization stunk to high heaven. The writing was sophomoric. I ignored the journey-to-work problem. The topic wasn’t even good enough for a college-level term paper. In fact, I ignored everything that was right about urban social geography. The only possible thing I could do was abandon the project and start over by selecting an appropriate topic. My stomach dropped to my toes. His brutal criticism was much, much worse than I had anticipated.

When I called Anderson in a near panic he tried to reassure me that Niddrie was taking his anger at him out on me. Apparently, more than a year previously Anderson and Niddrie had several near shouting matches in departmental meetings over when and how to apply the new grad school regulations the Dean had approved and for which Niddrie had been one of the driving forces. Niddrie wanted to apply the new regs to all existing as well as incoming grad students. Anderson staunchly opposed that action because existing students were locked into the previous regs and couldn’t be forced to change their educational programs. The discussion was hot and heavy but Anderson prevailed, partly because the University Attorney issued an opinion that supported Anderson one hundred percent. But Niddrie was royally pissed off at Anderson. And now he had me in his sights.

Anderson advised me to complete the dissertation as soon as possible and submit it to the committee. He thought he had the necessary votes to override Niddrie’s objections. But, he warned me, the work had to be of very high quality. With every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. Or he wouldn’t even be able to present it to the committee as being ready for defense.

Man, that was a terrible time because it came only a few months after Karin’s surgery and brush with death. My mental state was fragile and my powers of concentration were far less than adequate. But push ahead I did.

It took another four months to finish the outstanding chapters and another month and a half to polish and re-polish the whole thing. I held my breath and put the package in the mail.

Two weeks later I received another hyper-critical letter from my nemesis. Although the dissertation was improved, Niddrie wrote, it still failed to meet his standards or those of the University. As things stood, he could not vote in favor of advancing the dissertation to defense. I felt utterly nauseated.

That same day I also received a letter from Joe Vandiver, the sociology professor who had agreed to serve as my minor representative on the committee. I had taken two or three courses from him and we had developed a very good professional relationship that verged on friendship. Vandiver apologized but was forced to withdraw from the committee because he was taking a sabbatical and would be out of the country for the next two semesters. One of his colleagues who I had taken coursework from in demography had volunteered to take his place on the committee. When I read the name my heart nearly stopped. It was one of Niddrie’s good friends; I knew they would vote together against Anderson and me. I felt like yesterday’s garbage.

When I talked to Anderson later that evening even he was pessimistic. He wasn’t sure how I could get around Niddrie’s criticism. Worse, he was getting closer to moving to the USGS and that process was taking so much time that he might be forced to withdraw as my committee chair. My stomach turned over and over until I thought I’d vomit all over our kitchen floor. It looked and felt like the absolute end of the road.

That night was a taste of hell. I tossed and turned for hours and hours, agonizing over what could be done in a ver short time. What approach could I take that I hadn’t thought of? What techniques could I use that were appropriate to the topic? What would change Niddrie’s mind? What could I do to make the dissertation acceptable? What, what, what.

But the next morning I got up with a fierce determination and renewed spirit. Suddenly, during what I thought was a sleepless night I had discovered what must be done and, far more importantly, exactly how to do it. No more uncertainty, no more indecision, no more looking over my shoulder for the boogeyman. I knew what was needed to tie the dissertation together and get Niddrie off my back for once and all.

For the next fourteen days and nights I worked like a man possessed. I outlined, wrote drafts, tore those pages up, and re-wrote more polished material. San typed as I wrote. I would proof-read her pages, correct them, and she would re-type as I wrote new text. I searched for and found several old notebooks from previous grad courses, mining them for ways to use analytical techniques that fit what I wanted to do, and studied the early results with a vengeance, pulling one all-nighter after another, changing, improving, refining until it was what I wanted, what I desperately needed. I was consumed with the job of crafting the right approach, one Niddrie couldn’t possibly reject. I was fiercely determined not to fail. An indication of my mental and physical state can be summed up in one simple statement: I was living on Tums to calm my constantly upset stomach.

On the morning of the sixteenth day I drove to the post office and mailed the new chapter to Anderson. Twenty-eight pages of fresh material. Twenty-eight pages of an approach he had never seen and had never anticipated. Twenty-eight pages I had never discussed with him. And waited and waited. Holding my breath. Biting my fingernails to the quick. Sleeping fitfully at best. Able to think of nothing else.

Four days after I had mailed the new chapter Anderson called. I had thought I would instantly know from his tone of voice his reaction to the new chapter but was wrong. He simply sounded like the same old calm and steady Big Jim.

“When did you write this chapter,” he asked casually.

"In the last two weeks," I told him.

He couldn’t believe I had written that much complex material in such a short time. Finally, he said the words I had been desperate to hear.

“Well, the new chapter is very good.” He thought it was close to perfect. He couldn’t see how Niddrie could object because the new material connected all the dots.

“It’s a great solution,” he said with relief and something approaching admiration. “There’s no way Niddrie can object to the dissertation being ready for defense. And no way could he vote the dissertation down. Now that I’ve read the material,” he said, “it seems so logical that I wonder why you didn’t think of that approach before.”

I almost howled from the shear hysteria that gripped me. Why had I not thought of that approach indeed?

When we disconnected I nearly wept hot tears of relief.

