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