Postgraduate Column

from Issue 24

PHD SUPERVISION: A POSTGRADUATE PERSPECTIVE

Attending the BARS conference in August, I was struck by the number of excellent
papers given by postgraduates. Not only were such papers encouraging evidence of
the number of promising young scholars entering Romantic studies: they were also
testimonies to a number of successful supervisor/student relationships. With the
increasing professionalisation of English studies, as well as the growing role of
government in allocating resources to research projects, it seems inevitable that this
aspect of researching and training will come under more and more scrutiny over the
next few years. Given this context, it now seems the right time to return to the
questions: ‘What is supervision for?’ and ‘What makes good supervision?’.
The relationship between research postgraduate and supervisor is recognised
universally to be a uniquely precious one. For the student, the partnership should
stimulate them to produce top-class research and smooth their path from
undergraduate studies to an academic career. For the supervisor, supervision affords
the pleasure of being involved in a research project that interests them and provides
the satisfaction of watching and assisting a student progress from promising
undergraduate to first-class researcher.
In practical terms, the position of the supervisor is an extremely demanding one,
encompassing a variety of different roles. A supervisor must be an editor, correcting
spelling mistakes and grammar, as well as clumsy, banal or confused expressions. He
or she must be a walking bibliography who opens up different ideas and approaches
and recommends relevant primary and secondary material. The supervisor must also
be a psychoanalyst, able to tease out the problems and difficulties peculiar to a
specific student and prescribe them potential remedies. Perhaps most importantly, the
supervisor must be a critic willing to assess – with stringency and tenacity – a
student’s argument, evidence and analysis.
In response, the supervisee has two main duties: firstly, a responsibility to see
constructive criticism for what it is – helpful recommendation, not personal attack;
secondly, an obligation to keep in mind that your supervisor is a human being, with
their own research, teaching and administrative commitments and that their time is
not infinitely elastic.
These reciprocal responsibilities are currently being played out in departments that
are undergoing rapid change, with the result that new pressures are beginning to bear
upon both parties. The rise of mass participation in higher education has put further
administrative and teaching demands on departments, making the one-on-one
interaction of supervisory sessions more rare. Coming as I did from undergraduate
study at a university where teaching was overwhelming in seminar form, I found the
first-hand access that the supervisory session provided particularly valuable.
Whatever the merits of the seminar system, it can be particularly poor at weeding out
bad or lazy habits in good students – things that quickly become apparent in the
rigours of the supervisory system.
In addition, the role of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, as the main source
of funding for doctoral research, has put greater emphasis on completion rates and on
ensuring that doctoral research complies to set criteria. Thankfully, gone are the days
when graduate students were instructed to lock themselves in their study and emerge
only after four or five years with what they saw as their magnum opus. But the stress
on targets can hamper the process of thinking and researching, which is fluid and
sporadic and cannot always be done to order. At the same time, it could be said that
the growing numbers of self-funded graduate students introduce an uncomfortable
commercial aspect to the supervisory relationship. This situation could cause students
to see themselves as ‘customers’ and supervisors as ‘service-providers’ – and,
arguably, threatens to transform what is, at its best, a disinterested, scholarly
relationship into a commercial transaction. In such a context, we must be more
vigilant than ever to ensure that maintaining high academic standards, appropriate
deadlines and effective financial management does not detract from our rights to
scholarly independence.
In his perceptive study of educational theory and practice in Britain between 1780
and 1832, Literature, Education and Romanticism, Alan Richardson describes a
situation with powerful parallels to the present day.1 He describes how, in the period,
the Renaissance emphasis on education by dialectic (discussion, disputation and
debate, stressing intellectual and ideological adaptability) gave way to teaching by
catechism – instruction by a system of question and answer, prioritising the
cultivation of ‘appropriate’ moral and intellectual dispositions and the internalisation
of authority. In so doing, he shows us the potential pitfalls of trying to formalise
postgraduate education too rigidly. We risk replacing a situation in which ideas
circulate freely and intellectual risks are encouraged with a state of affairs in which
supervisor and supervisee are concerned primarily with ensuring that their work
fulfils a narrow set of pre-arranged criteria. If this happens, scholarship will be much
the poorer.
Instead, what the supervision system is very good at, and what we should make sure
is preserved, is the creation of academics with a powerful and distinctive sense of
themselves as individual scholars. It seems that every supervisee undergoes a similar
journey. They begin by being relatively subordinate and deferential to the supervisor’s
advice and direction. Soon, they learn to anticipate their supervisor’s criticisms, and
mould their work accordingly. After a while, however, they pull away from the
supervisor to develop their own interests.
It seems that all good supervision is paradoxical in nature, and, like parenting,
consists mainly of weaning students into independence. At the beginning of
Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge makes a similar observation about teaching,
when he pays tribute to James Bowyer (1736-1814), his teacher at Christ’s Hospital
School. While he remembers Bowyer as a strict disciplinarian – a subject of his
occasional nightmares – Coleridge lauds his former instructor for encouraging his
own taste to bloom, not forcing to digest a series of already-decided principles. As a
result, Coleridge writes, ‘The Discipline my mind had undergone … removed all
obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing my delight’.2
The purpose of PhD supervision is the same: to sweep away impediments to research,
not to ensure that a set of administrative imperatives have been internalised. While the
image of supervisor and supervisee as wrestling in psychic combat is, perhaps, a little
overblown – not to mention unsavoury – Harold Bloom’s famous examination of the
relationships between poets and their precursors holds much of value for both
supervisors and supervisees. Like poets, supervisees must ultimately clear imaginative
space for themselves, developing their own critical voice, sometimes in opposition to
their supervisors. Both parties could take heed of an insight that Bloom puts at the
heart of his analysis: ‘Weaker talents idealise; figures of capable imagination
appropriate for themselves’.3

Alex Watson
University of York


NOTES

1. Alan Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life, ed.
by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983)
3. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997)