CommPhD20

I think hammering this point home now is more important than ever. More people are learning this, but the funeral industry is an absolute scam. It's easy to pull because people are grief-stricken, terrified, and don't want to consider the possibility that anything yucky is going on. The people you deal with are perfect in their manner...they couldn't be scammers. So now imagine that some of us miss out on the subset of schools to which we applied that we really wanted while the only one or ones we got fall into the "well, I wanted options" category. Suppose then that after this devastating run of rejections we head towards April with only this particular set of results. Maybe these are utterly sub-standard programs with no track record of placement. Perhaps they are middling programs that are offering zero, partial, or non-guaranteed funding. Either way, our vulnerable minds will want to make this work. "I heard about that one person who went to Southeastern North Igloo State University - Bayou Campus and they are earning a livable wage now! I can do this!" The faculty at the school will encourage you to think this way because they really want you there to teach classes and/or pay tuition. Folks have to be prepared for that and realize that disappointment will make them want to compromise. Don't do it! Don't take out that debt, don't waste that decade of your life at a crap school only to be forced out of the job market shortly after entering it, don't fail to ask about how much the "student fees" are and whether you get medical benefits, etc. We all know lots of stuff but emotions, selection bias, and all kinds of things can twist our logical capacity. It is imperative to continue examining those first principles.

How did they reach you? Seems like a not-so-good sign for me.

This is a good point and brings us to two things. First, people who have "done it" like to be patted on the back and told how they have done the impossible. This is worth considering when you hear accomplished academics speaking about their job as if they are martyrs. It may not be as great of a job as it is made out to be, but let's not kid ourselves. Your tenured advisor almost certainly has a great job. With that said, the reason this entire system continues attracting people is survivorship bias. This is an actual psychological phenomenon that affects us humans in multiple parts of life and it is alive and well here. We see the "survivors," AKA our professors, and do not encounter the "casualties." You can keep telling folks that 75% of literature PhDs never get on the tenure track, but the only people we make contact with are optimistic grad students and the survivors of the process. People tend to fixate on the survivors and dismiss the existence or relevance of the casualties. It is too tempting to just assume those casualties were not worthy. The system is not that great at rewarding merit. There are highly qualified people that will do everything right and lose this game. Of course, it is very easy to suggest to somebody to simply run away from the whole thing when you are not faced with leaving something that you are very passionate about doing. The truth is that there are some "right" circumstances to pursue this. The following are some standards that are a combination of suggestions from my mentors as well as a few places like The Professor Is In: -you have to be young. A potentially decade-long process in which you will not be saving for retirement or preparing for anything but the job you fear not getting cannot be done in your 30s unless you have a spousal or other situation that puts you at no financial peril. -you cannot be taking out any debt. This means your graduate school needs to support you with full tuition and fee waivers plus a livable stipend that comes with medical coverage. If you aren't getting these things, reconsider how much you mean to the program and/or how worthwhile a program that can't provide these things might be. -on a related note, you can't already be under crushing debt from undergrad. If you took out $50K in loans in undergrad, going without an income for 5+ more years is probably a bad idea -again on the financial side, you can't enter into life-changing circumstances like childbirth, home ownership, or perhaps even marriage if you expect to be covering the expense of these things yourself. You're allowed to live an adult life as a grad student, but you won't be compensated in a way to pay for it. There's no shame in a spouse that works and supports you while you study, but if you don't have one then don't burden yourself with financial or other commitments that you cannot handle on your own as a grad student. -you cannot go to a school that does not have a clear track record of placing its PhD recipients in the kinds of positions you are seeking. If you cannot get hard data on this from the program, this should be a major red flag. Don't accept a few anecdotes. You want an idea of the percentage. You also want to know average time to degree and the attrition rate. If half the students quit, how good of a job is the program doing? "Fit" means nothing if you know going in that you have no chance at "fitting" into a job when you leave. If you aren't sure if you have a chance, you haven't done your homework. -you don't waste your time at grad school and while you own and encourage your intrinsic passion for your work, you realize it is all wasted if you do not leave prepared for the job market. You also accept that being well-prepared will likely not guarantee your dream job...or any job. But if you did everything else, you'll be in a position to readjust to your circumstances and somewhat painlessly change the trajectory of your life if that is what is needed because you won't be too old, you won't be burdened by debt, you won't be obligated to a child you cannot afford to raise, etc. I think the points on debt and school choice are the ones taken least seriously or are perhaps incorrectly interpreted. You don't get into the school you want and you start to expand the definition of what an acceptable program is.

