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The ABD Association

Anita G. Gorman

    They met at the College Club, not far from the university’s library, in a corner where the lights were dim. Dark paneling behind their table made the place even darker. Darkness worked for them. They were the ABD Association.
    Cornelius had thought of forming an alliance with other ABDs while he was working on Chapter 1 of his dissertation. That was three years ago. He was now working on Chapter 2. It was so obviously a time to forge an alliance with other ABDs, those who had completed All But Dissertation. All but—yes, they had already completed a great deal. All the course work—and the course work took a while, especially if the graduate student happened to be a teaching assistant at the same time. Then there were the language exams. When his mother was thinking of working on her Ph.D. in English in the 1950s, three languages were required: French, German, and Latin, and no substitutions, please. Nowadays almost any language qualified, not just Spanish but also Japanese or Swahili or Tagalog. And few people these days did three languages; usually a student had to pass an exam in one language without a dictionary or in two languages with a dictionary. His mother, her nose in the air, still referred to French, German, and Latin as the premier scholarly languages. “In my day,” she would opine, “the language exams meant something!” Cornelius just shrugged. He passed the Spanish examination without a dictionary, so that box was checked off. His mother asked him what Spanish had to do with a doctorate in English and a specialization in 18^th-century British literature. Cornelius searched for an answer. Didn’t Samuel Pepys sometimes use Spanish words in his diary—in the risqué parts? Yes, there was the connection. Cornelius’s conscience was eased; Spanish was certainly a legitimate scholarly language.
    The course work having been completed and the languages checked off, the doctoral candidate now prepared for the preliminary or qualifying examinations. At Cornelius’ university there were three such tests, one in the major area of specialization, and two in related but minor areas of interest. The first test took three hours, but the questions were rather general, so he was able to spill out just about everything he knew about 18^th-century British Literature. He even found a way to utilize some of those Spanish words in a paragraph about Samuel Pepys’ diary, while at the same time claiming that Pepys was giving early homage to multiculturalism, since he described his illicit encounters via not only Spanish but also Italian, Latin, and French bons mots.
    Weeks later Cornelius took his second doctoral examination in Literary Theory; he reveled in being able to combine deconstruction, new historicism, and biographical criticism with feminist, marxist, and psychoanalytic theory in order to demonstrate that a writer did not mean what he said or thought he said or wanted to say. Or something.
    His third exam, in Victorian Literature, nicely dovetailed with his other two areas, and when the questions enabled him to discuss Mr. Trollope, Mr. Dickens, and Mrs. Gaskell, he knew this ordeal was over. He made a point of using titles for his Victorian authors; in her day Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was usually called Mrs. Gaskell; therefore, in the interest of fairness he decided to call Thackeray Mr. Thackeray and Trollope Mr. Trollope. And so on. His professors sometimes wondered about him—or laughed at him. Cornelius could go on and on about Charles Dickens, and so he did in this final test of his knowledge.
    He experienced a great sense of accomplishment once course work, foreign tongues, and examinations were behind him. Fully 75% of the Ph.D. requirements were now done. He would soon be Dr. Cornelius Cannalon. That was three years ago.
    Cornelius Cannalon, ABD was now part of the murky, dark, unsatisfying world of the ABD, whose numbers seemed legion. They were everywhere, teaching part-time at junior colleges, sometimes at three colleges at once just to make ends meet. Some stacked shelves in grocery stores or tended bar or worked as aides in nursing homes. Somehow Cornelius found himself in the middle of an ever-widening circle of ABD friends, men and women who struggled to find dissertation topics, struggled even more to do research, and agonized as they wrote and wrote, getting older and greyer with each passing year. Then the idea came to him.
    He was sitting in the College Club one afternoon when Maisie walked up to him and handed him a menu. Dark though it was, he still recognized her from his Research Methods class, the class that convinced him that graduates of such a class could become either spies or librarians, adept as they were at finding out all sorts of minutiae.
    “So, Maisie, what do you know?” he said, pleased with the allusion to Henry James.
    “Not much, Cornelius; still working here and when I come home I’m too tired to work on my dissertation.”
