Earlier this spring, a colleague of mine chose to leave her position at the university. The reason was not that was offered a better or more prestigious job somewhere else. The fact is that she preferred an insecure life supporting herself by other means to the career offered by the university. Personally, however, I was not as shaken by her decision as by the fact that no one at the department really reacted, or tried to address it as symptomatic to a much broader and general problematic.

Departing from the case of my college, the essay explores a series of unaddressed questions within university governance in relation to the on going massification of doctoral education. The essay is based on a minor survey among PhD fellows at the Faculty of Humanities, UoC.