I would be tickled shitless if I got a personally written letter from a school that rejected me -- just because it would suggest that I still impressed them. With that said, I have no expectation of that as it would be incredibly time consuming and that doesn't make sense since it is already a burdensome process for working academics.

Thanks for adding insights, as I was flying blind when it came to some of the immigrant status stuff. I've worked in Residence Life throughout my career so I've yet to deal much with landlords, so the renter's insurance recommendation is helpful too. And OP, if the American healthcare system seems unbelievably complicated and exploitative....well, that's because it is. I wish we'd take some notes from our friends to the north.

FWIW, Dallas Cowboys have no resource-based advantage over any other team as the NFL has a hard salary cap, making it impossible to have a higher payroll than the maximum allowed. The minimum payroll is roughly 85% of the maximum, so everybody is spending the same. The NBA has a "soft" cap which lets you overspend the salary cap only to retain your team's own players, which will make it impossible to sign other players. If you are too far above the cap due to taking advantage of this rule, you start paying enormous penalties for the overage. For instance, the Brooklyn Nets are expected to pay a $100 million penalty for a $30 million overage this year, a figure which will double in the coming years if they do not fix that. The Yankees can pretty much spend as they wish and their payroll this year will be about 4x as much as the lowest team. Spending on veteran free agents in MLB is such a precarious proposition that the teams who do so often get themselves into just as much trouble as they do improve their team. They also have a "luxury tax" and it does indeed scare teams, but it is set so high that only 2-3 teams are within a stone's throw of it in a given year. I know you didn't mean for this to become a sports discussion but I couldn't help but drop some fun facts I would say that the NRC is more trustworthy but they're both complete bullshit. Rankings are completely wrongheaded in and of themselves, but NRC gives weight to things that actually matter and shuns the idea of hard rankings and instead favors confidence intervals, which makes more sense.

We haven't talked a whole lot about the problem that is an overproduction of PhDs. This doesn't act like a market in that while the demand for PhDs is static or perhaps going down, the production continues to escalate. This is because the stimulus to produce PhDs is very far removed from the factors that influence demand. It does act like a market to the extent that each individual person with a PhD becomes much more easily exploited when there is someone happy to adjunct for $25K/year in their place due to the amount of PhDs on the [not always literal] street. I'm going to avoid the inevitable argument that will ensue by naming names, but we all see those schools on some folk's application lists. There are too many schools that are pooping out PhDs for who knows what reason, though I would surmise it has something to do with relatively inexpensive labor without the appearance of using adjunct labor. The truth of the matter is we have some programs that are doing a very good job of preparing and placing PhD recipients into the academic job market. Others are issuing PhDs, for sure, but those people come out highly unqualified for most desirable academic jobs. The PhD issuing apparatus is composed of far too many schools that are doing a whole lot of issuing and not a lot of placing. This isn't poor career advising so much as it is a doomed-to-fail system. If this were a real market and you heard there were so many cars being made that most of them had to be sold at half-price to become rentals after sitting for years on an over-filled lot...would you react by saying, "Hey! I'd like to start a car company!" Unfortunately, this is what many universities are doing. They persist in giving out PhDs and even commencing new PhD programs because non-elite schools risk very little in having their PhD recipients ultimately become unsuccessful academics. I'm no free market guy myself and I think the deeper flaw in the system is that we care so little about funding our public schools that they are forced to resort to sacrificing educational quality in favor of bottom lines. The only reason they remain interested in quality is largely due to state-applied pressure to be great academically. If only we could apply the pressure for academic quality while also applying our funds like we did when the workforce was predominantly tenure-track. Instead we have this bastardized system that is forced to act like a business in some ways and act like a public good in others. Americans have become so completely individualistic that they see no value in supporting public education. Why should [some person who doesn't need public education due to age/economic status/lack of desire for it] pay for this? How could providing the populace access to great education that is unlikely to cause permanent financial harm benefit [that person]? The truth is that it does, but the effect is too delayed to be worth forking over some money. Hayek said that there are three potential states for an economic system. It starts with a binary: you have free markets or you have socialism. You have central planning or you have completely decentralized planning. This is easy enough to understand. The alternate, he says, is when you do just a little central planning. In this case, you have oligopoly. I personally still find this incredibly reductive as there should be some interventions into society against the encroachment of markets. However, it is clearly true that poorly or incoherently-made efforts at intervention can cause this kind of calamity. You can look at our media apparatus, the oil industry, the soon-to-be-dead net neutrality, and you can look at the literature PhD problem. A haphazardly placed market incentive here and there turns the whole thing to shit. The solutions tend to always be profit-oriented because we can empirically measure that. Measuring educational value is about as possible as it is for the Supreme Court to define pornography...so it tends to lose out. We will see it declining but those who are interested in bottom lines can make the unfalsifiable claim that it does not. Thus, nobody sees the problem in the adjunct-dominated workforce and its hidden supplement, the graduate student workforce that preys on the dreams of young adults and churns them out as disillusioned 30+ year olds with no chance at the work they are trained for and the rightful expectation for important work that compensates them in a way commensurate with their level of training.

