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1997-1980 Part 4: Academics at Wayne State

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More of the same and a tasty side dish. Continue reading →

I arrived at Wayne State with a masters degree in speech communication from Michigan. If I wanted to get paid to coach debate, I had to be a graduate student. Since I already had a masters, that meant that I needed to commit to work towards a PhD.

PhD candidates were required to take a given number of additional graduate-level classes. A few had to be outside of the department. Repeating classes in the same basic subject taken at other institutions was perfectly acceptable.

A dissertation was also required. The basic requirement was that it include original research in an important topic under the aegis of speech communication. My unhappy experience in that endeavor is described here.

PhD candidates at Wayne State were required to make three oral presentations. The audience for all three was the student’s committee of “advisers”, which consisted of three professors from the speech department and one from another department. The advisers could ask questions, make statements, and suggest improvements. At the end each presentation met and told the candidate whether he passed or failed.

The required presentations were these:

  • The oral examination. The outside adviser was not included in this exercise. Each adviser could ask any number of questions about any subject.
  • The defense of the prospectus for the dissertation. The prospectus is a printed document that outlines the purpose of the study, the plans for research, and the method of evaluation.
  • Defense of the dissertation.

In general, Michigan is a much more demanding school than Wayne State. These figures are from 2019:

AcceptanceGraduation
Michigan23%91%
Wayne State73%38%

This does not mean that every department at U-M was better. I was not favorably impressed by the faculty in my area of the speech department at Michigan. My favorite teacher at U-M (Dr. Cartwright) was in the psychology department. The one impressive person at U-M’s speech department (Bob Norton) did not take teaching speech seriously. I would say that the speech professors at Wayne State were slightly better.

The graduate students in speech communications at both schools impressed me equally little. Practically none of them would have been able to handle a rigorous curriculum, as in a math, science, or language department. I studied the bare minimum amount to get by, and I had no difficulties with any of the classes.

I think that I took at least one class from every professor who resided on the fifth floor except George Ziegelmueller1, who had been in the department for ages. I don’t remember George teaching any graduate-level classes while I was at Wayne State. If he did, it was probably in directing forensics.

Here are my impressions of the other teachers. They are listed in alphabetical order, with the ones whose names escape me at the bottom.

I think that Steve Alderton2, whose first year was 1977-78, taught a class in group communication. I don’t remember much about it. Steve got his PhD at Indiana, which had a very good reputation in speech circles.

Both George and Steve were on my dissertation committee. That experience is described here.

A museum in Esperance, Australia has some of Skylab’s actual debris on display.

I remember taking a class from Jim Measell3, but I don’t remember what the subject was. Sheri Brimm was in the class with me. That experience is described here.

In July of 1979 the Skylab satellite fell into earth’s atmosphere and broke into a lot of debris. Jim removed a ceiling tile from over his desk and scattered some fairly realistic-looking electronic parts around his office in hopes of persuading people that pieces of the satellite had crashed through the roof of Manoogian.

Barb O’Keefe3, earned her PhD at the University of Illinois, a gathering point of disciples of George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory. I think that her husband was also a devotee. She taught a class in communication theory, in which she described the “evolution” of communication theory. The second-to-last step was systems theory, which she dismissed because a system is never truly closed. Of course, that is true. The researcher tries to exclude externalities when possible and account for them when it isn’t. However, the externalities exist regardless of which construct is used to analyze the transactions.

The culmination, according to Barb, was PCT, which postulates that people have dichotomous (i.e., two dimensional) constructs that they use to evaluate everything. Examples are light-heavy and tall-short. I asked her about colors, and she replied with something like, “Oh, there’s an answer to that.” She never looked it up or told me where I could find it. She was quite intelligent and an effective teacher, but she was also a “True Believer”, and that scared me.

She also really upset me when she let slip that she thought that debate training “turned students into monsters.” I kept my distance from her.

This picture is from before the days when I knew Ray Ross.

I remember taking one seminar from Ray Ross5, the author of the Speech 100 textbook. It might have been about persuasion. All I remember is that it was the least demanding of all of the courses that I took, and everything that he taught was at least twenty years old.

Lie Ray, Gary Shulman received his PhD from Purdue. I took two of his classes. The first was statistics, which covered much of the same material as the class that Bob Norton taught at Michigan. The number of students enrolled was more than for Bob’s class. I remember that everyone was assigned a topic to explain to the class. Most of these topics were very straightforward, but the one that I was assigned was a complicated statistical tool that I had never heard of. I spent a lot of time working on my lecture, but it was just impossible (IMAO) to present it in a fashion that was comprehensible for speech students within the time limit, which I think was fifteen minutes. I got a bad grade on this exercise. This was the only time in my life that I complained about a grade. It didn’t matter; I aced the tests.

