Notable Graduate Theses

Bauman Moscow State Technical University: Computer science PhD student Dmitri Sklyarov wrote a computer program "as part of my dissertation work and as part of my employment"* called the Advanced eBook Processor.  He states that he developed the program "in order to demonstrate weaknesses in protection methods of PDF files."*  A complaint was filed against Sklyarov by Adobe Systems.  When Sklyarov, a Russian national, visited the United States to make a presentation about his work at the computer security conference DEF CON, he was arrested by the FBI and charged with designing a product that intentionally circumvented copyright protection technology under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  He agreed to testify against his employer in exchange for his release, and the charges against him were later dropped.  (In a trial a year later, a jury found his employer (Elcomsoft) not guilty.)  Sklyarov's dissertation and his employer's computer product were legal in Russia.  Over the course of the controversy, Sklyarov spent three weeks in jail (including Federal prison) and for five months he was confined to Northern California and prevented from returning home to Russia.

* - quotations above are from Sklyarov's public agreement with the US Department of Justice.

Queensland University of Technology: Filmmaker and PhD student Michael Noonan in the Creative Industries program developed a film entitled "Laughing at the Disabled" as part of his thesis.  The film included interviews with intellectually disabled young men in awkward situations, including audio of the filmmakers laughing at their answers.  Noonan stated that the project "seeks to give the disabled a voice through comedy and studies the shifting line between laughing at and laughing with."  The school's senior Lecturers Gary MacLennan and John Hookham publicly criticized the PhD thesis in a national newspaper.  In an editorial entitled "Philistines of relativism at the gates" they described it as "misanthropic and amoral trash".  MacLennan and Hookham were then suspended for six months after the university found they had engaged in misconduct by criticizing student work in an uncivil manner.  They sued the university and received an out-of-court settlement (rumored to be $200,000 each according to the Courier-Mail).  PhD student Noonan reportedly renamed the project "Laughing With the Disabled."

Oxford University:  Xu Zerong completed his M.Phil and D.Phil theses in international relations on the topic of Chinese military intervention in the Korean War.  He used archival documents as source material.  One year after completing his D.Phil thesis he was detained by Chinese authorities for photocopying secret documents -- specifically, four books about the Korean War.  (It is not clear from accounts of the case where he obtained the books, or whether they were public.)  Dr. Xu stated that he believed the secret classification of the material had expired after forty years.  The court found that Dr. Xu's photocopying of four books on the Korean War "severely endangered China's national security and national interest."  He was found guilty and sentenced to 13 years in prison.  As of this writing he remains in prison.

Submitted by Phil:
University of Paris:  In 1951, Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop submitted a Ph.D. in which he argued that ancient Egypt had in fact been a Black African culture. The thesis was rejected. Over the next nine years, Diop reworked the thesis, adding stronger evidentiary support. In 1960, he succeeded in the defense of his thesis and was awarded the Ph.D. degree.  In 1955, the thesis had been published in the popular press as a book titled Nations Nègres et Culture (Negro Nations and Culture). It would make him "one of the most controversial historians of his time."*

(according to Robert July -- citation in comments)

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) student Martin Rimm conducted a study of adult bulletin board systems (BBS) and Internet newsgroups.  By making broad generalizations that were not supported by his data, he argued that pornography was very widespread, and included graphic descriptions of it.  He then published the study in a non-peer reviewed journal and negotiated an exclusive with Time magazine, which used it as a cover story.  CMU itself helped promote the study, and widespread media attention further misinterpreted the results.  Ultimately the study was used to justify anti-Internet pornography legislation in the U.S. Senate, where one famously erroneous conclusion was entered into the Congressional Record: 83.5 percent of all messages on the Internet are pornographic.  (Other researchers estimated this number at <0.05%.)  The bill did not pass and much of the news coverage was retracted.

University of Iowa:  To test ideas about labeling, graduate student Mary Tudor selected normal children from an orphanage and over four months repeatedly told them that they were stutterers.  Participants in the study claimed lifelong emotional distress was the result.  Although they did not become stutterers, they did believe they had communication problems for the rest of their lives.  The State of Iowa settled their lawsuit in 2007 for $185,000 per plaintiff.  The name of this post ("The Monster Experiment") was coined by undergraduates at Iowa.

Ohio University: In the belief that articles were increasingly the currency of the trade in his area of scholarship, communication PhD student Stanley Deetz asked his committee to allow him to write his thesis as five essays rather than a book-length argument (as was the norm).  In order to get his committee to agree, he made a bargain with them that he would not defend the thesis until three of the five chapters were accepted for publication.  At the time it was rare for graduate students in communication to publish, but three chapters were quickly accepted in prominent journals.

Ohio University: When Thomas Matka was held back from entry into a Ph.D. program in Mechanical Engineering, he went to the library and unearthed 37 cases of plagiarism in M.S. and Ph.D. theses in his department, some with identical sections turned in sequentially to the same faculty member... his advisor.  The alleged plagiarists (some of whom had already gone on to become professors) were later asked by the university to either forfeit their degree or rewrite their thesis.

University of California, San Diego: The thesis of Christopher T. Brown, a M.S. student in Materials Science, was rejected because it contained a "disacknowledgments" section that profanely criticized university professors, librarians, and the state governor.  After one year, the University relented and issued him a degree, but refused to deposit his thesis in the library (ensuring that no one would read it).  He later sued the University over this failure to deposit the thesis and lost.

Columbia University:  Constance Benson submitted a Ph.D. thesis in Theology reevaluating the status of Ernst Troeltsch, a German theologian who died in 1923.  It was rejected by Columbia University as "unsatisfactory," but she alleged that her work was rejected because she discovered that a revered theologian was an anti-Semite and the committee didn't want to face that fact. She later sued the university and lost.