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Blog Keywords: Bangalore
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Thursday, April 15, 2004

Posted 7:45 AM by Anurag
Abolishing the PhD award ?

Recently, an article with the subject title was published in an Indian journal: 'Abolishing the PhD award.' Science and Culture, 69(11-12): 363-365. (Author's Contact Address: Subhankar Ray, Dept. of Biochemistry, Univ. of Calcutta, 35 Ballygunge Circular Road, KOLKATA 700 019)

The basic contention of the article is that PhD award should be abolished as a requirement for higher careers. The PHD process, according to author Subhankar, by and large, doesn't add value due to following reasons:

* The time given to a PhD candidate is limited and hence he can not attack a challenging problem.
* The process of research during PhD and its evaluation process both are flawed.

There are more merits in the latler point than the former. I guess even after 2 years of coursework, another 2 years are good enough to handle a 'challenging' problem. So time is certainly not a problem, as long as the researcher is motivated enough. However, the second point of quality of research programmes (in general) demands attention. A lot is left to be desired even at the top school PhD programmes.

In the end, the article is more like Nicholas Carr's article "IT Doesn't matter" published last year, which created whole lot of ruckus amongst IS professionals. In that case too, 'inside' the article, author had said that he was not discoutning the potential of IT per se, but just saying that IT didn't matter in a way it used to etc etc. But the quintessential result of that article was that it generated a lot of debate in the community about an important topic.

If for nothing else, and for all its lack of academic rigor, Subhankar's paper does bring out some problem points in our system, and as research professionals its our job to address these issues, especially if they happen to be correct!
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