As already noted, a committee of three to five professors is typically charged with supervising the preparation of a doctoral dissertation. In some institutions, master's theses are also prepared under the guidance of a committee of two or three faculty members. The chairperson of a committee is usually the candidate's chief advisor.

Committee members perform one or more of three functions: (a) give the candidate advice at successive stages of the research and writing process, (b) periodically monitor the progress of the project to help ensure that all is going well, and (c) evaluate the final product to determine whether it is of sufficient quality to warrant awarding the candidate a diploma.

If you, as the candidate, have any control over who will serve on your committee, then there are several items of information you can profitably collect as you decide whom you would like to have as committee members. Those items include the potential members' (a) styles of advising, (b) areas of expertise, (c) attitudes toward different types of research problems and methods of investigation, and (d) attitudes toward each other. Because we have already discussed the first three in this quartet of concerns, we turn directly to the fourth, --faculty members' opinions of each other and how those opinions could affect your work.

Two questions to ask about professors' personal relations are: (1) What sorts of disagreements among faculty members can influence their committee membership? (2) What are useful sources of such information?

Faculty Members' Disagreements

Disagreements can be professional, personal, or some combination of both. A professional difference often concerns such theoretical matters as those reflected in the positivist/postmodernist debate or in the relative importance of heredity and of environment as a cause behind people's behavior. Or a professional difference may center on research techniques--the desirability of questionnaires versus interviews or the appropriateness of a survey versus a controlled experiment.

Personal disagreements are antagonisms seated in people's dislike for each other as individuals. The dislike may derive from insults exchanged in the past, from one professor caustically criticizing another in a faculty meeting or public gathering, from competition between professors over departmental funds or office space, from an exchange of ethnic or religious slurs, from ostensibly immoral behavior, and more. Often the professional and personal become entwined, as when one faculty member incurs another's wrath by identifying the colleague's publications as "fluff" or as "founded on a set of false premises that lead inevitably to asinine conclusions."

Whereas some professors set aside their personal antipathies when serving on a committee and do not let their personality conflicts affect their work with the student, others do not. Whether intentionally or not, they end up using the student's project as an opportunity to strike a blow at the antagonist. The vendetta can affect the student's plan at various stages of the project--selecting a research problem, devising methods of data gathering, interpreting the results, and writing the final version of the study. In nearly all doctoral programs, and in some master's plans, the final step in the dissertation or thesis process involves a meeting in which the candidate defends her or his study before the supervising committee, and the committee then decides whether the product is worthy of the degree the student is seeking. In some instances, rival committee members use the occasion to vent their animosity by disagreeing with each other over elements of the candidate's project. The candidate's hope is that their enmity will not affect the faculty members' objective judgment to the extent of damaging the student's chance of receiving unanimous approval of the project.

One bright PhD graduate, after earning his degree, offered this observation about the dissertation experience:

Committee members are people, and like all people, have quirks, biases, and ways of thinking that run from the ridiculous to the sublime on occasion. Furthermore, institutions of higher education are like all institutions, with a climate and culture that must be recognized. Politics abound, and no doctoral student wants to get hung in the middle. Unfortunately, a student in the dissertation stage can become cannon fodder for political in-fighting.

Ergo, the work on your research will move along far more smoothly if the members of your supervising committee hold views of research that are compatible with your project and if they don't maintain personal animosities that could influence how your project will be evaluated.

Sources of Information

As suggested in Table 2-1, the most readily available sources of information about departmental politics are usually those veteran students who have had extended experience in your department, particularly in their roles of teaching assistants and research assistants. They are often well aware of the patterns of friendship and enmity among faculty members. At least in the form of rumor, if not in the form of unquestioned fact, such "old timers" can provide useful opinions about personal-social configurations in your department and can suggest which combination of committee members might benefit you and which might prove awkward or even disastrous.

Other useful sources are professors that you know well and whose opinions you trust. Some of them may not be forthcoming, since they don't want to be accused of meddling in such matters. However, others are willing to offer advice, often in such guarded phrases as "Professor X may not be as sympathetic toward ethnography as a research method as is Professor Q" or "Some students have found Ms A easier to work with than Ms B."

YOUR FELLOW GRADUATE STUDENTS

Not only can fellow students offer useful observations about faculty advisors, but they may also help you in other ways at each stage of your research and writing.

At the beginning, when you are choosing a research problem to pursue, your peers may suggest potential topics and may identify advantages and weaknesses of topics you have under consideration.

As you survey the professional literature that relates to your project, your compatriots may help by suggesting sites to search on the Internet, by sharing relevant articles and books, and by showing you the system they use for taking notes and organizing their references.

During the data-collecting stage, fellow students can be asked to critique the methods (survey, ethnography, experiment, historical analysis) and instruments (tests, questionnaires, interviews, observations) that you intend to employ. They may help you gather data by distributing questionnaires, conducting interviews, or administering tests. They may also help you classify the information you collect by suggesting categories in which to place data or by assessing the strengths and shortcomings of the classification scheme you plan to adopt. Your peers may also be able to suggest appropriate methods of statistical or hermeneutic analysis and perhaps participate in carrying out the analysis.

At the stage of interpreting the classified results, fellow students can be asked to critique your explanations in order to identify weaknesses in logic and to suggest alternative glosses that you hadn't recognized.

During the process of writing the final version of the thesis or dissertation, your peers may be willing to assist by critiquing your plan for organizing the document, by suggesting styles of tabular and graphic displays, and by proofreading the ultimate product.

EXPERTS OUTSIDE YOUR DEPARTMENT

Most students apparently recognize that they need not confine their requests for aid to the professors on their supervising committee. They realize that they can consult with other faculty members in their department. But students often seem to overlook opportunities to seek help from experts in other campus departments or in other institutions. It thus may be useful for you to extend your purview of sources of aid beyond your immediate setting. There are several ways this can be done.

If the expert you need is on your campus, you can phone to explain the kind of help you desire, or you can make an appointment to meet with the professor at her or his office.

If the person you wish to consult is in another institution, you can submit your request by phone, by fax, by e-mail, or by regular mail. If you do not know the professor's institutional location or address, you may find this information in your campus library's copy of The National Faculty Directory ( Gale Research Co., Detroit, MI, 1999) or in the membership roster of a professional society to which that person belongs. Names, addresses, and phone numbers of such societies are listed in The Encyclopedia of Associations ( 1999). Typical rosters are those of the American Anthropological Association, American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, American Economic Association, American Historical Association, American Psychological Association, American Sociological Association, American Educational Research Association, and Modern Language Association of America. Membership registers not only list professors' institutional addresses but they are beginning to include e-mail addresses as well.