In much of Europe, a PhD is only the first of two doctorates
Across Germany, France, Poland and elsewhere, many would-be professors must earn a second, harder qualification called the habilitation, often five to fifteen years after their PhD. It demands independent research on a new topic, a public lecture, and sometimes ten or more published papers, and it still may not come with a salary.
The habilitation is the highest university degree in countries such as Germany, France, Italy, Poland and Romania. Its name comes from the medieval Latin habilitare, to make fit or suitable, and it took shape in the Holy Roman Empire around 1652. At first it simply meant qualifying as a doctor. In nineteenth-century Germany, when a doctorate alone no longer seemed enough to guarantee that scholars could pass knowledge on, it became a post-doctoral step, and writing two theses became normal.
The bar is deliberately high. The second thesis is supposed to prove mastery of an entire field, so it usually tackles a subject quite different from the doctorate, and it must be done without a supervisor guiding the work. Scientists may need ten or more papers, produced across a stretch of roughly four to ten years, whereas humanities scholars are often expected to publish a substantial book. Some fields accept a cumulative collection of published work, which dominates in medicine, while in law such bundles have been almost unknown for about a century. Oddly, while German doctoral theses must by law be published, many habilitation theses never are.
Success is marked by a public lecture or defence, after which the candidate receives the venia legendi, Latin for permission to lecture, sometimes restricted to a sub-field such as criminal law. In German-speaking countries the holder may use the title Privatdozent, but keeping it generally requires some unpaid teaching, and the degree does not automatically bring a job.
Its grip is loosening. Since the early twenty-first century Germany no longer requires it for professorships, and it has become rare in many natural sciences while staying common in the humanities and medical research. France replaced its older State Doctorate in 1984 with a habilitation that qualifies holders to supervise doctoral students, and Poland until 2018 set a statutory eight years to obtain one.
Source: Habilitation
