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How far can one expect a external examiner to travel to be on defence/viva committee?
I'll base the scenario of this question on the PhD thesis defence committee recommendations in place in my university in Ireland. Similar may apply to other countries.
A PhD Defence/Viva committee in made up of a Chairperson, internal examiner and external examiner. The internal comes from within the university and the external from another institution (with some restrictions on affiliated universities).
Assuming for this question cost of travel is not an issue as it would be covered by your university and you/your supervisor agrees with choice of potential external examiner; is there any rule of thumb on how far you could reasonably expect a external examiner to travel to be on the committee?
One downside I can think of asking someone to travel a large distance is the possible time they have to take away from their work. Again taking Ireland as an example, an external examiner from Ireland/UK/EU could probably travel on the day or 2 max. If it was someone travelling from the US they may have to take a few days off. Areas with poor air connections may mean longer trips.
So the question is largely two fold. Should how far away a potential external examiner factor into the decision to ask them to be on the committee and how far you could reasonably expect a external examiner to travel to be on the committee?

In some universities, the external examiners are allowed to participate through a teleconference tool (e.g. Skype). Is there such a possibility in your university?

One of my committee members moved to a different university, and city, between formation of the committee and final defense. As @Alexandros suggested, she participate remotely. We used a combination of a phone conference call and software that let her see what was on my laptop screen, which was driving the overhead projector in the conference room

@Alexandros Not sure if they are allowed to participate via teleconference tool. A practical solution if possible.

Here in Sweden external examiners often come from the US, and the distance doesn't seem to be a deterrent for them. And this week there is another one coming from Japan.

How flexible is the scheduling? If your university is buying the air ticket, and you can accommodate the external examiner's schedule, I think your request will prove popular. Conversely, if you must insist that someone be there on a particular Wednesday during the middle of their term, I think they would be reluctant to agree.

@Anonymous For me this is more of a hypothetical question but a valid point. I assume there has to be some flexibility built into the system but not sure for definite.

I would just ask the potential examiner in an open manner, giving them the opportunity to decline without feeling bad. There are many reasons why a long trip may not be a burden: One of my external examiner came from Hong Kong to the Netherlands, but he used that trip to also collaborate with my supervisor. Another came from the USA, but use the trip to also visit family. You cannot know this without asking them.

Similar thing here: one of my (total of 5) examiners came from California to The Netherlands. Our department covered his travel and hotel costs for a few days; he came with his wife and planned another week of holidays afterwards. I think was a great arrangement for all, but I should mention that this professor was already retired so he probably didn't have any commitments.

If your university is paying the expenses, then it's quite plausible for an examiner to come from arbitrarily far away.  I myself have gone from the US to Europe to serve as an external examiner, and it was no more a burden than traveling to a foreign conference.  You can also combine other things into the trip: for example, when I served, my colleague also asked me to give an invited seminar, and we took the opportunity to work on some collaborations as well.

Pro tip some supervisors do: schedule the seminar the day before the defence, to make sure the opponent is in the country on time.

@Davidmh Excellent suggestion --- and also exactly what happened with me.  I also had to turn up early enough to obtain the appropriate (unusual) formal academic garb for the defense.

In my department, we chose examiners based on their expertise. It will be up to the proposed examiner to decide whether the journey is worth it or not and decline the task if so desired. Being in Europe, we have had examiners from Australia, China, South Africa and Brazil as well as from north America and closer. Distance has not been an issue when selecting candidates for the job, we have simply looked for persons who can have good insight and reputation.
One aspect, which is always present but not the primary reason for choices is also if they can be future connections for the faculty. Any examiner has to be free from conflicts of interest so for the most part they are new to the collaborative sphere of the faculty members but if they are of interest to widen the sphere, this is seen as a positive.
There have been a few issues that have emerged and that concerns long-distance travel problems. If we chose someone from Europe (being in Europe) a cancelled or missed flight constitutes a small problem since there most often are numerous other flights to destinations within a day. This is usually not the case with very long distance travel and any problem can cause irreparable delays and possibly a cancelled defence. So if a long distance candidate is chosen, we make sure the person arrives at least a day early to the defence. Extra costs will also have to be carried by the research group within which the defending PhD student belongs. The latter is a local solution that probably cannot be translated to all other academic cultures. The bottom line is that there are "dangers" with long-distance visitors.

As @Alexandros mentioned in his comment,
in this day and age, teleconferencing is a very viable option.
To give a personal example:
During the course of my PhD studies,
two of the members of my PhD committee
had moved away from the city where my university was located.

One of my committee members took a relatively short 4 hour train ride
to be physically present for my PhD defense.
The other committee member was at least a 7 hour plane ride away. This member decided not to travel, but joined my PhD defense via Skype (for video) and a conference call (for audio).

Based on my experience observing my PhD classmates, it was not uncommon for external committee members to join via teleconference.


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Is September too late to start sending emails to prospective advisors for PhD in the US?
I am planning to send emails to potential Ph.D. supervisors in my area of research at the start of September. I recently found out that most of my colleagues have already sent out these letters as early as July, and I am now worried that I waited too long. What are the negative consequences of a late email to a potential advisor? Is it possible they may have already committed to taking in another applicant by the time I have sent in my email?
Note: I am applying to Fall 2022 for a Ph.D. in Chemical engineering in the US. I am currently working as a research assistant in a lab in Asia, where I have been working since finishing my Masters Degree.

For what year? 2022?

Are you already admitted in a graduate program?  We need a lot more details.

Sorry for that, I am applying to Fall 2022 for a PhD in Chemical engineering in the US. I am currently working as a research assistant in a lab in Asia, where I have been working since finishing my Masters.

Many departments are just getting ready now to prepare for the upcoming application season as I speak, as far as I am aware.

You are probably just in time now to apply to most US doctoral programs for Fall 2022.
But it isn't clear from your question whether you understand the process. In the US, the first contact is not normally with a dissertation advisor, but with an admissions committee. After admission you can start thinking about an advisor. The advisor, in most programs, doesn't admit you to the program and may or may not fund you. Departmental funding is very common.
Here is a (dated) description of the process in the US.
Advisors are normally chosen after comprehensive exams and by mutual consent. It also gives you a chance to meet and, perhaps, work with a potential advisor before approaching them.

Let me add perspective as an undergrad on why we contact potential PhD supervisors before admission. We usually make a list of advisors whose work aligns with our interests and email them expressing our interest. This is primarily to find out if they will actually be taking PhD students that year, find out more about their work and their lab environment. It would be a lot of resources wasted if we apply to the program and then find out that the advisor I am interested in working with is not taking students, or is not currently working in my research area (or turns out to be an a-hole).

Modern advice is to email a prospective advisor before applying in my area of STEM at least.

@AzorAhai-him-, for this OP, yes, since they have a masters. But not for someone with only a BS. The linked page includes that sort of information.

@Buffy ? No I would absolutely tell an applicant with a bachelor's to email prospective advisors.

@AzorAhai-him-, and I would tell them to file a proper application and get back to me later if they are accepted. But I would spend zero effort at that moment in considering them as an advisee for research. There are too many things that must occur before it becomes feasible.

@Buffy Well I know you're retired, but it is common advice to chat with a potential supervisor before applying nowadays. Of course, it's your prerogative to ignore them, but I don't think it's good advice to say not to email when their peers may be (esp. as an int'l student). Also I don't think you can say "normally chosen after comprehensive exams," I actually don't know of a program where that's a rule in my areas.

Agree with @justauser.. However, do not commit yourself to a particular supervisor before you get there.. Get your admission, go there, study for a year, and then finalise your advisor(s) and your committee.. Also, it is your Ph.D. committee, so be bold and choose committee members who suit you -- No need to blindly follow your supervisor's suggestions on this.
Before I went to my uni, I badly wanted to work with Prof A... But after I attended that university for a few months, I realised that the temperament of Prof A did not suit me at all.. Thank God that I didn't commit myself to Prof A before I got there.

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Effects of having a few publications in predatory journals in the beginning of my research journey?
The question might feel a little common out here, but allow me to explain more.
I am a Junior Year CS Student and in my early days of getting involved in publishing conference papers, research articles in journals led me to certain journals which apparently fell under the Beal's list of Predatory Journals.
My question is How does a publication in such journals affect my profile in two domains:
1. Academia - Where all professors are highly educated and experienced and may/may not know about such journals. I would love to hear from anyone from the academia how do you treat such a candidate, whose early experience has been publishing in Predatory Journals? Does this affect my prospects of Further Studies such as MS/PhD?
I have transitioned from that phase and have a paper in progress worthy of publication in an IEEE Conference. My prior publications belong to IJRASET, IJSER - both apparently falling under Beal's List of Predatory Journals.
2. Industry: Assuming I switch from Academia to Industry and have mentioned publications from these predatory journals on my Resume/CV, How does the Industry perceive this and whether it affect my prospects of bagging an offer from them?
Looking forward to a healthy discussion, worthy suggestions and insights from the users will be highly appreciated and helpful!

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/38538/68109

Have you already published in such journals or only considering it?

@Buffy, Hey there, I have one paper in IJRASET already published and was considering to publish one in IJSER,(The preprint being almost ready).

Why do you knowingly want to publish in a predatory journal again?

