New position paper: From "profkip" to strong teams: what does PhD supervision require?

New position paper: From "profkip" to strong teams: what does PhD supervision require?

7 March 2026

PNN has published a new position paper in response to De Jonge Akademie's recent campaign against "profkippen" — supervisors who take on disproportionately large numbers of PhD candidates.

We welcome the campaign's core signal: unequal distribution of PhD candidates across supervisors is a real problem, and a cap on simultaneous supervision deserves serious consideration. But we argue that numbers alone are not enough. Good supervision requires us to ask harder questions about how supervision is actually organized.

Our paper puts three questions at the center of the debate:

1. What is the right scale? Supervision happens in teams, not just in one-to-one relationships. Any meaningful norm must account for team composition, role division, and available time — not just the formal promoter's candidate count.
2. What does expanding the ius promovendi mean in practice? Broadening who can award doctorates offers real opportunities, but must be paired with clear quality standards and team structures that protect the educational purpose of the PhD trajectory.
3. Is this a distribution problem or a capacity problem? Redistribution can shift pressure without resolving underlying scarcity. The Netherlands has been training more PhD candidates without explicitly accounting for whether sufficient supervisory capacity exists to support them.

PNN stands ready to contribute as a conversation partner in the national dialogue that needs to follow. PhD candidates experience these choices directly — their perspectives are essential to getting the norms right.

Read the full position paper here.

Read our response in ScienceGuide here.

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