In this instructional talk, Steve Tippins, Ph.D., addresses the complex interpersonal and procedural challenges doctoral students face when working with dissertation committees. He begins by explaining how faculty employment status (part‑time vs. full‑time) and compensation affect responsiveness, urging students to proactively request feedback and set realistic deadlines. He then outlines how to handle unresponsive or slow chairs, including reminding faculty politely, understanding institutional response timelines, and escalating to departmental contacts if delays become chronic. The speaker discusses dealing with unhelpful or adversarial feedback, emphasizing the need to treat criticism as a learning opportunity, ask clarifying questions, and seek alternative support when a committee member refuses to assist. When committee members give conflicting advice, Tippins advises defaulting to the chair’s judgment, breaking down each request, and responding with a structured “change matrix” that documents the original comment, the student’s response, and any revisions made. He highlights the strategic advantage of selecting a tenured chair, who may be more invested in supporting the student’s progress. The talk also covers the process of changing a chair or committee member, stressing documentation of the issue, formal conversations with the chair, and navigating institutional procedures. Practical communication tools such as change matrices, setting clear deadlines for revisions, and keeping the chair in the loop on methodological shifts are presented as ways to prevent endless editorial cycles. Finally, Tippins advises students to align their work with faculty interests, compliment faculty contributions, and demonstrate how their research fills a broader need, thereby leveraging faculty ego and increasing support. The session concludes with encouragement and an invitation for further questions.
Chapters
Welcome aboard, everybody. Today what I'd really like to talk about is what I'm just going to call committee dynamics, or another way to think of it is dealing with your committee members. And, you know, committee members may have assigned roles like chair or content person or methodology person or outside person, but they all bring their own personalities, their own life experiences, and their own biases about, you know, what should be part a dissertation committee and what, you know, students should be put through or what minimum standards are needed. But some of the questions we get over time are, okay, my chair just doesn't respond, takes a long time to respond, I have to remind my chair to respond. Well, let's think about some of this. If you're at an institution where many of the faculty are part-time, that most likely means that your chair and/or other committee members have other jobs, and working with you on the committee, while they like it and while it's important to them, may not be first, second, or even third on their list of things that need to get done in any given day. When you couple with that with, in these institutions where faculty are part-time, they don't get paid a lot of money. So if they don't get paid a lot of money, they also may not have a lot of incentive to, you know, be on top of things. Now, there are many faculty members who are part-time, don't get paid a lot, and are very attentive. But on the other hand, there are those that aren't. So reminding them that, you know, "Looking forward to your response," things like that, can be important. And this can also happen with full-time faculty members who are looking at their own publishing and their committee assignments and classes, and helping a doctoral student may not be the top of the priority there again. So don't just be passive and wait, but, you know, ask them, "Hey, I'm really looking forward to the feedback on this. Do you think I can have it by a certain date?" And I wouldn't say tomorrow, but, you know, allow them or give them the opportunity to respond again. And you will find some schools that have deadlines. You have to respond within a certain number of days, whether it's 10 or 14 are relatively typical. And look, life happens, and every once in a while someone's gonna take longer. Than, you know, you expect, or longer than even the institution says they have to do it, and that's okay. But if it is an over and over and over again occurrence, then maybe you check with someone at the institution about, you know, what their requirements are and how you can get help. Now, you can also get responses from committee members, chair, that is just not helpful or even adversarial. Think of it first of all as part of the learning process of becoming a member of the academic community. So maybe there will be feedback that is not incredibly supportive or is saying, "Well, look at it this other way," because maybe they're asking you to critically think about things. However, they can also be, "Yeah, give me more." Well, it's legitimate to say, "Okay, great. I'd love to. Can you help me understand what you mean by more?" Because you've never been here before, so how would you understand what more is without some support and feedback. And if they just say, well, that's not my job to give you more or to help you. Every once in a while you get that one. It's not my job to help you do this. You know, you don't want to respond, well, then what is your job? You want to respond by saying, okay, where can I get more support on this? Because if they're saying they can't do it or won't do it, then maybe they can help you find places where you can get more support. And if it's adversarial, then it's time to open up a discussion. Okay, I thought we were going this way. Can you help me understand why going this other way is important. One of the big things you're going to run into at times is Committee Member A says you need to add more here. Committee Member B says take all of that out. It's now we have to navigate different preferences about things. The first thing I say is default to your chair. What does your chair want when there's conflicts? Who do your— does your chair support, or is your chair one of the people who's saying add or subtract more. So we want to get to the chair to have the chair use their position as chair in order to help you navigate these situations. That's also a reason why I say when at all possible, if your institution is a tenure-granting institution, you want a chair who is tenured because tenured faculty members are dependent upon other members of the committee to vote for them when they go for tenure. So they may not be willing to push when you need support because they also need that vote for themselves. So having someone tenured is important. And I forgot to say this at the beginning today, also, if there are conflicting advice or suggestions for changes, break them down, figure out exactly what they're asking, and you may not, you know, make a change that someone wants. But respond