Jeffrey,

I agree with Matthew and Ashok.  Even undergraduates in my introductory Hinduism course do their best to use proper diacritics, and I require diacritics in senior theses focused on Indic texts and traditions.  If undergraduates take this seriously when required, certainly doctoral students should use diacritics in PhD dissertations.  That diacritics are becoming less common even in scholarly publications, as Matthew notes, is quite problematic, in my opinion.  As I tell my students, Kālī and Kali are not the same, so we can't just dismiss the diacritics as meaningless and unnecessary.  But publishers do it, I guess, mostly for the reasons Ashok incisively notes, which is even more disturbing.

Regards to All,

Tracy Coleman

Colorado College