My advisor has been insistent that no news is always good news.

Whether or not a given person has the money available, it's honestly a terrible investment. There is no PhD in any field worth the many hundreds of thousands of debt nor is there an MA that should cost at least 6 figures, especially after you factor in your living expenses. If you have the money, it might make sense to eat a short-term cost (maybe in-state tuition to get an MA) but to do something like the MAPH completely out of pocket is lunacy IMO. I believe there is no better use of your time than learning, but there are better ways to do it when you could buy several houses with the same expenditure. Why not just pay yourself to hang out at home or work some enjoyable, but low-paying job if you're going to drop that much money?

160 is a very good score on the verbal and 6.0....wow! That's great! It sticks out every bit as much as the 130. I'd say this though, you wouldn't want to let the 130 go unaddressed in your applications. Don't dwell on it, but speak with trusted (professors) advisors on how to explain that the 130 is not indicative of your abilities as a complete student and that you have compelling evidence to the contrary (namely, the strong verbal, excellent AW, and hopefully the rest of the materials in your app package).

I see there have been two acceptances by email posted. Not a good sign for me, but it was a longshot from the get-go. Congrats devwil, it's a really cool program in a great place to live. I lived in Boulder for a while and I hated to leave.

I'm in the Washington rejects crew as well. I was really fond of the place, but I'll live. So far I've had 5 decisions and I haven't gotten into the two I perceived to be hardest to get into and I have gotten into the other three. Of the rest, I don't see any easy acceptances (did I ever?). UIUC should be easiest as it is an MA program and I am a good fit, but two of the four faculty members I match with well are not going to be available for advising and may not be teaching at all in the immediate future. Being in-state there helps my odds, I think, maybe...but I'm not sure that it matters since I do have that solitary PhD offer. I'm a great fit for Northwestern and would love it there, but I'd rate it as very competitive to get into. While I fit the RPC program really well, I don't have a very good fit in terms of a single faculty member. I fit Colorado (Media Studies) very well and match well with several faculty members, but they very rarely admit students w/o MA into their PhD program. If I don't get any more admits, I'd be happy in Ohio State. I have a SO who has applied to several common places as well (different programs) and we're waiting to see how her situation unfolds. She's on the wait list at OSU, so that could be the runaway favorite if we can get her in there.

