Standing on the Banks

 This is one of those weeks where it is taking a lot of effort to absorb what has happened, but in a good way.  I wanted to just share a few thoughts today, as it does bear reflection.

As of yesterday (August 19) I am officially finished with my final degree program.  My last course, which essentially was the doctoral dissertation defense, took me all of 5 minutes to complete - all we had was what is called a "course requirements checklist," which is required at the start of every course in my program, and that took a whole 30 seconds to complete.  Then, there was a 3-question quiz which at most took a couple of minutes.  Within a short time afterward, the professor posted the final grade, and I was essentially done with my Ph.D. program.  While I do have the Ph.D. now, the official conferral of it and the receipt of my diploma together will come within the next six weeks.  It has been a journey which almost took 4 years - had it been another 5 days, it would have been 4 years exactly.  I have been told by a couple of people that I need to document my journey, and maybe I will at some point. But, for now, it is time to just take a couple of weeks to decompress before I move onto an article I will be writing for a scholarly journal.  However, today I just wanted to reflect a bit on the process and what it entailed getting me to this point. 

I started this Ph.D. program on August 24, 2020.  At the time, a lot of change was happening too, as on the negative I was starting proceedings of a divorce from my then-wife of 28 years, and I also was for the first week of the new program simultaneously taking a class to get my Maryland driver's license.  I have been aspiring to get a doctorate since my junior year of high school in all honesty, and if things would have been different, I would have probably achieved it 20 years earlier. But life takes some odd detours, and for most of my 30s I was focused on working and building my skills as an administrative professional - I did a fairly good stint in the mortgage/title industry back then, even essentially becoming the de facto office manager of an on-site title office in Pinellas County, FL, where we lived at the time. Opportunity had not visited me yet then, so I had to put plans for my graduate schoolwork on hold for several years.  It was approximately 16 years between getting my Bachelor's in 1996 from Southeastern University until starting my Master's at Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2012 (actually, I had originally gone back to Southeastern to do that, but due to a lot of other factors I transferred to Steubenville in 2014).  I was able to complete my Master's at Steubenville in 2018, and for a couple of years after I focused on work, paying bills, etc.  During that interim, I also did land my first paralegal job (I had earned a Paralegal Studies certificate in 2006) with a good company called Intrepid Paralegal Solutions here in Maryland: I still work with them now actually.  I was still focused on getting the Ph.D., and originally, I wanted to stay in a theology-based field until I found out that I wasn't accepted at Catholic University of America due to supposedly not having enough Theology credits in my Master's program (which was odd).  But God had other plans, and on the first Friday of Lent in 2020 I talked to my parish priest to get his counsel, and he more or less helped me make up my mind to pursue a History Ph.D. instead at Liberty University.  I enrolled in April 2020, was accepted quickly, and by June I found out I had been awarded a good financial aid package for the coming year.  So, I set my start date to the Fall 2020 semester, and before I knew it, I was back in school again.  While it was a different course of studies than I was used to with my previous academic programs, I took to it well and actually excelled.  By the time I finished the program a couple of weeks ago, I had a GPA of 3.89, which is really good, and to be honest I actually enjoyed the coursework.  Then, at the end of July, my faculty chair scheduled me to defend my 341-page dissertation I had spent a year working on, and I did that on August 5.  The defense went amazingly well, and I was also able to submit the dissertation manuscript to the university library (a requisite for receiving the degree) and it was accepted quickly.  While it was almost excruciatingly impatient for me to wait on everything, I received my final grades for everything yesterday and am just waiting for a formal conferral of my doctorate, although at this point I can be called "Doctor" now as I have essentially earned the honor.  I will add the end of this story when I receive the parchment in the mail in a few weeks, as that will be when I can finally and officially say I am Dr. David Thrower.  

So, people have had questions, and although normally I get a bit annoyed with such questions, I know they are well-meaning and I don't fault them.  Two very important ones have been asked about my accomplishment, and I want to address those briefly here. 

The first question was this - what now?  My post-doctoral plans are something I am not even sure about yet, so I am not exactly sure how to answer that at this point.  I now have a doctorate, and in all honestly, it qualifies me for work either as a staffer at a museum or other historical institution, or as an educator.  I am focusing more on the latter in all honesty, as I would love to teach at the university level.  I currently also am open to high school teaching/administration, but it comes with its own set of challenges - for one, you need state credentials to do that, and in all honesty, I don't want to necessarily go back to school again just for a teaching certificate, although I will if necessary.  A certification program would not be nearly as long, and it would aid in my career prospects, but there is also the fact I need to pay for my living expenses now and do need income.  I also understand the need to get more published too, and am actually being proactive at that now - my faculty chair who guided my dissertation process has invited me to write about a 25-page article for an academic journal he is editing and I will be working on that starting at the beginning of September.  The thing about publishing ventures though is that they don't pay, although being published does look great on a CV.  Therefore, for the time being, I am still doing freelance paralegal work until a door opens, and I am confident it will soon. I already have a possibility of a teaching position at a Jesuit high school in Baltimore I have been considered for, and am just waiting on that decision now.  In all honesty though, I am a bit uncertain about prospects at this point, but I know it is in God's hands, so I am doing my part and then letting him open the doors.  That is the short answer to this question.

