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SINGLETON DRONES ON ABOUT MATTERS ACADEMIC
A Retired Old Duffer's Blog Spot

QUALIFICATION OR CERTIFICATION?
WILL THE REAL CRITERION PLEASE STEP FORWARD
August 8, 2008

Earlier this week the Chicago Tribune published a front page lead story with the headline PhD? May Be From a Bogus U.. George Gollin, Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana) is working with federal investigators to shed light on the long standing and widespread proliferation of "degrees" devoid of academic rigor. Most of us who have been employed by universities and colleges have known about this for some time, but little has really been about it. Professor Gollin is performing a significant service to academic.

That having been said, bogus degrees are only a part of a larger problem. Once we weed out applicants with pieces of papers from degree mills, we will have pools of candidates who are properly certified, but does than insure qualification? The problem of qualification can be further divided into general qualification for academic employment and specific qualification given the nature and mission of a particular institution.

I was fortunate to be housed for most of my career in a department that took evidence of scholarship into account when considering candidates. We were less likely to be impressed by the prestige of the institution conferring the degree than we were by the quality of a doctoral dissertation and/or publications. Alas, I knew of other departments, both at my university and others across the land, that were more impressed by the name of the institution where the candidate studied than the quality of scholarship. And, yes, I have encountered applicants with doctorates from some of the nation's leading universities whose scholarship was slightly less than pedestrian. They are relatively few and far between, but more frequently encountered than one would wish.

What my department did not do is to probe deeply into the ability and desire of candidates to teach at an institution with a specific mission to populations previously under-represented in institutions of higher education. Mea culpa, I was sometimes less attentive to this area than I should have been.

The wonder is that quality control works as well as it does in academic life. Doctorates are formally awarded by universities, but in most cases they are really awarded by committees of three to five people. More often than not the qualifying examinations are rigorous exercises in demonstrating the ability of a candidate in both analysis and synthesis. More often than not the dissertation is a solid piece of scholarship. Every now and then-not that often-one hears a committee member mutter, "How did we let that one get through?" There is a similar variability in the diligence of search and screen committees at the hiring end of the process. Looking for qualification in a candidate is far more difficult and time consuming than looking for certification.

Nevertheless, I can honestly say that I was proud to be in the company of the vast majority of colleagues in my department, in my university, and in American academic life generally. It is the general excellence of that realm that makes the examples to the contrary stand out as such an embarrassment.