Academia is very broken if even your thesis committee is A) not interested in reading your thesis and B) can't even be bothered to when it is ostensibly their job.

What exactly is the point of dedicating years of your life to create something exactly nobody is going to read?

Most PhD have a few papers before finishing the dissertation. Many times the dissertation is made of a few paper by the author glued together. The papers usually chain, so it's instead of

introduction1 -> main1 -> conclussion1

introduction2 -> main2 -> conclussion2

introduction3 -> main3 -> conclussion3

the thesis is something like

long introduction -> easy example -> main1 -> main2 -> main3 -> main of preprint -> long conclussion

It's a philosophy thesis, and unlike STEM or soft sciences (history, linguistics...), they are very light on fact which make them very dry. The will read the introduction, conclusion (which can have more words than a physic thesis), the main thesis that interest them the most, and count on their collegue to read the other main thesis.

Also, very dry, so it's easy to loose focus, and you can read a rephrasing of your own thesis as a "he has the same ideas" (also, if you do that, please reference the author?)

I find a few of the example damning (hje should totally have added a citation and build his argument around it). Most less so, and i understand that a reader could not catch them.

Academia is very broken. That's it actually.

It's a long time that the incentive and job structure make universities a very toxic environment. Professors are basically running a 40 years race (about from bachelor or master graduation to retirement). It is still amazing that some good comes out of it.

It's very broken, and I'm not sure if it's possible to write everything original given that you're expected to repeat 2/3rds of past research to fill pages when you write your thesis. For a master thesis that was at least 100 pages. For a PhD nowadays each one of those is published as a book. At least it was like that in my engineering department.

For both me (physics) and my wife (history), in the American system, both at strong universities, most of our committee members read most of of our dissertations. For her, in a field where thesis by publication is not standard (your thesis is typically revised into your first book), her committee at the defense focused on questions and comments based on the committee's reading of the thesis more than on the actual defense presentation, which is apparently also normal in the field. In part, I expect that's because the thesis is expected to be built into something important post-PhD, and comments are seen as helpful in that process.

For me, it wasn't quite so apparent at the defense, and I don't know that all members read the final thesis carefully, but most of them had already seen me publish or present most of the research previously, often multiple times. I also know that some (and not just my advisor) did read the final thesis very closely. My thesis was only partially thesis by publication, however, which may have influenced this; it does now have a fair number of citations in its own right, which is somewhat unusual for the theses in the field, and potentially seen as awkward (it means there's significant work in the thesis that I never published elsewhere).

As a caveat, the American system (before current crises) does feel like it can have a two-tier system of PhD students who are expected to remain in academia (we both were) and ones who are not, even at strong universities. Expectations, and attention given, can vary considerably. The American system also tends to have larger and more closely involved committees than, for example, the UK/Irish system.

However, for the form of plagiarism discussed here: if someone had sentences from papers I published years ago interspersed in their work, and they weren't particularly notable sentences, I'm not confident I would notice. Depending on citations and what the sentences were, I'm not even sure I'd mind much, for example, if they were essentially copying a model definition.

Early work in any trade is mostly junk, and academia no exception.

But the process of creating that work, engaged throughought that process with those purported to be more practiced, is usually pretty good at seeding enough expertise and confidence that you might be able to proceed more independently and with real novelty, or might at least be prepared to share the trade with others new to it.

That's the point of those years, and so it's more than a little ironic that AI is being used to undermine a practicing expert while simultaneously eroding the traditional process for becoming one by making it so easy to just generate slop and engage with hallucinations than to actually practice writing deep work or engaging with primary sources.

The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.

There's a lot to be said about publishing in academia being broken and how nearly all the value comes from 10% of publications, while the rest are garbage spewed out for reasons orthogonal to the advancement knowledge. However, IMHO, none of that really applies to PhD theses.

It varies a lot by field, but in many (not all) scientific fields, a PhD thesis is largely a formality these days. Your publication record is what counts. The days where you could get a tenure track faculty position just on the strength of a PhD thesis are long gone.

Reproducing elitist social structure?