That's a great question and the reason is simple for me, being a Junior, I do not match with cutting edge research pedagogies but that does not mean that the research I do is subminimal, it is just not to the mark to be publish worthy in State of the art journals say CVPR, which is highly revered upon by budding researchers. As someone who devotes time to do research that he is capable of, I do feel the urge to get my work out, without bothering much about the background of the journal(this is the old me.) Hence, I might knowingly want to publish in such journals...

There's a difference between a low tier venue and a predatory venue. Can't you try publishing in the former instead? In research contexts, publishing in a predatory venue is worse than not publishing at all or just uploading a preprint on arXiv.

@aryashah2k No. Bad. Stop. You don't have to publish in Q1 in order not to publish in predatory journals, and "I do feel the urge to get my work out" must be moderated by a great deal of reason. If you feel like you must share results ASAP, arXiv exists. Post on twitter, if you will - just do not approach academic publishing in a way that is comparable to Instagram thirst traps... Please. Even if it is salami slicing publishing, you'd be still far better off doing it in journals which have at least some dignity and integrity.

See e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/103770/68109

In fact, assuming your work is incremental but sound, you risk unnecessarily sullying it by associating it with a predatory venue, and would likely make any serious reader summarily disregard it.

@GoodDeeds, that indeed is kind of you for helping me out with your views and suggestions, I do agree when you said I could target legit but low level Journals or even an Arxiv preprint rather than just ruining the credibility of my work by falling into these "thirst traps". Thanks a lot for throwing light on this, grateful for that!

You don't have a say, anymore, over what you have done in the past, so, having published once in a predatory journal is not a concern. It is what it is. But you do have a say in what you do in the future.
I's recommend that you not publish in journals that many consider disreputable. The main reason is not that they publish for money, but that they will publish just about anything for money. They don't have the same standards of scientific review that reputable journals do. You don't want to get associated with disreputable practices or low-quality work.
You are early enough in your career to make a turn to the light side, so that you won't be judged much, or for long, for your early actions. But if you continue on that way, you are unlikely to prosper.
If your work is of such low quality that you can publish only on predatory journals that will be recognized. The solution isn't to publish again in such places, but to improve the work sufficiently (as necessary) to be published in reputable venues. Quantity doesn't trump quality in academic work.
But the fact that you are doing any research as a Junior in college is impressive. Don't dilute that by going to the dark side. The more you do that, the worse it will get.

This is really helpful, thanks a lot for this. A lot of points mentioned by you are actually super meaningful and something that I can always carry with me as far as I belong to this Industry.

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How hard is to get a post-doc in the area of HEP-Theory?
At the moment I'm a high school student, who is passionate about the High Energy Physics areas, especially Phenomenology, String Theory, QFT and so on. I would like to pursue a B.Sc. degree in Mathematical Physics in the future in my country (central European country with a lot of famous string theorists ;) ). After that I would like to move to the USA to get a PhD in the one of the areas show above, but I heard that getting a post-doc and then a permanent job is quite hard.
Is it true? Would I have better success if I wouldn't limit myself only to the US, but include here, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

At present, yes, the academic job market in most fields is very tight. But it is very hard to predict what it will be like 10 years from now.

Currently, yes, it is quite hard. Assuming you go on to get your PhD in some field of HEP theory, you'll graduate with a very specific skill set that qualifies you for maybe about 10 available postdoc positions in the entire world, of which perhaps 3 or 4 will be in the US. (Obviously these numbers vary by perhaps a factor of 2 year to year and from one specific subfield to another; take them only as rough estimates.) But there are typically hundreds of people applying to each of these positions, so in the absence of other information your chances of getting one are not good. If you do get a postdoc, then your chances of getting a tenure-track faculty job are lower by perhaps another order of magnitude.
That being said, high school is way too early to be planning your future based on the chances of getting a postdoc. In particular, the difficulty of getting a postdoc should not dissuade you from getting a PhD in high energy physics, if you decide that's what you want to do when you finish college. There are plenty of other things you can do with a PhD in physics, especially if you have supplementary skills like computer programming. And by the time you approach the end of graduate school, you'll have a better idea of whether you are more qualified for a postdoc than the average applicant.

I think https://sites.google.com/site/postdocrumor/ gives a better idea of how many jobs are available. It's a lot more than 10, although if one specializes in too unusual a corner of theory one might not be in the running for many of them. I think a lot of people are positioned to apply for more on the order of 100 of those jobs.

@MattReece exactly, I'm not claiming that there are only 10 postdocs in HEP theory available worldwide. I'm saying that an individual candidate will only be seriously considered for O(10) of them, and will be immediately dismissed from consideration from the others for not having the right skill set or experience. This is based on my experience and that of a few other people I've talked to.

In many respects any career in academia will be quite hard. Positions are very dependent on funding so there is often little choice in location and wages are often quite low compared to similarly skilled people in industry.
However, I wouldn't let these things put you off. If its what you enjoy and you are half decent there will be jobs out there. Also I wouldn't worry too much about post-docs at your stage. After 7-10 years of undergrad and PhD you might conclude you don't really enjoy HEP so much, you enjoy something else more, or even that you just aren't good enough - theory type subjects at high school/undergraduate/research level are all very different (my view is slightly biased here, I did a masters level QFT module and then realised it definitely wasn't for me).
I would focus on doing well at your undergrad studies and preferably getting some research experience, for example via summer placements. Work out want you enjoy. If you find something try and do a PhD in that. Then you can worry about post-docs.

The advice to "just get a PhD and then worry about where it will get you" strikes me as... unwise.

Maybe that was poorly worded. Obviously you should worry about what your going to do before you actually finish your PhD but I think worrying too much about where you want to go after before you even start is a bit pointless too. Many people I know changed their opinion possibly several times over the course of their PhD.

I admit that no matter what subject I'll study (so i.e. I'm interested in it) - I'll try to do my best at it. To fully understand it.

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Can't attend conference but would like to get copy of papers presented
There are a couple of papers to be presented at a upcoming conference that I will not be able to attend but that I am very interested in. It is my understanding that they will not be published after the conference. The field is History.
Is there an etiquette about how I could go about getting a copy of the papers or is it even appropriate for me to look for them? Should I contact the conference organisers or the authors?

This may depend on the field, and what the presenter intends to do with the results afterwards. I would definitely contact the presenter. (The conference organizers are far too busy with other stuff to do anything, even if they wanted to.) However, be prepared to be ignored.

Honest question: Why would someone present in a conference with no proceedings or work not being further published?

If the conference publishes a conference proceedings volume than you can buy a copy or get it through your library.  You might also request copies directly from the authors.
Other conferences don't publish conference proceedings and there may be no paper corresponding to a particular conference presentation.  You can contact the authors but don't be surprised if they tell you there is no paper.

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Should I learn to use LaTeX to write up a History Masters Thesis?
So I reviewed the "What are the advantages or disadvantages of using LaTeX for writing scientific publications?" question on this forum and am sitting on the fence at the moment whether or not to use LaTeX to write up my masters Thesis.
I get the feeling that it is best suited for Scientific work but my MLitt is in History. I have searched my university website about LaTeX and most results come back from the maths department.
I am a part-time research student so my thesis with be approx. 50,000 words. At the moment I am using Libreoffice (I'm a Linux user -Ubuntu distro) to write up each chapter as a separate document which I was going to bring into a master theses document. I am using Mendeley to manage all my footnotes and bibliography.
I'm going to be meeting my supervisor over the next couple of weeks and would like to discuss the matter with him as to if I should/can use LaTeX. I'm sure how familiarity or usage of LaTeX within the History department will impact on my decision but would also like to prepare my thesis in the best possible way.

Edit 10/04/14: After a meeting with my Supervisor it appear that the History department has no preference on software for writing the thesis. Only requirement is that final thesis before defence is printed in ring-bound cover and the (hopefully!) accepted thesis is a hardback bound copy. My last written piece to my supervisor was done in LaTeX, using Texmaker on Ubuntu then exported to pdf, and other than some tweaking we need to do to the citation styling he was quite happy with the output. His advise was to use whatever software I was comfortable with (although he had never heard of LaTeX).

I would be grateful for answers from people who have used LaTeX in the Humanities area so as to be best prepared for my own decision on whether or not I would like to use it.

(Edit 10/03/2014) Just based on some of the answers, especially in
  relation to the learning curve with LaTeX, here is some more info that
  may be useful. Probably about 95% of my thesis will be text but I
  shall also need to insert some images (maps and photos) and will
  probably be entering some tables with stats. As stated above I use
  Mendeley for my refernece manager and have read some blogs where this
  is compatible with LaTeX so I think I would continue to us it if I go
  the LaTeX route.

To be fair, how many of the authors of answers suggesting LaTeX have used a recent version of MS Word including its advanced bibliography and auto-numbering features, for more than a couple of weeks? As a LaTeX user, I only have a pale remembering of how it all worked with an older version of Word, but one would have to be proficient with both worlds to write a fair unbiased answer.

The biggest concern for you should be the references, footnotes and cross references, if you can do that seamlessly and painlessly while splitting the document in several pieces with whatever you are using (e.g. Libreoffice) then no need to switch. The second biggest concern is version control and file corruption, as long as you can handle this for your purposes again no need to switch. Switching is an investment (time and effort, it's free), it makes sense iff the ROI is positive.

