PHD requirement for teaching: A double whammy for research and education

"As a large number of PHDs are done only to earn the qualification, it is a massive national loss of resources and time. The research work is neither useful for the society nor intellectual vigour as it is done for the sake of it"

When I was a student, there was one qualification I was in absolute awe of, and that was Philosophia Doctor or PHD, a doctor of philosophy!

Unfortunately, over the years, I came close to the academic world and my awe soon turned in a sense of confusion, and now I see it to be a typical Indian problem borne of the even more typical Indian superpower of turning anything good on its head by removing the essence and reducing it to a soulless system to exploit.

While I admit that there are some amazingly brilliant people out there in Indian academia who possess this revered qualification deservingly, I am sorry to say that an even far larger number own this qualification for one single reason and that is getting a teaching or research job where prequalification is set as PHD.

The quality of PHD research work and the output that we have in terms of manpower is largely doubtful and it is an issue that needs to be looked at because it has far-reaching ramifications on two fields that really matter in the information age.

Even though there may be a systemic justification in setting up PHD as a prequalification, what it has resulted in is a double whammy for not just research but also education. As a large number of PHDs are done only to earn the qualification, it is a massive national loss of resources and time. The research work is neither useful for the society nor of the intellectual vigour as it is done for the sake of it.

Students engaged in such namesake PHD work not only clutter and crowd the research space and eat up precious resources, as their sole aim is to get an academic placement, they bring a culture of sycophancy and politicise the academics.

As this same raw material ends up in academic positions, it is a vicious circle that has destroyed higher education, as those who have done PHD with no intellectual interest inject the same culture as they move up the academic ladder.

So, we start with people doing PHD on irrelevant problem statements without any interest and we feed them back into the system to make things worse.

As this cycle has continued since a while, especially in the state universities where jobs can be earned as a favour from the state, we are lowering the quality of ed-ucation and research with each passing year, and by the looks of it, we will soon be handing out PHD based on how good the guide finds the student-slave’s ability to cut vegetables or make tea

"If India wants to grow to a level of prosperity that she deserves, to have with the quality of manpower we have, we need to reinvent PHD as soon as possible"

The PHD prequalification has now created another problem, especially in science and technology domain, where the issue has an even deeper impact on not just Indian education but Indian economy that desperately needs highly skilled people to grow.

We are living in an era where science and technology are on steroid and are changing with a pace that no academician can keep up with. In such an environment, PHD is a dinosaur from the past and is about to get extinct. So, those required to teach in science and technology space need to be people working on the latest technologies on the ground who are unlikely to bother with having even a bachelor’s degree.

As we are still hung up with asking for a PHD in anchor positions in the academies, we have prevented entry (and exit) of such new blood into teaching. To make it worse, as academies are system-driven, they have no way to keep up with the curriculum changes required to be relevant.

The net result is, by hanging on to the archaic idea and qualification of PHD as a foundation on which we are running our universities, we have made them irrelevant.

The truth that we need to recognise is that a young kid with a genuine interest in science and technology would fare far better in avoiding a university qualification in India.

If we want to make our academies relevant, it is high time we throw the PHD concept out of the window. If we want academicians to have research oriented minds, it is far better to absorb those with interest in teaching early instead of them having turned into deadwood while doing a PHD and demand that they publish research while in tenure.

It may be worthwhile to also increase the state engagement in research even if it raises the academic hackles on the ground of “freedom of pursuit knowledge” by creating a state-driven repository of problem statements relevant to India and support such research in PHD programmes.

If India wants to grow to a level of prosperity that she deserves to have with the quality of manpower we have, we need to reinvent PHD as soon as possible.

We need to purge the sycophancy and politics it has brought to our universities. We need to make PHD research relevant and, most importantly, we need to stop it from holding the education system hostage.