Dear colleagues,



I would venture to enter the discussion again. There should not be questions about scholarly potential and abilities of faculty teaching science-based and theoretical courses. The complex issue is how to prepare studio faculty. Is only talent and a bachelor degree enough? Can they start teaching without acquiring experience and growing in design firms? Is it possible to keep working in both tracks? What are the disadvantages of hiring local designers who have worked construction documents for 30 years? (We need such people for such courses, of course.) How can we recruit talented designers who also can respond to the formal academic requirements for tenure? What kind of tenure and promotion system we need to create for studio instructors? The key to design education is the studio faculty. Yet this position is least understood in academia, subjected to poor assessment and mistreatment. There no productive mechanisms for professional development of studio instructors. There are no productive doctoral studies that help in this direction. (If there are exceptions, they prove the rule.) 



I agree that research on the impact of XYZ paint on the health of building users might not help much in studio instruction. Actually, it can even stifle design thinking by over-focusing on technicalities. However, a faculty who is teaching theory of architecture and history of Modernism needs to have doctoral training and a record of scholarly activity. Otherwise, we have a high school teacher who reads textbooks and relates their contents to students. 



Calatrava and Eisenman may be exceptions but they also prove the rule. Eisenman is a exceptional philosopher of architecture. He have had a very productive collaboration with the late Derrida. Eisenman has developed a very explicit system of design techniques that can be taught easily to beginners. However,  try to read some of Eisenman's philosophical texts and you will see the sophistication of his architectural discourse.



I always joke that F.L. Wright has a design doctorate from Louis Sullivan University in Chicago. However, how many people will have that chance? And how many other people have worked for Sullivan without moving beyond the draftsman position? Academia allows to acquire knowledge and skills in a more predictable, consistent, and guaranteed way. That is the value of academic education. Otherwise, I bet that an exceptional individual (the exception proves the rule) working in the Morphosis office might learn much more than in an average program of architecture. I mean more about making good design, vanguard design, and the aesthetic issues. 



Another consideration: Medical doctors study eight years in academic setting. Then they make another three years of internship in academic hospital. Then they sit for exams. If they want to get a specialty, they have to add two more years of training. Why do designers think that they can become stars with only four years of undergraduate education with no competition and poor grades? And after that they want to go and teach in that academic setting? I know many people like that. I am not talking on the top of head. 



Medical professors do operate, perform surgeries on daily basis. There are huge academic hospitals. However, there are no huge academic design firms. It is very difficult of an academic architect to work for a large design firm. The professional fields of medicine and architecture are organized very differently. In the U.S.A. no one will commission a large project (and even a small project) to an academic designer without support staff and commercial relationships with consulting engineers. I see a huge gap here. Even great adjuncts cannot fill that gap because they don't have the time for course development and instructional materials, curriculum improvement, and the development of new pedagogies. On the other hand, mediocre academic designers are more of a pain than a solution. It is a real conundrum. The salaries in academia are also lower, comparing talent, experience, and years of work. A good professor in architecture cannot make as much as a principle of a good design firm. 



Evidently the design professions (I envisage mostly designers in the aesthetic fields) need to grow. They need to reach at least the stage of medicine. One hundred years ago medicine was still an art. Two centuries ago medicine was mostly personal experience. Academic education was contributing to professional development, but most of the professional knowledge was experiential and tacit. Just read history of medicine and you will see what ridiculous healing methods were used, almost like in the Dark Ages. Scientific medicine have started with the great technical inventions of late 19th century and early 20th century.



In some way I feel awkward to make such argument on this list -- PhD-Design, a list for discussion of doctoral students and researchers. By definition, this audience should not question the role of doctoral studies in design. It should question the format and outcomes of these studies. There is a long way to go to catch up with medicine. Furthermore, medicine needs to mature too, compared with some other professional areas. We need to find out what we can learn from the leaders.



Best wishes,



Lubomir



PS Considering this discussion, I also think we need to keep the tail text that this is a discussion list of design scholars. No offence for design practitioners, but we need a forum for exploring, making errors, and finding the right way without hesitating what to say so that people do not get offended. By the way, I would not have made this argument on Practice-Design discussion list. I try to observe certain boundaries.