The Humanities PhD more

St Paul’s Talk: the PhD in humanities Hannah Forsyth: Final 080811 The university attracts tradition. The values of scholarship, even those invented recently, seem eternal and universal. Like religious ritual and trainspotting, university traditions give a sense of order in a fundamentally disordered process: the unknowable journey that is the discovery and production of new knowledge. Education scholars Angela Brew and Tai Peseta found in their research that academics tend to be irrationally attached to the PhD process as they experienced it, even aspects that were plainly cruel. In her contemporary study of the PhD at this university, Mary Helen Ward has found that this kind of reproduction of educational experiences seems to succeed in enculturating individuals into disciplinary norms but as pedagogy is anarchic: Ward calls it ‘accidental’. It is this chaotic and yet highly ritualised phenomenon that is our subject today. In the medieval university, the journey from inception as a scholar to master took around 16 years, the doctorate up to around 20. The doctorate indicated attainment of substantial professional stature in law, medicine or theology. It was from the German enlightenment that our contemporary PhD emerged, based not on scholarship, which had dominated the humanities tradition, but on a dissertation of original research. Spreading to America in the 19th century and then to England in the early 20th, the PhD was the trademark of the wave that made universities rulers of knowledge. By the mid-twentieth century, national and international wealth sat firmly on the research that universities provided – not normally humanities research, it must be said, but that did not really result in the decline in the Arts that we would expect, despite our frustrations with being what Stuart Macintyre calls the “poor relation”. That, I would argue is because of the reliance of democracy on knowledge to legitimise its decisions. Democratic nations had for some time realised their dependence on universal education and literacy: knowledge that would enable people to rule themselves. But after the second world war, I suspect that a new reliance on knowledge was developing. Experts – ideally, impartial academic expertise – was becoming a new source of legitimacy for parliamentary rule. Somewhat analogous to Plato’s ‘philosopher kings’, Menzies 1957 reform of the university system was in part based on the need for universities that would provide the public and the politicians that represented them with expert advice on the very complex diplomatic, political, economic and cultural transformations that the second half of the twentieth century would require. By 1947, when the PhD was proposed at Sydney University, universities worldwide had taken control of knowledge. As knowledge was produced, it was reinvested into the community of scholars so that over the centuries their authority had become substantial. Other institutions gradually lost their purchase on knowledge: the church, the state, trade guilds, patenting offices, commercial laboratories even academies of science by the mid-20th century all lacked the authority possessed by the university an authority that was no longer based on its tradition of protecting old knowledge but rather on its ability to produce new research. 1 And yet, in 1947, the idea of a PhD was heartily resisted by our own Faculty of Arts. ‘Horribly American’ was the dominant sentiment when the idea of a PhD was introduced at this university, which was mostly in order to compete with the new ANU. While it was introduced in the sciences at Sydney University in 1947, Arts remained dead against it. Those American PhDs, they argued, were inferior to our British Masters degrees. Anti-American sentiments were underpinned by a deeper priority granted to scholarship over discovery. Mastery, in the sense Sydney humanities scholars understood it, did not require discovery. It was a hierarchical epistemology that required the scholar to commence with a foundational understanding of the discipline, a type of education that would later be mocked for its tendency to reify a canon. Despite New Left criticisms in the 1960s, mere attainment of knowledge had long been deemed insufficient to constitute mastery. The master used some of the knowledge they had gained against some of the other knowledge they had gained: mastery thus required a level of familiarity with a field that was so thorough as to enable a truly critical engagement. There were some who saw discovery as sitting atop all of this. And eventually the doctorate would be considered to be the pinnacle of a still rather hierarchical system of knowledge. But at first many humanities academics were unconvinced. Discovery, so rewarded by the PhD, was easy, they felt. True mastery was by far the harder – and slower – path. The Sydney Arts Faculty resisted for ten years until in 1957 they capitulated and the first humanities PhDs were enrolled. Despite its blustering start, in the PhD the university worldwide found expression for all its hopes. The apprenticeship of scholars and researchers required that PhD graduates embody all the values and traditions of the idealised university. In order to achieve that, which seems a kind of scholarly Pilgrim’s Progress, I would argue that universities have tacitly developed six trials for the humanities PhD, with one wonderful triumph that compensates for it all. Science is different, sustaining a whole range of different traditions and rites of passage, and I won’t discuss it here. The six trials of the humanities PhD, to me, are: The Trial of Poverty, the Trial of efficiency, the Test of Faithfulness, the Trial of Writing, the Test of Liminality and the Trial of Disciplinary Complicity. Our reward, of course, is embodied in the wonderful Triumph of Originality. 