to that. I see that you're looking for this— me to change, for example, my methodology to this type of statistical test. I understand that test, and one of the underlying requirements of that test is, for example, normally distributed data. And you can say the data here, and now you can respond based upon the underlying assumptions. Oh, I get it, but the data we're going to use doesn't meet these requirements, so you're addressing them, acknowledging what they've said, and then addressing them with your position on this. And it gets to be an intellectual debate now instead of just you responding automatically to something. Sometimes you are faced with the need, the desire, however we want to phrase it, a new chair or even a new committee member. But chair typically is a bigger deal. Because, you know, it's harder for institutions to make those changes. There are schools that are very reluctant now to allow chair changes. You know, you are the client, you are the student that they're supposed to be helping. So if the chair is not being helpful, then you need to document what the chair has done that is outside of the guidelines of what happens. And this is assuming this is you wanting the chair to change. Sometimes chairs leave and you have to go through the process of finding a chair again. And it's just like the beginning. Find somebody who knows something about your topic, who has a track record of helping people move forward. And if it's a member of your committee, the chair, and they've left, maybe there's a member of your committee who's been involved and knows what's going on that can be, you know, step up and be your chair. Otherwise, you have to go through institutional steps that are needed. And more often than not, they're going to say, have you talked to your chair about this? So you're going to have to have a hard conversation with your chair asking, you know, I thought we were moving this way. Are we communicating differently? Are you still interested in serving on my chair? You know, how do we move forward and make this allow me to meet my goals? So it is a difficult conversation, but it's something you do when absolutely needed and when you've backed it up with support evidence that you aren't getting what you know, the university has promised you. Add, subtract, add back the stuff she told you to subtract. One of the ways that I have found helpful with that is when you're asked to make changes, respond with changes and respond with a change matrix, meaning here's what you asked me to do, here's what I had before, and here's how I made the change. So the first thing is, here's what you asked me to do. So it's reminding them that you asked me to do this. There are people who always want to make sure that they can make comments. In addition, you know, everybody thinks differently. It's great to get feedback from different people because you get different perspectives, and, you know, it becomes eventually conversations you're going to have to have with your chair about, okay, I'm trying to understand how you're thinking on this. Can you help me move forward this way? The other thing that I have found helpful is when you're getting caught up with responses from chairs or committee members, one of the things you can do is say, "Here are the changes. Can we defend? I would love to be able to defend," or whatever your next step is, and give them a date a few weeks out. So it's getting their mind off of the idea of continually modifying and editing to, moving forward. So I'm hugely in support of making suggestions about moving forward instead of waiting for them to think of moving forward. And that can sometimes move people off of the endless editorial merry-go-round. Yeah, I'll try that. Okay, give it a try. Let us know what, what's happening. And if you have to make changes in your document as you move forward, you talked about a certain sample and it's not available, or you realize the data is gonna be different and you need to use a different methodology, try to loop your chair in as quickly as possible instead of just doing it on your own and making changes, because then you're open to comments like, "Well, you did this change without letting me know, and we have to go back to the committee," and all kinds of things. The research is an iterative process sometimes. Research can, you know, there can be changes, and your chair just wants to be kept in the loop. So try to remember, keep them in the loop and involve them whenever possible. But more often than not, chairs and committee members are there to help, and it's just a question of navigating through mixed levels of responsibility and/or mixed levels of interest on your committee members based upon how they're compensated and rewarded in life. Are there any more questions? Uh, academics also have egos. So anytime you can use or involve the work that they've done, which can— you can think of it as complimenting them, or, you know, look, if, if someone thinks I'm intelligent, therefore they must be intelligent if they've thought I'm intelligent. So if someone thinks my research is good and my being your committee members or chair, if you are highlighting what they have done in order to move forward, they're more likely to be interested in what you're doing because you obviously are intelligent because you've, you know, realized the incredible insights that they have in the world. So, you know, try to couch it in their terms because they want to know where you fit in the work they do. So that's a pretty high bar. If you add publishing within 4 weeks of time, you know, that many journals— yes, so you have to tie in faculty interests but also with what Google or Facebook or Meta or whatever are doing and needing So you have to fill a need. And if you can show that you fill a need, and that's pretty much anywhere. If I show I fill a need, then people are gonna want to use my services, whether it's allow me in their program, hire me as a consultant, hire me as a professor, whatever it is. But they don't do this unless they have a need. So you wanna try to fill needs. So you have to have a concept. When you submit a book proposal to a publisher, typically you're not submitting the whole book many times, you're submitting a chapter or two, and they can see the promise in that and then say, "Yeah, great, come back in X time and with the whole book we're going to publish it." So you want to provide something that they can see promise to what you're doing. I mean, if you can do it in 4 weeks, great. Well, you know, put out into the messages in the school group and see if there's anybody there who has the skill set, interests, whatever that, you know, adds to the strength of what you're doing. You're welcome. We've been going a good amount of time today. If there are no further questions, I'm going to say I wish you much luck and a beautiful day. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you. Take care, everyone. Bye.
