Away with the ‘profkip’, says The Young Academy

Limit the number of PhD candidates per supervisor, advises The Young Academy. Otherwise you end up with ‘profkippen’ who have too little time for the early-career researchers under their wings.

For a cultural shift, you sometimes need a new word. In the fight against intensive livestock farming, the word ‘plofkip‘ (exploding chicken) was coined. Today The Young Academy launches a variation: the profkip.

With a three-page pamphlet (plus a summarising comic strip), the young leading researchers want to open up the conversation about the supervision of PhD candidates. They propose a ‘limes promovendi’. That is Latin for a limit on PhD candidates.

Opportunities and funding

They call the profkippen ‘both the result and the driving force behind an underlying problem’. According to the pamphlet, that underlying problem is the unequal distribution of opportunities and funding in academia.

Researchers often build their careers with funding from the Dutch Research Council NWO. That funding is mainly used to appoint PhD candidates, writes The Young Academy.

Once someone has received a grant, they are more likely to obtain the next one. That maintains inequality, the pamphlet states, and grant winners receive more and more PhD candidates. That is how prof chickens emerge.

Consequences

The harmful consequences: PhD candidates do not receive proper supervision, while the grant winners see their workload increase. The workload could be shared, because assistant professors and associate professors can also obtain the ius promovendi, in other words the right to act as a PhD supervisor. But this does not happen often enough.

So The Young Academy argues for ‘a reasonable limit to the number of PhD candidates someone may supervise at the same time’. How many that should be? This group of activist leading researchers does not say.

The message is that the conversation should begin. On 18 May there will be a meeting on this subject in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam, the building of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Young Academy, part of the KNAW, is for some members a stepping stone to a career in administration. The new Minister of Education Rianne Letschert was once its chair.

PhD bonus

Recently the PhD candidates network Promovendi Netwerk Nederland made a similar plea. “It is time to start a conversation about how many PhD candidates a university can handle”, chair Martijn van der Meer told university magazine Folia.

PNN argues for a revision of the ‘PhD bonus’, in other words the government funding per doctoral degree awarded. The system is said to drive up the number of PhDs through competition between universities.