In 1989 the chairman of my department asked me to find out how many Ph.Ds had been awarded by the department which was exactly a quarter of a century old at the time having grown from three members originally to more than a dozen. The answer was eleven; if you look at the website of the department now there are forty seven pictures of people described as current doctoral candidates. That is perhaps over-representative of the global boom in doctorates: the OECD’s 2022 document Education at a Glance suggests that the number of doctorates in the 38 member countries has doubled this century to the point that it averages 1.3% of adults over twenty five while in the USA there are now 4.5 million people with doctorates, also double what it was at the start of the century and a doctoral “nation” roughly the size of Scotland. By contrast the number of British people doing doctorates in British universities has actually declined this decade.

In fact surprisingly few of the staff of my own department had doctorates; when I had started work twenty years previously there was only one. They were sufficiently rare that, as one of my former colleagues points out, we were inclined to say of people “he (or she) is a Ph.D.” rather than that they had a Ph.D. One could describe the one colleague who had a doctorate as ahead of his time in seeing himself as “research manager” keen to develop “departmental strategy”; these were not concepts that troubled most of us. He was listed as a doctor in the local telephone directory which led to several instances of colleagues telephoning him in supposedly disguised accents to inform him of details of their pains and swellings. For the record, I did not do this myself.

I don’t know for how long I was officially registered as being a doctoral student (it was a D.Phil. Rather than a Ph.D, being Oxford), but I do know that I was in practice a full time doctoral student for only a few months. It was between my realisation that the graduate degree I was registered for, a B.Phil., largely duplicated what I had already done as an undergraduate and my being offered a temporary but more or less full time appointment teaching at my former college. This was followed immediately by the offer of a permanent full time appointment at the new University of Warwick. During this short interval I was able to discover a total lack of rapport with my supervisor. My subject was the politics of the environment which I suppose you could say was a good spot in 1968. I thought it was about the accounts of human beings’ relationship with nature in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill among others. My supervisor thought it was about studying the minutiae of local government decision-making. To be fair, it’s about both.

I have remained endlessly grateful that I spent so little time on my doctorate, that I did not have to spend my twenties as a perpetual student without salary or pension contributions, plodding a path to a book length work that wouldn’t even be published. Many would argue that it is a professional training in research, but it isn’t a training in the normal life of an academic. While others were doing doctorates from the age of twenty two I was learning other aspects of academic life: pastoral care, administration, communication, course design . . . I remember how a colleague in another university told me that he completed his doctorate and in his late twenties got a lecturing job and had to shift from being an expert on certain aspects of the politics of the National Union of Mineworkers to giving thirty six lectures on British politics. He found the transition extremely difficult. By the time I was in my late twenties I had two reasonably well honed courses of my own on the go, had published a book and several articles and was off on my first sabbatical leave. One’s twenties should be a time for broad learning and professional development, not for burying oneself in detailed research. Incidentally, my brief doctoral effort proved anything but a waste of time. The one chapter that I did write expanded into an article, then a course, then two chapters of a book for which in March 2024, fifty six years after it was written, I received a royalty sufficient to buy a decent meal for two.

In some university systems you are required to have a Ph.D in order to supervise doctoral students, but this was never true in established English universities. In the event in the last fifteen years of my career I supervised twenty four doctoral students though not all in my home department. By then and in the context it was a requirement of my job. A minority were English students who knew what they wanted to do and required a light touch as a supervisor. The majority were overseas students struggling with language, breadth of knowledge, finances and lack of confidence. Sometimes also social isolation. The comparison with the bright, self-confident final year undergraduates whom I taught on my options could not have been more stark. I used to laugh a bitter and cynical little laugh when anyone referred to “Ph.D level” as a high intellectual level because in my experience my doctoral students wouldn’t have stood a chance in any kind of intellectual contest against my undergraduates. I fully accept that it’s almost certainly different in other subjects, particularly in maths and the natural sciences, but that’s how it was for me at that time. The brightest of home grown undergraduates had long since stopped regarding an academic career as a serious option given the size of salaries, the length of apprenticeship and the lack of certainty about getting a decent job.

