Comments on: On not having a PhD

By: Matthew

Matthew — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 16:24:23 +0000

I remember meeting philosopher Jonathan Dancy at a conference a couple of years ago. He spent a good portion of the weekend saying “No. Not Dr. Dancy, Mr. Dancy.” Or something to that affect. The assumption among most of the US participants was that as a professor and professional philosopher he must have his PhD. I guess that proves the old saw about assumptions…

By: JRoth

JRoth — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 19:54:29 +0000

As a complete outsider to philosophy and (aside from my requisite tenure there) academia, may I just point out the obvious, that it’s funny to think that the only acamedicians who are not Doctors of Philosophy are philosophers?

By: real

real — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:06:20 +0000

wasn’t there even a time when doing a DPhil was a sign of inferiority? (additional hard labour to prove yourself?) Why after all did anyone need anything once they’d been through PPE? I like your notion of “young” Chris, it makes me feel a lot better (apologies to the young philosopher!)

By: Matt McG

Matt McG — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 12:58:18 +0000

As someone who has the Oxford B.Phil and is finishing the D.Phil [but finding 3 years + working on just one topic harder than I thought] I REALLY wish we still lived in the days when it was possible to go straight from the B.Phil or equivalent to an academic job…

By: harry

harry — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 02:54:36 +0000

Neither of my American employers (PhD required) have ever sought any evidence of any of my educational qualifications. My one British employer (PhD not required) demanded evidence of my PhD, BA, A Levels, and O Levels (actual certificates, no copies allowed). I must have noticed this before, but this thread has somehow crystallised it for me. BTW, my above comments refer solely to Philosophy—and I didn’t imagine they’d be trasnferable to other fields, esp in the sciences and social sciences.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 02:13:20 +0000

five year doctorate program Snort… wheeze… chuckle… I certainly feel more qualified to do good work and to teach upper-level classes now than I did three years into my program, but having made < $20K a year from age 23 to 32, and still finding it difficult to get a permanent job, I sometimes find myself getting grumpy and experiencing some generation envy. I don’t have a solution, though.

By: David Margolies

David Margolies — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 00:10:32 +0000

My godfather, who was a Cambridge classicist who became Master of one of the Colleges, only had an MA and was actually against PhD’s outside of the hard sciences. His view was that with a PhD, you had to spend the rest of your life defending whatever your dissertation said, and it was probably wrong, given the young age at which you produced it. (In contrast, in the hard sciences, right and wrong are usually ascertainable by generally agreed upon independent means.) What mattered to him was what you had accomplished after finishing University: what books or papers had you written, etc.

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 23:55:09 +0000

I used to love the idea of a PhD but now I know Jo wolff doesn’t have one I just don’t know what to think.

By: abd

abd — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 23:53:55 +0000

As my department head told me, it doesn’t make any difference if you’re a good teacher or not, if you want to play in our ballpark, you’ve got to play by our rules. A PhD is a union ticket. abd (all but dissertation)

By: GMT

GMT — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 22:17:27 +0000

I wept that I had no PhD, ‘till I met a man with no brain. [w/ apologies to cobblers and shoeless people everywhere]

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 21:07:49 +0000

There’s an important difference between the traditional British PhD – three years of lightly supervised research with the (normally unrealised) aim of producing a big “contribution to knowledge”, and the US model – a couple of years of intensive coursework and a “three essays” thesis which is, as sennoma notes, sometimes reduced to a boundup collection of journal articles. The rise of the US model reflects the need for ever more technical training for anyone who wants to reach the frontiers in any field – a natural consequence of the growth of knowledge. The older model had a significant element of positional competition.

By: Bob McGrew

Bob McGrew — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 21:01:38 +0000

I’m not so sure it’s just wasteful competition. I’m in the second year of my Ph.D. program (nearly done with the equivalent of my Masters), and I for one do not feel prepared to do teaching and research full-time or to mentor other graduate students. Also, the Ph.D. as collection of papers is the norm in computer science (at least at Stanford), and, I hear, in economics as well.

By: sennoma

sennoma — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 20:30:52 +0000

in philosophy at least almost all important work is now done in articles, not books (which tend to be reconstitutions of a series of articles). So the book-like form of the PhD is very odd Quite a lot of PhD programs in biology allow a candidate to bind up their published articles, write an essay covering the literature and placing their own work in context, and submit that as a thesis. On the main point, I agree with “wasteful positional competition” and “more of a stamina test”. Twinges of inadequacy caused by lack of a PhD are to be dismissed immediately as having no basis in anything other than the snobbish milieu propagated by hidebound academics who want to view their own degrees as meaningful in and of themselves. Which they aren’t, and I say that as one who underwent the requisite suffering. Research, or research not; there is no “qualify”—as one of my favourite philosophers might put it.

By: harry

harry — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 19:38:22 +0000

And on your main point Chris, no, I think you’re absolutely right. Its a simple case of wasteful positional competition, and makes the entry into academia more of a stamina test. Most of us with PhDs didn’t do any real worthwhile work till we were done and got jobs. And those who did valuable work on their PhD would probably have done it anyway. Another point—in philosophy at least almost all important work is now done in articles, not books (which tend to be reconstitutions of a series of articles). So the book-like form of the PhD is very odd (I think NYU does it differently). As perhaps the case of the anonymous ‘young’ political philosopher suggests. Hope none of my grad students read this…

By: harry

harry — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 18:50:58 +0000

He’s not young at all djw, he’s older than me (well, I’m pretty sure he is, at least if he isn’t its a matter of less than a year). And I shan’t see 39 again. But I am not telling his name—I think we should let him out himself.