Erp,

Thanks for the added information.

I went to a friend’s dissertation defense 33 years ago, one of the scariest days of my life. I just sat in a corner and listened and got progressively more terrified as the time went on. It became clear that two of the five wanted to grant the doctorate with no changes to the dissertation, two wanted to grant the doctorate with a few changes to the dissertation…but number five. He thought the dissertation was trash because he’d done fieldwork in X country decades ago and of course this couldn’t be reality. After the defense, we were escorted out of the room and made to wait in another room with very thin walls. We could hear raised voices. Finally, we were escorted back in and the decision was to grant the doctorate with a few changes to the dissertation. Ironically, the professor who had objected most strenuously to the dissertation asked my friend to come and speak to his graduate students that evening. Go figure.

I think PhD in the arts follow the same process. I checked Stanford. There is a Doctor of Musical Arts which requires a large-scale composition but also a PhD in Music which requires a thesis.

For a Ph.D. in Go.D. you apparently just need to pay your $200 for the diploma.(Jeepers, I shoulda thought of that 4 decades ago, before going through the process CM’s described…)