Postgraduate Column

from Issue 25

UNFINISHED PROJECTS: THE PHD TIME-LIMIT (A POSTGRADUATE  PERSPECTIVE)

Over the last decade, the time taken by research students to complete their PhDs has
come under increasing scrutiny. In the UK, full-time students are expected to submit
their doctoral thesis within four years and part-time students within seven. If a
department’s completion rates fall below a certain level (usually fifty per cent),
research councils will suspend funding for future postgraduates.
In many ways, this fresh emphasis on the final deadline can be seen as part of a
programme of government-led reforms – tuition fees, the founding of the AHRB, the
RAE – designed to foster a supposedly more ‘US style’, market-driven academic
culture within the humanities. Significantly, however, the education authorities have
not chosen to replicate the American PhD wholesale; which is longer (typically six
years) and includes taught courses, examinations and a shorter final research project
(usually taking two to three years to complete).
In one sense, it seems ironic that a renewed stress upon the doctorate as a singular,
finite project has arisen in Britain in a period when critical culture has rejected
descriptions of texts as autonomous, hermetic closed systems, and redefined them as
open, unfinished processes. For Romantic-period PhDs, this incongruity is
compounded by the additional irony that much of the work of one of the (if not the)
central canonical poets of the period – William Wordsworth – exists in multiple
printed versions and was itself part of an unfinished project – The Recluse.1 The
prevalence of such apparent paradoxes suggests that a marked disjunction has arisen
between the professed values of the intellectual climate and the everyday reality of
academic practice. Given this state of affairs, it seems appropriate to step back and
examine the various arguments surrounding recent efforts to bolster PhD completion
rates.
In their defence, such endeavours have given institutions added incentive to provide
students with adequate support. Students are now able to check departments’
completion rates before they enrol on programmes, and can expect that – if they work
hard and take advantage of the advice given to them – they will complete within the
deadline. In addition, efforts to shrink the completion time have been largely
successful. The AHRB’s Doctoral Submission Rate Survey shows that the 2002 four-
year submission rate was 78 per cent: a seven per cent increase from 2001 and forty-
four per cent higher than the submission rate in the early 1990s, which stood at thirty-
four per cent.2 Moreover, the time limit set on PhDs enables doctoral graduates to
embark on careers outside academia more easily: an unfortunate necessity as
opportunities for academic employment have declined.
However, the present-day situation has numerous disadvantages. In practical terms,
the scarcity of funding for the fourth year – the so-called ‘year of grace’ – means that
many postgraduates find that the greatest obstacles emerge in this period. Teaching, or
other part-time work, can detract from the necessity of submerging oneself in one’s
subject, at the particular moment when such absorption is arguably most necessary. In
addition, many students are reluctant to take out further loans and therefore add to the
debt already accumulated from undergraduate studies. At the same time, the stress on
completion rates does not allow for the capricious nature of the creative process. Not
only do separate projects obviously demand different amounts of time, but genuine
and imaginative understanding requires a process of writing, reading and reflection
that is slow and unpredictable, and does not fit into a preordained timetable.
Moreover, there is legitimate concern that centralised attempts to enforce finishing
dates reduce the PhD to a narrow set of routine tasks, stifling the very qualities –
imagination, creativity, originality – that produce good future researchers. Robert
Cowen has argued that recent developments have marked a ‘bureaucratisation of
originality’ in which the development of critical intellectual power is being prevented
by authoritarian control.3
However, this argument ignores and idealises the PhD’s past history. The romantic
myth of the PhD student engaged in a relentless search for truth derives from the
doctorate’s origins in Germany in the nineteenth century. The PhD was conceived as a
broad cultural experience, carried out independently, in which a solitary researcher
would write a thesis over a period of two or three years, under the supervision of a
lone doktorvater.4 When the qualification was imported into the American university-
system in the late nineteenth century and the British one in the early twentieth
century, the debates that surrounded it echo contemporary concerns. In 1905, William
James referred to the ‘PhD Octopus’, envisioning the qualification as a proliferating
contamination, with a suffocating grip on students and Higher Education Institutes
alike. He argued, along lines that recall recent ‘modernisers’, that ‘neither the
traditional doctorate nor its professionalised … version is adequate preparation for the
modern academic career’ due to its lack of apprenticeship in teaching, administration
and research management.5 It is not the case that the fresh emphasis on time limits
marks ‘the corruption of an ideal’.6 Rather, the tension between scholarly training
versus professional apprenticeship has dogged the PhD since its very inception.
Moreover, the argument that PhD research is a space for discovery and wonder
threatened with extinction by bureaucratic officialdom reverberates with many of the
claims made at the formation of the academic subject that most Romantics PhDs work
within: ‘Eng. Lit.’. As Raymond Williams has argued, it was during the Romantic
period itself that the aesthetic was first conceptualised as a sphere in which natural
beauty and personal feeling could be explored, detached from the crude materialism
of consumer capitalism.7 The early evangelists for English – Matthew Arnold,
Churston Collins and F. R. Leavis – rooted their claims for the subject in beliefs in
Romantic individualism, intuition and self-expression and opposed assessments,
regulations and institutionalism as morally and culturally impoverished. The very
skills that our subject nourishes – the ability to challenge fixed boundaries and
simplistic reductions – encourage us to view attempts to regulate our discipline with
scepticism.
However, as Robert Peel has argued, hand-in-hand with the encouragement of free
intellectual exploration, ‘surveillance of one kind or another’ has been ‘a continuous
feature of English through its history’.8 Not only was Arnold himself a school
inspector, but also – from the primary school to the PhD – English has always been
involved in the appraisal of individuals on the basis of their success in completing
finite tasks. While attempts to redefine the doctorate – as tasks to be carried out within
a definite period of time – are reductive and potentially damaging, the arguments
against them are predicated on a dubious binary opposition between individual
creativity and bureaucratic authoritarianism. This is an opposition entrenched firmly
in the past history of English as an academic subject, and one its proponents would be
eager to deconstruct if applied elsewhere.
Government-led initiatives to enforce PhD completion rates require a clearer sense
of the role and function of the doctorate itself, so as to avoid a mismatch between
conception and execution. Perhaps the status and quality of future PhDs might benefit
from a critical analysis of the history and purpose of the qualification. Such an
investigation might deter both researchers and administrators from making simplistic
assertions about the doctorate and enable both to understand the research process far
better. Until that date, the task of defining the main objective of the PhD remains
something of an unfinished project.

Alex Watson
University of York


NOTES

1. For further details on Romantic writers’ and editors’ struggles with textual instability, authorship
and revision see Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), which includes a chapter on Wordsworth.
2. Figures are from Arcady: The Newsletter of the Arts and Humanities Research Board 7 (Summer
2003), p. 7.
3. Robert Cowen, ‘Comparative perspectives on the British PhD’, in Norman Graves and Ved Varma
(eds), Working for a Doctorate: A guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences (London and New
York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 184-199, p. 184.
4. For further details see Renate Simpson, How the PhD came to Britain: A Century of Struggle for
Postgraduate Education (Guildford: Society for Research into Higher Education, 1983).
5. Cited in Mikhail Ziolkowski, ‘The PhD Squid’, in American Scholar (Spring 1990), p. 35.
6. Robert Cowen, ‘Comparative perspectives on the British PhD’, p. 184.
7. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London: Penguin Books, 1953), pp. 48-65.
8. Robert Peel, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Peel, Annette Patterson and Jeanne Gerlach (eds), Questions
of English: Ethics, Aesthetics, Rhetoric and the Formation of the Subject in England, Australia
and the United States (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1-35, p. 33.