One other thing to consider might be to use something like MultiMarkdown with its LaTeX exporting feature. You write more or less plain text, and then its postprocessor converts your text file into a LaTeX compatible file.

@Federico Well you still can't share word documents between computers without destroying the formatting, (rather inherent limitation of the WYSIWYG approach) the in every way worse typesetting in Word (Word's justified text..), the horrible math support (I don't enjoy clicking on buttons to create formulas) and the fact that correctly creating general formats in Word is horrible (people trying to imitate springer style in Word always look off), there really is no reason to consider Word for papers in my opinion (which journal accepts word docs anyhow?). But maybe that's just the engineer pov.

@Voo As a History student (appreciate you're coming from the engineer pov) the math support features won't be a deal-breaker on whether to use LaTeX but I appreciate your opinion with regard to the typesetting & formatting. Can you elaborate on why you think these features are worse in Libreoffice.

@gman Where to start? The kerning, justification algos(just tested in OO - still not perfect, but a whole lot better than the last time I tried in Word, good!), auto-hyphenation, it doesn't use hardcoded distances between headings and text but allows some variance for better textflow, etc. Or to take one more concrete example: In a well typeset document the whitespace between a dot that ends a sentence and one after say "i.e." should be different.

And one thing I just can't stress enough: If you send a latex document to a collaborator they will see exactly the same layout you do, while this is almost guaranteed to not be the case for either Word (there's a reason everybody says to only hand in final results in pdf and not doc form!). Basically if you collaborate on a word document, you're forced to do the final formatting and conversion to pdf on one PC and only one (and hoping to make some little change later on without having to fix the layout is everything but guaranteed). Not necessarily a problem, but something to keep in mind.

@Voo so have you used a recent version of Word for a significant amount of time? Which one? For how long? Not all your points sound convincing to me. What you list in your second message is what Confused would call "typographical OCD"; re "clicking on buttons to create formulas", I am sure there are hotkeys for everthing.

@Voo In general I hate formatting anything of any complexity in Word, and simple things can get very frustrating. However, I do have point out that in newer versions the math layout is vastly better and very usable. (OT for a history thesis, I know) It is no longer a weird embedded object. alt-= starts math markup, and you don't need to use the mouse at all if you don't want to. e.g type: \sum_\leftn=1\right^\inftyx^2 Things like matrices, equation arrays, etc are handled pretty well.  Definitely useable if you just need to quickly type up an equation.

@Federico I'll certainly concede that I haven't used Word much since high school (while ago) so I may be missing some parts, true. But you don't have to use a tool to judge the resulting layout of documents and even people without much typographical experience are generally able to distinguish a LaTeX document from a Word document by sight only (they may not be able to tell why one looks appreciably nicer though). I wouldn't call that "typographical OCD" but just "having standards".

@maybeWeCouldStealAVan Interesting, that didn't work (well?) in Office 2007 and since you could still use the equation editor box thingie in later versions I didn't even think of trying. Good to know when I have to correct some young cousins homework again.

If you don't do math in your text then the main benefit is that the source is pure text.  This allows you to use programmers tool chests including version control for backing up and that you can write programs that generate graphs that you can \include).  For small tasks the learning curve is most likely too steep, but for a really large written essay it is big enough to pay off.  Also the disconnection between what you type and how it ends up looking mean that you tend to focus on the writing and not on how it ends up looking while you write.

Git is not an argument to use LaTeX. I am writing a PhD in the humanities and I use git with odt2txt implemented to keep my odt files in version control.

Don't loose time with LaTeX. Trust me, LO and mendeley work fine. They are not as great as M$ Word, but they do the job. And to all the WYSIWYG haters: when you are writing, you only want to focus on the text and not on stuff like \emph{something important}. You also do not want to have to compile every two minutes. Moreover, losing the track changes option where your promoter can manually change things, saves so much time! Definitely, I moved away from LaTeX for writing in the humanities and I only go back when I have to impress someone. I use a LO plugin to convert to LaTeX if needed.

The “outline” tools in ms-word are great for organizing your content, the spell checker and grammar checker in word can also come in useful.    Learn how style sheets work in word, and don’t do any formatting by hand.   Most word users, blogs, and books will teach you the wrong way to use word, as they only know how to produce 1 page letters, I think this is the main reason word is so hated for long documents.

We are missing some options. How bout InDesign? I've been trying to learn that lately.  Math is great and easy in Word now btw. And you can set these autocorrects so that when you type certain things they automatically change(Ex. I have mine setup so I can type 'eps' and it will change to an epsilon symbol immediately). If you do use LaTeX I would really recommend ShareLatex.com because of the split screen, collaborating, extra options, backing up, access anywhere, & ESPECIALLY because everytime you make a change it keeps a copy of the pre-change document.

So I downloaded TexMaker and some thesis templates and I going to do some research on how suitable this option is for me. I'll have plenty of free time over this weekend to play around with LaTeX as it's our national holiday (St. Patricks Day) in Ireland and am off for a few days. This way when I meet my supervisor I'll have some practical use of the software under my belt.

@don.joey Your workflow with git and odt2txt seems to work only partially. How can you revert changes or merge two versions, for instance? I am afraid you'll need a txt2odt that replicates your formatting for that.

@FedericoPoloni To be honest, I've never had to merge or revert. Reverting I would do by simply checking out an older commit, copying the odt file, and then moving back to the latest commit, to paste it. When writing, I am not sure you really want to merge a lot (you want to know what you are copying in detail anyway). That said, you have a point that not everything is possible in the workflow I proposed.

@don.joey ok, no problem, just wanted to check if I was missing some important detail from your description. Still, I agree with what you suggest, that sounds like a good backup/versioning practice. You're right that merging is not that important in a thesis project.

So I met with my supervisor today and he had no idea was LaTeX was, but was happy with me to use whatever I was comfortable with as long as I could get a pdf to him. He was happy with the format of the LaTeX pdf I had sent him for review and said the department does not have a definitive template as it would probably have all the academics up in arms about what should be in it! So looks like it will be LaTeX.

Use LaTeX. Why? Because is beautiful:
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typography-done-in-tex-friends

I'm sure how familiarity or usage of LaTeX within the History department will impact on my decision but would also like to prepare my thesis in the best possible way.

I would say that it should impact your decision strongly. You should prefer a tool that is used by your colleagues and supervisor to one that is slightly better intrinsically. They are the people who know what you need to do, and how to accomplish it with the tools they know.
I personally prefer LaTeX to LibreOffice, but I would guess that the combination of LibreOffice and Mendeley have all the features you need. (One in particular that I'm going to call out is change-tracking. Enable it as soon as you start, or you'll wish you had before long.) But the advantage of knowing your tool and having colleagues who know your tool outweigh most of LaTeX's advantages.

I didn't know about the change tracking, was going to use comments. Just enabled it and have being doing some writing and its great. Thanks for the tip.

One of the biggest problems with word is that when putting the finishing touches to the document (i.e. formatting everything) you really can work on one and only one computer. It's basically impossible to keep the exact same formatting when sending word docs from one PC to another (and don't even think about mixing versions). That's a pretty big downside in my opinion, ignoring all the other problems with word (Word 2010 still can't justify text reasonably, no idea if they got that one fixed in the newer versions).

I recently made the mistake of writing a novel with each chapter as a separate document in LibreOffice. When I needed to combine them all into a single document, it wasn't pleasant. So that might be a consideration, depending on how many chapters your thesis has. As Imi mentioned, LaTeX definitely has better support for combining documents.
You might be interested in LyX. It's a word processor that uses LaTeX as a backend. You can get almost all of the abilities of LaTeX, but the learning curve is a lot shallower since it has more of the standard word processor features. It's a big help in following shane's advice not to get caught up in the minutiae of LaTeX. I use it for linguistics, where it seems to be pretty widely known. (Linguists have some of the same typesetting challenges as the math people). Newer versions have change tracking, as landroni mentions in the comments. Also, if you do decide to use source control, LyX can help you manage it, although it might take some coercion to set it up. LyX uses its own file format by default, but you can export to LaTeX.
As shane also mentioned, there are tools to convert LaTeX into other formats. Pandoc can even convert LaTeX into Word or Open Office format. Both LyX and Pandoc are available for Ubuntu.
So what I would probably do in your situation is write in LyX or LaTeX, then use Pandoc to export that to docx or odt for your advisor. You can read your advisor's comments in Word, make changes to your original, and export again. It sounds convoluted, but I do think you'll gain a lot in flexibility and tool support over using LibreOffice.
EDIT: Yes, you probably will have to put in some extra work to make the docx files generated by Pandoc usable. On the other hand, LyX and LaTeX can also save you a ton of time that you might have used struggling with LibreOffice's primitive support for pictures and formatting. (And special characters, not relevant to the OP's case, but very much so if you're doing linguistics or math.) If you're not sure, try testing your workflow on a small document: write something in LyX or LaTeX, convert it to odt or docx with Pandoc, and do the work to get the odt or docx file into a usable state. See whether you think it's worth it for what you're doing.

LyX DOES have Change Tracking. It works well as far as I hear.