There are two ways your income can be taxed in the US, more or less: 1. "Payroll taxes" - these are taken out of each paycheck and add up to 6% of your paychecks. One part goes to Medicare, insurance for seniors, and the other part goes to Social Security, which is fixed income for seniors. You will not pay payroll taxes on your stipend under most circumstances. This is a good thing for the most part, other than that you won't be eligible to receive Social Security if you naturalize and retire here without eventually paying payroll taxes. If you work in the USA, you'll begin paying into those and you'll have nothing to worry about. 2. You have the standard income tax. This is something you'll file after the end of the calendar year with the federal government (the so-called "Internal Revenue Service" or IRS). Some of your benefits will be taxable. What you won't include in your taxable income is tuition waivers or other portions of your stipend used for tuition. Certain other costs can be exempted from taxes, most notably things like textbooks -- the rule here is that it must be required of all students in the course. So books, computers, etc. you might buy for general research will not be exempted. Generally speaking, anything you spend on personal expenses, which includes your housing, will be taxable income. So if you have a $15K stipend and the rest of your costs are covered, then $15K is your taxable income. In the USA, it is customary for your employer to withhold a certain portion of your paychecks for the purpose of covering your income tax commitment. This is sometimes done for graduate stipends, but not always -- it usually is not if you have a fellowship rather than teaching or research assistantship. The amount withheld will be based on the assumed amount of taxes you'll owe at the end of the year. In this case, it may be the case that when you file your taxes, you'll be getting some of that back since more was withheld than was needed. If your school isn't withholding for you, you will have to make arrangements to budget that portion of your income -- you may pay on a quarterly basis. Further, you could be subject to state income taxes. Not all states have an income tax and there is a great deal of variability in how this is done. There is some chance that even if your state has an income tax, your income won't be high enough to be eligible. There are more variables based on your resident status and your home country. You may be a "nonresident alien" or a "resident alien," the latter of which will have what is known as a green card. Determining residency status for an international graduate student is bafflingly difficult to me as it is filled with exceptions and this and that. The fundamental taxation difference is that resident aliens are taxed on American income as well as any foreign income while nonresident aliens are taxed only on American income. I'm guessing you'll eventually become a resident alien, but that is not clear to me since there are exceptions for students. You can see some scenarios here: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Alien-Residency-Examples Germany (if that's where you live) and many other countries have tax treaties with the USA with provisions for students. These vary so much that it is difficult for me to tell how that will affect you. It may mean that you simply pay taxes to your home country instead. This partially depends on whether you intend to become a permanent resident of the USA or leave as soon as you are finished studying. Other insurance: You will need medical insurance. This is a benefit you should receive from your school, though not all will offer it. As you weigh your options, make sure to find out the degree of medical insurance they will offer. Either fully provided it free of cost to you or an 85% subsidy (you pay 15% of premiums) are the most common. These are usually good plans in that they cover nearly everything and are more cost effective since the risk is spread across the entire working portion of the university. When you receive medical care, you'll incur any costs not covered by the insurance. Certain services like doctor visits are usually paid for by what is called a "co-pay," which is a small flat fee you pay for each visit. The insurance company covers the rest of the cost. Depending on the insurance plan and type of doctor, these can be $5-$100. Under our new healthcare law, several types of preventative doctor visits must be provided free of cost: alcohol abuse counseling, aspirin for people of a certain age, blood pressure screening, cholesterol screening, colorectal cancer screen above age 50, depression screening, diabetes screening if blood pressure is high, diet counseling if you are thought to have risk of obesity-induced disease, HIV screening, immunizations, obesity screening and counseling, sexually transmitted disease testing, and interventions for quitting tobacco use. The costs for procedures and how you are expected to participate can vary. You start with what is called a deductible. You pay almost all costs (other than certain flat charges like the doctor visit co-payment and free preventative services) until you reach the deductible amount. So if you have a $500 deductible and you have a mole removed for $1000, you know you will have to pay at least $500 of it. After you have met your deductible, the amount of coverage provided by insurance varies. Generally speaking, insurance plans will cover 90%, 80%, or 70% of costs at this point. So-called "catastrophic plans" will cover even less. A new part of the law requires for money you pay for drugs to count against the deductible, since this was not the case before. Drug costs vary by drug, but generally speaking a plan will have several tiers -- preferred generics, nonpreferred generics, preferred name-brands, nonpreferred name-brands, and uncovered. Preferred generics (drugs that are old enough that they are no longer patented by the original pharmaceutical company) will often be free or just $5 or $10. The costs on others can vary widely. Another provision of our new law is a yearly maximum out of pocket costs, which sets a limit of how much you have to pay for all medical costs other than the monthly premiums and co-payments. This is set at roughly 10% of your income. If this is the case for your plan, if you pay $1500 - say, $500 from deductible and the other $1000 on prescription drugs and other procedures that your insurance helped cover - then the insurance must cover 100% of costs from there forward. All of this resets at year's end. It is meant to prevent you from losing all of your money due to an ongoing problem. There is no maximum amount for the insurance to cover -- a new part of the law. This means there is no limit to how much the insurance company may have to spend on your healthcare (in the past, companies would cut you off after a predetermined amount, at which point you were no different than somebody without insurance). Foreign nationals are eligible for insurance and if it isn't provided by the school, you are allowed to buy it along with federal assistance as a student. Other insurance to consider: Dental insurance may be useful and is usually inexpensive. $20/month would give you a great dental plan that would make trips to the dentist less expensive and guard you against costly procedures. Some of these plans hardly do anything to help save you money while others can be great if you have something come up. Vision insurance is the least common of health-related insurance and probably isn't necessary for a graduate student unless you have particular needs or it is provided by your school (dental and vision are not the standard for graduate student compensation). Seeing an eye doctor can be expensive, but not prohibitively so under most circumstances. A cheap doctor visit may be $100-$150 if you need contacts and the contacts will probably cost you $100-$200 per year if you do not have vision insurance. If you own a home, you'll need homeowner's insurance. I doubt you'll own one. If you rent, that is the landlord's problem. If you wish to drive, you must have car insurance. You will lose your right to drive if you do not have car insurance. The prices and coverage can vary widely, but each state will have a minimum of liability coverage. Without much of an American driving record, I am guessing that you will assessed as a fairly high risk and will pay more than the average person your age.