1. The Trial of Poverty is very often the subject of ridicule or angst, but is actually important. It is crucial to the reliability of university knowledge that it is separated from the pursuit of profit. The special character of university knowledge depends on the fact that we trust that it has been uninfluenced by the potential for political, sectarian or financial gain. We must not have scholars pursuing knowledge for money. But in this country, the trial of poverty has become a rite of passage that can border on the sadistic. This is most likely a result of a range of mistaken assumptions about postgraduates. 2 The average age of a PhD student in Australia is 35. For most, the option of returning home or turning to parents for financial support has long passed. Many have children. And not all have income-producing partners. Some are supporting whole families on a scholarship and a bit of part time work. Even under more favourable conditions, the costs of research always exceed the sources of funding available. Some universities do this better than others, ours is reputed to be among the worst in this respect. Travel to archives, field work, conference attendance to build a reputation are often funded from the scholarship stipend – for those lucky enough to have a scholarship at all. A credit card with a decent limit is a postgrad’s most essential prerequisite. These financial stresses, when they become excessive – as for so many they do – distract from the work. The problem can be even worse for students who study part-time. I am convinced that, were these conditions improved even slightly, so would we improve the quality of the research our universities produce. 2. The Trial of Efficiency requires that junior scholars prove their worth by achieving much with little. This is partly a collective expression of the trial of poverty: we want scholars who will pursue knowledge even under impoverished conditions – for over the centuries of university history, this has been the main, hard path to discovery. Poverty, for universities, despite grand buildings and elaborate libraries, is sadly the norm. However. More than 50% of the university research produced in Australia is conducted by postgraduates. A desk is not too much to ask. A desk – a real, permanent desk in an environment in which one has space to think with easy access to our wonderful library - this is the key to passing this trial of efficiency. When I moved to a permanent desk one year ago, my work accelerated dramatically. From an institutional perspective, I am convinced that, were all our humanities postgrads given this simple tool – and I know we’re working on it - our completion rates would certainly improve. 3. The Test of Faithfulness refers to that inevitable point in the PhD where one wonders, what is the point? Is this knowledge any good? Am I the right one to do it? In some ways faithfulness in the face of self-doubt is the hardest trial of all – and it is one of the reasons why a collegial environment is so crucial to academic success. It is also one of the reasons that a good supervisor is so important. In this relatively wealthy university, we are fortunate to have good supervisors in abundance. We should not feel too self-satisfied in this, however, for the work conditions at many Australian universities are deteriorating, leading to workloads that impede good supervision. The terrible lie that university quality is not connected to financial input should be exposed for what it is: scholarly sweatshops where efficiency is wrung from academics and the pretence of quality is maintained for marketing purposes, both for individual institutions and for the sector nationally, dependent as it is on its international reputation. We should all be concerned to ensure that this reputation is instead based on genuinely good scholarly environments where quality supervision is a possible thing. This should concern us across our whole sector, not just in our own narrow corner of the universe. If for no other reason than that if the reputation of Australian universities collapses, so does the reputation of us all. Collegiality is not confined to the institution or the College: it never has been. 3 4. The Trial of Writing I think is best captured by the poet Anne Bradstreet in her 1678 poem “The Author to her Book”: Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth didst by my side remain, … I cast thee by as one unfit for light Thy visage was so irksome to my sight; Yet being my own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could: I washed thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw. There have been several times over the past year that this process has struck me as so much harder than I had ever imagined. I prepared this talk a little while ago. I think if I had done it in the past four weeks, because of the trial of writing I may have been inspired by Dante rather than Bunyan and paralleled the PhD to the seven levels of hell rather than six trials and a triumph. A great contrast to the ‘just writing up’ that science postgrads describe, the trial of writing is particular to the humanities and social sciences. I would suggest that perhaps it should be examined more closely except that