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The story
A graduate student at Nara Women’s University has sued the university and the national university corporation that runs it, seeking the award of her doctoral degree and about 17 million yen in damages, after the university notified her the day before her PhD program was set to conclude that it would not grant her the degree — despite the fact that her dissertation had already passed committee review and she had published a co-authored paper with her supervisors in an international academic journal. The university has no rule requiring it to disclose reasons for withholding a degree; only after the student filed an objection did it explain that “a separate meeting held after the dissertation review did not reach the required number of votes in favor.” On 5ch, users debated where responsibility lies with the supervising professors, and discussed how the realities of earning a doctorate differ between the sciences and the humanities.
It was revealed on the 22nd that a graduate student at Nara Women’s University has filed suit in Nara District Court against the university and the national university corporation that operates it, arguing it was unlawful to withhold her doctoral degree even though she had met the requirements — passing her dissertation review and having her work published in an academic journal. She is seeking the degree itself plus roughly 17 million yen in damages. The suit was filed on the 18th.
According to the complaint and members of the review committee, the student submitted her dissertation in January. The review committee found it passing in February, and the findings were also published in an international academic journal as a paper co-authored with her supervisors. However, on March 23 — the day before her doctoral program was due to conclude — the university notified her that it would not award the degree.
According to the university, there is no rule requiring it to disclose reasons for withholding a degree. When the student filed an objection, the university explained that at a separate meeting held after the dissertation review, the number of votes in favor among attendees fell short of what was required.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
>and that the dissertation's content needed to be revisited
So basically the supervisors weren't doing their job, huh
There are students out there who just won't accept guidance
I'm just a high school grad so I don't really get how dissertations work, but I bet dozens or hundreds of these get submitted and reviewed all at once at term's end
If the supervisor just rubber-stamped it…
Maybe someone pointed out the published paper was low quality and it got rejected
It's probably more like a dozen or so per graduate school
About 5 faculty members scrutinize the content, then there's an oral exam that's basically like an interrogation
If it doesn't pass, that's a disgrace for the supervisor
There aren't that many doctoral dissertations.
Maybe 2 or 3 per supervising professor.
Around 10 a year per department.
Since it's that few,
professors do review them seriously.
By contrast, an undergrad thesis passes as long as the fabrication or copy-pasting isn't blatant.
Bachelor's degrees get mass-produced — 100+ a year per department, it's basically an assembly line.
And job hunting doesn't value it beyond just having a bachelor's anyway.
Only about 1-2 grad students recognized as top performers even get to submit a doctoral dissertation
Since reviewing a huge batch would be too much work, Japan's doctoral system is effectively a pre-screening system
Depends — some professors expect that, some don't, so it's hard to say
One thing's for sure: go against your seminar's policy and you'll never get your PhD
When picking a seminar, you should weigh the professor's personality, not just the research topic
– The February review committee ruled it passing
– Published results in an international journal as co-author with her supervisors
I never went to grad school myself, so I only know what I picked up from grad students I knew around the lab
but not getting a PhD after doing all that…
I've genuinely never heard of that happening.
Maybe it's something that occasionally happens depending on the university?
Guess it's rare enough that she's suing over it.
You can't get a PhD without your seminar professor's recommendation
If you don't clash with your seminar professor, this kind of thing doesn't happen
The pattern is: the professor approves it and you get to submit, otherwise you're not allowed to submit and just leave after completing your coursework credits (no degree)
That's why quite a few humanities professors don't actually hold a PhD
Komuro Naoki only got his law doctorate from Tokyo University because Maruyama Masao vouched for his brilliance
Recommendation?
She went through the formal review process,
so surely her supervisor already got it through the departmental meeting and the faculty meeting too, right?
Don't talk nonsense
If it's a course-based doctorate, you can submit it just fine
Depends on the field
In my field, the common pattern is: stay the full 9 years of the doctoral program, leave with 'completion of required guidance' status, then submit the dissertation within 3 years after that
Maybe that's true for the sciences, but humanities has a selection process too, you know? A humanities senior I was close with during my master's, further along in the doctoral track, was thrilled when he got informal word that he'd been cleared to submit
It's different between humanities and sciences.
In the sciences, each lab produces one or two PhDs.
I don't know about humanities, but given how few humanities PhDs there are, it feels like a tougher road.
Wait, so it's decided in advance to keep the numbers low, regardless of content?
If you look through the national directory of university faculty at a university library, plenty of humanities professors — even at good universities — never went past a master's
A lot of them submit their dissertation later in life once they're established, and get approved that way
There's even a kind of 'laundering' where you submit your dissertation to the very university you now teach at and become a doctor that way lol
In the sciences, there are even master's holders who go around calling themselves 'Doctor'
These days if a professor tried that, it'd give the student leverage over him
If it got out, he wouldn't just lose his job — he'd get frozen out of academia entirely
These days that gets you fired for cause immediately
National universities are cash-strapped, so disciplinary-firing a professor
conveniently doubles as a tidy way to cut personnel costs
Keio, Keio, and also Keio
Huh?
Wait, what?
WHAAAAAAAAAAAT?
Takenaka Heizo got his doctorate off just one paper, IIRC
Wait, a doctorate?
Off just one paper?
Wild, private schools ('wataku,' slang for private universities) really do be like that
If that was decided by group deliberation rather than one person's arbitrary call, then there's nothing wrong with it, is there
That's a field notorious for churning out sloppy dissertations
They submitted the data analysis by the co-authored paper's deadline and passed a batch of grad students, but later rejected one of them because the analysis turned out to be off
So the checking system is actually working, isn't it
These days there's a rapidly growing number of people in Japan who want to prey on even educational institutions like this to tear society down
It's bizarre that her paper passed peer review at an international academic journal, yet she can't graduate
The reason fields like 'Integrated Human/Cultural Studies' or 'Comparative Culture' have so many sloppy dissertations
is that a lot of the content can't be caught by peer review alone
so in the end, self-policing from within is the only option, and that's just the institution doing its job
I don't know if the paper got retracted, but normally you'd just issue a correction
No, it's a specialist journal — researchers from around the world routinely send questions about odd-looking data, real experts in the field, that is
For important papers, it's pretty normal to respond to those questions in a letter in the next issue
And if the data really was fabricated, then yeah, it should be retracted
If it's humanities, this reminds me of the Sokal affair
Background and Key Points of This Story
At Japanese graduate schools, it’s common for the substantive review of a dissertation (by a review committee) to be a separate step from the final vote by a body such as the faculty council that formally decides whether to award the degree — meaning there’s institutional room for a dissertation to pass content review and still be voted down at a later stage. The university’s explanation in this case, that “votes in favor fell short of the required number,” appears to reflect this structure. At the same time, the fact that the university has no rule requiring it to disclose reasons for withholding a degree, and only gave an explanation after the student objected, is a point that raises questions about procedural transparency. Thread commenters also noted that the realities of earning a doctorate — how readily a course-based PhD is granted, and how much a supervisor’s personal relationship with the student matters — differ significantly between the sciences and the humanities; without knowing this difference, it’s hard to make sense of the “she passed, so why?” puzzle. It should be noted that the reporting doesn’t specify which field this case falls under, and the content of the internal vote can’t be verified from outside.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread ‘Seeking Her PhD, Sues Nara Women’s University Despite ‘Passing’ Dissertation Review.’
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