I concur with much of what Dennis says, but have another slant on what to do about it. Part 1. Committees being in over their heads may be more of a problem when a committee is assigned by the school, than when the student has to to recruit a committee and have it approved by the school. Some schools allow (encourage) the committee to include outside qualified experts.
In many circumstances, the research that one does post-doc can only be done by teams. It seems ethically responsible to assure that the team (in the case of a dissertation, the committee) has the ability to develop the background. But it does not seem that the team/committee must have the background a priori. Dennis Roberts wrote: <snip so message is short enough to go thru my ISP's news> . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