Stanford, for reference: Princeton '62 Trinity College '66 Washington University in St. Louis '73 Yale Yale '87 Brown '79 Oxford '90 Universita' di Roma Laurea '72 Brown '93 Columbia '54 U of Manitoba '67 Rutgers UC-Santa Cruz '80 UT-Austin '72 Vassar '87 Illinois State '75 U of Manchester '86 Yale '88 Oxford Things are a little more jumbled up once you look outside an elite program that itself is in the Ivy league. Also worth thinking about the fact that the game has likely changed to a great extent in that elite students aren't always going Ivy and that there is more of a deliberate effort inside and outside of the Ivy/non-Ivy elite undergrad institutions to give aid to less wealthy folks. I'd fancy myself one of those "needed help to go to school financially" people and while I had offers from Ivies, I had just as competitive offers from non-Ivies and chose one of them instead, going with a SLAC where I felt like I mattered as an undergrad. I feel like we've done little to prove that the reason people from elite institutions tend to cluster at elite institutions for any particular reason -- we do have to face the possibility that it isn't the institution that holds weight, but rather the best applicants are going to those schools in the first place and continue to go to them at the graduate level. With that said, I think you'll see a strong presence of "that's a nice school" folks even at the best programs, though we can see some serious self-selection bias at the Ivy institutions.

Worry less about rankings and more about whether a particular school has a track record of placing its PhD recipients into the kinds of positions you're looking for -- and try to see whether this can be done without incurring a great deal of debt or personal hardship along the way.

There is no advice I've heard more consistently from academics than that undergrad institution hardly matters. There are things about your undergrad institution that might benefit you, like possibly better prep, a better feel for academia, and of course letter writers that are familiar names for the adcomms. Beyond that, it is a relatively small factor and many realize that name-brand at the undergrad level doesn't always mean much -- such as the people sitting on an adcomm using their grad students as primary teachers for their undergrad classes at Name Brand U. There will be some correlation, of course, as strong undergrad applicants are the most likely to become strong graduate applicants. Different academics will view things differently as well. Many people sitting on an adcomm will have had come from a humbler undergrad institution and/or have taught at one earlier in their career.

