Universities like PhDs
It was not always so, but these days, universities mostly require teachers to have PhDs (doctorate).
This reflects the dual assumptions that a PhD qualifies someone to teach their subject and that not having one disqualifies them. This is pure fallacy, both the knowledge and the teaching parts.
Completing a PhD is not the only way to learn something. Sometimes, it’s the worst way. Lots of people without PhDs are even more knowledgeable than those having them.
Also, a PhD is not a teaching qualification. By the time PhD graduates become lecturers, most have never had any teaching experience. Not surprisingly, many PhD gradates can’t teach at all. Everyone who’s ever done time in university knows the commonest type of lecturer; they deliver excruciating, confusing presentations that communicate nothing and waste students’ time.
Even if a PhD were a teaching qualification, such qualifications still don’t demonstrate teaching ability. All your worst teachers at school had teaching qualifications. This is because no teaching qualifications means anything anyway. Teaching ability is a personal characteristic not gained from study.
Only cooks can teach cooking, only photographers can teach photography, only carpenters can teach carpentry, and so on. Therefore, it’s safe to say that only writers can teach writing.
Having a PhD in writing doesn’t make one a writer, just as having a PhD in music- or art-theory doesn’t make one a musician or artist. Would you rather learn painting from an experienced painter or from an art-theorist who’s never held a brush?
Very few writers have or need PhDs. Most consider them a waste of time because they’d rather be writing.
Incidentally, the contents of PhDs in writing are, like all soft subjects, mostly opinion or unprovable assumptions: certainly questionable and sometimes moronic (e.g. “you don’t need story”). Opinion doesn’t count as fact or knowledge, even less when written by wannabe theorists who’ve never written for a living.
I’m not against PhDs, I’m indifferent. They’re meaningless, as are all degrees. When it comes to teaching professional writing, a PhD is at best irrelevant and more often a disqualification. Academics famously make the very worst writers (read their stuff and see).
Of course I realise that a PhD thesis is a substantial document. I’ve read many and edited several; gruelling ordeals they were too. This is because PhD theses conflict with ideals of good writing. They make no effort to enliven the topic, being inevitably tedious and dull; in fact, notions of aiming for general appeal or literary value are harshly discouraged. Instead of existing to communicate substantial ideas, PhD theses are often deliberately unclear; their actual purposes are to conceal mediocrity and make their authors seem clever.
People who write that way cannot produce or teach quality writing. Nevertheless, in many universities, anyone with a PhD in any subject is considered qualified to teach general-level academic-writing courses. This policy disadvantages students.
As an illustration of this problem, several of my former students were entitled to specialist academic-writing guidance free via their universities. Yet the students found such services so unsatisfactory that they chose to pay for my help instead. This was not an isolated occurrence. The problem is so systemic that a student accommodation block in Melbourne CBD offered an academic-writing tutoring service because most residents were unhappy with the teaching available via their respective nearby universities. The block was in the process of recruiting me to teach that, and I would have, but Covid-19 started the same week.
A few university teachers do know how to both write and teach writing, but in those cases, whatever abilities they may have are natural talent and were not gained via formal study. In any case, these teachers will be constrained by the course format and restrictive school policies.
Therefore, you won’t learn to write at university. These days, you won’t learn much at all except what a state of dire collapse universities are in.
Next section: Meaningless assignments
Articulate Writing 