Fear was part of the normal condition of doctoral students. Actually, it was mostly the wrong fear because they dreaded not getting the degree whereas I dreaded that I was wasting their lives by inadvertently luring them into pursuing a doctorate with me as supervisor. I was pretty sure that I could assist anyone towards getting the degree provided we started on the right foot with a viable subject, some sort of line of argument and some available materials. What followed was the complex and murky question of exactly how much guidance a supervisor should give. What I didn’t have to do was actually help with the writing because even then there were all sorts of ways of solving the linguistic problems which most of my students faced. Now, of course, AI solves them fairly instantly. I usually adopted an anti-perfectionist strategy: do the damn thing as quickly as possible and submit it. You will then be “referred” and given very specific advice by your examiners. Take this advice as fully and carefully as you can. Most of my students were referred, but none failed. But I did not enjoy or feel comfortable with the procedure and always said that having to supervise doctorates was one of the reasons that I pursued early retirement so avidly. And, yes, I was and am aware that there are people who regard it as the important part of their career.

Meanwhile, doctorates posed some family dilemmas. One of my sons was offered the chance to do a well-funded doctorate but turned it down without a second thought. Another wanted to do a doctorate (in philosophy) but I persuaded him not to because it would involve living in penury and probably not getting an appropriate job anyway. A third was well qualified – though not offered funding – and didn’t even consider it. Meanwhile, I did acquire one, but of “Letters” rather than philosophy. This meant I had three degrees, including a first one and an Oxford MA, two of which were essentially fakes; this seemed well in tune with modern academic life and standards. I was happy to have the doctorate because I thought that not having one might close off certain opportunities for me, especially abroad, in what I planned as a long and active retirement (it’s been twenty years so far and there is no hard evidence either way as to whether I was right).

Anyone who wants to defend the role of the doctorate in academic life has to contend with the undeniable truth that doctorates (even mine) have become deeply ambiguous and therefore devalued in a global economy and academic system. The D.Phil. as I first knew of it was a hundred thousand words of original scholarship assumed to be publishable by a major academic publisher. By contrast many American Ph,Ds included coursework to make up for the lack of specialism in a first degree and were considered (by many Europeans at least) to be no more than an over-promoted masters’ degrees. In many European countries, but especially in Germany, a mere doctorate was not important: what mattered was the Doctor Habilitatus or Habilitation, a kind of fully fledged professional academic recognition which qualified the successful candidate for a full professorship. Naturally it is rarely awarded to anyone under forty and the system is under attack for diverting and stultifying academic careers though it still exists in many places. At the other end of the scale it is a more or less unofficial rule in Italy that anyone with a degree can be addressed as Dottore or Dottoressa; readers and viewers of the Montalbano detective stories will know that the eponymous character, whose proper title is Commissario, is more usually addressed as Dottore which has come to mean something like “boss”. I do like the Italian etiquette, though, that it is not acceptable to describe yourself as Dottore.

A further force for devaluation comes from the tendency of many academic institutions to try to upgrade their staff who have not got doctorates as the assumption has been established that they should have. The most common method is for doctoral recognition by publication, including the “tripartite” doctorate achieved by submitting three published works. The most obvious problem about this is the question of what counts as having any substance as a publication. The term “privishing” goes back to the very beginning of my academic life and it is generally the case that outlets have expanded to meet the need to be seen to be “published”. Is it really publishing when the author has to pay to do it and nobody reads it? Also a long way away from the doctorate as I originally knew it is the work which is a subsidiary part of some senior academic’s research, a kind of extended set essay if you like; I can only imagine what I might have said as an extremely independent-minded, not to say arrogant, young man if someone had suggested that I spend years doing a piece of work essentially chosen by my professor or supervisor. And I don’t know what job I would have ended up with if I had been required to complete a doctorate while also learning on the job as an academic as many people now are, particularly in institutions which have been upgraded to universities. (The worst cases of this are probably in South Africa where fewer than 40% of university staff have doctorates and there is a national policy to upgrade as many people as possible.)

Fakes and grade inflation are everywhere and at least as much in academic life as anywhere else. What I think is worse than fakery about the increase in doctoral study is the waste of life: if you spend several years in what should be the most productive time of your life studying in a rather specialised way and you neither get to share your work with a wider audience nor do you get an appropriate and decent job out of it, isn’t that, frankly, rather tragic? Of course in saying that I am, in terms of public choice theory, going against the grain of some powerful systematic tendencies. Universities make a lot of money out of Ph,Ds – though the domestic market has largely voted with its feet – and those who have struggled through the system have powerful interests in sustaining it. But by exposing it one may hope to save the odd soul.

Lincoln Allison May 2024

(An edited version of this was published by Times Higher Education in June-July 2024 and apparently attracted an unusually high number of readers.)