More on the criteria for earning the Ph.D.

GMP is raging.

I am in a physical science field where journal publications are the most important, and many (many!) faculty have the criterion of 3 journal publications, preferably from the dissertation work, as necessary for graduation. I was quite peeved when I realized that this student would graduate with zero papers

ok. peeved. Why?

I asked the student if there was a reason that he was graduating without a single journal paper; if there was a reason that he must be graduating now and not in, say, a year?…He said it’s because his wife and he had been living apart for some months and he also happened to find a job there. I almost blew my top off

Look. We’re already in a bad place here, GMP.

First, you admit by your use of “many” that it is equally true that there are no hard-and-fast rules with respect to publication. You further emphasize that the criterion is held by “faculty”, i.e., individuals on doctoral committees, and not by programs or departments. So it is possible, that this student has been judged ready to defend by his thesis advisor. After that, it is up to the doctoral committee to either concur or object. So your proposal that this person should stick around merely to get a paper published should be viewed as your preference for icing on the cake, right?
Icing on the cake, versus moving on with one’s life to (re)join a spouse in another city. Real life, versus your personal preference for academic icing. It is one thing to express your personal and/or professional position. But this petulant outrage about it? Seriously? Um. Fuck you. Yeah, I mean that in the nice way since we’re blog acquaintances and all. But really. Get a fucking grip.
Ok, ok. I should extend some latitude. Perhaps there is something else at stake? Beyond a foot stamping belief that someone is getting away with one?

How much can we speak of universal graduation criteria in a department versus the discretion of the advisor? In my and related disciplines throughout the world peer-reviewed publications are required in order to get a PhD.

Look. They are either required, in which case you all should have been voting against awarding the Ph.D. or they are not. Heavily desired, demanded by some committees perhaps…but required? Clearly this is false. I happen to think it is actually a bad thing to make publication requirements,

I am not in agreement with this criterion. Especially given the large number of factors that govern successful publication that are independent of the degree to which the grad student has learned and been trained.
Furthermore, it suggests that experimental “success” vs. “failure” determines the quality of the effort. This is wrong and perpetuates a culture in which the pressure to fake and cheat is ever increasing.

but my personal attitude is not relevant here since GMP has herself admitted, through what she has written, that publication is not an actual bedrock requirement of the Ph.D. Even in her “real” hard science discipline that is so superior and rigorous to the rest of ours.
Nevertheless, she is a member of the Academy and is full welcome to have her own standards and viewpoints and to express (and act upon) them. That’s the way the system works. And we should listen (read) closely for anything that looks like a sort-of justifiable reason. Here it is:

A student with a poor quality PhD drags down the value of everyone else’s degree from the same institution.

Ok. I can get behind this sort of rationale. Is it true, however?
And here is where we arrive at the most interesting discussion point. How do we assess the quality of the institution? or, more likely, the quality of a specific disciplinary graduate training program? Sure, at some levels of periodic formal review of the program, perhaps a quantification of the number of papers published by Ph.D. grads, and the status of journals in which they are published, comes into play. But these reviews of programs also focus on other matters. Important ones, in my experience, include the median time to completion of the Ph.D., where postdoctoral training is sought and the eventual employment destination of students within academia and elsewhere.
It should not escape your attention that these outcomes of program “success” may not be in such lockstep with publishing papers as a graduate student. One major determinant of faculty hiring is the recent, i.e., postdoctoral, publication record of the candidate. It should be no surprise that a stellar publication record as a graduate student isn’t going to cover over a poor record as a postdoc. Conversely, a crappy publication record as a graduate student will be more or less ignored if the person has three first author CNS papers as a postdoc. Right?
And general age factors are involved if the doctoral program is reviewed on the basis of eventual faculty appointments, right? Time is a’ticking. An extra year, systematically applied, only for the sake of publications that will be irrelevant up against the postdoctoral performance makes the program look worse on the time to eventual faculty appointment scale.
Then we get off into the line of motivational factors. GMP herself mentions people that decide to stop short of the PhD for family or other real life reasons. This is no credit to the graduate program if a lot of people drop out (well, in some views anyway). It is likewise no credit if their graduates, with the extra year of publications in hand, are more likely to step off the bus during what should be the postdoctoral years either. So this raging against decisions being made (on the part of the trainee) to ignore the chance for a publication so as to join his wife a year earlier doesn’t really account for the fact that these are people with lives (*cough*Kern!*cough*cough*) we’re talking about, does it?
I come at last to my own considerations of “reputation” of graduate training programs. I confess, when trainees are still pre-doc or recently annointed, I don’t get a general impression of them by toting up their pubs. Yes, it contributes some but really, how could I possibly keep track? The things that contribute in a big way are my direct interactions and experiences at meetings. Poster conversations, their presentation of data from the platform, etc. This is what convinces me that the training program is a stellar one….the trainees appear to be good scientists with a head on their shoulders. At the next stage, again, it is a Gestalt impression based on those individuals who are lucky enough to land faculty gigs. And the occasional person in similar level jobs in industry. The ones that have failed out of the graduate program don’t really enter the picture. There could be 50 grads of Department of -ology from Massive Research University who have left the field, and this doesn’t really influence my impression- which is based on the 5 grads who have current faculty appointments in -ology. My impression of their publication record is likewise dominated by how they are doing as faculty and, maybe, how they have just done as postdocs. As graduate students? Puh-leeze. I mean, maybe if they have a great paper I’ll remember them…
As one example, there was a graduate student author of a foundational paper which relates to much of my research focus who has apparently disappeared from science. Or at least from -ology. The paper remains (and really, this is quite an accomplishment) but what does it matter to my assessment of the graduate program? How should I view it? As an amazing success for the department because this great paper was produced by a graduate student in training there? Or crappy because this dude has disappeared, never to be heard from again?
Then there are some other folks I’ve followed over the years. Some who didn’t do jack squatte as graduate students, or maybe struggled in one or another postdoc, but then went on to faculty appointments, a slew of pubs and a comfortable amount of grant support. How should I view their graduate departments? As sucky because they let these losers out without 3 (or 2 or 1) published articles? Or as brilliant because they recognized the person in question was sufficiently trained and that papers were just not relevant to the qualifications for Ph.D. (and, by the way, did not necessarily predict this person would never publish anything ever)?
My point is that there are very good reasons not to have hard and fast rules regarding the qualifications for a Ph.D. and to leave it up to the professional opinion of a committee of faculty. First, because hard and fast rules cannot possibly capture the nuances of every candidate’s preparation for a life as a Ph.D.-wielding member of whatever professional role they are to play. Second because real-life considerations do matter. And third because the connection to the “reputation” of the Department’s graduate program is unclear to me.