Gary’s other class, which, as I recall, was taught at night, was industrial communications. Vince Follert and Pam Benoit were also in this class. We had several exercises to perform as teams of three or four. The catchphrase was “Learn by doing”. The first project challenged each team to construct a castle using some tools that each group was provided—a stapler, some tape, string, some crayons, and construction paper. The castles were then judged on sturdiness, height, and esthetics.

Pam, whom I knew to be a good artist, was in our group. I gave all of the construction paper and crayons to her and told her to decorate them so that we did not finish last in esthetics. The rest of us then affixed one end of the string to one of the ceiling panels next to a wall. We then stapled the decorated paper to the string and taped the whole contraption to the wall. It looked nothing like a castle, but it was by far the tallest, easily the sturdiest, and as esthetically pleasing as any. De gustibus non est disputandum. We won the competition, but Vince claimed that we cheated.

In the second, much longer exercise, we had different roles in a factory that made some doodads from tinker toys. I was the foreman in the first segment. Gary never prohibited us from rearranging the furniture, and so I ordered that the desks of the people who were charged with locating the pieces moved so that they were next to those of the people who assembled them. This made everything very efficient and made the rest of the exercise, which culminated (on Gary’s order) in a strike of employees who were as jolly as Santa’s elves, totally inappropriate.

I had heard through the grapevine that getting a consulting gig with one of the auto companies was the Holy Grail for the faculty members in the speech and psychology department. I never found how many, if any, completed the sacred quest.

I am not sure that I ever saw this face in my three years at WSU.

I am pretty sure that I never met Geneva Smitherman7. I may not have even seen her. I have no recollection of where her office was. She definitely taught classes while I was at Wayne State. However, I never took any, and nobody that I knew well did either.

A surprisingly large number of graduate students in Wayne State’s speech department held outside jobs. A fairly large portion of this group took all of Prof. Smitherman’s classes and very few others. One of these students took the class that Ray Ross taught that I was in. She confided that she had many friends who would not take classes from any of the other professors. It was actually feasible to get a masters degree at Wayne State using this approach. If the student was willing to write a thesis (supervised by Prof. Smitherman), it could be accomplished in only a few years.

The effect that Prof. Smitherman and her ideas had on the department as a whole is discussed here. Jimmie Trent was the chairman of Wayne State’s speech department up until 1972 or 1973. I don’t know when Prof. Smitherman was hired, but it is fun to speculate that Jimmie hired her as a parting gift to the department. She is eight years older than I am. The timing could be right.

There was also a professor in the department who taught classes in rhetoric and oratorical analysis. I am not certain whether I took any of them or not. I definitely remember that he brought his adolescent son to our house on Chelsea one evening to witness one of our D&D adventures. We would have let them join the party of adventurers—I had a computer program that could generate a character in seconds and generate a nice printout with all of the characteristics. They declined the invitation.

I took one graduate-level class in psychology. I don’t remember the professor’s name, but he was both entertaining and handsome. I was more interested in the first characteristic than the second, but I did notice that about 80 percent of the students were female. I wanted to ask this professor to be the “outside” member of my PhD committee, but he was on sabbatical.

I found the psych students in this class to be no more capable than the graduate students in the speech department. I received an A with very little effort.

This guy probably aced his orals.

In one class session the psych professor discussed oral exams. He said that it was very difficult for the faculty members to assess the performance of the candidates. In general, they were mostly surprisingly awful. He said that some professors used a 10 percent standard. That is, if 10 percent of the answers seemed acceptable, that was good enough.

He also mentioned an exception. He told us about one fellow who was not considered a very good student. However, his performance in the oral exam was the best that any of the professors had ever witnessed. It turned out that he worked as a disk jockey (whoops; the meaning of that term has changed in the intervening years) “presenter” at the college’s radio stationed, and he was used to ad-libbing and responding to unexpected questions.

Well, if a little radio time had that effect, I figured that all my years of debate experience would certainly serve me even better. I did not waste even one hour cramming for my orals, and I passed with flying colors.

I took one other class; I cannot even remember the exact nature of the subject matter. It might have concerned statistics for the social sciences or the the use of computers in social science research. The instructor was weak. I remember that on one of his multiple-choice tests he asked for the definition of an algorithm. When he graded the test he marked the right answer (a set of rules to be followed in calculations or problem-solving) wrong and refused to admit that it was a mistake. I might have dropped the class or just stopped attending.

One desk that should have been empty had my marvy body in it. So what?

