You arguments are all fine if you wish to treat academic research like a self interested hobby. But public money should not be spent to create an elite of PhD graduates, which would give universities no choice over who they wish to appoint as lecturers and would not serve the needs of the broader society. I can quite accept your arguments serve some academics self interest very well but they are not really credible, hence why public policy doesn't back up your case.

Be aware that while many doctors may earn 100K, they still find plenty to moan about their lot, and still feel incredibly hard done by just as you lot here seem to be. Their union is too strong and should be smashed in the interest of patients.

Boudieu makes my contribution to this board today seem succinct. He uses 100 words where one would be necessary. He fails to collect evidence to support his point, and while his writing may be elegant to some, his writing is often evasive and unnecessarily difficult to understandd.

It's great to retain priveleges for those actually who would have a PhD under your restrictive illiberal policy suggestion, but the economy would suffer and those who wanted to learn and develop would suffer who you would not be able to do a PhD under restricted numbers.

"That attitude means we all suffer. The limitless supply of PhD graduates means the qualification is devalued for ALL . Professions retain their value by limiting entry, which is why they keep their salaries high,(remember doctors are publically funded too and are on 100k, but they limit their intake of students)."

Your attitude basically is the same as the old fashioned, economically illiterate argument that only a small number of people should be able to do an undergraduate degree otherwise it becomes devalued. But in fact lots of people deserve the opportunity to do an undergraduate degree, and a small minority (beyond the number of academics jobs available) are capable of doing a PhD and getting benefit from it.

Perhaps if the PhD was more a nationally organised qualification like GCSEs and A levels it would be possible to let all PhD students know the reality of job vacancies at the end of their PhD, but at the moment it probably still does rely on the PhD student making a professional judgement about how likely they are to get different kinds of jobs at the end. I don't think though that it is a very liberal approach to prevent extra people doing a PhD beyond the number of academic posts available either because they want the opportunity to learn for longer or because they want to use their PhD more imaginatively than the traditional academic career trajectory. So I definitely don't think there should be a restriction on PhD numbers.

Yes i've agreed with you that there is an issue being addressed over contract research. However, with limited resources, the logical outcome of this will be probably fewer better paid more secure academic jobs. This is hardly great news for those doing a PhD who have even less opportunities to prove themselves in an academic career with fewer posts available on PhD graduation. HE pay has been bad but the pay settlement last year was a good move in the right direction - certainly if academics complained again now they wouldn't get much of a hearing. HE spending is going to be tight over the next few years. The government can hardly be expected to invest more in HE when they can't afford to give pay inflation equivalent pay rises to key public sector workers.

If the last point means the role of government making universities accountable for the work they do, then we are not going to agree on this. I think you would find it hard to convince many outside academia why their hard earned money should be used for academics to approach research as a hobby without regular publishing or making their research useful to society and/or the economy.

5) The intensity of politics within academia, at the expense of the actual quality of research.
There's office politics in any sector. Universities are full of people who like to critique and debate.

3) Lack of long term, secure, clear career pathways (for the majority, not the minority that recieve tenure).
Work is going on at the moment to create more secure pathways for contract researchers. But this may be a way to allow more people to participate in academia and to get maximum results for scarce resources. What's the point in employing a researcher permanently when they are only required for two years for a specific project to the country? Research priorities change and someone in that discipline may not be required in the future.
4) The difficulty in maintaining a good work/ life balance (especially for women).
I'm not sure why women require a better work life balance than men otherwise not sure what the gender issue is here. The flexible hours of academia would be craved by those in most sectors of the economy.

1) Too much exploitation of PhD students, especially those that serve under "apprenticeship" style supervisors that have to do additional unpaid work in addition to their PhD projects.
By doing research collaboratively with more senior academics such as supervisors one can learn more quickly than plodding on as a lone PhD scholar, though of course this should not be exploitative.
2) Too few jobs, yet no restriction on training of PhD students.
The number of posts in academia has not gone down over the years, but sectors's demand for PhDs outside academia as certainly gone up. I think it's part of a modern economy to have lots of highly trained people who use their analytical skills in many ways. A PhD is not like a medical degree working towards one specific career and can be used productvely in many ways.

On the issue of RCTs in medical research in particular I quite agree with you. There are many other ways of collecting evidence about the impact of drugs other than RCTs and a combination approach of methods ought to often be used. Qualitative and quantitative methods can tell us very useful things about patients' benefits from treatments. But not collecting any empirical evidence at all seems a bit risky to me!

There's no particular reason why empirical evidence has to be quantitative, my data collection certainly isn't. But there is sometimes an inbuilt dislike by sociologists of quantitative methods which they need to overcome if they are to properly understand the issues they research. I would advocate that often you need a combination of both types of data. Too often, though, research that does not engage with rigorously collected empirical evidence at all is too abstract to be useful other than an enjoyable experience perhaps for the person who wrote it.

Shani - I can take your point to an extent. I think there is a whole debate to be had, however, over the genuine value of social science research that does not at least attempt to RIGOROUSLY account for empirical evidence (e.g. in medical sociology that means the academic must do more than build a whole theoretical approach based on the last time he went to hospital for personal treatment with no use of rigorously collected academic data). But of course there is value in longitudinal research and challenging existing research.

Good quality teaching again is about accountability, because while so much research is read by so few and does so little for anyone but academics' own egos, teaching equips the next generation with skills for the workplace and an appreciation of academia 'for its own sake' hopefully. We're never going to agree I can see, but in the university I'd say actually its your view thats still in the majority amongst grass roots academics (why wouldn't it be? it's comfortable, it's what's always happened, it allows almost complete personal autonomy over professional activity, it's a pretty relaxed way of working).