Dissertation adviser doesn't appear to want to graduate spouse

[Voyager]

@gooftroopag

He moved across the country to another university.

As for the political situation, there seems to be a lot of political upheaval around here due to the rise in prominence of the business and MBA programs. I don’t blame his adviser for leaving, especially if this is not an issue outside of Texas, but it is odd since he was on track to head the research group. I don’t know what his tenure situation was.

Ahh, Texas. A friend of mine was the chair of a major department at UT Austin and left for North Carolina because he was just too fed up with state politics.
So, has your husband seen the department chair yet? There clearly was some animosity involved, but that doesn’t excuse the adviser from being so under-handed. There is no doubt a fight among departments for resources, but that would result in losing the RA job, not this.
The best hope is if the chair thinks this professor was a putz also and agrees to make things right.

[raspberry_hunter]

@Voyager

My daughter’s adviser delayed having a baby until she got tenure, which might be a bit extreme. I was in Computer Science, not a hotbed of sensitivity, and lots of my fellow students wives had babies with no apparent ill effect. Some delay I can see, but two years?

Ah, but those were the days where it didn’t take you until age 40 to get tenure! (My friend’s mom did the same thing… but she had tenure by age 30, so it wasn’t a big deal. I think it was common in that generation.)

Yeah, I am with you, and so are my friends – I don’t think any of them actually got delayed by more than a year (and the one delayed by a year was the one who had twins). But that didn’t stop people from gravely telling them what a big mistake it was, and from mentally subtracting two years from the graduation date: “See, if you hadn’t had a kid, you work so hard you could have graduated in three years!” Uh, department average is five, and last time someone graduated in three was ten years ago, idiot.

[gooftroopag]

@Voyager

Ahh, Texas. A friend of mine was the chair of a major department at UT Austin and left for North Carolina because he was just too fed up with state politics.
So, has your husband seen the department chair yet? There clearly was some animosity involved, but that doesn’t excuse the adviser from being so under-handed. There is no doubt a fight among departments for resources, but that would result in losing the RA job, not this.
The best hope is if the chair thinks this professor was a putz also and agrees to make things right.

He got the committee member that wants to publish his work to review his dissertation. Hopefully this will get things moving, and stop the back and forth with suggesting new work to be done.