Helen Nebeker plans to submit and defend her doctoral dissertation this summer and doesn’t expect the effort to be noteworthy.

“I’m surprised that anyone has even heard about me,” she said.

But there are a few details about this doctoral student that do make her stand out. The 82-year-old professor emeritus taught in the English department for 30 years and originally wrote her dissertation in 1961. A professor emeritus is a professor who has retired in good standing.

Nebeker had to abandon her chance for the degree then because of ASU policies at the time and to care for her family.

Now, fueled by support from English department colleagues and current College of Liberal Arts and Sciences deans, she says she’ll go through the motions once again.

“I’ll [still] have to have a meeting to defend the dissertation and sign up for 799, a research course,” she said. “It’s a delightfully funny situation.”

When she originally wrote her dissertation during the 1961-1962 school year, Nebeker didn’t submit it because of a dispute between Arizona universities about whom they could offer doctoral degrees.

“I was getting ready to do the dissertation, but [ASU] told me that they couldn’t award a Ph.D. degree if I was on tenure-track, but if I stopped doing the dissertation, they’d put me on tenure track immediately to become an associate professor,” Nebeker said. “So that’s what I did.”

The choice was not a hard one, she said, because the teaching position was a rare opportunity in the 1960s to help support her husband and two school-age children.

“At that time, for a woman to become a professor, to get tenure off the bat, that was unheard of,” Nebeker said. “There was no choice.”

ASU was just becoming a research institution at the time, and administration made this decision because it “was concerned about establishing an immediate credible university reputation,” said Leonard Gordon, dean of the Emeritus College at ASU.

It was, in fact, that ASU wanted so badly to hire Nebeker as a teacher that created the problem in the first place, he said in an e-mail.

“The English department wanted her to have received her completed degree but [also] wanted her to be on the faculty,” Gordon said.
“[Nebeker] accepted that and as a productive and excellent faculty member earned her tenure and promotion through a full professorship.”

Nebeker moved up the ASU teaching ranks for 30 years, eventually serving as associate chair of the English department for nine years before retiring in 1988 and being awarded a professor emeritus position by ASU the same year.

She even reworked her dissertation into a book, called “Jean Rhys: Woman in Passage,” which she published “very successfully” in 1981.

What she still did not have, however, was her doctorate.

Nebeker said she’s pursuing it again primarily because her colleagues, including Gordon and English department chair, Neal Lester, raised the issue and have supported her along the way.

Although she fears she’ll “have to jump through some more hoops” before the process is over, including having to reconvert her published book into dissertation format so she can defend it, Nebeker said she’s grateful for this support during the process.

“It moves me deeply,” she said.

Having that slip of paper, however, wasn’t necessary for Nebeker to live an accomplished life, having publishing two books and successfully earned a full professorship without it.

The reason the degree will still be meaningful after more than 40 years, she said, is the same reason she originally stopped pursuing it — family.

“I have children and [two] grandchildren who have graduate degrees from ASU and even great-grandchildren who will graduate from ASU,” Nebeker said. “So don’t you think that’s a nice heritage to have?

“And besides, it gives me something to do in my retirement.”

Reach the reporter at trabens@asu.edu.