“PhD” stands for “piled high and deep,” an old joke goes. This could come to mind with the recent and tragic Jason Arday scandal. Because the problem of Arday — a fabulist who had a fraudulent doctorate — isn’t limited to Arday. In fact, says an expert on the matter, the entire PhD evaluation process is flawed and corrupt. He even quotes an academic at a prestigious university who says that he never fails a PhD thesis — no matter how bad it is. In other words, Arday’s tragic death (he committed suicide) relates to a larger issue: the death of academic excellence.
Daniel Sokol, who treated this subject at The Telegraph recently, knows whereof he speaks. After all, he has for 15 years served as a lawyer for failed doctoral students in Britain. Note, too, that at least much of what he bemoans can be extrapolated to the United States. It’s also no small matter. A PhD is often (if you have the right politics) a ticket into pseudo-elite circles. You not only can teach tomorrow’s leaders, but can enter academia and disgorge ideas into the wider society. (Pseudo-elite arenas such as the legacy media and entertainment pick up academia’s theories and run with them.) A PhD bestows “expert” status and, sometimes, access to the ears of the powerful.
Not Your Grandfather’s PhD
Sokol explains the doctoral-corruption matter simply. “Poor theses can pass, and good ones fail,” he writes. He elaborates:
Universities care about the integrity of their academic qualifications, as they so often tell students, but only up to a point. Having a PhD is no guarantee of academic excellence or intellectual ability. As any academic will tell you, there are plenty of mediocre PhDs.
Some of this is ideological, with doctoral examiners more likely to pass theses aligning with their own worldview. Yet there’s far more to it.
Remember the admission by late Congressman John Conyers (D-Mich.) that he hadn’t read the Patriot Act before voting for it? “We don’t read most of the bills,” he confessed.
So it is with PhD theses, apparently. They represent years of research (supposedly) on a precise area of scholarship and can be 100,000 words long. Evaluating them properly can require dozens of reading hours. Yet as Sokol explains:
The thesis is typically examined by two academics, one from the candidate’s own university (the “internal” examiner) and one from another institution (the “external” examiner). PhD examiners are paid around £200 to £250 [~$307] for assessing the thesis. This is a piffling sum for the amount of work required, and some examiners may cut corners. I have had cases when examiners told students in their oral examination that they had not read the entire thesis.
It is similar in the United States, too: PhD examiners’ compensation is low to nonexistent. And you get what you pay for.
This brings us to the aforementioned professor who never fails theses. An old school friend of Sokol’s, he told the writer that an F will invariably be appealed. He just didn’t want the grief of responding to complaints.
So what happens if a candidate has plagiarized or used a ghostwriter (AI perhaps, today) while generating his thesis? There’s a strong incentive to turn a blind eye, states Sokol. After all, investigating means months of academic and administrative time and includes dealing with numerous appeals and hearings.
Sokol also mentions this factor:
Examiners are usually nominated by the PhD candidate’s supervisors, and so personal and professional relationships can play a role in assessment decisions. Supervisors will tend to select examiners favourably disposed to their student’s approach or intellectual outlook. Examiners who fail a colleague’s PhD student, especially if that colleague carries a strong reputation, may worry about the repercussions on their own career and reputation. Academia is a small world, and professional relationships may influence judgment.
In other words, academics are much like our politicians.
Tales of the Pseudo-elite
This academic corruption explains not only why university scholars may act so foolishly, but also why they’re so easily fooled. As to this, consider something called “the Sokal Hoax.” National Review related its particulars in 2017 in “Academia May Now Be Beyond Satire”:
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist and self-described “academic leftist,” composed an essay that was a word salad of solemn academic jargon. He said he strove to be “especially egregious,” by maundering on about “the dialectical emphases” of “catastrophe theory” becoming a “concrete tool of progressive political praxis.” His essay’s gaudy title was: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”
He sent it to the left-leaning “cultural studies” journal Social Text, which swooned, perhaps in part because Sokal larded his nonsense with political tropes that are catnip to lettered leftists — “emancipatory mathematics,” “demystify and democratize the production of scientific knowledge,” “the crisis of late-capitalist production relations.” Soon after Social Text published his faux scholarship, Sokal revealed in another journal, Lingua Franca, that it was a parody.
To reiterate, this esteemed journal published his pure and utter nonsense, thinking it actual scholarship. And while academia did have a conniption, there was no self-reflection. Thus could Powerline write in 2018:
Everyone is buzzing today about the revelation of the three academics — James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian — who placed over a dozen complete hoax articles with various premier ‘cultural studies’ or ‘identity studies’ academic journals. All three professors, it should be noted, consider themselves left of center, as does Alan Sokal, the New York University physicist who placed a hoax article about the supposed subjectivity of physics in the postmodernist journal Social Text 20 years ago. (Yet somehow Social Text stayed in business instead of closing down in embarrassment, as they should have.)
Commenting on this in 2019, pundit Mike McDaniel stated:
What’s remarkable about this is they set out to prove the editors and peer reviewers — professors with doctorates in their respective fields — could not tell the difference between actual scholarship and absolute nonsense couched in contemporary social justicey eduspeak. One of the papers was a rewrite of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The paper was titled: Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.
Is it really so remarkable, though, given what we now know? Maybe it’s time to apply Ronald Reagan’s “Trust, but verify” standard to doctorates and take “PhD” to mean “perhaps highly dubious.”
