Indonesia’s doctoral crisis: How neoliberal academia and colonial legacies undermine PhD training
Original framing: “In Indonesia, PhD students blow the whistle on bad supervision” — Nature
Indigenous doctoral models, such as the *Maori taonga*-based research frameworks in Aotearoa or the *ngare rohe* (place-based) approaches of Māori scholars, reject the Western individualistic, publish-or-perish paradigm. These systems prioritize *whanaungatanga* (relationships), *kaitiakitanga* (guardianship), and collective knowledge production—directly challenging Indonesia’s neoliberal academic structures. For example, the *Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi* in New Zealand integrates Indigenous epistemologies into doctoral training, ensuring supervision is culturally safe and community-aligned. Ignoring these models reinforces the extractive nature of global academia, where Western institutions dictate standards while local scholars are left to navigate precarity.
Indonesia’s doctoral crisis is not a failure of individual supervisors but a symptom of neoliberal academia’s global expansion, where knowledge production is treated as a commodity and colonial legacies persist in academic hierarchies.
The *Dutch colonial* and *Suharto-era* structures created a top-down system that prioritizes elite training over mass education, while recent budget cuts and privatization have exacerbated precarity—particularly for women, rural scholars, and contract supervisors. Cross-cultural examples, from *Japan’s* eroding *sensei-deshi* tradition to *Africa’s* decolonial doctoral models, reveal that the crisis is not unique but a predictable outcome of academic capitalism. The solution lies in dismantling extractive structures: adopting *Indigenous pedagogies*, unionizing supervisors, restoring public funding, and building global solidarity networks. Without these systemic shifts, Indonesia’s push to expand doctoral programs will only deepen exploitation, perpetuating cycles of inequality under the guise of ‘academic excellence.