Ken,
I don’t have a dog in the fight here. I don’t have a PhD and expect to die doctorateless. I do not supervise PhD students and am unlikely to ever do so. I do, however, interact with a lot of people with PhD degrees in quite a few subjects including those supervising PhD students. They make up quite a broad range.
While I do not disagree with most of what you wrote, I find two things curious.
The first is that you define a PhD degree in terms of a self-perpetuating system. It is interesting that the use for PhD degree seems to be the ability to allow others to get a PhD degree. Research training and disciplinary knowledge are seemingly useless unless coupled with the ability to confer different research and disciplinary knowledge on the next generation. What's up with that?
The second is that the PhD is a license to teach not just PhD students but undergraduates. And not just research but the non-research part of the ostensible subject matter. If this implied licensing is the worry, shouldn’t we fear a PhD degree in design given to a researcher who is not qualified to teach how to do design? After all, many more design professors will spend much more time teaching people who want to be designers rather than researchers.
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
[log in to unmask]
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
[log in to unmask]
+1 252 258-7006
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|