What I had done was to switch gears and use multivariate analysis to relate Kinloch to the universe of all-black cities in the U. S. and then to the other black communities in the St. Louis Metropolitan area, determining how it fit or didn’t fit in terms of defining socioeconomic characteristics. Statistical analysis was the coming thing in the social sciences and Anderson thought I hit that nail on the head. He was very upbeat and I was as well. I knew from experience the sociology guy wasn’t likely to object to my approach since we had had that conversation about the use of statistics in social science in one of the courses I took from him about three years previously. I also knew the Niddrie wouldn’t want to pose objections in the defense that could be shown as spurious or ad hominem attacks and would most likely back down from his trenchant opposition. I also knew Niddrie was not a statistics guy and may not have understood the techniques I had used and would be unwilling to expose his ignorance to his colleagues.

As soon as I inserted the new chapters into the body of the dissertation and sent the revised copy to Big Jim, Anderson asked Dr. Shannon McCune, the new Geography Department Chairman, to play an active role on my committee. [Author’s Note: McCune was a VERY BIG GUN nationally. Previously, he had served as the Director of the famous American Geographical Society, president of the University of Vermont, provost of the University of Massachusetts--Amherst, the first civil administrator of Japan's Ryukyu Islands, serving from 1962 to 1964, was an expert on the geography of the Far East, and widely published in all the right journals.] Then, before McCune could demure, Anderson promptly sent him a copy of the newly revised dissertation. McCune reviewed it, sent me a short letter requesting a number of fairly minor and easy to make changes, and complimented me on the excellent job I had done using statistical measures as an integral part of the research. Anderson certainly knew how to play big league politics. He had outfoxed Niddrie by getting McCune on my side and everyone on the committee knew it. Niddrie, a political animal if ever there was one, would be extraordinarily reluctant to oppose the new Chairman publicly, even if it was only for a dissertation defense.

Anderson certainly knew how to play politics in the big league. He had outfoxed Niddrie by getting McCune on my side and everyone on the committee knew it. Niddrie, a political animal if ever there was one, would be extraordinarily reluctant to oppose the new Chairman publicly, especially if it was for something as trivial as a dissertation defense.

After reviewing the revised copy Anderson gave him, Niddrie sent me a letter with his grudging admission that the new material had changed the dissertation for the better. He would no longer oppose the dissertation or the defense, even though he thought I had wasted an opportunity to do better work on another topic. I breathed an enormous sigh of relief and finally stopped shaking inside.

The dissertation defense was on April 20, 1973. Good Friday, no less. To my surprise and immense relief, Niddrie never showed up for the defense, though later that afternoon he signed the approval form as a member of my committee. The Sociology Department guy was there and said very little of substance but voted to approve the defense. Clark Cross, from whom I had taken two courses in photogrammetry and satellite imagery and was not among my favorite profs, was also at the defense, even though he wasn’t officially on my committee. He threw a few softball questions designed for me to hit out of the ballpark, which I did. And for that I was extraordinarily grateful because I knew from Anderson that Cross was furious with Niddrie for trying to screw me because of his disagreement with Big Jim. Anderson, who never had to resign from the committee as he said he might, carefully led me through the defense, making sure I nailed all the highlights.

I was then asked to leave the room while the committee discussed the defense. Although I knew I had done well, tension still had me by the throat. Things could still turn to shit. After all, my life, as I then imagined it, was on the line. After an interminably long fifteen minutes, Prof. McCune called me back into the examining room. He announced to me and the committee I had passed, shook my hand, and informed me I had done a fine job, which is what he almost certainly told everyone who not performed abysmally and had failed. And so I earned the PhD the year I turned 30, though I didn’t formally graduate until later in the summer of 1973.

Several months later, Big Jim told me that he knew McCune had previously been Provost of the University of Massachusetts and also served as Governor-General of the Ryukyu Islands, a high level U.S. Department of State diplomatic post. He thought all that experience dealing with controversial and sensitive intellectual and political issues would ensure McCune would be fair and objective about my dissertation and would be an effective counter-weight to Niddrie’s one-sided negativism. He also told me he mentioned to McCune in passing the previous difficulties he had had with Niddrie and immediately realized from McCune’s reaction that he was well aware of what had transpired and was not happy about the way Niddrie had conducted himself.

After considerable reflection over many months, I came to realize I disagreed with McCune about doing a fine job. Both Niddrie and Anderson had been closer to the truth. Anderson was right because I did shed new light on an existing problem, though it was more from a flashlight than a spotlight. Niddrie was right because I should never have selected that topic in the first place, mostly for reasons he never tumbled to: I was white and my research had every appearance of using the problem (an all-black city isolated from surrounding white suburbs) for my own benefit. Academic imperialism at its finest. Which, of course, is exactly what I had done since I got a PhD out of the deal and Kinloch got jack shit (not counting the $2,000 the Head Start program received or the funds for conducting the survey). As Niddrie had perceptively noted, I had wasted my time in certain significant ways.

But it wasn’t the fatal blow to my career as he had grimly prophesied. Actually, I had learned a great deal more from working on that topic than I realized at the time. It taught me about land use competition and conflict, especially between groups of different status in terms of socioeconomic characteristics and power, a topic I soon would explore with grad students at EMU in several papers published in professional journals.

So, after all was said and done, the dissertation was a mixed bag that leaned more to the positive side than Niddrie would ever give me credit for. In the final analysis, I believe he was very disappointed I didn’t fail, which was a terrible thing to say about someone whose vocation in life was to educate. But the experience taught me that even your most trenchant critics have truth to tell you if you are open to listening and learning. No matter how painful that experience may be.