Judged, Then Buried

We queue up examiners for every thesis, then leave the reader’s chair empty.

At the end of every semester, a quiet funeral takes place in our universities. The thesis has been neatly bound, its title stamped in gold across the cover, its signatures collected one by one. After the viva comes the tea, the sweets and a lavish lunch, paid for, naturally, by the poor scholar. Then the thesis is carried to a cupboard and left there. The burial is complete. Nobody comes to recite the fatiha at the grave, by which I mean that nobody comes to open it and read. Or perhaps somebody does. The trouble is that our system has never thought to find out.
Let me fix the limits of my claim before someone else does. I am not saying that every thesis goes unread; I have no evidence for that. My claim is smaller and, I think, sharper: there are two kinds of readers, and we have arranged for only one of them. The first kind judges. That is the examiner, the journal editor. The second kind uses: the reader who takes a question from the research, draws a conclusion from it, or changes a decision because of it. We have built a long queue of judges and left the user’s chair empty.
It would be unfair to pretend the judges are missing. According to a copy of the Higher Education Commission’s policy on research publication and external examiners that came my way, a PhD thesis must be reviewed by at least two outside experts, and the candidate must publish an article from the research as first author. In the social sciences that means one journal from the HEC’s “X” category or two from its “Y” category, the Commission’s own ranking of journals. In the university policies I looked at, the publication requirement stopped at the PhD. So the patient is visited faithfully while still alive; my question concerns what happens after death. Every one of these requirements falls before the degree is awarded. Once the degree arrives, the judging stops, and the using never begins.
Plagiarism screening tells the same story. Turnitin’s guidance, as I read it, allows the benefit of the doubt up to a similarity of nineteen per cent, and suggests a closer look when five per cent or more comes from a single uncited source. Universities run each thesis through the software before the defence and, if it crosses the line, allow a revision. This is a necessary precaution; plagiarism ought to be stopped. But consider the question the machine is built to ask: does this text resemble another text? That is a question about the purity of the research, not its usefulness. And so whatever has a machine and a rule attached to it gets done for every thesis, while whatever has neither, namely whether anyone learned anything from the work, is left to goodwill. We washed the thesis clean and wrapped it in the shroud of a degree: white, spotless and signed. Judged, cleaned, certified, buried.
Now look at the mourners and ask where each one’s interest ends. The student’s degree is complete on the day of the defence. The examiner’s job ends with a report. The university enters one more degree in its ledger. For the supervisor, the thesis sometimes carries on as a paper, but that journey depends on personal enthusiasm, not on any rule of the system. In other words, nobody’s core interest lies in the thesis being used afterwards. When a system has no ledger in which the user’s interest is entered, the user’s absence is not an accident. It is what the design produces. Beyond this point I am guessing, not proving: when the defence is the destination, the question a student asks while choosing a topic may quietly change from “which question matters?” to “which topic will sail through approval?”
The cost of this absence comes in two kinds. The visible kind is easy to add up: the student’s months of labour, the supervisor’s time, the institution’s money. The invisible kind is harder to see. A study that nobody opens after the defence has nobody to catch its mistakes. Whatever is useful in it helps no one. And the same question stands a fair chance of being asked again, from scratch, somewhere else. Without a user, research becomes a record, not knowledge.
We do have a graveyard. The HEC’s Pakistan Research Repository is a digital archive of MPhil and PhD theses; according to one introductory article I found, it holds more than nine thousand in full text, so that a scholar can see what has already been done before starting something new. But keeping a repository and having a thesis used are different things, just as owning a cemetery does not guarantee visitors. In my search I found no figures for how many of those theses have been opened, or how many turned into an article, a book or a decision.
Here a fair objection deserves a hearing. Perhaps a thesis is not a product but an apprenticeship. An MPhil student writes one to learn how research is done, and if that purpose is met, it is no tragedy that nobody reads the result. True enough. But the two purposes are not enemies. A good thesis trains the student and also sends part of itself out into the world as an article. My complaint is that we claim both and measure neither. We pay for the training, we issue a receipt for the contribution to knowledge, and nobody has asked the receipt where the goods are.
So what is to be done? The answer is not to abolish the thesis but to measure its life after the defence, and then to build that life. The principle is simple. What is not measured does not become anyone’s responsibility, and what is nobody’s responsibility is left to goodwill, which is precisely the system we have now. Four proposals follow from it, each with its own limit.
First, account for the thesis’s lifespan. Every university should publish how many of its theses became an article, a book or a policy note within three years. That would, for the first time, enter the user’s interest in the university’s own ledger. The limit: counting can reward weak journals, so each entry should state the quality of the outlet.
Second, a summary anyone can read. Every thesis should be deposited with a plain-language summary of about fifteen hundred words, because the user is not always a specialist. She may be a teacher, an official or a journalist. The limit: sensitive data will need separate handling.
Third, a list of questions that are actually wanted. Departments and local institutions should draw up the problems they face, and topics should come from that list wherever possible, so that the user exists before the thesis is written. The limit: basic research must not be squeezed, so the share of such topics should stay small.
Fourth, examiners’ reports in the open. Published with the thesis, without the examiner’s name, they would tell the next reader what the examiner found and where the work stayed weak. The limit: examiners may become less candid, which is exactly why anonymity must be a condition.
What binds the four together is that each one writes the user into somebody’s ledger. If I had to say where to begin, I would begin with the first, since it needs no new law, only a directive from the HEC and an annual report from each university.
The claim can also be tested. If universities produce figures showing that a large share of MPhil and PhD theses are used after the defence, in articles, books or decisions, my claim will be weakened and I will withdraw it. And if no figures exist at all, one thing will at least be plain: we have never measured how long our research lives.
The fatiha is recited once; reading happens again and again, and knowledge stays alive through that repetition. For the thesis we built a queue of judges, installed a similarity machine, arranged the signatures and the binding. We left only one chair empty, the one where somebody might sit down, read it and carry it further. As long as that chair stays empty, no thesis is safe from being buried on the day of its defence, however sturdy the binding.