Do I understand you correctly that you do think that an accepted dissertation is something like a guarantee for some work to have an academic merit?
Honestly not trying to annoy you, or anyone else. We know for a fact that there are a lot of dissertations which should never, ever have been approved.
This particular case might or might not have scientific merits, and I do not intend to discuss it in detail. I do not want to belittle the author, or the thesis, or the work. I read the comments above, and I have my doubts now, but seriously: I don’t care so much about the particular case. I care about academia, and about science, both as institutions and as processes.
Hence, I thought I should FTFY:
Really, really honestly: I have seen so much bad practice in my lifetime that a dissertation is not reassuring in its own right. [ETA: SAUSAGE FNGEOS AGIAN, hadn’t finished that last sentence…]
ETA 2: if we are going to discuss this, we should split this off. I don’t want to derail from the point about racism and marginalisation, which is every bit as important as the scientific process, academia, and it’s perversions.
