Spiralling debt is (still) mostly alien to our PhD students. Where their challenges do become unique is red tape. Despite attempts to simplify and streamline the process, the procedure as a whole remains baffling. Certainly, some of its discrete elements are important, but somehow a clear cener and periphery are absent in the flattened landscape of bureaucracy. For instance, our students must defend their theses either in the university’s Aula or the Agnietenkapel, creating a huge and unnecessary pressure on these historic buildings and greatly limiting candidates’ schedules for no defensible reason.

Not that these schedules would otherwise be simple. A typical student, her supervisors and dissertation committee, must run the complex and ever changing administrative gauntlet currently enshrined in no less than twenty-three steps and overseen in part by a dedicated office in the faculty and a central university office. Certainly, everyone is doing their best to ensure that (mostly) public money is  properly spent. But in the end, the core purpose of quality control gets sacrificed at the altar of compliance with regulations that may be tangential to it.

Ultimately, awarding a PhD degree is an act of recognition on behalf of your direct academic interlocutors. Given the atomization of knowledge, fewer and fewer people could give that stamp of approval, especially if they are mostly expected to belong to your own department or institution. It is simply futile for a university to try and regulate each and every aspect of a superficially inflated procedure. With the exception of independently checking a text for plagiarism, directly relevant feedback is almost entirely within the scope of a department or institute, discipline or field. After all, it is their reputation and future that is on the line.