Since I broke the Claudine Gay / Harvard story, life has been a bit crazy.
Every newspaper in the world has covered it.
Most recently, today the Washington Post confirms that Claudine Gay committed plagiarism.
After tweeting this, I received a few offers to do a PhD:
I have to say I am intrigued. It should be obvious to my subscribers that I have been hung up on academia for a while now, since, well, I write about academia.
This is a bit unconventional, but I have thousands of professors that Subscribe to this Substack, and it is currently PhD admissions season, so it would be stupid not to use my platform to ask. If you have a place for me in your program, please email me to talk about it:
chrisbrunet@protonmail.com
In addition to my GRE score, I have a Master’s degree in Financial Economics from the University of Western Ontario, and a glowing letter of recommendation from the University of Chicago economics department, where I worked as an RA.
I also presented my research at Stanford, which will soon (hopefully, pending peer review) be published in an academic journal.
I was originally interested in doing an econ PhD, but am increasingly thinking that a public policy PhD might make more sense.
Please refrain from telling me that academia is dying, or that I am potentially making a stupid decision. Yes, yes, I know. I have heterodox preferences, okay?
good luck!
just make sure to weight heavily your prior that you are very disagreeable and nonconformist (i don't know what that means for a mentor, but that should be first and foremost)
I really do think academia is dying.
I think a PhD only makes sense if you want to be a professor.
MAYBE if it's an economically pointless topic and academia has a monopoly on funding for it.
Otherwise it's an opportunity cost and a waste of time. I recently dropped out of a computer science PhD program at a relatively high ranking university (top 10 in the US for CS PhDs).
I don't want to be a professor, I don't like computer science research papers, and academia definitely doesn't have a monopoly on funding for computer science research, especially anything I would be interested in doing (basically machine learning, which is currently blooming and any new advancement is surely worth immediate money and therefore is a business idea and not a thesis).
Is public policy "research" even a thing? Isn't your substack better than public policy research journals? Do you want to be a public policy professor?
Also see this: https://www.josephbronski.com/p/want-to-be-rich-drop-out-of-school
Just my 2 cents