You may be wondering how a student could have “just stopped attending”. Well, the university had a requirement that the prospectus be presented and defended before completing the coursework. I don’t remember the details. I was not ready to write my prospectus on time, and, besides, I was busy coaching debate. So, for a semester or two I attended classes for which I had not registered. This was not the smartest scheme that I had ever devised, but, since I did not pay tuition either way, I could not see that it would harm anyone.

I do not understand why none of my instructors challenged my presence. I am quite certain that the university provided every instructor with a roster of all enrolled students.

Occasionally someone who was not on the roster attended one of the classes that I taught. I took attendance every day and, in a friendly way, challenged all the interlopers. Occasionally they were just guests of one of the enrolled students8. None of the people whom I challenged ever came to a second class.

My failure to enroll went undetected for quite a while. When someone in the administration finally noticed I was ordered to report to the dean’s office. He grilled me about why I did this. I told him frankly that I had no excuse, but I wanted to do whatever was necessary to get back in good standing. He grilled me about this over the course of a handful of interrogations. He apparently thought that my actions were part of a nefarious scheme.

I discovered during these exchanges that the school was reimbursed by the state based on enrollment numbers. So, what I did cost Wayne State some money. Of course, it also saved the state of Michigan the same amount of money.

I also had to go to track down the instructors and ask them to submit grades for me. Fortunately they were all still on campus. None of them gave me the slightest bit of grief.

Of course, if I had stopped attending a class because I could no longer tolerate it, I just never asked for a grade. I had plenty of credits without those classes.

I spent a lot more time researching than I did studying for these classes, which for the most part, I considered useless. None of my research concerned anything that I had studied in classes at Wayne State. It was concentrated in two areas: 1) the social science research that used the ten standard questions in the “shift to risk” research, and 2) the medical research concerning hemispheric specialization. The former was compiled in anticipation of doing a dissertation on some aspect of the area. The latter was because I was intellectually curious about the subject. In the late seventies almost no one outside of the medical community was aware of all the recent breakthroughs in understanding the function of the brain.

There was no Internet; there were only libraries. I had boxes full of 3″x5″ file cards on both subjects. I used the “shift to risk” file to prepare my prospectus. I used the hemispheric specialization data for a paper that I submitted in 1980 to the Journal of the American Forensic Association9. I wrote it in response to a two-part article in the journal by Charles Arthur Willard10 (whom I knew as the debate coach at Dartmouth College) entitled “The Epistemic Functions of Argument: Reasoning and Decision-Making From A Constructivist/Interactionist Point of View”.

I knew that Dr. Willard, like Barb O’Keefe, received his masters and PhD degrees from Illinois in the speech department that promulgated Personal Construct Theory. My paper presented a short review of the current state of the neurological evidence about the way that the human brain makes decisions. It argued that some of the fundamental elements of PCT were inherently inconsistent with the fundamental postulates of PCT.

Before sending my paper to the same journal I let George read it. He agreed with me that people in communications theory were not conversant with research by neuroscientists. He asked me if I was sure about “all of this”. I assured him that when something was questionable I had been careful to include disclaimers.

My paper was quickly accepted for publication, but the principal reviewer wanted me to make a few minor changes. By then, however, I had decided to change careers. I let it drop.

1. George died in 2019. A press release from Wayne State can be read here.

2. While writing this I discovered that only a few years after I departed in 1980 Steve Alderton changed careers entirely. He got a law degree and then became (for almost three decades) an official of the federal government, a world traveler, and an artist! His obituary is here.

3. Jim Measell left academia in 1997 to specialize in public relations. His experiences are described here.

4. Barb O’Keefe Northwestern https://dailynorthwestern.com/2019/08/14/campus/school-of-communication-dean-barbara-okeefe-to-step-down-in-2020/

5. Ray Ross died at the age of ninety in 2015. He was at the Battle of the Bulge! His obituary is here.

6. Gary is a professor of strategic communication at Miami University in Oxford, OH. Information about him can be found here. I wonder if Jimmie Trent hired him.

7. It appears that Geneva Smitherman is now at Michigan State. Here is her Wikipedia page.

8. The most memorable of these occasions was when one of the students brought her identical twin sister. This was the same student who started one of her speeches with, “I want to take this occasion to introduce all of you to my best friend, Jesus.”

9. The journal’s title was later expanded to Argument and Advocacy: the Journal of the American Forensic Association.

10. Charlie Willard has a Wikipedia page.

1980 Why I Am Not a PhD

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Orals and dissertation Continue reading →

By May of 1980 I had enough hours in speech and related subjects to qualify for a PhD. My oral exams and my dissertation remained.

