Only doctorates in the house?

Michael Bywater

Butter bad. No! Butter good! Night-lights turn your kiddies into four-eyed gits! Smoking makes you impotent! New cure for cancer found! Oops - no! Sorry! It's not a cure after all! But a glass of red wine a day protects you against... no. As you were. Sound familiar? Of course it does. But the health scares and duff, creaky `medical breakthroughs' are merely the tip of a great, grubby iceberg of special pleading and academic case-making which is drifting inescapably into the heart of our intellectual life. Politics, the arts, broadcasting, literature, science, divinity and even that ostensibly most empirical of disciplines, medicine: all are falling slowly into a carefully non-gender-differentiated disrepair of conformity, performing a stately but unenlightening ellipse around the axes of essentialism and relativism. ``The University,'' wrote John Donne, ``is a Paradise. Rivers of Knowledge are there; Arts and Sciences flow from thence. Counsel Tables are horti conclusi (as it is said in the canticles) --gardens that are walled in -- and there are fontes signati, wells that are sealed up; bottomless depths of unsearchable counsels there.'' But now the University has become a money-machine -- how else do you explain the triumph of this week's Millennial Beast, the PhD? Even 25 years ago, you could look at any college fellowship roll and find only a handful of doctorates; now it is compulsory. Then, and for the centuries preceding, what counted was not just scholarship but also a rarity of intellect and that specific kind of academic genius, which can detect and support unlikely interconnections, and which leads to the only sort of teaching which is truly worthwhile. Now, like some intellectual credit-scoring exercise, academic futures depend on the possession of the piece of paper, the scarlet hood, the stupefying thesis. Money. At Cambridge, they charge a PhD student 8,000 pounds a year. For that, they offer access to the library -- to which all graduates have free access anyway -- and one supervision (or,if you're lucky -- or perhaps unlucky -- two supervisions) a term. Jam, and good money for it. But it doesn't work. People drop out in swathes.

Nothing more than a test of determination, the Ph.D privileges the boring, the dull-but-worthy, the ones who happily embrace the required narrow-mindedness, ad hominem argument and selective attention. It is the academic equivalent of turning oneself into a `corporate man' to climb the greasy pole.

And yet the universities still exercise a tremendous influence on every aspect of our lives. They train statesmen and civil servants, guard over public policy, perch on the shoulders of writers and journalists, set the terms of public discourse.

But to make this money-grubbing exercise in carefully footnoted, constipated endurance the precondition for any position of authority in our academic life, which exists for our collective salvation and enlightenment, is an act of horrid folly whose harvest of slack-jawed or headline-grabbing sub-rationality we have barelybegun to reap.

-- The Guardian News Service

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