What peculiar times we live in, when a social media pile-on is considered sufficiently newsworthy to attract national and international media attention and be discussed on Radio 4’s The World at One. This week’s brouhaha concerned a Twitter/X post by Ally Louks, a PhD graduand from the University of Cambridge, about having passed her viva. The subject of her thesis, on “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose” may not be the average person’s cup of scented Earl Grey (though it is embargoed, so nobody bar her supervisor and examiners has actually read it). But so what? This was simply one of countless similar celebratory tweets from students, an individual’s exhalation of relief after three years of hard work. 

I feel sympathy for Louks, having been subjected earlier this year to a disturbing pile-on of my own. While Louks sparred gamely with her abusers, I swiftly muted mine and have still not read much of what was written, though friends wrote to express concern and I picked up the gist from an article in this very magazine. The irony that struck me was that Louks and I had been trolled for almost diametrically opposing reasons: she for a thesis perceived as too political (aka woke); me for expressing concern, as an academic who views it as a professional responsibility to keep personal politics out of the classroom, at the “hyper-politicisation” of higher education.  

In both cases the worst of the cyber-bullies hailed from across the pond. In Louks’s case, there were comical outbursts from people outraged that middle-class Americans would have to foot the bill for her studies, having mistakenly assumed the University of Cambridge to be a minor state university near prestigious Harvard, the US equivalent of Oxford Brookes. In my case, the charge seemed to be led by Canadian sociologists so irate that anyone had questioned the sacred tenet that “everything is political” that they resorted to the most egregious, libellous insults. In both cases, the pile-ons were disproportionate, hysterical, at times unhinged, and, in the most violent threats to Louks, smelled very ugly indeed.

Some academics, then, can be as noxious as anybody else when they set their minds to it, but what was most concerning about the response to Louks was the resolute anti-intellectualism of so much of the comment. After making a few anodyne comments about Louks’s experience, I too had to fend off countless hackneyed (and categorically incorrect) comments about how if you have a PhD you’re “not a proper doctor” and shouldn’t use the title. A PhD in the humanities is, I was told, a waste of time, a passport to a lifetime working as a barista, and of no value to society. The tone was one of total contempt, not just for Louks’s topic, but for the very endeavour of study itself beyond a handful of subjects, preferably for the minimum time possible.

There were multiple misunderstandings about what a PhD is. (Of course the UK and US systems are somewhat different.) A PhD is just a qualification, a culmination of someone’s studies, pursued only by those who are really devoted to academic study. Some might seem more interesting than others. Some might seem questionable or silly – and there are far stranger topics out there than Louks’s – but ultimately it’s just someone’s degree, their own affair.

Most PhD students don’t go into it expecting riches, but nor are they “unemployable” 

Whether a PhD passes is determined by whether it makes an original contribution to knowledge. This factor dictates that PhD topics venture into the unknown: they are by definition specialist, and may have a small readership. Some theses barely see the light of day again: even someone who becomes an academic may not necessarily teach their specialist topic, but they will have mastered the advanced skills in analysis and argument that equip them to teach others. Other PhD topics might speak to a wider public. I’ve used my own to write books and articles, give talks, and present broadcasts that have been genuinely appreciated by a general audience interested in the arts. 

Most PhD students don’t go into it expecting riches, but nor are they “unemployable”. Some (although increasingly few) will find work as academics. Others go on to all manner of other professional careers, because employers, unlike Dwight in Tennessee or stuffu0570040 in Florida, recognise that a PhD has value as an exercise in intellectual rigour: in finding, sifting and prioritising information, in marshalling evidence and articulating an argument. I know Music PhDs who have become teachers in top public schools, gone into senior finance roles, and joined the Civil Service. 

Some people pursue doctorates in retirement, almost always self-funded, simply out of a desire to study a particular topic in great depth and learn from an expert in the field. A PhD can be a gruelling slog, and no viva is a walk in the park. Anyone with the determination and sticking power to do it at this stage of life and at their own expense is only to be applauded. They owe “society” precisely nothing.

… many now feel obliged to fall in with a particular ideological agenda to stand a chance of getting an academic job

There are, however, legitimate debates to be had about funding decisions, while distancing ourselves from philistine arguments that humanities funding should be cut altogether. A particular concern of mine is that we are seeing a situation where humanities funding, at PhD level and beyond, is increasingly being reserved for research that addresses a relatively small number of currently fashionable socio-political issues. Adverts for funded PhDs and indeed jobs now routinely encourage or compel applicants to engage with critical social justice themes, whether genuinely relevant to their interests or not.  

Where graduate students used to have an entirely free rein in topic choice, allowing them to do the sort of “blue-skies thinking” that can lead to really groundbreaking intellectual discovery, many now feel obliged to fall in with a particular ideological agenda to stand a chance of getting an academic job. This is regrettable because it limits freedom and independence of thought and will ultimately result in the contraction of knowledge, as scholars huddle around the same few predictable themes. This is why we are seeing so many projects on intersectionality and the like: such topics have currency in today’s academic market. But to bully an individual graduate student for this larger systemic issue or on any other count is reprehensible.