Why Write A PhD?
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13 July 2011
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further articles dealing with the
research process and the connundrums of PhD study :
Pissing
On Every Lamp Post : |
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1.
Are PhD’s Really Original? The
internal rules in universities rules which define a PhD invariably say that
it must be an original contribution to human knowledge. Ground breaking
dissertations have indeed been written from time to time. In fact though, few
PhDs amount to some grand, original contribution to human knowledge. Many
dissertations do include fresh assemblies of data, which may or may not be
useful to someone. However, the interpretation of the data found within these
documents is rarely original, except in a trivial sense. This is
because although a PhD is usually written by one individual, it is only
allowed to see the light of day after acceptance by a supervisor, various
independent examiners, as well as a research committee of the institution.
The net result of this institutional filtering is typically a set of
propositions which will offend nobody, preferably hedged in the most obscure
and tentative language to allow escape and denial if, by some accident, an
original idea slips through, then an external party feels threatened or
offended, and heat is turned on those who risked their signatures. The whole
process had its origins centuries ago in censorious European ecclesiastical
environments, and that fundamental psychology of risk aversion remains. In
terms of the candidates themselves, worldwide now there is a rolling tsunami
of PhD candidates, while in the nature of things, only a small percentage of
those people will be equipped by cognitive capacity, or psychological and
cultural conditioning to be highly creative. There
is another problem in evaluating the originality and value of doctoral
dissertations, and that is a general crisis in the nature and outcomes of
research generally. The explosion of human knowledge which has changed the
world beyond recognition over the last 300 years has depended critically upon
scientific research – that is, systematic experiment which employs the
careful selection of variables, is performed under controlled conditions, and
which is repeatable by other researchers to check its validity. Science
practiced rigorously in this way has brought us a long way, and freed some
from the bonds of centuries of superstition. However, there are problems.
Only a tiny percentage in any population anywhere really grasps scientific
method. Schools and even universities (not to mention industry and
businesses) do have a small quota of truly scientific minds at work, but they
are also awash with individuals, many influential and in management
positions, who utter the word “science” as a purely magical prayer and follow
what are really blind religious rituals in the name of science, hoping it
will yield them wealth. Indeed, their rituals often do yield wealth. Am I
just being cynical? No, I am expressing soundly based skepticism.
For example, there is now a flood of meta-statistical studies showing that a
vast percentage of “medical research” is either very poor science or
downright dishonest (for example, see this David Freedman article from the Atlantic Monthly: “Lies,
Damned Lies and Medical Science“). What goes for medicine goes for every
other kind of research, and even more so in social sciences where the
variables are essentially impossible to control. For most people, this
is all too hard. They will just follow the money, and damn the science. The
poor PhD student who really sets out to do “original research” is quite
likely to find that his examiners, and the university administrators also
think his ideas are all too hard to support … 2.
The Incentive Trail for PhDs To
be realistic, we must ask where the rewards lie for the production of this
document, the doctoral dissertation. It may be that an entirely open public
accounting cannot be publicly expressed in institutional documents, but like
covert values in general, actual (as opposed to promised) rewards are likely
to have great hidden power. The rewards seem to divide into those accruing to
the actual writer, and those accruing to the institution with its associated
members. 3.
The Idiosyncratic Researcher Individuals
may pursue a particular line of research out of genuine intellectual
curiosity, and for some of them this curiosity may override the more common
needs for public respect, a credible income, a viable career, and so on. In
fact the research activity may persist long after it has become apparent that
its pursuit is quite counterproductive to any normal lifestyle. It does not
necessarily follow however that such a commitment to inquiry will be a
contributing asset towards success in the institutional environment. Others,
more driven by vanity or social pressure may well make the compromises
necessary for PhD acceptance long before the genuinely interested researcher
surrenders his independence. 4.
The Personally Instrumental At
final completion, for the individual the award may signal qualification for a
particular career path and/or acceptance into a particular profession. It
might offer enhanced mobility across social and national borders. It may even
amplify marriage prospects of a certain kind in some cultures. Not all PhDs
generate these rewards for all individuals. 5.
The Individual and Self-Esteem Depending
upon the personality of the award holder, the PhD may serve to buttress the
self-respect of the individual against uninformed criticism. It may (or may
not) induce some sense of superiority, such as others obtain from rank,
money, inherited status, and so on. It may pander to vanity. In short, the
PhD has a potential to touch the core personality of the holder in ways great
or small. 6.