I'd say that there is limited value of high GRE scores and GPA. Of course, there is much to be lost if they are distractingly low. Statement of purpose is huge here as is (when applicable) a writing sample. You want to prove your ability to thrive in the program. You must demonstrate your fit as well as your competence as a future academic. As you might guess, your letters of recommendation are tremendously important in this case as well. You want people that are professional academics vouching for your maturity, ability, and future prospects for becoming a successful academic yourself. They will also be more credible to the adcomm in their assessment of your fit at the particular school (this is where it comes in handy to not have letter writers distribute the same form letter to each school). Publications and conference presentations are pluses in this regard too, since they demonstrate your understanding of the world of academia as well as proof that you can produce worthy scholarly material. Now, this can have limited upside unless you have presented at a very important conference (and did well) or you have published in somewhat distinguished journals. They won't be all that impressed by publications in a fly-by-night journal beyond the fact it demonstrates your interest in scholarly activity. GPA comes in next and there is some wiggle room here. The meaning of a GPA at one school can be much different from another. Some undergrad schools and types of schools are typically going to produce high GPAs, rendering them pretty unimpressive. Other schools might have the other reputation, which is that of deflated GPAs. They'll be looking more closely at how you did in specific courses and how deeply you studied your subjects. This is another time where there is some value in it being high but as an abstract number it means little. On the other hand, it will be hard to compensate for a low GPA (think 3.0-3.2), but not impossible. After all, lots of variables are affecting that final number and it is still relatively unimportant. I think GRE scores mean the least of all. I believe there is an arrangement in place with ETS that makes them require this for other benefits that fall outside what most or all humanities departments get from GRE reporting. It is more a fact of being part of a larger graduate school than anything else. With that said, it would be troublesome to have low scores because, of course, that would raise eyebrows. The quant score will mean next to nothing unless the graduate school has imposed minimum limitations on the programs. Doing better will be impressive and help, but you won't be able to build an application off of it. This is why you see people bitching and moaning about being rejected despite super high GRE, super high GPA, and [insert big number here] presentations and publications. Unlike undergraduate admissions, the empirically measurable stuff is very weakly predictive. Of course, many bitchers and moaners reveal character traits that make it unfathomable that they could have convinced three academics to endorse them in a confidential letter...which will easily sink that other stuff.

Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head that the comm side of rhetoric seems to be more invested in the spoken word, though it is rather funny that the academic work always ends up as words on the page when all is said and done. As far as disciplines and their similarities, this has always intrigued me. I was lucky to go to a SLAC that really encouraged the questioning of disciplinary divisions. It turned out that my interests straddle the humanistic and social scientific, which is why I feel kinship with the folks in here (and even moreso the Film Studies people) despite the fact that many of my target programs would be identified on the social scientific side of the divide. I ended up finding the vaguely defined field of communication more flexible than "English," which is wonderful in its own ways but has much more entrenched disciplinary methods and the like. I like the discussion of rhetoric from the program description at Northwestern's Rhetoric and Public Culture program -

Interviews are still the exception to the norm. Most of the time, in this field, interviews seem to be more of "last chance to see if this person is absolutely nuts" than it is a legitimately competitive venture. Even in the latter case, obviously most of the work is done by your application in the first place.

FWIW, rhetoric is indeed already a part of many communication departments -- it is basically what founded that field. It seems like the main difference between comp/rhet. and rhetoric is whether the program cares much about whether you can do it rather than simply studying it. After that, of course, there are other differences, most importantly the context in which rhetoric is studied. The communication side of rhetoric is often focused much more on public/political rhetoric. The justification, whether fair or not, for comp./rhet. being in English literature departments is the idea that it is invested in the creation of literary texts. Obviously, it would be easy to say that this is the vocation of creative writing rather than comp./rhet. I also think that most comp./rhet. folks here have a vision for the field beyond the "public communication" component as well.

That's great! A really excellent program. It may be matched, but certainly not surpassed.

I haven't heard anything about a visit weekend, I just plan to visit either way at some point in time.

Update - accepted to Syracuse Newhouse Media Studies MA. Personal email from DGS telling me they had just made the decision. Funding not yet sorted out.

Also, got an acceptance from Syracuse! Media Studies MA program. Got a really nice letter from the DGS referencing our previous interactions and some things like that. He said he is actively seeking funds for me, but no promises just yet. With a fully-funded PhD offer from OSU and a fellowship nom. pending there, I'm not sure that Syracuse is much in the running though. Kind of strange that I immediately felt weird about getting the offer -- when I saw who it was from and the word "acceptance," I wasn't able to really revel in the admission decision since I felt like it wasn't good enough from the get-go. I suppose this is a good problem to have, though! You never know what I'll find out when I visit OSU or as I reach out to some contacts in the field that might make me need to go to other options.

I think there are some reasons to look on skeptically re:CU, but there are also some reasons for optimism. I Skyped with a member of the Comm. department (which incidentally led me to realize that I needed to apply to the Media Studies PhD instead) and he seemed pretty upbeat about the whole thing and answered a lot of my questions. I think here will be a lot of goods to come from the restructuring, most notably a buttload of money flowing through the new school. As far as the Philosophy department business, it is very troubling, but not to me as an applicant. That's a stinky discipline right now in that regard and it seems to be confined to that department. The school itself has been the only proactive actor in that deal and it's because of them deciding to release the report to the public that we even know about it.