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Why is a PhD required to be a professor at almost every university? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Ben Waggoner, PhD, biology professor, on Quora:
Back about 700 years ago, if you wanted to become, say, a sculptor, you signed on as an apprentice to a master sculptor. At first, you’d do all the menial jobs; sweeping and mopping the floor, hauling the blocks of stone, sharpening the tools, making the coffee (OK, maybe not in the actual Middle Ages as such)... and when he felt like it, your master would show you the basics of carving stone. You'd start getting some practice under the master’s supervision, maybe carving some waste bits of stone that the master didn’t need. If you aren't too bad at it, you might go on to do parts of a sculpture yourself—maybe the parts that few people will see, like the rear end of an angel statue that will end up fifty feet up a wall, or something. As you get more practice, you are trusted with more and more complex tasks, you get more and more experience, you learn more and more of what the master can teach you and eventually, you get the chance to carve a statue all by yourself. It gets judged by the local guild of stone carvers and if it’s good enough, you become a master stone carver yourself. That statue becomes your “master piece”—in fact, that’s what the word originally meant: a piece of work that showed that you could work on the level of a master.
This is what a PhD basically is. Exactly how it works can vary from department to department, and from university to university, but basically, you stop taking the kinds of classes that you took as an undergraduate (unless you need a few to fill in gaps in your background knowledge, or to pick up skills that will be useful). Most of your classes are seminars and discussions. But most of your time and effort goes into creating what is, hopefully, an original piece of research. With guidance from your major professor (which can range from helicoptering to malignant neglect, but hopefully is a happy medium between the two extremes), and hopefully some funding and resources through your major professor as well, you come up with an unsolved problem in your field, or a question that hasn’t been addressed before, and you answer it. In the sciences, you design the experiments or field studies and then go out and try to do them; in the liberal arts, you design whatever program of reading and research you need. And if all goes well you bring it to a successful conclusion, publish your results for the academic community to see, and receive your PhD.
What the PhD shows is not so much that you know a lot of stuff that you can repeat. It shows that you know how to add to humanity’s store of knowledge. It shows that you can follow the standards of your academic field and produce something that nobody thought of before. It shows that you know how new knowledge is arrived at. And hopefully, you’ll be able to keep on doing that for the rest of your career, adding to the sum of our knowledge, and knowing how to add to it in a valid way.
That’s why a PhD is required, at least for tenure-track employment, at most universities in most departments. Being a professor means not just that you repeat memorized facts to anyone who doesn’t run away fast enough. You’re expected to do research, or other scholarship, that advances the state of knowledge in your field—just as our medieval sculptor was expected to produce new sculptures and statues, not just copies of older ones.
(Note: In some fields, like creative writing and studio art, the Master of Fine Arts or MFA degree is usually the highest degree a professor has—this is normal. The idea is still the same: to get the MFA, you have to write and publish creative writings, create a sizable portfolio of art and show it in galleries, etc. At some universities, people may be hired without PhDs because there may be other considerations: at the Baptist college in my town, at least as of a few years ago, you had to be a Baptist of a particular sect in order to be hired as a professor, and the science department mostly consisted of people who hadn’t finished their PhD—but who were staunch Baptists of the correct variety. And at my university, we do have people on the faculty who have Master’s degrees but not the PhD—however, they teach lower-division courses, they’re not expected to do research, they don’t get paid as much, and while some have pretty stable positions, others might teach for a couple of years and then go on to do something else.)
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