Defending a Thesis

Defending a thesis before a committee of professors can seem like torture for a nerve-racked graduate student facing the prospect of having years of hard labor torn to shreds.

But for the faculty members who sit in judgment, there has been little trepidation--until now.

“I don’t think anybody is going to walk in frightened” to a dissertation review, said Phillip Gay, a sociology professor at San Diego State University, where a mechanical engineering student apparently upset about a poor thesis evaluation has been arrested on suspicion of shooting three professors to death Thursday.

“But I think [professors] are going to be just a little more selective about whose committees they agree to serve on,” he said. “I know that’s in my mind.”

The oral thesis defense--a rite of passage used by colleges and universities for decades to determine a graduate student’s mastery of knowledge--is usually a collegial event in which the faculty reviewers have as much stake in a positive outcome as the student on the hot seat.

“It’s not inherently a hostile situation at all,” said Gay, who has evaluated scores of graduate student theses.

Still, the potential for violence from a disgruntled student has long been a subject of gallows humor in the ivory tower. “I’ll be at dinner at the dean’s house and someone will say, ‘I refused to sign off on Sergei’s dissertation today. Hope he doesn’t kill me,’ ” said a UCLA professor who has sat on five doctoral dissertation review committees.

“There’s an unspoken tension between graduate students and professors on their dissertation committees, especially if there’s a rewrite rejection that can’t be satisfied and it drags on for years,” he said. “Some real tension can emerge there. This is very much a power relationship.”

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And, in fact, the relationships have boiled over into violence on occasion. At the University of Iowa five years ago, a physics graduate student shot three members of the physics and astronomy departments, as well as an administrator and a fellow student, in a dispute over an academic honor denied him.

At Stanford University, a graduate student who had been working 19 years to earn his PhD bludgeoned a mathematics professor to death with a hammer in 1978.

Richard H. Dekmejian, a political science professor at USC and former head of graduate studies at the State University of New York, said he tries to screen graduate applicants for their psychological as well as academic fitness.

“It requires a degree of psychological stability and the ability to withstand the pain . . . [of] graduate work,” he said. “We try to take into account the student’s psychic status.”

Dekmejian said he and his colleagues encourage graduate students to obtain counseling to handle the stress. And, unlike some universities, USC tries to make students stick to firm deadlines for completing their graduate research, so they don’t join the legion of what are known in higher education as “ABMs” and “ABDs”-- which stand for “all but master’s” and “all but doctorates.”

“There are so many of them running around this country, each of whom is filled with tremendous resentment and anger,” the USC professor said.

Students working on graduate degrees must complete a thesis or dissertation on a subject they choose. Those research papers can take months or years to write and are then evaluated by a panel of professors, including some chosen by the student.

The evaluation includes a presentation by the student--which can last anywhere from half an hour to half a day--followed by questions from the panelists.

One panelist is the student’s main advisor and can generally be counted on to be a strong ally during the oral defense session. The other members include professors from the same department as well as faculty from other areas who have an interest in the research being presented.

The process is “sometimes real friendly” and “normally very collegial,” said San Diego State’s Gay. “Most faculty don’t go into it saying, ‘We’re going to get this guy.’ When you walk into a thesis defense, you have a stake in the student and generally you’ve got pretty positive feelings about the student.”

The majority of theses are approved because of the constant consultation and revision that go on before the paper is presented, professors say. The final paper generally is not presented for review unless the faculty advisor has determined that it is sound and well supported.

The California State University system does not keep figures on how many master’s theses are rejected each year. But other statistics indicate that the failure experienced by Frederick Davidson, 36, the engineering student accused in the San Diego State killings, was not the norm.

According to the most recent figures available, Cal State granted 751 master’s degrees in engineering during the 1994-95 school year--59 of them at San Diego State.

San Diego State officials said Davidson had already met once with his thesis panel, which told him it had serious questions about his paper, “Characteristics of Torsional Shape Memory Alloy Actuators.”

He allegedly shot the committee members at the start of what was to be a rebuttal session, where Davidson would have a chance to defend his work. If he had been unable to satisfy his critics, his master’s degree would have been denied.

Several professors said they were puzzled over why Davidson and the committee had reached this point, because it is so unusual for a thesis with serious deficiencies to be presented.

“Normally, a professor wouldn’t allow his student to proceed unless his thesis is satisfactory and he is going to graduate,” said Balbir Narang, a professor of aerospace and engineering mechanics at San Diego State. “I don’t know why his thesis went to a stage where it had to be rejected.”

University officials declined to offer an explanation, citing federal rules protecting students’ privacy, but said they do plan to review the thesis defense process in the wake of Thursday’s deadly attack.

Davidson had struggled for years to finish his graduate work and establish a career in aerospace. He earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering five years ago, just as severe cutbacks were hitting Southern California’s defense industry, keeping him locked out of high-paying jobs in his chosen field.

His situation reflects trends that experts say can exacerbate the risk that routine academic judgments will lead to conflict.

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More students today grapple with pressures unknown to the typical college student a generation ago. They may be older than the traditional fresh-out-of-high-school student and holding down jobs to pay for their education or support a family. Or they may be returning for a new degree after being laid off from a downsized industry.

“We’re under big stress all the time,” said Son Dinh, 34, an engineering major at San Diego State who works 35 hours a week as a receiving clerk for a company in El Cajon. “A lot of assignments are due all the time, and you have less and less time in which to do them these days because most students have to work full-time jobs just to be able to go here.”

As society grows more complex, increasing the need for workers with more sophisticated skills and knowledge, the stakes attached to a college education and advanced degrees also rise, said San Diego State sociology professor Gordon Clanton.

“There are higher stakes in that we are more than ever a credential society,” Clanton said. “People think, ‘If I don’t get my credential, I’ll be doomed.’ ”

That is reflected in a nationwide increase over the last decade in the number of master’s degrees awarded. Between 1985 and 1995, that number increased 33%, from 289,000 to 383,000.

And college students today seem less likely to accept what they consider arbitrary academic pronouncements, and more apt to object to poor grades, instructors say. Many professors lay part of the blame on the self-esteem movement of the past two decades, contending that it has created a generation of youths who don’t want to accept responsibility for their own failures.

The UCLA professor, who asked that his name not be used, said tension between students and professors has been increasing from undergraduates on up to PhD candidates. Students come into classes with expectations of getting an A, while professors, reacting to criticisms of grade inflation, are tightening grading standards.

San Diego State’s Gay said he was the target of death threats two years ago from a 45-year-old undergraduate student to whom he had given a failing grade. The student later shot a woman in a movie theater during a screening of “Schindler’s List.” A few semesters ago, Clanton, Gay’s colleague, was threatened by a student who showed up in his office with her boyfriend, apparently brought along to intimidate him into changing her grade.

“The growing tendency among students to blame academic failures on someone other than themselves encourages rather than discourages a retaliative response to a moment of academic failure,” he said. “The idea that you get a low grade for not knowing stuff is no longer a fashionable idea.”

Times staff writers Michael Granberry, Amy Wallace, Tony Perry and Ralph Frammolino and researcher Steven Tice contributed to this story.