What constitutes a “Proper” PhD?

Educational prestige is frequently spoken about as though it were an uncomplicated reflection of intellectual merit. Universities are ranked, credentials acquire differential value, and the institutions occupying the highest positions within these hierarchies come to function not merely as places of education but as markers of intellectual distinction. A doctorate from Cambridge or Oxford can consequently signify something beyond the successful completion of doctoral research: the institutional name itself becomes capable of conferring assumptions about intelligence, academic seriousness and scholarly legitimacy upon its holder.

There is a sociological problem with this apparently straightforward relationship between prestige and merit. Institutions do not exist outside history, and access to them has never been distributed independently of class, race, gender, wealth and social power. The institutions that have accumulated the greatest authority to define intellectual excellence are also institutions whose historical populations were produced through profoundly unequal structures of access. If institutional prestige is subsequently treated as evidence of the superior intellectual capacity of those who successfully entered these spaces, historical advantage risks being transformed into an apparently natural hierarchy of merit.

The problem is therefore not whether Cambridge is an excellent university. It plainly is. Nor is it whether academic standards matter. They plainly do. The more difficult question is what institutional prestige can legitimately tell us about human intellectual capacity. A university can establish that an individual satisfied its admissions requirements, completed its programme of study or met its standards for the award of a doctorate. It cannot establish that those who never entered the institution were intellectually incapable of doing so. To make that inference is to confuse institutional selection with the distribution of intelligence itself.

This distinction has acquired particular significance in recent debates surrounding Professor Jason Arday. During the wider public discussion of allegations concerning Arday’s scholarship and credentials, David Starkey used the language of a “proper PhD” in a conversation with Nathan Cofnas. I encountered the remark in a social-media recording that is no longer available to me, and I therefore do not rely upon the recording here to reconstruct or quote the wider exchange. The phrase is nevertheless sociologically revealing because of the broader discourse within which questions about Arday’s academic legitimacy have been situated.

Cofnas’s published intervention makes that broader context explicit. His discussion of Arday was framed not simply as an inquiry into the academic conduct of an individual scholar but as DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge. Arday’s case was connected directly to questions of diversity, Black professorial representation and academic standards, including the suggestion that Cambridge’s treatment of the case raised the question of whether maintaining Black professorial representation required an abandonment of standards. This was not an isolated intellectual context. Cofnas had previously advanced hereditarian arguments about race, intelligence and academic representation, including the proposition that Black professorial representation at institutions such as Harvard would dramatically diminish under what he regarded as a genuinely meritocratic system.

The significance of this sequence extends beyond either Cofnas or Starkey. It demonstrates how easily an allegation concerning one Black academic can become incorporated into a much larger argument about the legitimacy of Black presence within elite intellectual institutions. The analytical object shifts. The question is no longer simply whether this academic satisfied particular scholarly standards. It becomes whether Black academics are present because standards have been altered to accommodate them.

This movement from the individual to the racial category is crucial. If Arday had been a white professor accused of precisely the same forms of academic misconduct, the allegations could have been investigated with exactly the same seriousness. What would not ordinarily follow is the proposition that the case tells us something about whether white professors are intellectually qualified to occupy Cambridge. The individual scholar might be scrutinised; whiteness itself would be unlikely to become the object under examination. In the racialised case, however, individual conduct can acquire representational significance. One Black academic becomes capable of functioning as evidence in an argument about Black academics.

It is here that the language of the “proper” PhD becomes sociologically consequential. Proper appears to distinguish between credentials, but the distinction raises a prior question: who has historically had access to the institutions whose credentials have acquired the authority to define what proper looks like?

That question cannot be answered through institutional rankings alone. It requires us to examine the social production of educational prestige itself.

The question of what constitutes a “proper” doctorate cannot therefore be separated from the social organisation of British higher education. Institutional prestige is not merely an academic classification. It operates within a stratified educational system in which access to different universities remains patterned by socioeconomic background, schooling, geography and accumulated forms of cultural and social capital. The university named on a degree certificate may consequently signify much more than the intellectual quality of the work undertaken there. It can also reflect the unequal educational routes through which different populations become distributed across the higher-education sector.

This distinction is important because there is a tendency to read educational destinations retrospectively. Once somebody has arrived at Cambridge, Oxford or another highly selective university, their presence can appear to confirm the intellectual qualities that supposedly brought them there. The institution and the individual authenticate one another: the university is prestigious because it contains exceptional people, while the individual is presumed exceptional because they were selected by a prestigious university. What disappears from this mutually reinforcing account is the social process preceding selection.

Students do not encounter elite higher education from equivalent starting positions. Educational trajectories are formed over many years through differential access to resources, expectations and institutional knowledge. Some young people attend schools where applications to Oxford and Cambridge are ordinary rather than exceptional, where teachers possess experience of selective admissions processes and where university attendance is embedded within the assumed trajectory of academic success. Others may be equally intellectually capable while attending schools with fewer resources, having limited access to specialist admissions preparation, undertaking paid employment alongside their studies, or growing up in families for whom the university system itself is unfamiliar.