For info, exporting from LyX to ODT via pandoc is more of a hassle than it may seem at first. If you need ODT as the final output, for a novice you may as well stay with Word-like clones.

@landroni: You're right, I was looking at outdated docs. Sorry about that.

Additional benefits of LyX: (1) easy (gui) import/export for .rtf, which would make it easy if you need to switch between programs for any reason (2) deals with auxiliary files cleanly and automatically, (3) easy BibTeX, especially if you're doing in-line citations that are author (year), (author year), athor et al (year), or whatever crazy thing you want (though historians probably favor footnotes?).

For some people, the crucial features of LaTeX are portability and permanence. With LibreOffice and (especially) MS Word, you are essentially at the mercy of whether developers decide to make all future versions backwards compatible (I have a couple of papers I wrote in grad school that are effectively inaccessible until I find a machine with MS Word 98 for Windows). In contrast, with LaTeX, the source file is just plain ASCII text, so it will be forever readable and editable in any computer, regardless of operating system.
If your advisor is not LaTeX-friendly, you can have a look at this other question, the answers to which provide a number of tools to strip all LaTeX tags from a file, so you are left only with the plain text. From my experience, that is an acceptable compromise to most people.

It's not entirely true. Even with LaTeX, packages change and you may not be able to reproduce the exact same result with a later version. You can always recover the text, that's true, but the same holds for Word: a .docx is just a zipped xml file.

@FedericoPoloni: With TeX archiving your whole environment (including all used packages) and using exactly that two decades later is easy while the same will be extremely hard with *Office.

@MartinSchröder Still not convinced. How do you archive your whole environment? Is it easier than installing an older version of Word in, say, a virtual machine?

@FedericoPoloni: With TeX you can easily archive all input files (i.e. the complete TeX distribution). And since it's open source and portable and stable, you can archive the sources for the binaries (and if you want the operating system (Linux, BSD)) and recreate them later. It's still much simpler than with closed source software like Microsoft Office or complex free software like LibreOffice.

To answer the question with a clear yes or no would be to oversimplify things. LaTeX is used for much more than just mathematics so I would not hesitate from that point of view. Learning something new is always useful so again, no argument there. What you need to ask yourself is if you are interested in learning LaTeX. this may depend on whether or not there are others using it in your neighbourhood. Being completely alone is tougher than having some other persons with whom to work when learning. Another question is to what extent LaTeX is used in your field for journal publications etc. So, try to assess how much use you will have in your field from learning it. Since LaTeX can be used for writing papers, books and reports as well as for making presentations (a la PowerPoint) and posters, it includes bibliography handling, it is a very useful tool for any field for scientific writing.

Very valid points Peter. I would be interested in learning something new but as a part-time student it can be hard to get time to interact with groups that may be learning. That's something I'll have to check out in my university if there is a LaTeX group.

@gman TeX.StackExchange and the LaTeX section in Wikibooks are both excellent resources.

It is quite likely your advisor has never heard of LaTeX, so don't expect too much from discussing it with him.
LaTeX has a fairly steep learning curve but it is good for working with references and great for working with math.  Since you don't need the latter at all, it may not be worth the effort for you.

Just for grins, go up to your advisor and say, "I'd like to write my thesis in Lahtech with PDF output." If he gets that deer-in-the-headlights look (very likely), you'll know you're out of luck. On the other hand, he may only want a hardcopy of the thing, in which case you may be free to use whatever you want. Most likely, you will be required to supply at least the finished result, if not the original source, in some specific format that your department uses. That may relieve you of the choice... Certainly play with LaTeX ahead of time, but don't invest a lot in it yet.

Yes...unless...
You will have references, many of them.  Managing references is a complete pain without the facilities provided by LaTeX or one of the often  expensive tools for word (there may be something free for libreoffice, and it may be good).  It may be a little easier with the citation styles typical in humanities/social sciences than it is for physical sciences, but still not easy.  So unless you have access to a good tool for managing your citations in your wordprocessor, just go for LaTeX.
Cross-referencing between sections and to figures/tables is also much easier.
You may find a tool like LyX suits you - or you may like the freedom of just getting on with it in a decent text editor.  This list may be helpful in that regard.
I can thoroughly support the view expressed above that you should start on a smaller document.
When it comes to commenting by your adviser, such as for a dissertation, pdf comments on your work, or handwritten comments are fine, but for collaborative writing of a paper with non-LaTeX users things become a lot harder unless you're in charge.
Using LaTeX to Write a PhD Thesis by Nicola Talbot is well worth a read, it's from a CS background but don't let that put you off, it's clear and well written.
On the other hand, if you start writing in a word processor, you will end up sticking with it, which is fine, plenty of theses get written that way, but nobody ever finds the time to switch from one system to the other.
Also note that if you use libreoffice and you work with people who use MSoffice (or even for different versions of MSoffice) change tracking is rather fragile.

TO update this ten years on: There are now a good many free, and good, reference management tools for Word

I would say it is worth your time and effort, not that the effort required would be great, as other have said first off talk to your professor and ask if he has any opinions on the matter.
I wrote the paper for my B.Sc. in LaTeX and to do so I learned it mostly by myself, with some help from some post grads but those were for issues you will not hit when writing an historical paper, in the spare moments between actually writing the code my paper was about.
Like yourself my paper didn't involve large swathes of mathematical formulas with lots of Greek letters but it did require almost Swiss-like precision, and I felt that with my limited command of Word I would be better of just starting from scratch with LaTex and knowing exactly the cause effect relationship between my actions and the document's presentation (I was and still am weary of losing all my formatting in Word due to a slip of the mouse).
Some of LaTex's strongest points in its favor is the ease with which it can handle citations for you as well as index your pictures, give them captions and etc.
The fact that you use Linux already is also a factor as setting up a good LaTex editor on Ubuntu seems much easier than on Windows to me, I highly recommend Kile as the editor it's not WYSIWG but it will keep you from making syntax errors due to the large amount of LaTeX snippets available and it also simplifies the "make a pdf from all this mark-up" process.
Another point in LaTex's favour is the very friendly and responsive community at the Tex exchange
I have to be honest that it was very easy for me to pick up LaTeX because I already had experience with HTML which is also a mark-up language, but in my opinion if you understand what happens when you bold a word on a Stack Exchange site (see the * * and their effect) then you can understand LaTeX.

Yes I also have a little experience of using html as have done some website work in my spare time. Good to know this would help with LaTeX.

@gman It will help tremendously.

All mentioned pros and cons are valid, but... LaTeX is written by smart people for use by smart people. Word is written by smart people for everyone, including dumb people. Take your pick. For me, 5 dissertation years spent with LaTeX as an everyday companion was thoroughly enjoyable.

If you're considering other software besides just Microsoft Word or LaTeX, then I would put a vote in for Scrivener, which I switched to halfway through my Masters (submitted in December).
Scrivener is a bit LaTeXy in that it separates the composition from the formatting, with the latter done as a single rendering process at the end, but it also allows a high degree of style and formatting while you write, however this should be viewed as a 'preview' rather than actual formatting.
It was originally designed for novelists, but there's a growing community of academics using it going on the posts in the forums. I found it great for handling things like numbered lists such as figures and tables, and, particularly important for linguistics, example sentences.
The basic workflow is that you compose in Scrivener and then 'compile', which will format the entire document and apply formatting in a single hit, then you can either print directly, or if you need further post-processing (like Endnote), then output as a useful format for you and take it to whatever program you need. My workflow was to go into Word and run Endnote, plus a couple of other small tasks, and then print. For a 50,000 word document, my time spent in Word was about 3 hours (including proofing). Scrivener also supports compiling to a LaTeX document using MultiMarkDown syntax.
Anyway, some dot-points:
Pros:

Great hierarchical sectioning support, in fact this is key to its organisational structure
Secure in terms of text data, which is stored in individual text files (one for each section/subsection)
Much easier to learn than LaTeX
Support available from the forum from the developers, and very quick response from them (I once suggested a feature and it was rolled-out two days later)
Good support for multiple independent numbered lists (tables, figures)
Good support for cross-referencing to chapters and sections
You can output to .doc or .rtf and have track changes, but see last Con.

Cons:

Not free; $40 (PC) $45 (Mac) once-off purchase (free 30-day trial, free for Linux)
Originally designed for Mac, and other operating systems are still catching up on features. There is a Linux release but it is in beta (however the features that are missing only affect the compile process, so you could conceivably write in Ubuntu and compile on Mac)
No support for Endnote apart from mapping ctrl/cmd-Y to open Endnote, that is, scrivener does not insert formatted bibliographic citations either in-line or as endnotes (but if you work using raw field codes, then pass them through to Word, it works great)
Formatting presets in Scrivener do not map to 'styles' in Word (although again, there are workarounds)
Not intended to be a complete typesetting program, but a writing program. You should expect to have to post-process your document in another program.
Importing from Word is not very good. This will affect what you do with track changes and supervisor's comments (you'd have to incorporate them yourself manually).

Sorry about the plug – I do not receive any kind of support from the makers of Scrivener; I just think it's the best writing software I've used, and since you're trying to weigh up the benefits and costs of switching to LaTeX, I definitely think you should consider it since it is compatible with LaTeX anyway, and is much easier to work in.