    He ordered a hamburger, fries, and a beer and pondered. Maisie wasn’t making much progress on her dissertation, and neither was he. Antonia—he loved alluding to Willa Cather when he talked to her—had had her proposal ripped to the proverbial shreds by her dissertation advisor and was beginning at the beginning for the second or maybe the third time. Jonathan was recovering from the unkindest cut of all: he had failed his dissertation defense, something that rarely happens to students who have completed some 300 pages of writing under the direction of a seasoned advisor. Then there was Annabelle, who came up with a different dissertation topic each week: the gypsy in British literature; Scotland’s eighteenth-century song culture; Regina Maria Roche’s “anti-influence” on Jane Austen; the dime novel and its effect on popular culture. Annabelle enjoyed dreaming up topics but could not make a decision. Too obscure, too general, too narrow, already done, old hat, too difficult to research, impossible to find a focus, clichéd, even silly. She thought of starting a website, doctoraldissertationtopics.com, and charging for entrance to her lists. But that also took time, and there probably wasn’t much of a market for that sort of thing.
    Yes, each one of Cornelius’s ABD friends was stuck, and so was he. When Maisie returned with his food, he suddenly had an epiphany.
    “Maisie, I think I’d like to start a support group for ABDs. We could meet here some evening when you’re not working. We could pool our resources and maybe our misery. We could help each other.”
    And that’s how it began. Tonight they were all in the dark corner of the pub: Cornelius, Maisie, Antonia, Jonathan, Annabelle. Cornelius began their discussion.
    “So, has anyone made any progress?”
    Silence.
    “So, has anyone made any regress?”
    Antonia spoke up. “This one isn’t about me, but it depressed me, so I regressed, I suppose. I heard about this guy in the history department who was doing his dissertation on the Soviet Union and the Cold War and how the Russians would eventually take over all of Europe. This was in the 1980s. The guy’s name was Dmitri, so I guess he had a Russian connection. He had written over 300 pages and was all set to defend his dissertation when the Soviet Union collapsed. He had a nervous breakdown. Do they still call it that, nervous breakdown, I mean? I wonder what happened to the guy. I guess he could have changed his topic to why the Soviet Union collapsed. But I doubt that he could have used much of the old dissertation. Didn’t he see this coming? Maybe he spent all his time in the library and never read the newspaper.”
    Cornelius thought for a minute. “Now there’s an argument against using a topic that’s too contemporary. Imagine writing about someone who is alive one day and dead the next, or who writes her most important work after you’ve finished your dissertation, for crying out loud. I’m sticking with the eighteenth century; it’s safer.”
    Jonathan spoke up. “At least that guy didn’t fail his defense. I’m still wounded and trying to pick up the pieces. I’m thinking of having a nervous breakdown. Or maybe I’ll just chuck the whole thing and start my own business. I could advise people about getting their doctorates.”
    Cornelius rolled his eyes. “Right.”
    Annabelle smirked. “Did it ever occur to any of you that some ABDs don’t really want to finish their dissertations? I mean, it’s kind of comfortable—as long as you don’t run out of money—to say you’re in the middle of it. People are so impressed. You can do a little a day or maybe less than that. You don’t have to look for a full-time job, since you’re still writing, and besides, universities won’t hire tenure-track people unless they have finished the degree. So you can put off coming to terms with the rest of your life. You can dream you will be hired by a great university or a charming college in New England with a long history, when in fact, if you’re hired at all years from now, it’ll probably be Lower Beaver State College in some grimy town in eastern Pennsylvania. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”
    Antonia spoke up. “Don’t forget those dissertation advisors. Mine forgets our appointments. Apparently it took her seven years to write the dissertation, so she wants to make sure I take ten to get mine finished. And she doesn’t like any of my topics. When am I going to get a topic that I can start working on?”
    “I have a topic,” said Maisie. “I like my advisor. The thing is, I hate this topic, but I’m too embarrassed to tell her and start over. I kind of like working here at the College Club, I make good tips, and when I go home I’m too tired to write about a subject I don’t care about. Maybe I could open up my own pub, with a doctoral theme: The Dissertation Den or something like that. For placemats I could use rough drafts of doctoral theses. The walls would be decorated with pictures of famous people who never finished their doctorates or never started them but who are the subjects of other people’s dissertation dreams. The menu could include stuff like advisor’s appetizers, editor’s entrees, deconstruction desserts. The possibilities are endless.”
    “And most people wouldn’t get the jokes,” Cornelius said. “I have a proposal. Let’s have another round of drinks. It’s on me. Let’s not have an ABD support group. It’s too depressing, and how can we support each other when we’re not getting anything done?”
    Jonathan nodded. “Yeah, but we need to stay motivated. How about we meet one year from today and report on our progress. And if we see each other before then, let’s talk about other stuff. Important stuff. Like baseball.
    They ordered their drinks.

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