Down the Brain Drain: Searching for Doctorateness in all the Wrong Places

This article reviews Perspectives on Research Assessment in Architecture, Music and the Arts: Discussing Doctorateness. Its editors’ aim is to establish a framework for applying the concept of “doctorateness” to the assessment of practice-based doctoral research in art and design fields. The book’s principal claim is that the purpose of practice-based doctorates is to uphold and maintain art and design practitioners’ values. I review each chapter and I evaluate the chain of inferences that lead from scoring the thesis to doctoral education’s purpose. I conclude that the authors’ argument undermines the research-teaching-study nexus.