Dear PhD Supervisor: Why Academia’s failing me, not my brain.

Dear PhD Supervisor,

I have been wanting to write this for some time. Because I am unhappy. With you. With the PhD. With the nature of academia. Let me explain.

I remember our first conversation going down the wisteria arch at university and you asked if I really wanted to do this project or if I would prefer doing something questioning ‘what is internationalisation’; I didn’t want to do that and despite my attempts to find another tutor, I have ended up with you. You see me as stubborn, as not learning and growing through the PhD project. But in the end the whole thing feels like you are trying to turn me into a mini-you. And I’m not.

You like philosophy and see it as a way of framing the world. I see it as a way of creating artificial arguments without addressing or answering the problems of the world. Our politics and world view don’t match. I suspect you lean to the left and I know you oppose the neo-liberal agenda. I lean to the right and see market forces as a good way of making universities work. You see new media and journalism generally as dumbing down, reducing debates to nothing but core messages. I see it as requiring more intellectual precision to make knowledge accurate, brief, accessible and engaging. You think academics should be left to do research and not made to reach targets in terms of publications, income won and impact generated. I think it is important that we justify our existence in Higher Education, the amount of money spent in taxation and show how our research transfers to the non-academic (some might say ‘real’) world, just as other businesses have to. Yet none of this should matter if getting a PhD was about educating or developing an individual to be an academic. It does matter if the process aims to form someone in your own image.

In my recent essay you commented:

Christopher’s journalist background [sic] comes through in his writing style – short, pithy statements - and this is at odds with the problems he is grappling with and therefore there is an uneasy tension. He is aware of this and is working hard to find his writing style.

To be honest, I smiled at this as I wasn’t a very good journalist as I was too wordy. My academic tutors at both BA and MA level would have described my “short, pithy statements” as “engaging” and that reading across the whole piece developed a sense of discussion and nuance rather than in any particular sentence. I think I have developed a ‘style’ but not one you like as it happens to be the opposite of your slightly wordy style which seems to repeat itself and can lose the reader (particularly the non-academic one).

And this is the whole trouble: my job, world view and engagement with new media has been shaped by people beyond academia, by issues that affect the wider world and by forms of media that try to bring my work to a wider audience. ‘Traditional’ academia, of course, wanted to be relevant and accessible, too, but just as the internet has changed our social interaction and ability to access knowledge, so must it change access to academia and the way universities operate. Academia should not lose its rigour, its use of peer review and independence. But, for me, academia needs to change the questions it asks and the people it engages with. All of this challenges your role and status as an academic. Perhaps I am part of a generation constrained by fewer social norms and constraints than those before me that I want this to be extended to my research.

But I do not and will not believe – as you would have me believe – that this challenging and changing of academia makes me unsuitable, unable or, indeed, intellectually incapable of finishing my doctorate.

All good wishes,

Your PhD tutee

What I Really Learnt about Social Research Methods

For those who have been following my twitter feed or Facebook status, you will have noticed that I have just passed the Post Graduate Diploma in Social Research Methods with a distinction. Thank you to all of you who have sent kind wishes. So I have another qualification to my name and a few more letters. But what does this say about me as a researcher and about my research?

Well, I do know more about research methods – or at least the questions I should be reflecting on when deciding the methods. A lot of the programme was less about saying how particular methods work and much more about reflecting on how to define the most appropriate methods. Each module made us ask a different question:

- What statistics are needed – and what do they really show?
- How important is the individual researcher in qualitative research?
- What are the philosophical and ethical underpinnings to the research?
- Is the research design possible, reasonable and related to the questions posed?
- What responsibilities does the researcher have to the discipline and the research community?

These are universal questions to do with research but require far more self-awareness than I had originally thought. When undertaking arts/humanities research (in France and the UK) the importance of the individual was hardly evident other than in our (academically worded) ‘opinions’ on the products of human endeavour. When looking at journalism research (as part of the MA), the aim was to remove the individual researcher from the reporting but being reflective of their practice is a fundamental skill.

Some of this has changed my opinions, other elements have reinforced what I feel. At times I have felt lost when trying to position myself in all of these debates. I am more of a numbers person but the programme (and my tutor) are more words and qualitative people. Both my research area and questions require a more nuanced way of looking at things. One of the causes of the current economic situation is an over-reliance on false-statistics and only metrics which are measurable. Life is more complicated than that and requires us to examine a variety of numeric and non-numeric data to understand it. That said, as I tried to argue in the philosophy essay, just because I am not using pure numeric data, doesn’t mean that my research should not have the same rigour as quantitative research.

So, ultimately, what did I learn from my Post Graduate Diploma in Research Methods? Perhaps that social research – by which I mean research looking at society or its members – is about reflecting about my own role and the impact of my research. This means making sure that the questions posed and researched are created and answered in a reflective, self-aware way. Research may not produce as concrete answers due to this but given the trouble that ‘absolute’ answers gets us into – perhaps that is no bad thing, either.