These differences matter because intellectual capacity requires social conditions through which it can be cultivated and made visible. The possession of ability does not guarantee that an institution will encounter it. A young person can only demonstrate capacities that circumstances have allowed them to develop, through opportunities they have been able to access, before institutions equipped to recognise particular forms of achievement. The sociological problem therefore lies not in denying individual merit but in recognising that merit is encountered after opportunity has already been unequally distributed.

Contemporary evidence continues to demonstrate this stratification. Research by the Sutton Trust finds substantial socioeconomic disparities in access to highly selective universities, including a continuing underrepresentation of students from lower-participation backgrounds within Russell Group institutions. Its more recent analysis similarly concludes that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds remain less likely to attend elite universities even when they possess the grades to do so. The distinction persists beyond undergraduate study. Research on postgraduate progression found that among graduates progressing to higher degrees, those from professional and managerial backgrounds were considerably more likely than working-class graduates to undertake that study at Russell Group universities, with inequalities persisting even among graduates with strong academic attainment.

The significance of these patterns is not that working-class students never attend Oxford, Cambridge or Russell Group universities, nor that privileged students are incapable of genuine intellectual achievement. Both propositions would substitute crude social determinism for analysis. The significance lies in demonstrating that institutional destinations are socially patterned. If access to universities carrying the greatest prestige is unevenly distributed, then that prestige cannot subsequently be treated as though it were entirely independent of the inequalities that helped determine who acquired it.

This is where the notion of the “proper” degree becomes sociologically consequential. To describe an Oxbridge doctorate as proper in implicit or explicit contrast with a doctorate obtained from a post-1992 or otherwise less prestigious university does more than rank educational institutions. It risks transforming an already classed distribution of educational opportunity into a hierarchy of intellectual legitimacy.

The mechanism is subtle because the inequality disappears as it operates. Social and economic advantage can increase access to particular schools, educational resources, cultural experiences and institutional networks. These advantages can increase the probability of entry into prestigious universities. Prestigious universities then confer credentials carrying substantial symbolic and material value. Indeed, contemporary evidence shows that attendance at Russell Group and Oxbridge institutions continues to be associated with significant labour-market advantages, while elite universities themselves provide reputational and network benefits beyond the formal content of the degree. The credential subsequently becomes available as evidence of exceptional individual merit, while the unequal social conditions through which access to that credential was structured recede from view.

Privilege can therefore be converted into prestige, prestige into recognised merit, and recognised merit into apparently objective evidence of intellectual distinction.

The point is not that merit is unreal. It is that merit does not emerge outside social structure.

This distinction matters particularly when comparing institutions such as Cambridge with post-1992 universities. The latter have played an important role in the expansion of British higher education and have frequently educated populations historically less well represented within elite institutions. The hierarchy between these universities is real insofar as institutions possess different levels of accumulated wealth, research intensity, selectivity, reputation and access to powerful networks. What does not logically follow is that this institutional hierarchy maps neatly onto the intellectual capacities of the people within it.

A university hierarchy is not an intelligence hierarchy.

The doctorate makes this distinction especially important. A PhD is not supposed to certify the social prestige of its candidate. It certifies the successful production and examination of an original contribution to knowledge according to the standards required for the award. If a doctoral thesis has been appropriately supervised, examined and awarded by a recognised university, then an argument that it is somehow less proper merely because of the institution from which it originates requires explanation. If the research is methodologically weak, derivative, plagiarised or otherwise fails scholarly standards, those are legitimate grounds for criticism. But they are properties that must be demonstrated through examination of the scholarship. They cannot simply be inferred from the institutional name printed on the certificate.

Otherwise, institutional reputation begins performing the intellectual evaluation that should properly be performed by engagement with the work.

This is why the language of the “proper PhD” raises a question of class as well as academic standards. If students from different social backgrounds remain unevenly distributed across the university hierarchy, then ranking the legitimacy of their qualifications according to institutional prestige risks reproducing social inequality at the level of knowledge itself. Those whose educational trajectories led them into already prestigious institutions receive credentials carrying an enhanced presumption of intellectual authority; those whose trajectories led elsewhere may find that their scholarship must overcome the diminished symbolic status attached to the institution from which it emerged.

We might describe this as the classing of knowledge: the process through which the social hierarchy between educational institutions becomes capable of producing a corresponding hierarchy between knowers.

That formulation does not suggest that all universities are academically identical. They plainly are not. It asks something different: whether differences in institutional prestige can legitimately be converted into assumptions about the inherent intellectual worth of individuals. Once those assumptions become naturalised, the graduate of the elite institution does not merely possess a credential from a prestigious university; they can acquire a presumption of intellectual legitimacy. The graduate of the less prestigious institution may possess precisely the same formal level of qualification while being required to establish that legitimacy.

The distinction becomes more consequential when class intersects with race. Britain’s educational hierarchy did not develop separately from the histories through which wealth, institutional access and social authority were distributed. Black people did not enter British universities from a historical position equivalent to that of populations whose presence within Britain’s oldest educational institutions had been established over centuries. Colonialism, racial discrimination, migration, labour-market inequalities, schooling and the intergenerational distribution of economic resources have all shaped the conditions within which contemporary educational trajectories occur. None of these forces determines the destiny of every individual, but neither can they simply be removed from an analysis of who reaches which institutions.

