Professors must have PhDs, at least

In Bangladesh public universities, a teacher can be promoted to a professor without a PhD degree if he or she serves eighteen years, has twelve published articles, and some administrative experience. This old belief requires further thought. Now-a-days, in good universities around the world, even an entry position without a PhD is rare. Having a doctoral degree as well as having published articles would be a good prerequisite in assessing a potential candidate for a professor. UGC regulations on minimum qualifications for appointment of teachers and other academic staff in universities and colleges in Delhi 2009 require that a PhD will be a compulsory requirement for even an associate professorship. Most universities around the world require professors to have a at least a doctoral degree. Even in Bangladesh, top five private universities do not have a single full time professor without a PhD degree. It is good news that some private universities recently require a Ph.D. even for assistant professorships.

So what is the rationale in requiring a doctoral degree for a potential professor? To earn a PhD, a faculty has to go through some institutional processes including giving and attending seminars, interaction with the internal and external members, and participating in a doctoral colloquium. Doing PhD is more institutional than writing articles. All these activities are aimed at creating better knowledge and new knowledge. Seniority and administrative experience cannot substitute the purpose of a PhD. Individual articles and a PhD work are not the same thing. An article can have internal inconsistencies with another article but a PhD work is likely to be more internally consistent. An article is narrowly focused but a PhD work is both narrowly focused and broad. An article usually deals with one idea whereas a thesis deals with more than one idea. One isolated idea has a greater chance of conflict with another isolated idea. But since a thesis deals with more than one idea in one place these have to be consistent. In a Ph.D. programme a candidate must complete a prescribed course of graduate study which he may not complete in his bachelor's programme. So in addition to his own discipline, a Ph.D. candidate must know some specific prescribed courses particularly of research, e.g., statistics, research methodology. A thesis is like a good book, it has to be examined by a panel of expert examiners, many colleagues, and several seminars. To my knowledge, all great pundits have at least a book. A book has several internally consistent ideas, each approached from different angle-philosophy, literature, anthropology, economics, behaviour, and many others. In a Ph.D. thesis philosophic explanation and interpretation of a thesis is generally expected but an article does not always have to satisfy this requirement. But since an article has space constraints, it usually focuses an idea from a limited discipline. An article has a smaller audience than that of a good book. Theory of knowledge suggests that an idea has to be explained from various disciplines but without sacrificing focus and specialisation. Nobel Laureate Frederick Hayek is relevant here; he argues that knowledge never exists in concentrated form. Knowledge shall be taken from many individuals who separately posses bits of knowledge and frequently contradictory knowledge.

 When you write an article you associate with only your colleagues and peers of your own discipline but when you write a thesis you have to associate with the 'strangers', 'rest of the mankind' (in Adam Smith's words). One's ideas have to be accepted not only by friends and relatives but also by strangers; not only by insiders but also by outsiders.

Good education is always mostly self-education. Here learning is not limited to specific syllabus, reading materials, and instructions. The researcher travels around wider time, place, persons, history, subjects, and sources of knowledge. Unlike course work, which is basically oriented towards a definite syllabus, skill, procedure, Ph.D. work predominantly is an intellectual exercise. Here the supervisor with whom the researcher works, is more friendly with the latter, and considers him as his colleague. The supervisor is in fact a co-worker and many a times, publishes articles from the thesis under joint bylines. The researcher has more freedom in his learning and working environment. Unlike a teacher in a course work, the supervisor in a Ph.D. work does not give definite answers rather he tries to arouse thinking in the mind of the researcher. The supervisor gives clues at best, and the researcher proceeds further on his own. The entire process gives the researcher virtues such as independence, confidence, tolerance, love for respect and fellow feeling.

Coherent theory suggests that a belief must be consistent with other beliefs, related and unrelated. A Ph.D. scholar has to research not only his own discipline but he has also to search for other beliefs not related to his own discipline. In this process, he will learn two things: first, other beliefs which are consistent with his own will further explain, interpret, widen and broaden his own beliefs in the light of these other beliefs. Second, he will find some gaps and differences or even contradictions in these beliefs. In these cases, he will search for the reasons of these differences and contradictions and diagnose these reasons. He will find bad reasons, good reasons, and better reasons. This evaluation exercise will unearth differences in beliefs for factors such as time, place, person, history, socio-economic conditions, and environment. He will weigh stronger reasons against other weaker reasons, which is the precondition for creating better knowledge. But writing articles do not always follow this epistemic process. That is why a Ph.D. work is usually considered a foundation for doing good research and writing good articles.

The writer is Professor of Accounting at Dhaka University.

e-mail: dhiman_chowdhury@yahoo.com