Opening bid: two plus two PhD candidates per supervisor

What a great coinage by The Young Academy: the Profkip. The word captures exactly what the problem is. Our PhD system bursts at the seams in some places.

These "young" academics are absolutely right that we need to do something about supervisors who supervise far too many PhD candidates. That is not good for the PhD candidates, not good for the other supervisors, and ultimately not good for the "promotors" themselves either.

The solution The Young Academy advocates is a "limes promovendi", a limit on the number of PhD candidates under a single supervisor. That’s a very good idea. But the question then is where that limit lies. At ten PhD candidates per promotor? Five? The Young Academy merely indicates that the academic community needs to discuss this, but does not provide a maximum.

Shall I make an opening offer then?

Two plus two: every academic can act as a daily supervisor for two PhD candidates and sit on the supervision team for another two PhD candidates.

In addition, every academic should also immediately be granted Ius promovendi, as I suggested earlier.

Why two? I have seen in Australia how well this works. When I worked in Sydney, the Australian Research Council had a rule that every researcher could participate in a maximum of two projects. That is, of course, not exactly the same as two PhD candidates per supervisor (a project can have multiple PhD candidates, or a postdoc instead of a PhD candidate), but I think the dynamics of two projects and two PhD candidates will be comparable.

Australian academics, and especially the very senior professors (the archetypal Profkippen, so to speak), are much more selective when it comes to the two projects they want to participate in. And they are genuinely committed to those two projects.

This allows their research talents to flourish much more. Instead of managing a large bunch of projects, Australian academics do a lot of research themselves. They are in the lab. They develop computer code. They dive into the archives. They interview respondents. They write articles as first authors. They practice slow science.

After all, it is strange that in the Netherlands we give the most successful scientists—those with the most projects and PhD candidates—the least amount of time to do what they are evidently really good at: conducting scientific research.

As a young academic in Sydney, I found the two-project rule fantastic. More than once, I got the chance to take on a major role in a collaboration proposal because the professor who was the usual suspect already had two projects and was therefore “full.” That gave me the opportunity to crawl out from under the professor’s wing.

It might sound a bit radical to limit everyone to a maximum of two PhD candidates at a time, but if we combine this with Ius promovendi for every U(H)D, we will be rid of the ‘Profkippen’ in one swoop. And I think our job satisfaction and scientific results will benefit from it as well.

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