The focus of this paper is on how LERU universities develop, maintain and evaluate their high quality culture in doctoral education, on how they go about achieving their goal to train doctoral researchers to the highest skill levels to become creative, critical and autonomous intellectual risk takers, and on how they focus on stimulating a rigorous research culture, rather than on mechanistic, tick-the-box quality assurance processes. Although the latter have a justified role to play in our current culture of accountability, they are not, by themselves, a guarantee for quality. The paper is full of examples taken from daily practice at LERU universities looking at how they define expectations for doctoral education, how they set up scrutiny processes, how they use indicators to measure quality and how they build in feedback mechanisms to enhance a quality culture. The paper also contains a number of recommendations for universities, policymakers and funders in Europe on how to maintain a quality culture in doctoral education.