My Life with a Robot…and a Doctoral Student with Dr. William Barry
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:22:12]
And with what you’re saying there, I think what students need to realize is that you need to be. Aware of your own goals and objectives, you need to be strategic about how you’re approaching the dissertation project and you need to make sure that your dissertation is helping you accomplish those goals and objectives. Obviously, if you’re going to be building off of this research and this is what you’re allowing your career to blossom into, then you want to take your time with it. You want to make sure that you’re you’re doing all of those things that you just said. If, however, what your your goal is to graduate and your dissertation ultimately won’t matter past, then, which a lot of professionals that’s the case. They need that credential showing that you can do the research, showing that you can get it done, and then getting that dissertation published so that you can move on is the goal. And so it’s important to make sure that as you’re making these decisions, you’re always doing with the end in mind. My kids went to elementary school that used Dr. Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as their their framework for their pedagogy, which I love. And we talk about that with our students a lot, particularly that habit number to begin with. The end in mind, where do you want to go? What you want to get out of this? Now, let’s make sure we’re mapping your journey so that it’s consistent and authentic with your goals where you want to go to also.
Dr. William Barry [00:23:33]
That’s where we that’s where we’re good to team. You’re helping them get to the goal. Right. And I, I again, I mean, that’s the philosophy side of me. I’m looking at it as well. Is that your responsibility, though, from a community perspective, is that you’re contributing to the world’s knowledge? And so when I see thesis is that I do, yes. The person, not their doctor, document their goal of their thesis is proving something that is not true. Yeah, it’s a leadership concept. And you go, well, that’s not just does it ring true? And there was a guy to thesis I forgot, which was about rumors about some group of people somewhere. And then about five years later, he said, oh, by the way, none of that works, but I got my thesis. It’s good. So there is that part of it. You have there is a responsibility for people that are going into the thesis to realize even if you’re just getting it to get it because you want to do the journey or you have a credential for work, unlike, for instance, your MBA and your Masters, where you’re going to get that credential when you’re in the level of a doctorate, you are contributing to the world knowledge about something. And that is a large responsibility that I don’t always hear people talking about. I do hear about their goals, what they’re going to get done, but I don’t get ask sometimes. So how is that going to contribute to nursing or how is that going to contribute to leadership or student poverty? I wasn’t going to contribute to leadership and I’m very surprised sometimes when it’s like, well, you know, I just go from my job. I did this and I understand that. But I think it’s equally important that we do take a breath and realize how what is about two to three percent of the world population has a doctorate degree,.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:25:10]
Closer to one.
Dr. William Barry [00:25:10]
What’s that?
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:25:12]
It’s closer to one in the US is the one closer to one. And if you look at the census numbers, it bounces around a little bit, but it’s closer to one. I think it’s been below to for at least the last couple of years since I’ve last looked at it for about ten years back from that, I think it was stay below two.
Dr. William Barry [00:25:28]
So, Russell, if we’re not going to show everyone this one percent and we’re responsible, we have to be we have to be better than that. We I think we have to be better than just saying, yeah, I got my doctorate and then I’m going to do this system that there has to be some sort of sense of responsibility that I do or I am responsible for either promoting progress in the world or I’m not. I mean, it’s not bad to go backwards if you’re questioning something, but things can be regressive. I mean, when you talk about education, when I see these systems that are continually promoting, for instance, banking education, where kids are just sitting there, but they go, but look, the goal setting is really working. Yeah. You’ve mixed goals with a really bad pedagogy and then you’re promoting that or, you know, human basic needs. Talking about Maslow’s Needs. Right. Maslow never meant it to be the framework for human needs for everyone. It was based on nineteen people. It was all white people, two women. And when you look at the when you look at it as a valid and reliable framework, it’s not. But it gets repeated thesis after thesis because it becomes sort of, hey, it’s just accepted. Instead of saying, hey, there’s like a guy named Glauser, Love, Power, Fun, Freedom and Survival, there’s a lot more research. So that’s an example of like when I go in front of crowds of people, educators, I’ll say your basic needs. How would you base it on literally ninety nine percent Maslow. I’m assuming that’s what you’re going. How has the stayed in education so long in theses? Why? Because I got a thesis in Maslow; I’m an advisor and I just pass it down and someone has to break the cycle and that’s an example that I bring up that I would I would argue that anyone who just says that Maslowian concept of needs. And it’s hierarchical is definitely under question. I mean, just common sense people that are saints and we sacrifice all kinds of things for a while, right. We don’t eat keep up our survival. So right there, we know the hierarchy doesn’t work. You you’re doing your thesis itself is evidence that the hierarchy doesn’t work because you don’t eat. You say on paying sixty thousand dollars, I’m living in the shack. Why am I doing a doctorate? So that that’s an example of a responsibility that we keep promoting these myths. Like when I believe that Maslow’s, it’s helpful, but it’s still a myth, that we do great damage to the community of knowledge and we hurt we hurt young people that are learning. So that’s just one example. So I’m not sort of philosophical, Russell, and prepare to finish, but I think it’s important that we take that responsibility.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:28:04]
