Those two hyphens give away his familiarity with the conventions of professional manuscript preparation. Get yourself a copy of a professional style book.

What? you can't be serious. What would suggest? Please don't tell me a single hypen should stand for an em-dash, I'll have a heart attack.

The problem with this whole argument is the idea that a PhD is a professional degree. It is not. It's an academic degree. Getting the degree does not get you a job the way a medical or law degree does. Instead, it prepares you to do the work that could get you the job. And the quality of the school has to do with how well it prepares you, not whether it gets you a job or not.

For example, someone can graduate from Harvard or MIT with a PhD in microbiology, but that won't get them a job in academia. Publishing papers on successful research, however will. Of course the degree helps. But the research is necessary. Publication should be necessary for a writer in academia, as it is for every other field.

The question isn't between an em-dash and two hyphens, but one hyphen and two.

I agree with indievirtue and klondike, I'm not at all saying your opinion is wrong Seth, however, I do feel you are trying to say that the PhD study is equal to MFA study and therefore simply an extension, meaning it cannot be considered to be a professional degree. If that were the case their would be no need for PhD English, Creative Dissertation programs and most people do not understand that out of the thirty or so programs in the US most of them are still PhDs in English, not simply just writing. Regardless of what MFA programs require in English classes, it is not at all the same. Most people can get through an MFA program without ever taking an English course. I feel there are many MFA grads who are simply not trained to teach or participate on the academic level of English/CRW within the university, they're simply artist and do not understand the study of both equally. This is what separates the PhD and the MFA, and allows the PhD to be viewed as a professional degree. As most of us know, many of the published information on the blogsphere about this subject comes from your compilation of information, and many people look to you as the master in knowing this information, but you must be aware of your own biases and the fallacies in your own argument on this topic.

for accreditation a college needs to have a bunch of PhD's on staff

Is it a professional degree? Does it prepare the candidate for teaching? Does it help get teaching jobs? All good questions. How does the PhD-granting institution benefit? An even better question, I think. Why do people choose to pursue CW PhDs? To stall, buy time, avoid daily grinds while shopping a manuscript?

Anyone interested in an academic career should check out the fora at chronicle.com, the website of the Chronicle for Higher Education. It's not specific to artists (i.e. MFA types), but it is skewed towards the humanities, so truly massive amounts of useful advice can be found there. "Useful" in the sense of, if you want an academic job in the humanities, you will want to know what they have to say. The folks there discuss everything you could possibly want to know about the interview process, for example. Good stuff.

And of course, the Chronicle's website also has job postings.

comparing the exam process to taking 9-12 lit courses is stupid.