No Margin for Error: Submitting a Dissertation Through the Years

While dissertation submission requirements are rigorous at the University of Michigan, there was a time when turning in one’s final paper entailed a much heavier lift—literally.

In the analog days of the university, Ph.D. candidates carried printed pages, extra copies, forms, fees, and sometimes a great deal of stress from one office to another. They worried about margins, page numbers, binding, microfilm, and whether one small formatting mistake might slow down graduation. The history of dissertation submission is a story of changing technology, changing rules, and the people behind the scenes who helped students get across the finish line.

Today, University of Michigan Ph.D. candidates produce about 1,000 new dissertations each year, all deposited in Deep Blue, the University of Michigan Library’s digital open access repository, after their successful defense. Together, they form a rich collection of knowledge that can help curious readers around the world understand and advance their fields. With more than two centuries of history, U-M has had to continuously make decisions about how to collect, preserve, and share dissertations over time, decisions that have had a significant impact on submission guidelines for doctoral candidates.

In the early years, dissertation submission rules were simple but expensive. A graduate student handbook from 1900–01 details a requirement for every doctoral candidate to deposit $50 with the university treasurer after the thesis was accepted and before the examination, returned to the student if they failed the final exam. The cost is equivalent to roughly $2,000 today, likely covering the hard costs of ink, paper, a printing press operator, and binding materials.

By the mid-20th century, dissertation submission rules had become very detailed, with requirements for abstracts, style, pagination, binding, margins, and more. A 1950 doctoral student handbook explained what to do if a committee asked for minor revisions at the defense. Students could insert corrected pages by cutting out the old page near the left margin and pasting the new page onto the remaining “stub,” or the narrow strip of paper or cloth left in the binding after a page had been removed. The handbook was very clear about the tool for the job: rubber cement. Today, it is hard to imagine a doctoral student editing their work with crafting supplies, but it was the most practical solution of its time.

For many years, dissertation formatting was a high-stakes part of the process. Twentieth-century issues of the Michigan Daily show classified ads for freelance typists who helped students prepare dissertations. These typists could be a lifeline in the days before personal computers, especially when every page had to meet exact rules. 

Still, Rackham staff had to check the final product—and often found incorrect formatting in the work done by freelancers. Longtime Rackham employee Julia Thiel, who retired in 2024 after 32 years at the university, remembered the paper era clearly in an oral history interview with Rackham and the Bentley Historical Library.

“We didn’t want [students] using outside resources because then they would say, ‘Oh, well, the typist said this was fine,’ and we would have to have that argument with them. And the last thing we wanted to do is argue with upset students,” Thiel says.

Thiel worked in academic records and dissertations, where staff were sometimes known as the “ruler ladies.” The name came from the careful checking of margins. But Thiel says the nickname made them sound scarier than they were.

“We weren’t nearly as vicious as people thought,” she says. “In fact, we only used a six-inch ruler because we didn’t want to intimidate students, but we rarely used them because once you are going through a couple hundred pages of the dissertation over and over, you get a good sense of what the margins are.”

The margins mattered because dissertations were physically bound. The left margin had to be wide enough for glue and binding. The pages also had to be trimmed. A large dissertation needed extra care because a small margin could disappear into the spine.

“That’s why there were margin requirements. It wasn’t just because we liked rulers. It was because they were being published and bound,” Thiel says, adding that page numbering was actually the biggest problem that students had. 

“The margins, they usually got right or close to right, but those page numbers were the devil.”

According to Thiel, the front matter had to begin with lowercase Roman numerals, with page ii appearing in the right place. Students often put a page number on the title page when they should not have. In the paper era, staff might help students fix small errors with whiteout, typewriters, or replacement pages.

Thiel recalls stacks of dissertation copies waiting for review. Some students had to submit multiple corrected versions. Extra pages did not go to waste. Thiel recounts that Marina Seaman, a longtime Rackham staff member who worked in the copy room, would turn leftover dissertation pages into notepads.

There were also unforgettable dissertations. Thiel remembers one that was about 1,500 pages and filled three volumes. Another, in mathematics, was only about 25 pages, including the references. According to Thiel, printed dissertations included a page after the title page where students could add acknowledgements or anything they wanted. “We always liked looking at what people had there, lots of Calvin and Hobbs, lots of fun quotes,” she says. Dissertations, like the people who write them, vary widely.

As dissertation collections grew, universities needed better ways to preserve and share them. Printed copies took up space and were hard to search. Microfilm and microfiche offered a solution. These formats stored images of pages on film, allowing libraries to preserve many documents in a smaller space.

At U-M, submitted dissertations were once sent to University Microfilms, founded in the 1930s by U-M alum Eugene Power, who also served as a regent for the university from 1955 to 1966. After a few rounds of rebranding over the decades, the company is known today as ProQuest. It was recently purchased by the information technology company Clarivate. 

Providing academic, public, and research libraries with large collections of digital resources, ProQuest’s archives include scholarly journals, ebooks, dissertations, historical newspapers, and primary sources. Adding a dissertation to ProQuest is not a requirement for U-M doctoral graduates, although many appreciate the additional exposure and point of access for others to connect with their work. 

Today, U-M doctoral students are required to archive their dissertations in Deep Blue, a free platform that digitally preserves and shares the work of U-M scholars, including dissertations, to serve the public good. Unlike commercial platforms, Deep Blue is run through the U-M Library and supports long-term public access to university research.

The university’s shift to digital systems did not happen all at once. Thiel remembers Rackham’s move from paper files to computers in the 1990s and early 2000s. Before modern systems, staff entered data into simple terminals connected to central university systems. Paper forms, files, and hand-carried documents were part of daily work. Around the turn of the 21st century, systems that later connected to digital tools like Wolverine Access, the campuswide administrative portal, changed how records could be managed.

Today, the University of Michigan Library holds about 47,000 dissertations. Of those, roughly 23,000 are fully available to the public online. Digitizing takes time, resources, and careful attention to accessibility so that readers with disabilities can access the content, as well. 

The Unlocking Dissertations Project, a partnership between the University of Michigan Library and Rackham Graduate School, is part of the university’s celebration of 150 years of doctoral education at Michigan. Its goal is to turn a century of graduate scholarship into an open, usable, and measurable public resource. Given its emphasis on accessibility, the project is not just about scanning old pages—it is about opening doors.

Over the last three years, U-M dissertations reached 2.3 million active users in about 200 countries and territories, with 89 percent of dissertation views coming from outside U-M. While submission requirements and access to dissertations have changed over the years, the function of submitted dissertations is unchanged: to preserve knowledge and help it travel farther than its author could have ever imagined.

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