Timothy Stanley

Disposable Academics

April 24, 2013 timothywstanley@me.com

ON THE evening before All Saints' Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year... They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.

"Doctoral Degrees: The Disposable Academic" The Economist - http://econ.st/10dWA96

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