I’m a fifth year PhD student, which is the average year a student in my department graduates. For the majority of my time in my PhD program I’ve had an absentee advisor. He doesn’t respond to emails about 90% of the time and is very difficult to reach otherwise, because he doesn’t appear in the department in person very often and makes himself scarce when he is. I’m not his only student and the other students have had similar issues to mine, though perhaps not quite as bad. My issue is what I should do with regard to defending my thesis. I’m sort of at a loss as to what I’m supposed to be doing if I can’t talk to my advisor. I have written a thesis, but I just can’t reach the guy.
I have written two fairly substantial papers (to be clear in my field this is a pretty normal amount of papers to have when one earns their phd), one of which was a solo paper, after taking a long time to find my footing in research. Part of what took me so long to find was that I was a very unproductive student during the pandemic, there were personal issues but I could’ve worked harder. My advisor also did meet with me for basically the entirety of the time my institution was not holding in person classes, and I emailed him consistently every few weeks and he didn’t respond for a year. I told other faculty in my department about this situation but nothing was ever made of it. If I have a major regret with graduate school it’s that I did not change advisors then and there. I did not, though, so I am where I am.
I have good relationships with other faculty (both at my institution and outside), and many of them have recognized the issues of my advisor’s conduct both through my situation and the situation of his other students. The problem I face now is that my advisor seems to really dislike me, and seems to be apathetic at best to my progress, actively obstructionist at worst.
To summarize what happened last semester, I spent much of the time away from my institution giving talks at other universities on my recent work. The entire time I had been trying to meet with my advisor regarding grants and job applications. When I was finally able to meet with him (essentially by cornering him, because, of course, he responded to none of my emails or my requests in his student seminar to meet with me), he told me it would be inappropriate to recommend me either for grants or jobs, because I was not productive enough, and that my behavior was inappropriate, for having gone ahead and tried to apply for things without his permission, and in this meeting I was met with a lot of hostility that I had never seen before. We had never been anything but polite and congenial, though my advisor is very taciturn and has never given me any advice I’d consider “helpful”. Whether or not my work is to the level he deems appropriate to support, that is not for me to say. But I was taken aback at the idea that my behavior had been inappropriate. Later he found I had made a pretty serious mistake in my second paper, which left me deeply embarrassed, but I think I handled it with some dignity and I did correct the error.
That was the last time I was able to reach him at all. I don’t really know what to do. Whether I should reach out to other faculty in my department, or the department coordinator, or someone else in the University. I’m really just at a loss and I feel totally abandoned. I decided sometime after that meeting in the Fall that I just didn’t want an academic job, and I have had a lot of offers outside academia, so that I have a lot of things I could choose to do when I’m finished. At this point that’s all I want, to walk out of here with a degree, but I don’t know what exactly I’m supposed to do to get that when my advisor won’t even talk to me.