In this specific case the guy has 16 other published papers already, so if he'd wanted to walk away with a PhD he probably could easily have done so already. Th

In this specific case the guy has 16 other published papers already, so if he'd wanted to walk away with a PhD he probably could easily have done so already. That being said, I'd imagine that Oxford would be one of the places that could find a way to award a PhD for genuinely outstanding but unusually short work if that had been his only achievement and he'd asked for it. Seems like one of the few universities still run chiefly by academics, not administrators.