Unfinished Business: The Terminal All-But-Dissertation Phenomenon in American Higher Education. This item is unavailable.Unfinished Business: The Terminal All-But-Dissertation Phenomenon in American Higher Education

In Ireland it is said that there are forty shades of green and from my thirty plus years in academia, I believe the same can be said of beginning doctoral students. The naiveté with which I approached my doctoral studies could not be matched by many save possibly the early Irish immigrants who came to this land via Ellis Island expecting to find streets of gold and jobs aplenty in the joyous comforts of the Bronx. I went to graduate school, that is to say, the Hartford Seminary Foundation, to pursue a Ph.D. because I wanted to teach in higher education. Really, I just wanted to be a university professor and because I was a preacher’s kid and knew about things ecclesiastical, the seminary seemed the most comforting place to do doctoral studies. It proved everything I had hoped for and more. Those years are glorious and splendid to me even now, some thirty years later. And yet, no one could have been more uninformed about doctoral studies than I was when I entered.I remember clearly my first encounter with someone who was introduced to me as an “ABD” from Yale University. This was at a faculty/student party and I didn’t have a clue as to what “ABD” meant other than something different, if not important, owing to the deliberate and somber posture and tone of the introduction. I pondered but was too shy to ask what it meant lest I revealed just how green I was at that time. So I met the fellow who at the time was teaching in a small nearby college where I was destined to be adjunct lecturer my second year in a four year doctoral residency program. I conjured such titles of distinctions as “Another Bright Divinity” student or “Always Be Driven” or even “Anything But Departure” as meanings for the term. I didn’t ask and only came to know what it really meant, namely, “All But Dead” or “All But Dissertation.”