Steve Alderton died in 2019.
Steve Alderton died in 2019.

I needed to form a committee. I think that Steve Alderton1 was assigned as the head of my committee. I doubt that I chose him. I did choose George Ziegelmueller, the Director of Forensics and also my boss, and Ray Ross, the author of the Speech 100 textbook. Other graduate students assured me that Ross was a soft touch.

I was not worried about the orals. I reviewed a few notes for maybe an hour just before the test began. A psych professor had told us that the average performance on oral exams is horrendous because most students get flustered. The best performance he had seen was by a mediocre student who also hosted a program on the university’s radio station. I figured that my 14+ years of debate experience was more valuable than that. I knew that the trick was to admit it quickly when you didn’t know something. Don’t try to invent an answer. That is, maximize the time spent on what you know by minimizing the time spent on what you don’t know.

There was one difficult question that I knew that I had to answer. Steve asked me whether validity or reliability was more important in a statistical study. I mulled over the question for a few seconds and then chose validity. I hedged my bet by saying that reliability was important, but if your study lacked validity, you did not have anything. I am pretty sure that I gave the right answer.

Anyway, the committee only kept me waiting for about five minutes before they told me that I passed.

The topic of my dissertation was communication in groups. I was most interested in the power of arguments. Before I describe what I proposed to do, I need to talk about a group-communication study on which I worked with Steve earlier in the year.

The data for Steve’s study was collected before I became involved. Forty or fifty people were presented with two different problems that were each described in two or three paragraphs. They were asked to choose between two alternatives in both cases. Their responses were recorded.

Then they discussed both problems as a group. My recollection is that there were fewer than ten groups. Each group turned in a recommendation for each problem. The discussions were recorded on tape. Someone transcribed these onto paper.

Steve and I then categorized some of the utterances in the discussions as arguments. The idea was to use statistical tools on the arguments to determine how powerful they were in producing the results.

For some reason Steve was only interested in one of the two problems. We spent a long time reading the transcripts and marking them up. He had somehow established a minimum level of agreement about what constituted an argument, and he claimed that our two evaluations had met this standard.

The final step was to find the correlation between the arguments and the conclusion. The statistical tools required that the items being counted are independent of one another. Well, most people in the social sciences would consider the groups independent of one another. If not, there would be almost no studies of groups. The individuals could also be considered independent, at least when they were filling out their original forms heard from other participants.

Steve, however, wanted to use a method called “conversational analysis” that someone at his Alma Mater, Indiana University, had advocated. In this method the arguments themselves were used to determine the sample size (always designated by the letter n). If you counted the groups, you would probably need at least one hundred of them to have any chance of getting a statistically significant result. Even if you counted individuals instead of groups, the sample size of this experiment was not very large.

However, if you set n based on the count of the arguments, and dozens of arguments could be identified in each discussion, it would be much easier. To me it seemed clear that the people in the groups were not independent of one another. It is even clearer that the arguments should not be considered independent of one another.

Steve had offered to add my name to the paper in which he summarized the findings. When I told him that I did not want him to do this, he asked me why. I told him that I thought that he was calculating his sample size wrong, and this decision made it much easier to get positive results. He responded that quite a few studies that used conversational analysis had already been published.

Believe me; I thought of a lot of sarcastic ways to explain my reluctance to be involved. I did not let any of them past my teeth, but my face may have betrayed how worthless I thought that this approach was. To say Steve was insulted would be a gross understatement.

What did interest me was the problem that he discarded. I don’t remember all of the details, but it involved a student who was challenging his final grade in a class. The grade was based on four tests. The letter grades for the tests, one of which was an F, were provided, as was the final grade assigned by the teacher. In the text it said that the teacher had not erred in his calculations. I think that the four test grades were B, B, C, and F, and the final grade assigned was a D.

In several groups, one enterprising member calculated the final grade the way that one would calculate a GPA: (4 for A, 3 for B, 2 for C, 1 for D, and 0 for F). By this method, the student had four grades with a total of eight points. The group member argued that the student should have received a C because 8 (3+3+2+0) divided by 4 is 2. In every group in which the argument was made, the group’s decision went in favor of the student. When it was not, the decision went the other way.

It was a perfect argument!

Well, like Pope Urban II’s famous speech that launched the first crusade, it was effective, but I would hardly deem it “perfect”. In the first place, the text of the problem explicitly stated that the instructor had not made this kind of a mistake. Furthermore, the 4-3-2-1 method is never used in grading individual tests because the range for an F is too great. What if the F on one test was, for whatever reason, a 0? If the B’s are 85’s and the C is a 75, the average grade is 61.25, a low D.