The Individual in Public Perception Also
for the individual, the award may allow others (qualified or not qualified to
have an opinion) to believe that the PhD holder has an important level of
expertise in some area of knowledge. In practice this expertise may or may
not exist. It may be well applied, or it may be negated by other factors such
as (for example) a poor sense of proportion or poor judgement, or individual
personality quirks. 7.
The PhD as a Tool for Other Players For
society as represented diffusely through governments and public endorsement
(where it exists) there is a generalized notion that each PhD graduate has a
good chance of making contributions to the common welfare in ways that, say,
some guy flipping hamburgers is unlikely to. Whether this faith is justified
in the aggregate is a complex question not only of monetary economics, but of
what the said society values as a contribution. For
the issuing institution and its stakeholders, the award of a PhD represents a
kind of public validation of their activities. That validation has many
components: -
there is the claim that the institution really is a productive environment
for ‘new knowledge’ -
there is an opportunity to claim that the new knowledge has significance for
the culture in which it is embedded. -
there is the reflected glory of having sheltered, nurtured and guided the
researcher in ways that are productive for the society. -
there may be financial reward as a direct consequence of innovation, or in
the very least through the marketing edge of being associated with a winner. -
there may be a further role in encouraging other researchers or even
industries to build upon and profit from the claimed new learning. 8.
Barriers to Originality and Completion in Research Just
as every PhD candidate brings his or her own strengths and limitations to the
task, so institutions themselves have their own collective characters, and
also characteristics which are common to institutional environments
everywhere. However, while candidates may be malleable to some extent, as
well as willing to grow and develop unexpected capacities, institutions and
their fixed players start from conservative compromise, and tend towards
rigidity over time. This has real consequences for the creation and
acceptance of PhDs. Institutional
courage is a rare quality in any culture, and commonly punished when it does
appear. Collective and personal timidity is therefore a defining motif in
most institutions. Creativity may be relatively disciplined or fairly
undisciplined, but a timid and conventional personality is not its most
obvious agent. In truth, a high proportion of academic staff are very
ordinary people. Individuals, academic and non academic, are attracted to
university life for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons are publicly
admired, and some are more covert. My own observation over a long period has
been that large numbers of the people I have met in these places were not
terribly adventurous, or brave, or even curious. Many liked the ‘cultured’ ambiance (real or imagined) of universities. They liked security and comfort
and predictable lives. Their conversations were neither witty nor learned.
Many liked to feel a little superior to the common workforce, but might be
shocked to learn how much they really have in common with many office workers
and public servants. Many
a beginning PhD candidate, coming to the door of faculty life, finds himself
or herself an outsider in every sense. He is a marginal figure, financially
and socially insecure, and not quite acceptable. He is a source of some
unease if he shows any potential to disturb the fixed patterns of
institutional life. The document he is expected to produce is required to
follow rules and rigidities as arcane as a medieval quadrille. Although it
need not (probably must not) say anything of great significance, he should
say it in a way that sounds both significant and suitably obscure. The proper
performance of this writing act signals that the candidate has absorbed the
values of the academic club sufficiently to be admitted to junior membership.
In common with countless other cultural institutions, an academic player must
never seriously question the rules of the game. There is a universal
punishment for denying the tooth fairy, Santa Clause, God, the Chinese
Communist Party or the Academic Quadrille: it is exclusion from the spoils.
Most of course learn to dance in the required fashion. Those who do not are,
on the whole, easily dismissed. 9.
The Dilemma So
here is the dilemma of one who sets out to write a PhD. The award is not an
old one in Australia, or even England, yet increasingly it is codified. Those
asked to examine PhDs now study manuals on how it should be done. They go
through checklists which define everything from line spacing to the inclusion
of, say, a literature search in the correct place. They check whether the
writer has expressed himself with proper circumspection, and count the number
of times he genuflects in the direction of ‘famous’ authorities. There are of
course many excellent PhDs written which happen to meet all of these
expectations. There are also library repositories groaning with
never-to-be-read-again PhDs which made all the requisite dance steps,
gathered the imprimatur of the committees and experts, and signified… well,
nothing except the elevation of their owners to scholastic heaven. The
problem of course is that rare dissertation which somehow wriggles past the
supervisor, whirls by with some mischief in its eye, doesn’t fit the
checklists, but really does say something of significance. The
PhD candidate reads the rules and finds that he must make an original
contribution to human knowledge, whatever that means. Then he looks around at
the place where it is to be done. He looks over those who have the power to
accept or reject his ‘original contribution’. What does he see? Mostly he
sees an environment steeped in risk aversion. He sees a place where knowledge
from ‘authority’ almost always comes up trumps (notwithstanding cautionary
tales of the Ptolemaic universe believed by the wise men of Europe for 1,500
years until challenged by Copernicus and Galileo). He sees that he is really
required to please a group of people who instinctively seek safety in numbers
(they call it peer approval). He sees above all that he is a temporary
hanger-on amid a cosy club of employed insiders who rarely venture beyond
their comfort zones. Maybe, given a certain cast of personality, he will want
to be one of them. Or maybe he is the type who self-destructively yearns to
swim free in an ocean of inquiring minds, and heads off to subversive reaches
in Google cyberspace. 10.
