Up the Creek

      Backing up a bit, in my third year of graduate study I found that I was in the wrong program. It was too late to start over, to meet the requirements of the Psychology Department for my Ph.D. there and it was too late to repair the damage to my relationship with M and anyway I saw no future in that direction. What I wanted was to be an experimental psychologist, but there was no way that any department of psychology would offer a job with my half-assed training. Now I was at the point of my dissertation research, after which I would have a Ph.D. in Education and without proper training in anything.

      What would I do for my dissertation research? I had to do that work with Buck, I decided, and Buck agreed, willing to go to bat for me against M or anyone else. So I did that, an experiment with kindergarteners using an apparatus that Buck had designed and used. The theoretical framework was Amsel’s Frustrative Nonreward theory, which was the framework for Buck’s research program. How this got done, how M was led to step back and let it be done, I don’t remember and perhaps never knew. But it was done, my research was completed, my dissertation written, and my dissertation committee signed off on it. That was in the early weeks of 1965. I was set to graduate in the June ceremony with no idea about a job. Perhaps part time teaching at Long Beach State. I would have to scratch.