It is important that and you mentioned earlier on that maybe there’s some guy who said, oh, I did this, this this from my thesis. And then five years later, he’s saying none of that worked out. I think that’s perfectly fine, except you need to be able to say that in the dissertation, you should know in the dissertation. Here’s what we did. And it didn’t look like it worked out or it looks like it’s promising. We don’t know; let’s investigate more. Those are ways of moving the the kind of the boundaries of knowledge forward. But putting something out there that you claim is correct when you don’t know. Again, very important to know what you know and what you don’t know. But putting something out there that that you claim is correct when you don’t know, that’s dangerous and. But I tell my students all the time, you know, the result is the result, win, lose or draw, you write it up and you get your thesis because that’s that’s the goal in this endeavor. That’s the goal is to is to do the research and get an answer. Now, if you’re going into academia, they’ve got another set of criteria that they use, because if you don’t find something interesting, no one is going to want to hire you. You’re just not sexy. And you’re somebody else who found something is going to be considered more a better candidate to bring in. They’re going to be considered a better candidate for getting grant money and all of those sorts of things. So they do play by a slightly different set of rules there. But still, ultimately, if you were a hotshot academic and what you worked on for your thesis didn’t work out, but you were brilliant in the way that you investigated it. You should be just fine to move forward in your career and you’ll work on something else that maybe won’t work out or maybe will, but you’re still expanding the boundaries of knowledge, both in things that we know and things we know not to be true. Both of those things or knowledge.
Dr. William Barry [00:29:49]
You reframed that really well, Russell. And I think the way you said that at the end of the day, it’s. Probably a better way to say it after your refrain is that you just want to be able to look in the mirror and feel that I did this ethically and that. So I think that’s a better way. So, I mean, as I was waxing a little bit philosophically, I do believe that at the end of the day, just make sure that I was ethical and I will, you know, wrestle my thesis at the end of the day was about failure, that I failed. I was a high school principal. Had studied, done all this stuff and made all these moves. The school had things that happened to improve student learning. But as far as leadership, it ends with me basically saying I have my superintendent was fired unfairly, had a special ed and I resigned. And then at the end of the day, I failed as a leader. And so that’s how my thesis ends, which again, is not the usual ending to the thesis. But look at all these great things. And if I failed, but it was about what do we do? We go from that failure because the failure was that the journey that I was taking to the mountaintop, just simply a couple of trees that I needed to go around them. But I was very honest that the trees had fallen and then I couldn’t do that. And I know that there was a moment there in the thesis writing where you say to yourself, you know, I could just kind of end right here and don’t know. It’ll sound quite brilliant. Or, you know, there’s nothing wrong with saying and being honest that this didn’t work. But look where it brought us. It brought us to a new route. So I found that the committee, which I was very nervous about to say that I had again, failure is just another opportunity. A lot of times that’s what this was. But I like what you just said, it being ethical, being willing to be fair if it didn’t work 60, why it didn’t work because you’re going to save someone else that journey of making the same mistake. So, yeah, I like the way you frame it.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:31:50]
And another thing that in the real world in research that is true is that some truly brilliant, great research comes up with answers. But most good research develops more questions than answers to developing a good question and throwing it out there and letting the dogs hear the meat off the bone is is every bit as valuable as actually finding something out and figuring something out, because this is generally the process. I mean, there we can start talking about sort of philosophy of knowledge and so forth. I have this thought kind of like Plato’s allegory of the cave, that there’s there’s truth out there. But everything that we do in science is an approximation of that truth. And we can get better and better and better at it. But I kind of think that getting to that truth in some sense is like an asymptotic adventure or goal. We’re never going to get there. We’ll get closer and closer and closer and closer so that science is never over. There was a I don’t remember his name. There was a physicist back around the turn of the century from the 19th to the 20th. It said, listen, physics is done. There’s like these I don’t remember what it was, five or six things that we needed to to learn how to do. And once we figure out these five or six things, we can back it up. We’re done. Well, one of the things the answer to that thing was quantum mechanics. So, boom, we have a whole new understanding of the world that we still don’t fully understand. Another one I don’t remember. It might have been the procession of Mercury’s orbit, might have been another one. So that was relativity. Einstein activity was the answer to that one. And it’s just hubris to say, OK, we’ve got it all in here. I think there’s always going to be more than we do know. That’s kind of my thought philosophically about it.