The Last Player Standing Why
did Thor May still keep running in this contest? He managed to lose the best
years of his life following the Idiosyncratic Researcher model. Along the way
he learned a little of the music of the spheres, spurned producing the
required document in the required manner, forsook whatever chance there had
ever been of what others called a respectable career, stayed free and perpetually
close to poverty. He wound up in Asia, having a not bad life as one of the
despised white trash they call an English conversation teacher. He tried a
third fling at the PhD game with some reluctance, motivated by a foolish idea
that a bit of truth telling from 33 years of experience might be of use to
someone, and doubly compelled to keep the Angels of the Apocalypse at bay for
a little while longer. Specifically, if he could shove a magic document
called a PhD under the pointy noses of very-important-officials, like the
Chinese Public Security Bureau mandarins, he might be allowed to live a happy
and productive life for a few more years, offering opportunities to young men
and women, as opposed to frittering life away, unemployable and unwanted in some
rented room on the pittance of an Australian age pension. These were trivial
concerns of course amongst the councils of the wise back in Australia. As it
turned out, the Chinese Public Security Bureau mandarins like their
Australian analogues, were not in the least bit interested anyway. Their rule
book said that at 65 foreigners were gaga, prone to drop dead and should be
expelled. And so it happened: PhD + age pension = silly old bugger. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Other References English, Tony (March 16, 2011) Weasel Words
and the Soft Sell, The Australian @ http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion-analysis/weasel-words-and-the-soft-sell/story-e6frgcko-1226022023977
[on academic standards] Onselen,
Peter van (June 22 2011) Loneliness of the PhD Thesis Writer, The Australian @ http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion-analysis/loneliness-of-the-phd-dissertation-writer/story-e6frgcko-1226079461466
Slade, Christina (20 April 2011) Unlocking
The Doors To A Doctorate, The
Australian @ http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion-analysis/unlocking-the-doors-to-a-doctorate/story-e6frgcko-1226041757331 The Economist (16 December 2010) The
Disposable Academic - Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time + 190
comments, The Economist
@ http://www.economist.com/node/17723223, Wiener-Bronner,
Danielle (25 April, 2011) What's Wrong With American Higher Education?, Huffington Post @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/25/whats-wrong-with-american_n_853640.html Wong, Stephen (25 November 2009) In China,
an Easy Route to Academic Glory, Asia
Times @ http://atimes.com/atimes/China/KK25Ad01.html
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Most
of the discussion here was written to myself in 2009. It was done as I
finished off what was to finally be the doctoral dissertation which one
particular assembly of examiners and university administrators felt that they
were able to accept. Their imprimatur would perhaps influence my public
credibility, for what that was worth. That is, whatever else I wrote or
said might have a higher standing in the future for those within the academic
sub-culture. Of course, I myself did not change a whit (not even in terms of
ego enlargement). It was also crystal clear that the greatest number of
fellow humans found the term “PhD” or “Doctor of Philosophy” either entirely
meaningless or a fresh cause for treating its owner with suspicion. My
cultural roots were after all in Australia, a spot famous for swaggering
anti-intellectualism. The ultimate Australian put-down is to call someone a
“know all”. There is never a shortage of “know-nothing” characters
ready to cut any likely “know all” off at the knees. Oddly, the know-nothings
become quite timid when faced with actual, complex problems themselves. (
These Australian cultural habits can clash violently with the East Asian
approach, where people think it is polite and morally right to “give face” to
the other guy). Coming out of the Australian soup, my own engagement with the
whole doctoral enterprise had always been ambivalent, even at the end, and
some flavour of that self-doubt may be evident below. I have published the
document because others are at this moment going through the torturous
process of wondering about their commitment to writing a PhD. This may help
them to crystallize their ideas, whether or not they agree with the
sentiments I express.