Last week, I finally defended my dissertation at the University of Chicago.
This was a long time coming. A really long time. When I first enrolled at the U of C back in 2002, Barack Obama was my state senator. In the time it took me to earn my Ph.D., he went from the Illinois legislature, to the United States Senate, and finally to the White House. So sensitive was I to this unfortunate juxtaposition that I made sure my dissertation defense was scheduled before January 20. That way, I could at least say I finished my degree before he was my former president.
What took me so long to finish? I can’t really blame the progressivism of the academy or the drivel that higher ed produces every year. For starters, the University of Chicago does not really indulge in the trivial. If anything, the school takes itself a little too seriously: While browsing through the university bookstore last week, I discovered a shirt advertising all the Nobel laureates who had been students or faculty at the university (yes, it included Obama for his Peace Prize . . . no, I didn’t buy it). The political science department in particular is a place where people study serious subjects like Aristotle, Congress, or NATO. And while it is liberal, that is actually not a bad thing for a conservative. There is nothing better than a civil disagreement with a serious person.
No, the peculiarities of the modern academy cannot explain away the delay. The truth is that it was nobody’s fault but mine that the degree took me so long to finish.
I always found it very enjoyable being a student. The good professors would assign books that I hadn’t read before, structure the subject matter in a way that made me reexamine my prior beliefs, and facilitate meaningful classroom discussions. And what did I have to do in return? Usually write a couple papers and take a test or two—all of which demonstrated that I had learned what they taught me. Rarely did I have to come up with my own ideas. And when I did, it’d probably be for the very end of a 25-page paper. No big deal.
But a dissertation is a different animal altogether. I had to come up with an original argument, rooted in the existing scholarly research but challenging it in some meaningful way, elaborate it over the course of about 250 pages, then defend it to three specialists in the field.
In fact, it didn’t matter how good I was in learning other people’s ideas. To write a dissertation, I had to have an idea of my own. I tried to think of one all through my mid-20s, but I could never come up with one that fit the bill. So I pretty much gave up, though I remained enrolled in my program. Over the last 10 years, I’ve written plenty of articles, as well as two books. I believe I’ve grown as a writer, so it always bugged me that I never came up with an idea that would work for a dissertation. Then I hit upon one, about two years ago.
When I was working on my last book, I was really bothered by how badly James Madison is treated these days. We’re in the midst of an Alexander Hamilton boomlet—which is fine by me—but pro-Hamilton writers still do not understand what Madison was all about in the early days under the Constitution. I had an idea about what was motivating Madison, and that became the dissertation.
Ironically, once I came up with the idea, it only took me about 16 months to write the whole thing. Turns out, that was the missing piece of the puzzle. One good idea.
On the flight home from Chicago, I was reading a biography of the Kinks. The first quarter of the book is about their travails as working-class kids in postwar London. It’s an engaging read, but there are a million stories identical to that of Ray and Dave Davies. Why was I reading about them? It’s because Ray had an idea for the five-chord riff that leads off “You Really Got Me,” and Dave had an idea to play it loud.
“Huh. I guess I’m just like Ray Davies,” I thought to myself as the plane reached its cruising altitude. But I quickly shrugged off that grandiose thought with a quiet chuckle: “I’m comparing myself to the Kinks? Ugh. I’m already letting this degree get to my head!”