You should definitively learn LaTeX.
MS Word is slow, is instable, and the document is just, if you are not a guru at Word, ugly. You need a lot of expertise to control the blank spaces between words, to get a line break correct, to avoid orphan lines, etc., not to mention more advanced things related to type setting.
The ease to use of MS Word is not real ease. It just makes any secretary think he/she can use it. For a two page document this might be OK, but actually it requires a lot of experience to get a document right.
I don't agree that LaTeX has a steep learning curve. There are tools which make LaTeX pretty much WYSIWYG. Read the first two or three chapters of an introductory LaTeX book, install miktex and simatra PDF viewer on your windows, use EclipseTex for editing, it's pretty easy, and it does not required you to be a rocket scientist to type set documents that are nice to see.
You'll love LaTeX once you started using it. You'll wonder how it is ever possible to use Word any more.

Definitely no.
This may sound like a flippant response but it's actually grounded in experience and much thought.
I'm in a STEM discipline where LaTeX is considered by faculty to be the ONLY way to do word processing so I've had time to really formulate my viewpoint here.
Note: I use Word here but I assume LibreOffice is of the same quality/functionality.

Latex used to be better than Word in terms of controlling your document with precision and with things like formatting, bibliographies, and equations. Now that word has evolved to it's current state there is no advantage to LaTeX unless, as someone has already mentioned, you are into kerning and typography-type stuff. You can easily adjust margins, bibliographies, styles, equations, etc in Word these days. It's just which you learned the idiosyncrasies of first and more thoroughly.
Word is easier and more universally accepted. Everyone knows what to do with a docx file. What would a older professor who may not be a tech person in a history dept know what to do with .tex, .cls, .bib, or .ttf files? If you wanted to get feedback you'd have to put it into pdf and then getting comments would be annoying as others have mentioned.
I just used LaTeX for the first time to write 2 papers in the past couple weeks. I used the ShareLatex site and a template from an academic journal in my area. Without ShareLatex I could not have done it in a timely fashion. It does automatic versioning the entire time(at least for the time I used it). So every single time you make a change it keeps a copy of the document before the change. You can share it with others as the name implies and it will function like Google Docs in this regard. You can specify which compiler you want to use and some other options. It also lets you upload any and all files you might have associated with your document including fonts, images, template class files, etc. The only issue is when fine tuning formatting things make sure you look at the pdf because the little preview display isn't as high fidelity.
Inserting figures can be annoying. Especially with various file types. I had to convert all my figures to jpeg's to avoid issues I had with png's. They don't always go where you put them. LaTeX puts them where ever it sees fit. Yes there are settings to try to force LaTeX to put them where you want instead of where it wants but do you really need to be having a fight of wills with your word processor???

Summary: There is just absolutely no reason I can see to use LaTeX for the average person who is not OCD about kerning, ligatures and pristine fonts. Yes, it's fun at first playing with all the options and features but after awhile you just yearn for the simplicity of Word. In past years before the current state of mainstream word processors maybe LaTeX had it's advantage but now I get better results using Word and it's equation editor and formatting tools than with LaTeX. If you don't have equations and scientific things to display, as I suspect you might not, I would just write it in Word. If you want to play around with LaTeX for the typography aspects then copy what you've written into a .tex which you can then experiment with the nitpicky font details and see that when it's all said and done... the difference in output may be imperceptible.

I upvoted this to cancel the downvote, not because I think it's the right answer, but because it's a reasonable contribution to the OPs quandary.

Didn't downvote but this seems slightly biased. Some of the TeX problems you mention sound more like a lack of experience.

It is biased. Why wouldn't I be biased against what I consider to be an inferior approach? Your comment even exemplifies the whole point of why I'm anti-LaTeX. Why should one learn what is a programming language to do something he/she already knows how to do in Word? The only advantage I experienced was being able to easily change the spacing around mathematical operators in my equations. As the OP is a history major I don't think he/she will be taking advantage of that ability much. In the past LaTeX was useful for the average writer but now it's just a relic from the pre-decent-Word era.

This may sound like a flippant response but it's actually grounded in experience [...] I just used LaTeX for the first time to write 2 papers in the past couple weeks. That's the problem. LaTeX has a steep learning curve, no one here is denying it. You can't expect to use it for two weeks and know enough about it to brand it as useless. How long have you been using Word in comparison?

Word has actually been quite powerful when it comes to doing things that academic papers require for quite some time (I remember doing this stuff in Word 6.0 and it working very well). The problem is that those features actually have a bit of a learning curve, so much so that people don't use them.

In fairness I think it's good to the anti-LaTeX view as well. I have used Libreoffice to good effect to date and am comfortable using it. Like other answers, Confused I think, has highlighted some of the pitfalls I may encounter by switching. A the moment the learning curve would not be the deal breaker as I like learning tech as well.

To summarise the answer: "LaTeX is harder and the same things can be done in ___Office". This is only true for when you are stuck on the learning curve of LaTeX. But when you get more experience and you get to appreciate the power of user-contributed packages like pgfplots, tikz, siunitx, booktabs, longtable, as well as the various styles, fonts and bib packages ... you see what they can offer that no ___Office can! And after you immerse yourself in LaTeX for a while, you see that the typographical differences are not at all OCD but rather a greater appreciation for clear layout.

I'm really tempted to downvote this, but I won't. It is good to have different points of view, I'll say that. However, 2 weeks is next to no time to learn something like TeX/LaTeX. I've been using LaTeX since the late 90s, and I've only really learned much in the last few years, largely thanks to the tex.sx site.

I still have problems on my country to open a docx file... just saying.

Simply wrong. I use Word (when forced) and it still can't get simple things like section references right (they're regularly lost as the document evolves and the only warning you get is “Error! Reference source not found.” in your printout). Styles can be done in Word, but the capabilities are limited. Forget indexing, unless it's improved after Word 2007 (I haven't tried recently). 2. That depends on the discipline and location. (cont.)

Well, yes, LaTeX doesn't do version control, that's not its job. There's specialized software for that. Word's built-in support is nice until you reach its limits, which is soon (e.g. all changed reference targets appear as changes, all kinds of spurious formatting changes come up). 4. Inserting figures in Word? Yeech. I always have to fight it to get the figures not to overlap the text, and its built-in diagram editor tends to move bits around willy-nilly. LaTeX's figure placement isn't a panacea but it's easier to get not completely wrong.

Just in relation to points 2 & 4. 2. LaTeX can export to pdf which is how I currently send my work onto my supervisor and I get hand written comments back so I don't think that will effect my work flow. 4. I will probably have about 5 maps, less than 10 tables and at max about 10-15 images to insert so I think I shall be able to standardise all my content. My girlfriend is graphic/web designer so will get some guidance on formats there.

So, Word 2007 is roughly 7 years old. Yes, the features have improved! :)

To the rest of the pro-Texxers I didn't say LaTeX was useless. I come from an academic environment where we are extremely heavily pressured to use LaTeX for every little thing and I just don't see the reason for it. I make beautiful equations in Word, neat diagrams in GraphViz, insert said diagrams in Word, manage & insert citations in Word with a couple of clicks. I guess I think of Word as a GUI that probably hides a LaTeX system underneath(just how I think of it, probably not factual). Why go through the anti-usability of LaTeX when there's a great GUI unless you're doing something unusual?

The question I posed in an earlier comment has STILL not been answered, "Why should one learn what is a programming language to do something he/she already knows how to do in Word?" And when I say Word I mean a ____Office word processor released in 2010 or later since let's not go skewing the comparison (next let's comparing Windows 3.1 Vs Ubuntu 13.10   ;) ).

@Confused It's all well that MS Office's features are constantly improving, but I'm reluctant on spending my money on it every 2-3 years when LaTeX is free. Otherwise, very good answer.

@Confused, I'm glad to have your anti-LaTeX answer in order to balance out the pro-LaTeX answers above. As to your question, "Why should one learn what is a programming language to do something he/she already knows how to do in Word?" I began using LaTeX while taking Physics in a summer semester. We had to write lab reports twice a week. Naturally, I picked Word at first, mainly for speed. But my graphs and figures, which looked perfect on the screen, were almost illegible when printed (on a laser printer). So I buckled down, learned LaTeX, and swooned over the results. That's why.

YES... and why not use both!
The learning curve for using LaTeX (with a good template) is actually relatively small, and will save you time/headaches in a large document such as a thesis since the formatting is automatically taken care of, and probably looks much better too (especially equations). Just paste your text into a .tex template, and create a .bib file.
My process is to write the draft (unformatted text) in LibreOffice with each chapter as a separate document, referencing with tags only, and storing the figures in a separate folder. The reason is that I find it easier to think/edit in WYSIWYG. Once I am happy with the draft it takes minimal effort to transfer it to LaTeX: I just go through and create a .bib file from copy and paste EndNote entries whilst I am inserting reference tags.
The end result looks perfect and I have saved time, avoiding the formatting problems that plagued my MS word undergraduate thesis.

First, I am a mathematician.
I see no reason whatsoever to use LaTeX for humanities work. I think the best tool to write regular texts or books without formulas is LibreOffice.
I write my non-scientific (and even some mathematical) works in LibreOffice.
This is despite I have rather expert knowledge of LaTeX, I don't like to use it unless strictly necessary.
LibreOffice handles images and tables well. Just learn to use it.

