{"id":678,"date":"2008-08-01T08:17:28","date_gmt":"2008-08-01T14:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/2008\/08\/01\/dissertation-follow-up\/"},"modified":"2008-08-01T08:17:28","modified_gmt":"2008-08-01T14:17:28","slug":"dissertation-follow-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/01\/dissertation-follow-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Dissertation follow-up"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think it would be appropriate for me to comment on my previous post about the poorly written dissertation<\/a>.  I gave the impression to some that I did not esteem a particular school, and I want to state that that is not the case.  My point would have been the same if I did not name the school, and in hindsight, I should not have included its name.  The reason I did is that I admire the school, and was thus surprised by this paper.  But by not making my admiration clear, my post communicated the opposite. <\/p>\n

Southern is one of the leading evangelical seminaries in the U.S. today.  I think all would agree on that.  No one would have been surprised if the dissertation had been written at the Seminary of the Wacko Theological Nuts.  I have several friends who are former and current PhD students at Southern, and I have the highest respect for each of them.  One of them wrote a dissertation that I cannot understand, but that is owing to his brilliance and my ignorance.  Furthermore, I think it is fair to say that he became this knowledgeable because of his PhD education at Southern<\/em>.  (He was smart when I knew him in college, but he’s a different machine now.)  On the other hand, I have seen poor papers in other seminaries.  I recall that in college I typed a paper (that was a job in those days) for a graduating senior, and I thought that they really should not allow a guy who writes this poorly to graduate.  So this issue is one that crosses schools, degree programs, and geography.  And thus it would have been better for me to omit the name of the institution.<\/p>\n

It might be appropriate to note here too what may not always be recognized by my readers.  I consider this blog to be a personal and private blog, written for my friends and former students.  I do not have any interest in others reading this blog, though if they find it and do so, I can’t stop them.  I have a public blog and several websites, but there are no links to this blog from any of them.  The search engines do not index this blog (because of settings I have made).  The intention is to be invisible to the world.  Others find me, and in hindsight, I should have chosen a more obscure domain name (like s8r5e9w2vw9u234nw9dk.com), but that doesn’t change my purpose here.  I realize that anything on the web can be found, and so there are things I don’t include here (including personal details about our family; that’s why we have a family update email).  But things I discuss here are intended to be “in house,” and among friends.  Sometimes someone I don’t know will comment, and it may sound like it doesn’t belong.  That I attribute to the fact that they don’t know me and assume I’m speaking to a different audience than I am.  All of this is perhaps helpful to communicate, and it would tie back to the Southern issue in this way: my post was not intended as a public flogging of the school but rather a comment to friends about a particular aspect of today’s educational system.  A seminary faculty doesn’t need me to tell them how to grade papers, and completed dissertations are publicly available on the internet.  I intended it as an entertaining private comment on a public matter.<\/p>\n

I thought about simply editing the previous post<\/a> to delete the school’s name, but since many have already read it, and the comments would be difficult (or impossible) to appropriately edit, I chose to address it here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think it would be appropriate for me to comment on my previous post about the poorly written dissertation.  I gave the impression to some that I did not esteem a particular school, and I want to state that that is not the case.  My point would have been the same if I did not\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-things-i-dont-like"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}