This story is currently making some waves here in Canada; even though it's not about a History department, there's much within it that I think you'll find familiar.

It raises so many questions, though; if the thesis supervisor evidently believed the student was simply incapable of handling the material properly, why did he keep supervising him at all? And why did the student receive a Masters degree for a thesis that was substantially written by the supervisor ostensibly instructing him?

Most amazing to me is that the above claims, if they were directed at me about my conduct as a supervisor, would be ones which I would be vigorously determined to refute. The supervisor is instead offering them as his own defense.

Anyway, we're all pretty riled about it. Have any of you encountered problems of this sort in your own departments?

I spent a big chunk of the last week at the annual History of Science Society meeting, which was in Chicago this year. A lot of my colleagues were at the Society for the History of Technology meeting, which for some reason was inconveniently scheduled at exactly the same time in another city. Kind of annoying when you have to choose! (But I understand that conference logistics are no easy task.)

Oddly, the HSS meeting is often co-located with the annual Philosophy of Science Association meeting. I say "oddly" because historians and philosophers of science have not had much of a dialogue with one another for several decades now, whereas the line between history of science and history of technology has become ever more permeable. You can see the disjunction by looking at the titles of the various talks on the program — the history of science talks all look mostly like "history" talks, whereas the PSA talks look, well, like something else. Historians of science do care about philosophy of science, but mostly philosophy of science from the 1970s backwards (Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Fleck, etc.) with very little forward after that.

Anyway, I was sort of idly wondering whether other sub-fields of history had odd bedfellows like this. History of science is deeply influenced by history of technology and what is known as Science and Technology Studies/Science, Technology & Society (there are deep, dark debates about which words "STS" ought to mean, but they are more or less similar), a sort of catch-all term for people who study science and technology from a humanistic perspective (which has a lot of influence/participation from anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and lots of other fields that intersect with sci/tech issues like law and policy). It is, in terms of its work and methodology and concerns, much more connected to these fields than most other historical subfields (i.e. diplomatic history). (There are a few exceptions — i.e. environmental history.)

It would be mildly interesting to put together one of those network diagrams of citations to see how historians talk to one another or read one another, and to see which disciplines actually have cross-over these days.