PhD needs a reset

World over, the PhD program is in a crisis, and there are ample amount of articles written about why we need to rethink our PhD programs. For example: 

• The Paradox of Doctoral Training - the Node
• The Reimagined PhD: Navigating 21st Century Education
• PhD Crisis: Oversupply or Mismanagement of Talent?
• PhD Education: 2025 Expectations and Transformation

This is yet another post about this topic-- but one that is hopefully, in a very different direction. There are major issues that are debated about PhD education today-- including funding and the industry relevance of the research carried out. 

But very few observers, if any, are addressing the fundamental reason why a PhD study exists in the first place. 

A PhD is a degree in philosophy-- not in technology or science or engineering. One does not think in terms of a Computer Science PhD, Data Science PhD, Mathematics PhD, etc. It is just a PhD-- a thesis communicating the results of a philosophical inquiry. 

A philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality is by definition, interdisciplinary. There is nothing that is "out of syllabus" for a philosophical inquiry. 

And in my opinion, this disconnect with the core reason behind a PhD journey, is the biggest crisis we are facing today. At a time when there is an acute need for people with philosophy skills, not only are we discounting this important skill, but we also actively mock and lampoon philosophers with stereotypes of being impractical figureheads living in their own ivory towers. 

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Philosophy is a term that is greatly misunderstood today. I remember some years ago, when a former colleague came to meet me and I was mentioning that I was mentoring a "philosophy club" among our students. After this, we went to the cafeteria and we both ranted about the troubles we are facing in our respective lives, talked about politics, history and anything that caught our fancy. And then, just before we said goodbye, the former colleague said, "There, I guess this was one more session of your philosophy club?" 

I just smiled and nodded, not having the heart to tell him that what we just had was a ranting session-- not a session in serious philosophical inquiry. 

Similarly, several ideological schools-- that make up the different -isms are called philosophies, and the respective ideologues of each school are called philosophers. Philosophy is not a specific ideology. Someone who embodies a ideological structure and lives it and advocates it, is an ideologue-- not a philosopher. 

There is an episode in Big Bang Theory where two physicists who are PhD holders are having a philosophical debate about Quantum loop gravity, and String theory. And their disagreement ends up breaking the personal relationship they have been having. That is not a philosophical disagreement-- that is an ideological disagreement. The PhD holders there were not philosophers-- they were ideologues, pushing their respective ideologies. 

A number of such so-called philosophical debates are just ideological debates. From the viewpoint of philosophy, they are all ill-posed philosophical problems. 

Take for instance, the debate between skepticism and faith. A scientific mindset is supposed to be characterised by skepticism, and a religious mind is supposedly characterised by faith. But it is not hard to see that one who staunchly advocates skepticism is actually practising "faith in skepticism" and one who staunchly advocates faith, is actually practising skepticism about anything else other than their object of faith! 

Or for example, the debate between "evolution" and "intelligent design". The philosopher only asks the evolutionary theorist "Was the process of evolution designed-- or did it evolve from a meta-evolutionary system?" (Arguing that it was the product of a random chance does not cut it because we can still ask the question whether the mathematical properties of that randomly chosen mutation that lead to evolution of life-- was that a product of design?) Similarly, the philosopher asks the "intelligent design" ideologue "Who designed the designer?" 

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In the name of Science, today we only have different hermeneutic ideologies, each in a territorial battle with others for occupying mind space and bringing new converts into its fold. 

Each hermeneutic ideology is blindly pursuing its interests pushing away anything that comes in its path. Be it AI or Mars colonisation, or genetic engineering, or whatever else, each hermeneutic universe wants to be at the centre of what is termed as Science. 

In my professional life, I often get very hostile vibes from others when I criticise the way the term "agents" are used in current day Agentic AI. Almost as if, I have committed a religious blasphemy of some sort. The idea of agency has been studied for thousands of years, and in computing itself, it has been studied for at least 40 years now. And what is called an agent in an Agentic LLM today is just a very sophisticated service that can break down an instruction written in a very high-level language (natural language) and converts it into actionable elements. Pretty much a sophisticated compiler. An agent on the other hand, has to display some kind of subjective self-interest and free-willed intentions. 

The research ecosystem today resembles an ecosystem of different ideological schools with many "believers" affiliated to each school, and each of which, are vying for market share and mind share. 

What we don't have today, are genuinely disinterested philosophers who are characterised by vairagya and samadarshana, who are not aligned with any ideology, and who are not incentivised by any kind of prestige or recognition, and are solely driven by philosophia ($φιλοσοφία$), or the "love of wisdom."

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Recently, I was arguing that the goal of philosophy is not to find a solution to a problem, but to find an epistemological grounding that leads to the dissolution of the problem. 

At its core, philosophy is about questioning the "obvious" to uncover the underlying structures of reality, knowledge, and value. Rather than providing a fixed set of answers within a hermeneutic framework, philosophy questions how the existing state of affairs came about in the first place. It needs to ask how we can justify our beliefs, what constitutes a meaningful life, and how can we navigate the complexities of human existence. 

A PhD in that sense, is not about outputs (or what it produces), but about outcomes (how it transforms the people who go through this process). 

