Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Doctored


An article in the Christmas double edition of The Economist - The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
– has been attracting a lot of attention.

When I was an undergraduate it was not very common (outside the natural sciences) for anyone to do a PhD as a full time student. Those destined for an academic career could still graduate in July & start work as an assistant lecturer in October (with the prospect of acquiring tenure in two to three years time), something of which I remind myself when we hear complaints of modern students being taught by mere postgrads, not proper professors.

Of course research & publication were required, but formal theses, submitted for examination, were quite rare.

We knew they did things differently in America.

One story which was current in my day illustrates this.

Alan Stuart was assisting Maurice Kendall with the new, revised edition of The Advanced Theory of Statistics, which even today, (having gone through even more revisions & expansions & acquired even more authors) is the bible of the subject.

Kendall was then working at an American university & wanted Stuart to join him. In those more expansive days – no problem, we can find him post.

Except that when he arrived & was discovered to have no PhD – whoops, sorry, our rules don’t allow mere bachelors to hold proper jobs in the academy.

The laid back Brits solved that one easily enough.

The Senate of the University of London simply awarded Stuart a DSc, which was clearly merited by the quality of his work.

I have been unable to trace any mention of this, quite probably apocryphal, or at least embroidered, story on the public web via Google, nor any reference to Kendall and/or Stuart spending any time at an American university during the years of the preparation of the new edition the late 1950s, though it is possible that the obituary in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Vol. 48, No. 2, 1999 may provide some kind of confirmation.

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