I think using dynamic documents is the only way to ensure your work is reproducible. Latex is an important tool in my workflow that helps me achieve this aim, and I view it as a necessity. Word documents are simply not reproducible.
You can read about the issues with Word here, here, here and here.
If you adopt latex you should also use Pandoc, which I don't think anyone mentioned here. Pandoc allows you to convert a document to range of other document types with a simple line of code. I'm imagining the person who tries to cut and paste from the latex generated PDF into a Word document because that is what their advisor wants. Pandoc will make your life easier.
Scrivener is also another nice option that will allow you to write in markdown, it converts to latex on the backend and then converts the latex to pdf. Scrivener is also a great companion for long-form writing.
To the person that said:  "You should prefer a tool that is used by your colleagues and supervisor to one that is slightly better intrinsically." I'd argue that you should use the tool that gets the work done most efficiently for you. Latex is going to save you so much time in terms of formatting the document. So, please explain to me why anyone expect that I use a tool that's going to require me to needlessly spend hours out of my productive schedule to tweak the formatting of the document over and over again? Your whole statement is anti-progress.

To be fair, I have spend hours tweaking the formatting of a document in LaTeX, too.

A contrary view, perhaps, but: NO.
If you take the time to learn how to use word properly - understanding styles, using a good reference manager with a Word plugin, and so forth, then it is capable (but keep many backups).
LaTeX is a better tool, but there's a significant amount of time and effort needed to learn it. In STEM fields this is often a good investment for one's future career, but in history you are unlikely to be working with other people who use LaTeX, so future manuscripts etc are likely to have to be in Word to fit with co-authors.
Spend your time using your long-term tool (Word) well - which is not how most people use it - rather than learning a tool that you will be the only user of in future collaborations.


text:
Is it common for the head of a department to be able to reduce a tenured professor's salary to 0?
I'm referring to an incident at Purdue. The head of the Purdue math department tried to pressure an older tenured faculty member to leave by setting his salary to 0 (among other things).
I actually don't understand how she had the authority to do this. Do department heads typically have control over everyone's salary? Why was he not allowed due process? If you are no longer performing your job, who is responsible for "firing" you?

I think you are mischaracterizing this, especially the claim that there was no "due process". You don't actually know that to be the case. Untenured faculty are possibly "at will" in some places, but protected by normal employment laws in others. Tenured faculty have more protections.

p. 25 of https://web.math.princeton.edu/~cf/DonnellyAppendices.pdf suggests that the professor's salary was cut "by refusing to assign him teaching and then imposing “buyouts” for the teaching that has not been assigned", which, if accurate, sounds like an unreasonable policy.

Ultimately, yes, there are procedures for terminating employment. We have one side, but not the other here…

Something that really surprises me is that the AMS accepted to publish such a letter, without the full picture.

This sounds to me more like a law question, about whether the professor in question has a case for constructive dismissal.

@MassimoOrtolano: The AMS asked the department for a response, and got empty words in return (see the letter just after Fefferman's). Quite possibly the administration is silent for legal reasons, but at this point there is no good reason not to publish the first letter (otherwise, every story could be spiked by one side remaining silent).

FWIW, there is a slightly more substantial discussion on r/math.

Although the documents I’ve seen are quite damning and seem to support extremely poor performance and at best an inattention to the details of specific requests, two exceptions stood out for me: (1) I think the request to prepare full written lecture notes with definitions, examples, and more is unreasonable. The detail asked for seems almost like asking him to write a textbook for the course. He is essentially being asked to prepare lecture notes that would be suitable for binding and distribution by the student bookstore for ALL students taking this specific course at Purdue. (continued)

(2) Given that he's having so much trouble teaching Math 262, then why was he being required to teach ONLY Math 262? This seems to undermine the administration's arguments about his teaching of Math 262 and strongly suggests it's in response to to his current lackluster research and teaching, a response that could be argued as undermining the department's commitment to teaching.

Very clearly, this is not common practice or we would all know such cases.
It is, then, an apparently exceptional case to which a university has applied exceptional measures. I don't know any of the specifics of the case, nor do I know any of the protagonists, and so have no opinion on the matter. At the same time, the concept of tenure leads to situations -- known to many who've been in academia for long enough -- where someone just doesn't care any more about doing a good job, and departments then have to think about what to do in such situations. These are personnel matters, lawyers are involved, privacy rights need to be considered, and as a consequence one almost never gets to hear the university's side of the story: What you hear about is the affected professor's side of the story, and that of colleagues who may or may not actually know the truth of the matter. I suspect that in the current case, nobody other than the professor and the department head know whether the person's salary really was set to zero: The professor can claim that it was, the department will not be able to comment on the matter, and everyone else should consider whether what they think they know is the actual truth. There is a lot of material in this file, but I don't think we should assume that everything in there is factually correct.
Fundamentally, though, the file linked to points out the sorts of problems departments face. Someone hasn't done research in a few years (no publications, and colleagues will generally know whether the person really did or didn't do anything research-related), hardly any service contributions to the department, and giving lectures that students loathe and (more importantly) that do not teach them what the general public that pays for the university needs them to learn. Just like any other employer, universities cannot tolerate this for very long. At least morally, while tenure is supposed to protect faculty from recriminations about speaking out, it isn't meant to protect faculty from just not doing their job; yet, tenure is something that makes it very difficult for universities to fire someone who isn't doing their job, and so they have to resort to uncommon measures like those mentioned in this case.
So no, this isn't common. Whether it's legal I don't know; whether it's actually true I also don't know. But situations like the one that appears to be at the heart of this case do happen on a regular basis, and universities have to come up with solutions.

There is another part of the question worth answering separately:

I actually don't understand how she had the authority to do this. Do department heads typically have control over everyone's salary? Why was he not allowed due process? If you are no longer performing your job, who is responsible for "firing" you?

First, the salary wasn't set to zero (if one were to believe the linked to files): The person was placed on unpaid leave. Second, the professor was afforded due process: The letters by the department head show that for a long time, he was placed on what is typically referred to as a "remediation process" whereby you are assisted in performing a number of steps that get you back into good standing (in his case, writing a syllabus, writing lecture notes, and writing a research plan); he just chose not to do it, or at least not to take it seriously. As for who is in charge of firing a professor: There is a process, called "post-tenure review", that is used to revoke someone's tenure; it usually takes several years and the university apparently did not want to take that long.

I doubt that "tapering off" research as one approaches retirement would be grounds for dismissal. More likely to get a bigger teaching/advising requirement.

@Buffy True, but what should a department do when someone is "tapering off" in research and at the same time also refuses to (or is unable to) be a reasonable teacher? The case that prompted the question isn't about someone's waning research productivity. Take a look at the documents linked to, it's actually quite an interesting (and rather sad) read.

Re: Unknowability of whether the person's salary was set to zero -- the linked personnel file has a memo from the department head (Appendix 15, July 5, 2022) that says, "In short, you are not teaching in 2022/2023... Thus we cannot pay you. Starting with the Fall semester, your pay will be reduced to zero and you will be placed on unpaid personal leave." Unless we think that file was likely a forgery? But the response by the dean in the AMS doesn't suggest such a thing ("The College of Science regrets that Professor Fefferman chose to release incomplete confidential personnel files").

@DanielR.Collins Being placed on unpaid leave and having your salary set to zero are not the same thing. No university is going to pay someone for long, tenured or not, if they're not doing any teaching, not doing any research, and not doing any admin or service. If the faculty member were to resume teaching at an acceptable quality, presumably their pay would be restored to their former salary.

@WolfgangBangerth Thank you for your answer. Your last paragraph basically explains that the premise the original question is wrong. The professors was given due process, but refused to work with his department to improve his course.

No, it isn't "common" for a department head in the US to have such power, but it might be possible for them to (at least) start termination procedures for some faculty, especially untenured faculty. Starting the process for tenured faculty is probably also possible, though the process would be different. (I can't speak for other countries.)
I don't think that the faculty as a whole at any reputable US university would stand for a system in which anyone's salary could be adjusted downward by fiat. The revolt would echo across the nation, if not the world.
But, I think that claims are being made, not all accurate, and possibly not all honest.

For various reasons, a person could become incompetent to continue teaching; stroke, severe concussion.... A prominent person in my field was hit by a bus. He survived but was badly impaired. That would require some process to remove them from teaching to avoid damaging both the students and the university. Buyouts might be part of the offerings, but those would normally require acceptance. The level of buyout might be negotiated. "How about one year's salary in exchange for giving up tenure?" "Two years?".

Downward adjustments of salary are fairly common at my school (week, more accurately, one division of my school) for tenured profs who lose grant support.

We can't know the full story from outside, but one possible explanation for the documentation that is publicly available (linked above) is not exactly that the professor has become incompetent to teach through a diminished capacity, but instead it might be that increased technological expectations have left this professor behind. The professor seems to be very knowledgable about mathematics and very naive about technology. Whether it is fair or reasonable for universities to expect all tenured faculty to keep up with technology is way over my head.

@ScottSeidman, I would guess and hope that such things are spelled out in contracts.

