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This type of thing makes me unduly nervous about my own dissertation, which is silly, but it’s interesting to me how some people outside academia perceuve a lot of importance in dissertations and MA theses that isn’t realistic. A conservative or centrist or someone was posting a lot of ridiculous-seeming disses and theses on X to make fun of, which like, sure, some of them did seem laughable, but an MA thesis in a humanities department doesn’t mean much anymore and even a dissertation isn’t peer-reviewed or really published. Maybe the fact that these documents are often available publicly on Proquest (or wherever) makes people assume they’re academically significant in a way that an actual academic book would be?

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It's very much like this with articles in college newspapers. It used to be, you could be in school and write your articles and at most your classmates would laugh at them. Now it's all online for all to see and every so often a college student is main character'd for this.

But even an academic book or journal article is, at the end of the day, someone's work assignment. How profound is every memo everyone has ever produced? How profound does it need to be not to be pilloried?

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