The second question has to do with the topic of the dissertation itself.  I don't like talking technical stuff with my writing with anyone in all honesty, because I get this sort of reaction in many cases: 

I am not saying this to be pretentious or elitist, but when you are the researcher in a certain topic and no one else is familiar with it, it can be frustrating to explain it to people.  I am going to essentially give the "Reader's Digest Condensed Version" of the dissertation topic to those who were asking now, and hopefully it will suffice to satisfy any curiosity.

I had originally considered three areas of research, as there are three specific areas of historical topics I am interested in personally - Appalachian Studies, Late Roman Antiquity, and World War II.  I decided after taking what were called "Seminar" electives in my doctoral program in each area to focus on the latter.  Since I had been reading about most of this stuff since I was a kid, I decided to focus on the ideological background of the Nazis, and I decided to go a different route with it by focusing on what are called central narrative convictions (CNCs) of the early National Socialists.  Central narrative convictions essentially consist of the answers to questions that shape the narrative of any group.  I got the idea from a hermeneutics class I took at Southeastern back in 2012 under a professor, Kenneth J. Archer, who articulated the idea in the textbook for the course he authored himself.  While Archer coined the term "Central Narrative Convictions," he also borrowed the concept from a 1986 book entitled The Transforming Vision by authors H. Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh.  The four questions that Middleton and Marsh posed which Archer noted constructed the CNCs of a particular group (or the "story" of the group, as he termed it) are these:

1. Who are we?

2. Where are we? 

3. What's wrong?

4. What's the remedy?

These may look vaguely familiar for those who have read my articles over the past several years, because in all honesty they construct a brilliant model, and I am indebted to Dr. Archer for introducing it.  For the most part, it is the CNCs from those questions which construct the worldview of both a group and the individuals who comprise the group.  Then, taking this a step further, I drew upon my Philosophy coursework from Steubenville years ago, in particular my professor John F. Crosby's 1996 book The Selfhood of the Human Person, and what I found was that that these CNCs entailed both things the group held in common (universals, or communicable attributes) as well as things unique to the individual or group (incommunicable attributes).  This leads to a couple of important insights that drove the thesis of my dissertation. 

For one, the CNC model is a valid one to measure and analyze the ideologies of both individuals and particular groups.  That being said, it has been utilized in other forms by other writers over the years - the famed Appalachian religious scholar Dr. Loyal Jones utilized a similar model with six questions in his book Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands.  While this is technically either a sociological or anthropological device, analyzing CNCs is also important to historical writing as well, because understanding a particular group can also aid in a more comprehensive view of historical events.  After all, ideological streams do animate political and social movements, and thus understanding them historically also means understanding them ideological as well. And, this leads to a second point.

Analyzing a group's ideological foundation is not limited to just groups which have a positive impression in history, although that is a lot more fulfilling.  It also applies to groups which are rightly understood as being evil, and the Nazis were definitely evil.  But, knowing the "story" of why they came into existence does help understand the currents that fed into them, and like any group, the Nazis didn't appear out of a vacuum.  There were a lot of earlier antecedents who came before the Nazis, notably the Volkisch movement of which the Nazis would be the fullest manifestation of.  Therefore, with that in mind, I analyzed four areas from which the Nazis evolved, and they were these - occultism/mythological views of origins, Darwinian eugenics, certain political groups, and finally the work of certain philosophers (Nietzsche, Kant, Gobineau, Chamberlain, etc.).  With those in mind, there are also complexities and contradictions, such as why after Hitler and the Third Reich came to power, many of these groups and individuals who contributed to the evolution of National Socialism were later suppressed and persecuted?  Also, were the Nazis authoritarian or totalitarian, Left or Right, a product of Enlightenment thinking or its result, and what distinguished them from earlier groups?  These questions were all dealt with more deeply in the dissertation itself, and they are somewhat elaborate and not easily analyzed in a short article here. Sufficive to say though, it was extremely enlightening to research all this, and although I would come to some different conclusions on a personal level, the job of academic writing is to present evidence as is seen, and not to speculate one's own conclusions (although that speculation may actually have merit in another context).  For those curious, that is the abstract summary of the dissertation itself.

So, what do I hope to do with this?  I did this research in order to provide a foundation for other projects in addition to fulfilling the requirements to earn my doctorate.  I even plan eventually to utilize it in articles here, and you will see more of it in months to come.  I am also going to self-publish my work as a paperback book later, and if you are interested stay in touch as I will let you know when it is available.  Hopefully, this will answer several questions people have asked me. 

Getting a Ph.D. is a huge milestone for me, and I am grateful that God gave me the ability to do so.  And, for those who have encouraged me and supported my efforts, I thank you as well.  I also had a lot of opposition from people who really had no stake in any of this, and to them I say - bug off.  If someone cannot be there for you when you need the encouragement, then they don't have any right to criticize or offer opinions on it, and they need to shut up.  That is harsh, I know, and for those of you who this applies to, you have been told.  For the others though, thank you for your interest and encouragement, and may God bless you.  Thank you for allowing me to share, and will see you next time.