@gnometorule I read all of it. I'm not convinced that any of it can be taken at face value. The student complaints seem serious to me, but I don't know the real story.

Is it common for the head of a department to be able to reduce a tenured professors' salary to 0?

No, department heads do not have that kind of discretion anywhere as far as I know.

I actually don't understand how she had the authority to do this.

Charles Fefferman, the writer of the letter you are citing from, does not allege that she/he did, and it does not appear that this is what happened exactly. Fefferman said that the department head threatened to reduce the professor's salary to zero, and that the professor's salary is currently set at zero.
To understand better what actually happened, I looked at the documents on Fefferman's website. Appendix 15 in the appendices document is the letter in which the professor was informed that he was being put on Unpaid Personal Leave status. (The wording of the letter and the context of the previous letters makes it clear that this is what was meant by the references to "setting the salary to zero".) Importantly, this letter was signed by both the department head and a higher university official with the title "Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs College of Science". Thus, the authority for the decision to place the professor on leave came from outside the department.
(This resonates with my own experience as department chair — a position with comparable but typically slightly less authority than a department head — some years ago. I would often write letters informing people of various things, but whenever I lacked the authority to make a decision, there would need to be a separate letter bearing the signature of the person above me in the hierarchy who had the relevant authority, otherwise it would be meaningless for me to state that decision as fact. Sometimes the letter from the higher administrator would take a while to prepare, so the initial letter from me would say something like "I would like to inform you that I am recommending to the Dean that ...".)
What about the "threatening to set the salary to zero" part? That part is in Appendix 10, which is also a letter from the same two people. Anyway, even if the department head made such a threat all by herself/himself, it is conceivable that a department head would make a threat to do something that is not strictly within their authority to carry out. Possibly making such a threat could simply be shorthand for "I will ask the university to reduce your salary to zero, and I have confidence that they will follow my advice", or it might be empty bravado.

Do department heads typically have control over everyone's salary?

Department heads in some universities have some control of faculty salaries. For example, I have heard of places where the department head makes decisions about how much of a salary increase different faculty members get each year. But I don't know of any place where the head can decide to reduce a faculty member's salary to zero unless that is done as the result of an administrative process where allegations of misconduct or incompetence can be heard and defended against. (Also, as I mentioned above, the phrase "setting the salary to zero" is informal and inaccurate — technically the only way someone's salary would be set to zero is if they are placed on unpaid leave. If they continue doing any work, their salary obviously cannot be set to less than minimum wage.)

Why was he not allowed due process?

We don't know if he was or wasn't. If you look at the files, you'll see that there was some process that went on for quite a while, with various letters, meetings and so on. So I think there is a controversy about this. Possibly it's not black and white, and what one person interprets as "due" process someone else will think was corrupt and one-sided.

If you are no longer performing your job, who is responsible for "firing" you?

All US universities have a process for firing or disciplining faculty members who are accused of violating university policy. The decision to literally fire a tenured faculty member (what in administration-speak is sometimes referred to as "separation", at least on my campus), is usually reserved to the university president or chancellor since it is obviously the ultimate sanction. The authority to reduce someone's salary or place them on unpaid leave for some specified duration may be delegated to a slightly lower-ranking administrator, but I don't think typically it's left to the department head.

No, it is pretty uncommon for universities to try to take any kind of disciplinary action against tenured faculty, which is why people talk almost every time anything like this happens.
However I get the impression that the chair and the university's administration are fully in agreement. The chair didn't do anything on her own; rather, the university did it, and she was its messenger.
I've never heard before of a university telling a tenured professor that (paraphrasibg) they're cutting his pay because they can't schedule him to teach because he's a bad lecturer. This sounds novel and even innovative to me.
I would like to share a couple of illustrative stories from other math departments.
It is unfortunately more common for chairs (or assistant chairs or whoever is doing the scheduling) to intentionally schedule (tenured) faculty they personally dislike to teach at inconvenient times. E.g. I knew someone who was scheduled to teach late at night, and then early the next morning, just to mess with him, every time. I don't know whether he officially complained, but it stopped when someone else started doing the scheduling.
A newly elected chair of onedepartment sent a memo (on paper; this was before e-mail) to everyone, along the lines of "URGENT: provide your research plans for the next year by 11 a.m." Most people had tenure, discussed the request, and collectively decided to ignore him. He soon sent out a second memo, "I'm firing you all for insubordination". At this point, the administration asked him to stop making the department a laughing stock. No one was fired, of course. He only remained the chair until the end of the semester, and stopped being friends with many people. My point is, chairs lack the authority to say such things without the university backing this action.

"t is unfortunately more common for chairs (or assistant chairs or whoever is doing the scheduling) to intentionally schedule (tenured) faculty they personally dislike to teach at inconvenient times." -- That's even been used in literature: In the excellent book "Stoner" by John Williams, the protagonist is a professor who gets in trouble with his department head, and subsequently teaches early morning and late evening classes for the next many years.

I knew someone who was in this exact situation.  He simply put up with it because he knew that his "tormentor" would rotate out of his position of power soon.

I don’t know about that being common but it is absolutely possible to reduce salary in many systems, but the university will need to document why and in the context of that universitiy’s rules. The situations can vary widely and vary further if the faculty is unionized or not. Also relevant is whether this is in a public university (where broad state laws may apply to all state employees, such as forbidding unions). This is in contrast to private schools, though some things such as ‘right-to-work’ laws may apply to all workplaces in a state.  The university will have stated levels of performance (such as minimum outside salary to be replaced by grants/contracts,also such conditions may be in individual faculty member contracts) and probably has stated what can happen if not met. In some systems if salary reduces below 100% tenure is automatically lost.  This last is questionable but not challenged. In my opinion tenure is nothing but the requirement for substantial due process. The specifics of that due process are typically stated in university rules.


text:
Is a case study a type of research paper?
I can’t find an answer that explicitly says that a case study is a type of research (e.g. analytical research paper, persuasive research paper, definition research paper, etc.). There’s this site that says that a case study is a research methodology (it’s the third chapter of a research paper).

You need to be a bit clearer. Most case studies used in education are at least a bit contrived.

The term is applied differently in different disciplines, it seems. What discipline is your question referring to?

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

The case study is a qualitative research method in several disciplines, mostly in the social sciences.1 A research paper that builds on this method might also be referred to as a "case study".2
1 See e.g. Gerring, J. (2007) Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
2 See e.g. Hooghe, L. (2005) ‘Several Roads Lead to International Norms, but Few Via International Socialization: A Case Study of the European Commission’. International Organization, Vol. 59, No. 4, pp. 861–898.

Thank you so much for clarifying.

A "case study" can mean several things:

A small[*] piece of original research that was published as part of another research paper or review. For example: a paper describes a theory and subsequently applies it to a small and well-defined subset (a case) of possible applications of the theory, thereby providing anecdotal evidence that the theory is useful,

Particularly in the social sciences, a "case study" may be described in a separate paper, and present anecdotal evidence (or contradiction) of a theory that was published elsewhere. (So similar to (1), but the "case study" is now a separate publication)

A study that is not published in a peer-reviewed journal, but used for example to promote new equipment from a commercial manufacturer by demonstrating its usefulness for the given "case" (this is also called "application note").

Note also that some journals have very specific requirements for the publication types they accept, and that those types are defined by the journal in question.
[*] see commments

+1 Most qualitative social science researchers would argue that case studies can be designed to provide much more than anecdotal evidence, however! (Even most quants would agree.) And (especially comparative) case studies are not necessarily "small" pieces of research. The three case studies by Theda Skocpol in "States and Social Revolutions" span some 300 pages and go to profound depths.

@henning Just to clarify: "small" here is meant with respect to the set containing all the other possible cases, not to describe the amount of effort invested in the research or length of the paper or something like that.

I see, "small n" then. Thanks for clarifying.


