I still feel a quiet joy whenever someone calls me “Dr. Mendoza.” It reminds me of the long, uneven journey toward finishing my PhD at the University of Canterbury in 2023—the exhaustion, the doubt, the relief, and the kindness of people who carried me when I needed it most. 

But that joy always arrives with a shadow question: 

I don’t ask that because of insecurity. I ask it as a discipline—a way of refusing to mistake the title for the work. It forces me to return, again and again, to questions that should unsettle any scholar:

What kind of scholarship am I practicing?
For whom?
And toward what larger good?

Jessica Soho posed a similar challenge to UP Diliman graduates in 2025 when she asked, “Eh ano naman kung UP graduate ka?” Titles provide opportunities. They create credibility. But they don’t answer the deeper moral question of purpose. A PhD is not a halo; it is a responsibility. And “Doctor” is not simply something you are called.

It is something you must spend a lifetime becoming. 

Historically, the PhD was never meant to crown the “smartest person in the room.” It was a training in the disciplined practice of inquiry. You were apprenticed into a community of scholars. You learned to hold your claims up to scrutiny. You learned humility, patience, and rigor. You learned that evidence requires care—and that knowledge is not a private possession but a public trust.

A PhD was a formation, not a performance. Ideally, it still should be. But we also have to confront how the landscape has changed.

We live in an age of mass higher education. Universities face increasing pressure to generate more graduates, demonstrate their impact, secure funding, and remain competitive in the global arena. Doctoral training now happens inside institutional logics that value speed, visibility, and output. Many students complete PhDs with overstretched supervisors, thin mentorship, or limited research cultures—through no fault of their own.

This blog post is not a nostalgic lament for a golden age that never fully existed. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that when the PhD becomes primarily a credential, the formation side weakens. The title risks floating free from the discipline—ethical and intellectual—that should ground it.

And in the Philippines, these pressures collide with another reality.

We live inside a credential-hungry society. Titles confer authority, access, and sometimes protection. When that happens, the PhD becomes symbol first, substance later. That symbolic power attracts everything from well-meaning shortcut programs to outright diploma mills.

The damage goes beyond reputation.

When the doctorate can be bought, rushed, or hollowed out, public trust in scholarship erodes. The title “Doctor” becomes an aesthetic rather than a commitment. And sadly, the work of scholars who have struggled through rigorous, ethical doctoral training becomes harder to see and value.

But I don’t think the problem begins with the diploma mills.

I think it begins much earlier—with our expectations.

Treating the PhD as a badge of superiority encourages people to pursue it as such.

If we treat it as a public responsibility, then we begin to protect its meaning.

Resolving the problem requires regulation, yes—but more than that, it requires imagination.

A PhD should indicate that an individual has been trained to:

A doctorate should not only certify expertise. It should deepen conscience. And it should deepen gratitude—because no one reaches that point alone.

When people call me “Dr. Mendoza,” I think of the people who built the conditions of my becoming. I think of my parents—most especially my father, a seafarer—whose long months away made it possible for me to study without fear. Because of him, I went to De La Salle–College of Saint Benilde, once dismissed by some as “the school of dropouts,” now home to leading creatives, chefs, entrepreneurs, architects, and even an Oxford graduate like Miguel Luis Arias.

Institutions evolve. People evolve. Therefore, our understanding of the purpose of education—and the PhD—should also evolve.

Many rightly anchor their work para sa bayan. I share that grounding. But my orientation is also cosmopolitan: our scholarship should be capable of caring beyond borders—national, cultural, and intellectual. Knowledge should travel. Knowledge should connect. Knowledge should heal.

So when I ask:
Eh ano ngayon kung may PhD ka?

I don’t mean to diminish the journey. I mean to protect the meaning of the title—for myself and others. I mean to resist the drift toward empty credentialism. I mean to remind myself that becoming “Dr. Mendoza” is not a finished achievement but a daily practice of responsibility, reflexivity, and care.

A PhD is only worth anything if it forms us into people who can be trusted—with truth, with students, with publics, with power, and with doubt.
 
And the day I stop asking that question might also be the day the title stops meaning anything at all.