A good thesis may provide an answer to a long-standing open problem-- but a great thesis is one that opens up new ways of thinking and new possibilities, by questioning the fundamentals of what we have taken for granted. 

If there is any time in history where we desperately need strong philosophers, it is today. World over, we are in a bizarre state of affairs in just about every sphere of human activity-- be it in geopolitics, technology, climate, society, business, etc. Much of what we had taken for granted until the end of the 20th century are getting ripped apart by current developments. 

We can't even start to imagine a society where everyone is constantly under surveillance by law, where weapons are autonomous killing machines, where we depend on AI to run our lives, and where climate is getting increasingly intense. Yet, we are entering into this reality at a fast pace. 

We need philosophers who can ask deep questions and reach a mental state that lies beyond what is causing our current day problems, and get a sound understanding of where we are going. We need guidance from those who have seen the dissolution of these problems in their minds. 

And yet, the only questions we are asking our PhDs are about Nobel prizes, citations, awards, prestige, etc. 

We are literally facing an existential crisis, and we are only using simplistic carrot-and-stick approaches to drive our PhD programs! 

PhD needs a reset-- and we need to bring the Ph back into the PhD!  

The product and byproduct of universities

Several years ago, I heard this interesting argument in a speech by a famous academic. It said that, the primary product of a university is the ideas and knowledge it generates-- while its graduates are just the byproducts created in this process. 

It was very intriguing to hear this, and I found it quite a profound observation. Indeed, as the speaker argued, universities are not meant to create trained personnel for the industry-- that needs to be primarily addressed by industrial training itself. "Industry" does not mean one thing-- and indeed within the same industry there are vastly varying needs that are constantly changing. An independent body like universities cannot put its entire focus on the narrow goals of meeting variegated and changing industry needs for the next placement cycle. 

Universities and higher-education are also not meant for imparting "conceptual foundations" in students-- students are expected to enter universities with fairly strong foundations. 

The primary role of the university in a society-- as the argument went-- is to act as a catalyst of progress-- by infusing fresh new ideas and perspectives that give us new understanding of our world and our challenges, and equip the society better. Societies have an incentive to build universities, when universities become the source of thought leadership through original, rigorous research by exploring ideas that are relevant, pertinent and timely to the society. 

As a byproduct of this activity, universities also create graduates, and the graduates get "prestige" and social status because of the brand value that the university has earned by its thought leadership and impact on the society. Their pedigree of having been associated with teh university opens doors and creates opportunities for them. But all this is possible only if the university was a thought-leader in the first place. 

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This argument is compelling, and I do believe it has a lot of merit. 

But over the years, my perspective has slowly started to change, as I found the opposite argument just as compelling. 

One of the pathologies of placing our primary focus on ideas, and treating people as byproducts is that such a setup can easily slide into toxic work environments. It is generally difficult to understand the worth of a new idea when it is generated (to quote Michael Faraday when he was asked what is the "use" of his discovery of electromagnetism: "What is the use of a new born baby?"). Because of this, some arbitrary, dominant ranking or metric becomes center-stage and gets brutally pushed down on researchers and students. Having no other frame of reference, graduates who are the byproducts of this system, emerge bruised and abused, and end up believing that toxicity is what "rigour" means! And then they move on to other institutions and implement the same toxicity there. 

This is the context in which I came across the opposite argument, which says that the primary objective of a university is to bring about a transformation in its students-- from novices to experts to eventually transform the population to a collective state of responsible empowerment. In order to do this, the university needs to generate new ideas and thought-leadership, as byproducts. 

I have argued this point of view in some of my previous posts on outcomes versus outputs: here and here. 

In this mode of thinking, it is the people who are the primary focus. It is the people who create ideas and take the ideas-- and more importantly, the hermeneutics or the way of thinking, that they developed in the universities back into the society and bring about changes. It is imperative on the university to watch how their students are transforming through their journey, and facilitate desirable transformations by removing roadblocks in their journey. 

In such environments, reflection and introspection are very important. Not only are we creating solutions, applying knowledge and driving change, we are also deeply aware of how we are ourselves transforming in this process. The transformation that we go through is the outcome, while the things that we produce in this process are the outputs. 

I often tell my students that there is a difference between "doing the job of a teacher, and being a teacher" and similarly, between "doing the job of a student, and being a student". 

The latter is the personal change that we encounter, which remains with us throughout our lives. 

It is not that people don't get transformed in an output oriented environment-- they do get transformed into cynical, insecure, and toxic professionals, confusing this for rigour and discipline. Scale this at a country level, and we can see that despite having several engineering colleges, we do not create any new idea or new ways of thinking of solving our own problems, and instead, all that the graduates of our premier universities dream of, is to go abroad and settle down there. This is the transformaton we are creating. 

Once, apparently someone visiting from abroad asked the Director of one of our premier tech institutes, "You guys have created such a miracle that we are struggling to understand! You take the best and brightest young minds of the country and make them good for nothing in just four years! How do you do it?" 😜

I don't know how true that story is-- but you get the idea! 😁

So yeah, the products are still the people-- who are transformed from complainers to solution-givers, from insecure and fearful creatures to confident yet humble professionals. In this process, they go through the latest tech, the latest framework, the latest whatever, and produce the best papers and ideas according to whatever metric-- those are all important, to the extent of being byproducts.