I have been required to attend a formal course in supervising PhD-students, in spite of having 20 years of experience of such. As a way of examination, I had to give a one hour talk on the topic "Risk, perception, and mitigation of doctoral education", which was based on an extensive literature review of mine.
It surprised me to learn the strength of risk-minimization actions applied by university management (at all levels) on doctoral education.
You can view the talk at the attached link. (Skip the first minute as it is in Swedish and nothing of relevance is being said).
I would particularly appreciate comments on the following questions:
Do you recognize the situation in your University?
In your experience, are the public and the media apt on reporting on the doctoral education?
What external threats do you identify for the universities reputation w r t doctoral education?
http://media.play.du.se/50f5fe02
Kenneth:
I think one external threat would be how the quality and value of the work is received by academia and other interest groups. If the doctoral students takes too long to complete the research, the time lag may negatively impact readers by not being too current.
Best regards,
Debra
@Debra: I agrree that timeliness is an issue, but I do not think it is an external threat to the University w r t the epectations of the funders. I invite you to listend from 5:00 an onwards in the talk when I compare the 1960-1980 paradigm to 1990 and onwards.
There is a continuum of risks:
1) The university closes down through lack of doctoral throughput and lack of continuing professional education.
2) The human capital reserves do not grow, and the university falls behind in world rankings.
3) The university maintains its ranking.
4) The university grows its human capital and throughput and becomes a higher-ranking university.
Management should naturally be concerned and do everything to encourage 4) and discourage 1).
Management is therefore concerned about how the world perceives the university. Its Public Relations arm even resorts to selective reporting of the many indexes available in order to pick the one that enhances the university's image the most. Creating and continuing the education of doctoral candidates and supervisors then gets lost in the Press Releases. The long term effect of this is that university management starts managing by the numbers in the press releases, instead of enhancing the university's intellectual prowess. This is the “Quality and Value” of their work, as mentioned by Debra. Surely this prowess is the most important metric for ranking universities?
Yes, there is rationale behind management not favouring the “bads” of “silly, soft and suspect” research. It gives the university a bad name if it is always winning IgNobel prizes.
Management do not have good numbers on the bads and goods. Neither do they do formal or even intuitive analysis of the stats.
Can we force the supervisors to study how to supervise? My inaugural lectures were on "How to Supervise Research” and attendance dropped off exponentially!
Also how many “highly unsilly, highly unsoft and highly unsuspect” candidates should supervisors allow into the system to undertake cutting edge research? There is a different risk, that their candidates will not graduate.
My own approach is to inform the student of all the hidden aspects (crafts, culture) of research, to improve the student's chance of success in the minimum duration.
The supervisor has a mental model of factors mitigating (predicting) success in the minimum duration, and we can surely rely on his / her judgement, ensuring that the supervisor regards the candidate as his / her own.
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