I'm just saying -- sometimes a great notion

is not a great notion, it's somebody's preferences. 

Somebody's tweet in my timeline asked for items for a powerpoint presentation which seems to be about what people wish they had known before they did their dissertations. I had two suggestions. One is how to avoid fallacies. I've talked about that on my Fact-Checking blog. A lot.

The other was how you tell your advisor to take a flying leap when they want you to use the latest jargon instead of plain English.

I got a like on that one.

So the point being that while STEM dissertations have to rely on physical evidence and mathematical calculations, non-STEM (are you listening, you liberal arts people?) go by fads, fancies, and the favorite whims of the department heads and advisors.

It's like that Elliott Gould movie where he's defending his dissertation, and one of the evaluators jumps down his throat about not addressing that particular person's hobby horse, warped as it might be and not available in the literature Gould had access to. (His dissertation was saved by a campus riot interrupting the defense.)

That's aside from the classics field where authoritarianism reigns. I've pounded on that on my Classical Greek page and it's still true in the 21st century. A couple of guys at Cambridge who were teaching Classical Greek looked at the stack of handouts they used in their classes and decided they had a book in there somewhere. Problem is, their point of departure was Smyth's century-old 800 page work which, as I know from studying it, is incomplete, inaccurate, and outdated. Oh, sure, the 21st century book throws in aspect as a sop, but the authors fail to see that they have failed the test of Occam's Razor. If they know what it is. Of course, Ockham studied at Oxford, not Cambridge, so there's that. 

So people who are about to defend their dissertations know that their advisors are pushing them to create ephemera, works doomed to extinction once the fad passes, not build a body of solid research to influence future studies. And that is a very sad thing to have to say about people who have put in six or ten years on a paper chase.

I'm just saying....