I thought that it might be interesting to explore why people in the groups capitulated to what seemed to me a poor argument. However, it was Steve’s data, and I did not have the gall to ask him for it to write a competing paper. As it was, he was very irritated with me already.

For the dissertation committee I also needed to recruit someone from outside the department. I planned to ask the professor who taught the psych class that I had aced and who explained about the orals. However, when I finally got around to asking him, I learned that he was on sabbatical. I really had no choice but to ask the psych department to provide a substitute. I sent the assigned professor a copy of my prospectus, but I had never actually talked to him!

Dorwin Cartwright died in 2008.
Dorwin Cartwright died in 2008.

For my study I wanted to use the “shift to risk” studies to which I had been introduced by Prof. Cartwright in the psych department at U-M. At that time at least forty papers had been published that used exactly the same set of twelve problems2. The original study had concluded that groups made riskier decisions than individuals. Some later studies found that this shift only occurred on nine of the twelve problems. One problem showed negligible change, and in the other two the group decisions were actually more conservative.

In these studies the answers were always given in terms of a probability of success at which the riskier choice would be desirable. That is, people were asked to assign a number between  one in ten and and ten in ten that represented the lowest chance for success for which they would recommend the riskier alternative. My hypothesis was (1) that each of the twelve problems had a natural set of arguments; (2) not all people are accustomed to making risk-reward decisions based on Bayesian probabilities; (3) these people can be swayed by arguments that they had not considered.

Steve asked the committee to determine whether this study was (1) important enough for a dissertation, and (2) really about speech communication. The psych professor immediately spoke up. He said that he could not address the second issue. However, he said that mine was a very clever approach to an important topic. Despite the fact that there had been a large number of studies to analyze these shifts, no one had ever proposed this mechanism. I was dumbfounded by this unrequested assistance, and all the committee members were very impressed.

Steve insisted that I add conversational analysis to my methodology in order to bring it under the rubric of speech communication. I agreed to do so, but as I was telling the committee this, I said to myself that I would never spend a minute on this study. It now seemed to me like a potential nightmare that might drag on for years.

I also realized that I really did not want to be a professor of speech communication. I loved debate, and, at least at that time, the only way to coach debate was to be on the speech faculty of a school with a debate program. I probably would need to fight for funding for the program, a task that I would not enjoy. Furthermore, because of my background in math and statistics, I felt certain that I would be asked to sit on every committee that evaluated a statistical study. I had heard about and even participated in a few of these, and I had yet to encounter one with which I would want to be associated. Here are a few examples.

  1. My first postgraduate class at U-M had been an introduction to graduate studies. In it one of the students asserted that he wanted to go to an Arab country to study their television shows to determine how much they widespread and influential American shows were. He wanted someone to finance him to go to Arab countries, watch television for a few months, and take notes. For a PhD!No, he did not speak Arabic. When I asked if they had something like a TV Guide that he could analyze, he said that that would not be sufficient. He said that he needed to see how many camels there were and stuff like that. I am not joking.
  2. At Wayne State I participated in a study in which the experimenter obviously lied about what was happening in other aspects of the experiment. The fact that I figured this out should invalidate his approach. It is absolutely not allowed. If I were on his committee, I would have made him start over with a new design.
  3. I also read Juddi Trent’s dissertation. She found that the speeches in Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign differed significantly in style and content from the speeches in 1968. It was a well-known fact (and one that she acknowledged in the first paragraph of her dissertation) that Nixon wrote the first set, and he employed a team of speech-writers for the second set. Her null hypothesis was that the techniques were the same. She then used statistics to prove that the two sets were not likely to be identical, something she knew for a fact before she started.

Faculty members have three main responsibilities: teaching, publishing, and serving on committees. I had little interest in the subjects I would need to teach and publish, and I would be considered an ogre by all of the graduate students. I decided to do something else with my life.

What I decided to do was to try to help Sue’s fledgling computer software company become more viable. Since Michigan was in the throes of one of its increasingly frequent “auto depressions”, we decided to move back to Connecticut.

1. While writing this I discovered that only a few years later Steve Alderton changed careers entirely. He got a law degree and then became (for almost three decades) an official of the federal government, a world traveler, and an artist! His obituary is here.

2. This is called the “Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire” (CDQ) published by Kogan and Wallach in 1964. Here is an example: “Mr B, who has developed a severe heart ailment, has the choice of changing many of his strongest life habits or undergoing a delicate medical operation which may succeed or prove fatal.” Participants are asked to read the statement and then imagine they are advising the main character. They are then asked to indicate the probability of success (from 1 in 10 to 10 in 10) sufficient for them to choose the risky alternative.