I suspect, a bit like raising children, that each thesis is unique –like any advice on parenting, you should listen to it all and then ignore any that does not apply. Theses, like children, seem to be stubbornly resistant to rules. The trial of writing does impact the length of candidature and the last, most torturous phase seems to be a surprise to all – though mention the torture to anyone who has done it and they will tell your theirs. While retaining this oddly well-kept secret might stop from scaring off too many promising potential candidates, perhaps some better planning is in order. Here we offer people a permanent desk – a tool that I have said should clearly be given at the start. But there are probably other things that would help. Money is certainly a problem at this stage: for most, scholarships have run out at exactly the moment when focus is most needed – and being able to focus while you’re also worrying about paying bills, finding more paid work, completing piles of marking or planning just how far a pot of lentil soup can get your family is clearly not ideal. Special scholarships or even loans to help those in real need at this stage would be smart. The other thing is space. I was recently very fortunate to be able to rent a house down the coast, keeping me away from coffee with colleagues, interesting but distracting seminars, preparation of school lunches and the squillion other tasks that make true focus very difficult. Wouldn’t it be lovely if a supervisor could offer a nice secluded spot for a week to their cash-strapped, time-poor postgrad? How many holiday houses are owned by members of our community of scholars that they might be willing to make available? Or perhaps the university would like to invest in a couple? Or again, perhaps $5 - 600 grants-in-aid could be set aside for that purpose? 4 5. The Test of Liminality refers to the uncertainty of the position of the postgraduate in the community of scholars as well as the uncertainty of the outcome of their study. Roderick Kramer argues that a certain amount of paranoia actually helps a PhD student as they navigate the substantial uncertainties of their position. This seems to me like wishful thinking. Neither truly staff nor truly student, the postgraduate lives in limbo. They are an uncertain member of the community of scholars right up until the moment they hand in their dissertation. And then, suddenly, they are locked out – quite literally, in some cases, according to rumour, where a student heading back to their desk after submitting a thesis was unable to access the postgrad space. It requires a remarkable level of self-confidence and an extreme-sport level of risk taking to look with equanimity towards this sudden exclusion from the community of scholars that has thus far nurtured one’s intellectual development. And then to look towards exceedingly daunting employment prospects: remembering again that PhD graduates are, on average, not young. I don’t know what it would look like, but a better postdoctoral pathway than this must be possible. Perhaps replacing some of our sector’s vast quantity of casual teaching with two year postdoctoral teaching contracts might be an option. But it requires more thought than I have given it. And finally, the area I suspect of greatest intellectual challenge: the Trial of Disciplinary Complicity. The relative value of new knowledge is tested, in part, using a wide range of established, and yet constantly renegotiated, disciplinary norms. These can frustrate emerging scholars. Yeats’ 1917 poem ‘The Scholars’ refers to the conformity of students in pleasing college masters: All shuffle there; all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think. The frustration is because our heroes of academia are the opposite. Yeats said: Lord, what would they say; Did their Catullus walk this way? Lastly. The Triumph of Originality is obvious. It is the point of the PhD. It requires a tough pilgrimage, for such a wondrous triumph is not achieved easily. But the rewards – the intellectual rewards, that is – are substantial. It is originality that offsets the trial of complicity, a line that is harder to walk the closer to the end one gets. And it is why a special collegiality amongst postgraduates is so important, keeping a space separated from academics who have built their careers on now-unquestionable provocations. The best part of any university seminar is the beer with postgrads afterwards. This is where the real discussion happens, when the academic staff are all gone. This is where the problems with a received theory are highlighted, where struggles in methodologies are confessed, where boredom with the same old ways is expressed and where new ideas start to emerge. 5 This, in fact, is how the university became what it is. Eric Ashby once described its transition from medieval institutions for the reading of a canon and development of professional skills to communities of scholars who pursued knowledge so that knowledge could be the best it could possibly be. He said: “In lodgings and in taverns ideas were born and nursed. They were vague and unpractical ideas that a man of the world would not entertain for a moment: yet thousands of students discovered that the rest of their lives was filled by a growing and maturing of these ideas, and the very subjects taught matured in this atmosphere.” This is how we make a university. By nurturing an environment in which new ideas are possible. And that is why the PhD and the postgraduates who take it are so important. 6