text:
Seriously considering quitting my current PhD program after 1 week of starting - any advice?
Edit #1:
Thank you all for the comments. After sorting out some messes in my recent life and thinking things through. I do realize quitting isn't just a "magic bullet" to make world perfect. Still, it is good to read all of your posts and the solutions you guys offer!
TL;DR:
New starting Ph.D student in my very first year who has lost faith in my current university & my supervisor. Seriously considering quitting but don't know what to do.
Background
I'm 25 and have just graduated with a Master degree in computer science(computer vision, robotics specifically). My publication record is on track with 3 papers on A-tier conferences. I have good internship experience in the summer. Other than that, I have always had a great interest in research, machine learning in general, and I have been hardworking, from other's perspectives. I have a GPA 3.9 out of 4.0 for my master, and have been offered full financial support from my PhD program.
Current Academic Situation w/ My Supervisor
When I first applied to PhD programs, I applied to only two schools (my current university with my current supervisor & another good univ, both top 100) and ended up in the same university (I have also done my BS.c at the same university). While my current supervisor is a nice person & easy to talk to, I always feelextremely neglected & unsupervised the first thing. Most of the time, I only met up with my supervisor to seek research advice once per month or two only(I usually have to email him to ask beforehand so that he can coordinate a time, and sometimes he forgot still). However, for some engineering students, he will meet up way more often.
Secondly, every time I talked to my supervisor, I feel he's no longer interested in catching up to state-of-the-art compsci methods & prefer to work on more ECE-oriented projects on joint stick design or other things. This is also obvious, since all new students he recruited are from ece or mece & he's spending more time discussing with them. Another thing to denote here is that, although I'm working on computer vision research, there's no GPUs in our lab, and every time me or my fellow PhD student proposed for one he will sideline the entire conversation. This causes severe issue for me and my fellow PhD seniors, since we do not have the computational resource to demo any advanced Reinforcement Learning or Computer Vision methods on our lab robot, and we ended up settle with old GPU using our own money & have to make compromises in our methods(which renders our results weaker). However, he has no problem buying a 150, 000 fancy robot arm for the mece students he recruited.
Thirdly, after 4 years of observing my supervisor, I can fairly confirm that he rarely communicates with other professors in other universities (weak academic networking). I have talked to my seniors about this and they pretty much confirm this.
Basically, I feel I'm losing faith in my supervisor's capability in guiding me with a strong compsci resume for my PhD. While I totally agree that PhD students should be totally capable of conducting his own research, it doesn't make me feel less tiring and stressed over the fact that, I have to compete against top labs & univs for SOTA, and without constant feedbacks from my supervisor I sometimes feel very stressed and lost. The other problem is the academic networking, since my supervisor rarely networks himself, it has made it extremely difficult for me to get in contact with other leading researchers / experts. Another thing is the lack of investment in basic equipment (GPUs), where I sometimes felt my supervisor just didn't care.
Other Background
Financially I do not struggle for anything either, and I'm more than happy to pursue my PhD career, since I do love working research.
I come from a family of academics. My father is a professor in MECE with strong academic records & international connections (this is why I feel I'm struggling with my supervisor, since I have had a lot of experience with various researchers from my father's connections, and I feel my supervisor isn't catching up in years). My parents are well-aware of my supervisor and his lab situations(since I talk to them on a regular basis), and they always told me that it's OK and normal, as long as you work hard yourself.
I have talked to my post-doc senior, and my other PhD seniors (one of them has very strong publication at places like CVPR), they are all struggling for their own academic career compared to people coming from other top univs, or simply because the other people are more social with each other. I just feel my future is somehow hopeless even if I get a strong publication track and other thing (and that is a big if).
What would I do?
In summary, I am staying at the university where I graduate from my bachelor's degree. My supervisor has been making some peculiar choices & all my seniors have issues with their own academic tracks throughout the year. I feel my future is hopeless if I am to graduate from my PhD with what I have now. I want to quit my current university, and apply to a better place. I don't know if that's naïve since people get skeptical when you quit your PhD. I honestly have no idea what to do.
If I am to quit my current PhD, I'd need to apply for a work permit & look for a job since I'm not a Canadian citizen. I just feel clueless and feel something is missing from my PhD & am no longer satisfied of the situation I have to work with during my master. I'd love advice from anyone.

Could you make it shorter or give a summary? That's very long.

As far as hardware (GPUs) goes, why not take advantage of AWS? Otherwise it sounds like you and your advisor are off to a rocky start, you needing more attention and guidance than he or she is willing to give, or typically gives, and you expecting a different kind of advisor than you have. Don't quit yet, explore changing advisors later. If you're one week into your PhD work, you're probably still focusing on coursework for the next year. And despite your affinity for research, you might explore whether a PhD is for you.

Can you tell me more about how he sidelines the conversation?

A professor at a top 100 university must have at least some strengths other than being just a nice person. Are they a strong publisher? Do they know some ropes that others don't? Sometimes one benefits a lot (career-wise) from working with professors who do little supervising, but have other positive attributes such as writing every lab-member's name on every paper. What is the h-index of your senior peers? Be pragmatic.

If you "always feel neglected and unsupervised", why did you chose to stay with your MSc advisor for a PhD programme in the first place? Was this the only out of your two applications that got accepted, or did you have a reason for your preference?

"I come from a family of academics. " so do you have to be an academic?
Regarding Canada: how long would it take you to apply for citizenship? longer than the PhD? shorter?

I want to quit my current university, and apply to a better place.

Don't make a hasty decision after one week. First I'd suggest you figure out what your options are

Are there any other professors at your current university that are doing work that interest you? Preferably same department, but you could even look at other departments.  Changing advisors with the same university will be much easier than changing universities.  Don't necessarily contact any of them yet, just determine if this is an option or not.

If you did change schools, what other school would you go to?  Make a list of the three or four schools you would like to go to.  Now those schools will have application deadlines.  Figure out what those application deadlines are.   I don't know how it works in Canada, but in the US the application deadlines would probably be sometime in December.  Let's assume that it is December 1 for talking purposes.

Hopefully the fact that you know you have some options and that you know you have some time until you have to make the decision on those options will give you some mental "breathing room".
Now, backup a few weeks from that application deadline.  Let's call it November 1st.  Try your absolute hardest to make things work with your current advisor until then.  Talk to him if you can, and express your concerns.  Don't tell you that you are thinking about quitting necessarily, but just talk about what you'd like to see changed.  Many other questions on this site might help with the discussion.
If you get to Nov 1, and it still doesn't work, then start talking to other professors in your department and see if you can change.  And if that doesn't work, then start writing those applications to other schools.

Upvoted mostly for the bold lines, which I also wanted to say. And PhD crisis is somewhat likely to happen for some time to come....

Thank you so much for the kind words and the bold. After cooling down from courses, conference deadline and a long talk with my parents, I realize it may indeed be a hasty decision. And you're right about expressing more of my concerns (my supervisor is the kind of person you need to "push" a bit to get your ideas accepted or to make certain changes, it takes long but that's how I get some good tracks with my master). I will definitely try my best as well to see things differently. Thanks!

Speaking from personal experience... This could prove to be quite a journey.
Good part is that without close supervision you can do things you are actually interested in instead of slaving away doing some possibly dead end research for a few years. Bad part, obviously, is that you are on your own. Now, whether it is a good thing or a bad thing is field-dependent and, more importantly, that is where your personal quirks kick in. Your parents are somewhat right about "just working hard will get you there", but social expectations have also changed since they were starting their careers.
Personally, I do not regret going that path but not having resources and not knowing how to obtain them has proven to be a major obstacle setting me back a few years. To me, that is less important than creative freedom I have enjoyed in the process, but might not be the case for you if you want to approach it in a more "mainstream" way, with tenure track firm in sights and all that.
To that end, I would offer a quick summary checklist for your expectations.

Are you prepared to be the main AND corresponding author for your articles? I.e. instead of advisor doing the bulk of the work preparing your results for publishing and handling the process they would only intervene as you encounter difficulties?
When do you plan to learn navigating grant funding and observing your research institution relevant formalities? Say, lab equipment does not come out of thin air: do you expect your advisor to sort it out and let you focus on the topic entirely? Would you rather learn how it works from lab head's perspective?
Do you actually have a team (yourself included) capable of doing the work you want to do? Top-100 uni is not telling much if its strengths lie elsewhere and the relevant lab is fresh established and lacking support?

You are at crossroads right now. Huge opportunities, huge risks. But no guts, no glory, right?
Two big points though, irrelevant of your ultimate decision - no networking is beyond terrible in academy. I could not possibly stress it enough. If the supervisor does not do that, you would have to.
Second, not having support, even if it is stupidest things like affirming what you are doing is okay (in my case, relevant to publishing) could prove crippling to your academic performance. Yes, your supervisor is the person who is supposed to help with that and yes, ideally that happens by the virtue of you both working on the closely related topics or even on the same one. Unfortunately, far from all supervisors are great and approachable, and sometimes you might feel less intimidated approaching your fellow senior students.
TL;DR: What are you getting out of this program? If you got hardly any involvement from anyone (primarily, your supervisor) and no perks of being a PI in your own chosen topic (ability to secure funds for the lab, assign some work to people)... Well, yes, this arrangement is not really helping you in any significant way. Quitting is very much on the table, but it sounds like you do not know that well how things operate around you, relying on second-hand information from senior students and having hardly any networking. Sure, this is a hard situation to find yourself in, but just applying to another program does not mean all listed issues would instantly evaporate. You do things you were assigned to do fairly well, but this is not enough for an academic career. I would say that stress from dealing with everything is probably too much, but do not expect to find a perfect lab ticking all the boxes, or even the ones you prefer ticked the most, just have at least something to help you in your career.
Also, best of luck!

Thank you so much for the long answer. This is actually quite a lot of information. Some things to note: 1. While being in top univs, my supervisor's lab is small, total creative freedom. And with most senior phds graduating from my lab, things are actually looking stressed even for my supervisor himself. 2. Networking is a serious issue for my supervisor, and with covid connecting to new places and new labs are worse. After calming myself down I completely agree with your point that applying to another won't be a magic bullet, so thanks for pointing this out.

Same here, a first-year Ph.D. student in computer vision.
I totally understand the anxiety when lacking GPUs, but I would recommend you to talk to your supervisor first and let him know all of your concerns. If it still doesn't work out, you may like to tell him that you would apply for a new position and see if you can stay in the same lab until you make it, and of course, you have to keep working for him.
This is what two of my friends did. Both of them got to better places. One of them has graduated with great tracks.

Been trying to talk him into buying GPUs with no luck. But will see. :P