The danger is that historical inequality becomes invisible precisely at the point at which its contemporary outcomes are interpreted. If particular groups are historically underrepresented within elite institutions, their absence can be interpreted as evidence that they lacked the ability to enter them. When those institutions subsequently diversify, however, the presence of those same groups can be interpreted as evidence that admission or appointment standards have been relaxed. The logic becomes remarkably difficult to escape: exclusion produces absence; absence is read as deficiency; inclusion produces presence; presence is then read as preferential treatment.

The Black scholar is consequently placed in an epistemically precarious position. Their absence can be naturalised, while their presence requires explanation.

This is what makes the public discussion surrounding Jason Arday sociologically important. The issue is not whether allegations concerning an individual academic should be investigated. Academic integrity requires precisely that. The issue is what happens when the investigation of one Black scholar becomes incorporated into a pre-existing argument about whether Black academics would occupy elite universities under supposedly purely meritocratic conditions.

Cofnas’s published intervention makes that movement explicit. His discussion of Arday was framed as DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge, and it culminated in a question about whether having Black professors required the abandonment of academic standards. Whatever one’s assessment of the allegations against Arday, the analytical movement is unmistakable. The object under examination has shifted from the conduct of one scholar to the legitimacy of Black professorial representation.

This is precisely where the seemingly separate questions of class, race and institutional prestige converge.

A discourse about a “proper” doctorate may initially appear to concern academic quality. But when the hierarchy between doctorates follows the hierarchy between institutions, when access to those institutions is itself socially stratified, and when the credentials of a Black academic become incorporated into an argument about whether Black professors are compatible with academic standards, proper begins to carry considerably more weight than a simple judgement about scholarly rigour. It becomes a question about who is presumed to belong among legitimate knowers. And historically, that presumption has never been distributed equally.

The question of what constitutes a “proper” PhD therefore extends beyond the formal requirements of doctoral education. It reveals a broader sociological problem concerning the relationship between institutional prestige, social inequality and intellectual legitimacy. Universities do not simply assess knowledge; they exist within social hierarchies that influence whose knowledge is most readily encountered as authoritative.

This distinction matters because educational prestige is easily mistaken for evidence of intellectual capacity. Yet the populations entering Britain’s universities have not arrived there through historically equivalent routes. Class shapes access to educational resources, institutional familiarity and opportunity. Race intersects with these inequalities through longer histories of exclusion, migration, discrimination and unequal access to the institutions in which intellectual authority has accumulated. None of this negates individual achievement. It does, however, make it analytically untenable to treat institutional destination as a socially neutral measure of intelligence.

The language of the “proper” doctorate exposes this slippage particularly clearly. There is nothing objectionable about distinguishing rigorous scholarship from inadequate scholarship. Academic standards require precisely such distinctions. But the appropriate object of that judgement is the scholarship: its originality, methodology, integrity, contribution and examination. When the institutional name begins doing that evaluative work in advance, prestige has ceased merely to describe the location in which knowledge was produced and has begun to confer a presumption about the intellectual legitimacy of the person who produced it.

The Arday controversy demonstrates what happens when this presumption intersects with race. The significance of the case lies not simply in the scrutiny directed towards one Black academic, but in the ease with which questions concerning an individual scholar became connected to wider claims about DEI, merit, Black professorial representation and academic standards. Once that movement occurs, the Black academic is no longer being evaluated solely as an individual. Their presence within the elite institution itself becomes something requiring explanation.

This produces an asymmetry that deserves greater attention. Members of historically dominant groups are more readily permitted to succeed and fail as individuals. Their misconduct may damage their own reputations without necessarily placing the intellectual legitimacy of their racial group under examination. For historically underrepresented groups, however, individual achievement can be required to demonstrate collective possibility while individual failure becomes available as evidence of collective deficiency. The person becomes representative precisely where others are permitted to remain particular.

The problem with the idea of the “proper” PhD is therefore not that all universities must be regarded as identical, nor that institutional prestige is meaningless. It is that prestige cannot bear the explanatory weight sometimes placed upon it. Cambridge can certify that somebody successfully completed a Cambridge doctorate. It cannot tell us how that person’s intellectual capacity compares with every person who studied elsewhere, and it cannot tell us what those historically excluded from Cambridge might have achieved under different conditions of access and opportunity.

A hierarchy of universities is not a hierarchy of human intelligence.

Once that distinction is lost, social advantage can disappear into institutional prestige, institutional prestige can be translated into merit, and merit can subsequently be invoked as evidence that existing inequalities merely reflect differences in ability. What appears to be a neutral defence of academic standards can thereby reproduce the very social hierarchy that helped determine whose credentials acquired the greatest authority in the first place.

Perhaps the more revealing question, then, is not whether one doctorate is sufficiently “proper”. It is who has acquired the authority to define proper knowledge, through which institutions, and with what historical consequences.

That question takes us beyond the university hierarchy itself. It requires us to examine something deeper: how particular populations came to be recognised as producers and owners of knowledge while others were positioned as its objects, informants and sources.