Sometimes a cultural shift requires a new word. In the fight against industrial livestock farming, the Dutch coined the term plofkip, referring to fast-grown broiler chickens. Today, De Jonge Akademie is introducing a variation: the prof-kip—a play on words that combines “professor” and “chicken,” suggesting supervisors who are overloaded with too many PhD candidates at once.

In a three-page manifesto (plus a summarizing comic strip), the young top scholars aim to open up the conversation about PhD supervision. They propose a limes promovendi—Latin for a limit on the number of PhD candidates.

Opportunities and funding

The manifesto describes prof-chickens as “both the result and the driving force behind an underlying problem.” According to the authors, that problem is the unequal distribution of opportunities and funding in academia.

Researchers often build their careers with grants from the Dutch research council NWO. That funding is primarily used to hire PhD candidates, De Jonge Akademie writes.

Once a researcher has secured one grant, their chances of winning the next increase. This perpetuates inequality, the manifesto argues, and grant winners accumulate more and more PhD candidates. That, in turn, creates prof-chickens.

Consequences

The harmful effects are clear: PhD candidates do not receive adequate supervision, while grant winners see their workloads continue to rise.

The workload could be distributed more evenly, since assistant and associate professors can also obtain ius promovendi—the right to serve as a PhD supervisor. But in practice, this does not happen often enough.

That is why De Jonge Akademie calls for “a reasonable limit on the number of PhD candidates a person may supervise at any one time.” How many that should be, however, the group does not specify.

The message is that the debate needs to begin. On May 18, a meeting on the subject will take place at the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam, the building of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.

De Jonge Akademie, part of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, serves for some members as a stepping stone to an administrative career. The new Minister of Education, Rianne Letschert, once chaired the organization.

Graduation bonus

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

PNN is advocating a revision of the so-called “graduation bonus,” the government funding allocated per awarded doctorate. The current system, they argue, fuels competition between universities and drives up the number of PhD graduations.

This article was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor