Dear All,

Let me add a little bit to the current debate.

What is a PhD: what does it qualify us for?

In my view a PhD only shows one thing: that the candidate can get  
through what is of necessity a trial and bring it to some sort of  
decent conclusion. What this shows is that we can be trusted with  
funds, ie a grant. We have survived the trial: we organised, learnt,  
formulated and reformulated, and went on even through the difficult  
times; and we did it on a relatively large time scale. That is, we  
did research, proper research where we don't know the outcome and are  
prepared to rethink our initial propositions, sometimes in a radical  
and difficult way.

Why do a PhD: what is the benefit?

I don't think that doing my 2 PhDs helped my career: probably the  
contrary. Many colleagues became ever more suspicious of me, and  
remain so even in this age of the almost compulsory PhD. I do think  
the work I did in doing them taught me important things and a  
refinement of creative thinking and constructive rigour. To do a PhD  
to satisfy job conditions seems to me to be a terrible thing: you  
need many qualities, specially personal determination and deep  
curiosity.

Teaching and PhDs.

There is one further point. The term for the teacher of a PhD in the  
UK is supervisor. I think this is very important. A PhD is not  
taught, it's not even tutored, it's overseen. In my opinion this is  
crucial to what it is about. The candidate has to lead and has to  
find the question and the answer. Note, this is implicit in the  
notion that the candidate will produce some original knowledge: in  
which case (s)he is the world's only authority on this knowledge.

Other doctorates.

This means, of course, that I'm doubtful of the so called  
professional doctorates. By these I mean taught doctorates with  
small, and teacher managed projects etc. These seem to be based on  
the sort of thinking that allows medics to be graced with the title  
Dr, and has, in my experience, been driven by demand from societies  
that require a Dr title from senior managers. It's fine to teach  
programmes like these, but they really are not doctorates. (The  
requirement of the Dr title seems to be the management equivalent of  
the transfer of the title professor from authoritative teachers to  
middle managers in universities.)



Ranulph



Personal PhD profile:

I studied Architecture (though mostly I did contemporary classical  
music including electronic pieces). During that I met the  
cybernetician Gordon Pask. Not wishing to spend my life converting  
London terrace houses, I found Gordon had arranged for me to do a PhD  
in cybernetics. I had no intention of doing a PhD and only did it by  
accident or, perhaps, serendipity: as with most architecture students  
in the 60s, I has scarcely met anyone with  a PhD and the thought of  
doing one never occurred to me: a PhD was, I believed, only for the  
very very clever. (I thought the same about conferences.) Having  
finished a PhD at the age of 28, I discovered that I had been doing a  
lot of work in Psychology, so I did another PhD in psychology, which  
I finished when 41. I thus did 2 non-design PhD's, both as a  
youngster and then when somewhat older. The first was full time and  
the second part time. Neither was in design, but then I didn't want  
to do "architecture", so that was fine. In the end, I find them all  
very closely tied up, but that is another matter.