Trust me, I’m a doctor: proposal for a professional doctorate pledge.

This article considers the need for a professional doctorate pledge that would be relevant to all doctoral awards at higher education level. The proposal includes a discussion around the emergence of the first professional pledge within the medical profession and how the need for a Hippocratic style oath was revived in the later nineteenth century and extended to other professional sectors. The use of pledges is relatively new to higher education, with some universities in the USA recording the use of a graduate pledge from the 1980’s. However, there have been a range of reasons for the perceived need for such pledges in higher education. A principal reason would seem to be to emphasis the employment worthiness of its university graduates in terms of motivation and attitude, rather than for more altruistic values and personal integrity. This paper arose from reflections by the author on an ongoing study on the identity of new doctoral graduates, over the summer of 2018 (Milburn et al., 2019). This paper represents the culmination of many discussions around the theme of a doctoral pledge and includes a proposed doctoral pledge for use across higher education.

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