faculty focus
Just what the doctorate ordered
A veteran facilitator of doctoral education offers her top 10 tips for better PhD supervision. By Tara Brabazon
The quality of doctoral theses is a pressure point in higher education. Cue nostalgic soundtrack. Doctorates are not what they used to be in my day. Or so the story goes.
PhD standards matter to me, but PhD students matter more. Whilst teaching first-year students is a joy and is important, our doctoral candidates are the most precious people in our universities. They literally are our future. They must be nurtured, respected, supported and challenged – but always mentored.
These are self-evident truths. Making them operate in universities is more difficult. In our academic culture, administering students is confused with supervising them. Universities, desperate to lift completion rates, are applying Bette Davis’ s rule for makeup to PhD administration: more is more; more is better.
The irony is that the more regulations, guidelines, safety nets, forms and protocols the managers of doctorates impose, the lower the completion rate. The longer the candidature, the less likely students will submit. In‘ fixing’ PhDs with administrative interventions, managers are creating the problem they are attempting to address.
All this talk about the calibre of postgraduates and their theses is obscuring a more complex question. What about supervision? Have the standards of supervision also declined? This is the question few wish to ask and fewer want to answer. What demands do we place on ourselves to improve, sharpen and learn about the best practices of supervision around the world? The focus is institutionally inwards, reviewing spreadsheets of candidatures lengths and completion rates. Instead, the attention should be outwards, seeing what works in universities we admire and assessing if any of these practices can be deployed in our institutions. After working in eight universities in four countries, and examining and reviewing in many more, I have logged the best and worst of what I have reviewed, supervised, examined and managed in doctoral education.
Here are 10 recommendations.
DO NOT CONFUSE THE ADMINISTRATION OF A
1 CANDIDATURE WITH SUPERVISING A CANDIDATE The prime initiative that increases the quality and speed of submissions is to remove the institutional fallacy that more administrative demands on a student and supervisor will enable a completion. Indeed, many of the institutional practices at the moment are aimed at protecting students from their supervisor. Whether it is a fear of sexual harassment, personality clash or legal action, the focus is on ensuring that a student is not reliant on a supervisor, but anonymous and impersonal processes and protocols. In reality, however, the way to ensure a completion is to build a quiet environment where a supervisor and student form a strong and trusting bond that enables their research.
EDUCATE – RATHER THAN TRAIN – SUPERVISORS
2 Tethered to the first problem, many supervisors in the UK suffer through a bizarre practice necessary to put them on a supervisory list or register for a university. This involves a period( one to three days) of supposedly being trained by an experienced supervisor. Unfortunately, supervisors are not being prepared for supervision, but instead are crammed with administrative procedures for candidature management in a specific institution. What is required instead is detailed discussion of postgraduate andragogy and best international practice, so there is no confusion between experience and expertise.
MAINTAIN A GRADUATE SCHOOL WITH A DEAN OF
3 GRADUATE STUDIES The Balkanisation of doctorates kills them. Too many people have too much to say, much of which is ill-informed or directed by self-interest rather than the needs of the student. Too often – and I have seen this problem much more in UK universities than in Australia – the pastry principle applies to candidature management: layer upon layer upon layer of rules and regulations
26 | campusreview. com. au