Dr. William Barry [00:33:38]
I agree. And that’s why I ask what is the meaning of quality? And when you look at what is the beauty quality, I’m I’m still working on it. So I what I did was I was really excited about the thesis because I got to formally explore a question that I really love to explore, talk to thousands of people about this concept of quality. And still today, I’m still doing my thesis. Today I’m still talking to people. So what does that mean when you said that that was quality or these elections going on? I hear people saying, oh, well, we did a quality job here coming the ballot. You go, yeah, I’d like to know, what does that mean? Quality. So I found that you know that. One of the most fun things I think about the thesis process was finding that question that just kind of seems to your heart is if you find that I could just see from my own personal experience, it’s a lifetime. I’ve been with the same question now for 15 years, and it’s still with me every day. It’s kind of like writing behind my teaching and it drives me. So I’m constantly looking at what is the meaning of quality when I’m talking to someone else. Am I meeting your quality needs? What do these people think? My sense of quality is what am I portraying myself? So that leads you to all kinds of different exploration. So I love that. I think that finding the question that you personally are deeply interested in will make the thesis process much more enjoyable and I think optimizes your success rather than having this artificial question from the outside that maybe a committee member and they will do that. Right. Say, how what do you think of this question? And if you’re not going to speak up for yourself, you go, OK, because it may further that professors work. And I think that’s one of the problems with thesis is a lot of times she would say, a lot of times about times. In my experience, people are doing thesis is that are helping the committee or people on the committee more than it’s about your work. And you’ve got a good committee. They’re about you. They want you to succeed. They build off it. And that’s why it’s so important to really find the right school, find a committee that you can work with and that you can that you are able to take feedback from again. Right. Russell, if you cannot take the feedback, you’re not going to make it. And taking feedback in the thesis is feedback like you’ve never had before. In an academic level, your masters is not in your master’s prepares you be academically. I don’t think anything prepares you better than being in a long term relationship with your wife or something that prepares you very well for feedback.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:36:13]
The treatment of the way you said, I think is one hundred percent true, given the context of what you want to accomplish, that you have to you have to make sure that you’re making those decisions. When you say find the right university, it’s not a question of is this the right university, right or wrong, black and white. It’s is it the right fit for you? Is it going to help you accomplish your goals? Is going to create what you want. The statement you made a little bit ago about the thesis often helping the committee. I think that in most traditional universities, that’s one hundred percent true, because it goes back to this notion that from the Middle Ages of the master apprentice relationship and that’s what traditional doctoral students do, is they do their master’s work for a period of time. They start literally writing the papers. They they’re contributing to the papers at first without attribution. Then they’re writing the papers without attribution. Essentially, they write the papers with attribution. Then they get to actually claim authorship of papers and then they get to do their dissertation and head out. And it is very much it was born of that at that time, this master apprentice relationship. So you are doing literally doing your your advisors work for a certain period of time as you go through that process. If you’re in a traditional, really traditional academic setting,.
Dr. William Barry [00:37:35]
That’s why it’s why it’s important for people to go. I’ve got to go to Yale or your Chicago go here. It’s much better to find a university that you fit with and that you can feel comfortable is at the end of the day, you know, when I interview people when I was a back a long time ago, I was a high school principal. I can tell you that I don’t remember any Ivy League teachers beating state school teachers to get the job. You know, the people at Harvard, they’d be on the top of the pile. Right. But at the end of the day, you had to perform. And this is no, I’m not ripping on that. What happened was a lot of the people of the Ivies were doing curriculum. They really knew the knowledge. But when it came to pedagogy and teaching, the other candidates were more well-rounded. So I always had it on the top. You know, the classic schools never I saw they always made it through the pile and in the final — and then I just lo and behold, it just happened to be that none of them from my years hiring got the job only because it’s about teaching. So when you get your degree and you go out there, I think it levels the playing field. You know, I’m I’m out there. I was at Oxford not too long to attend college as an emerging technology ethicist. I’m surrounded by Oxford graduates. Right. So you’re not even at a good university. So it’s Oxford and I’m an American. So you’re an American at Oxford and you’re sitting there. You know what? We’ve got the same letters after our name. We went through the same process. We had vivas. We went through that. So you can sit there. You’re going no matter where you went to school. I went to school, along as it’s accredited. We went through the same process. We were in the same one percent club.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:39:13]
Right.
Dr. William Barry [00:39:14]
But there is that there is still and I see some folks that didn’t go to. A Tier one school. The idea that I didn’t get a doctor, don’t get over that. That that is no longer when you’re 18, 19, five, you went to there, you got your doctorate. And if you did a good thesis, that thesis will stand up at any school. And you should you should feel very confident in any room to talk.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:39:38]
And you have to recognize what you’re trying to do, what you want to accomplish, and make sure that you are accomplished in those areas. Because everyone has strengths, everyone has weaknesses. You don’t go out there trying to remediate your weaknesses to get ahead in life. You play to your strengths. And so these folks who are well, quite honestly, if I understood you correctly, you were talking about a bunch of people who went to Tier one research universities who were applying for positions that were primarily about teaching.
