Guest editorial: Revitalising the doctorate post-pandemic

Citation

Gough, M. and Race, R. (2024), "Guest editorial: Revitalising the doctorate post-pandemic", Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education, Vol. 15 No. 2, pp. 117-122. https://doi.org/10.1108/SGPE-05-2024-099

The COVID-19 pandemic has been occasion for a re-think about many things. The impact upon higher education and its main practices is a theme which has been approached recently by many researchers and commentators. No journal special issue to date has focused exclusively on the doctorate in this context, which is one thing that we achieve here. There had, however, already been a webinar series on the topic of the post-pandemic doctorate and this series is indeed the origin of this Special Issue. The Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) Postgraduate Issues Network, in collaboration with the Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education Society (PaTHES), organised a series of five webinars hosting 12 internationally distributed presenters on the theme, “The Post-Pandemic Doctorate, opportunities for revitalisation of theory and practice” (PaTHES, 2020; SRHE PIN, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d). There then followed a symposium at an international conference (Gough et al., 2021), designed as a critical reflection on the series six months on, with (too hopeful) an expectation then that the world could already be moving on happily from the pandemic.

The webinar series and symposium constituted a concerted and coherent attempt to consider how the management and general conduct of the doctorate post-pandemic need not be, and is better not, returning to “business-as-usual”. Business-as-usual up to the point of the pandemic had tended to restrict opportunities and flourishing in the broad sense for those within, or trying to access, doctoral education, exacerbated by the pandemic and differentially for different groups (Deem, 2021). The webinar series and symposium explored and set the scene regarding the challenges, possibilities and prospects for hope (Frick, 2020, 2021) regarding the prosperity of doctoral education in an equalitarian framing. The webinar series and symposium asked not only what has been the point of the doctorate but what should be the point of the doctorate considered anew that would embrace the need for creativity and inclusivity to meet constant change but is at the same time assured regarding its own purpose and importance in the face of challenges and other changes which tend to subsume it into other purposes, which themselves may mask partial interests. This Special Issue captures these international sentiments, with a view to making a contribution to positive change in policy, management and supervisory practice in doctoral programmes, to re-imagine beyond business-as-usual to that end.

When we, the academic community, are considering implications for education of a major historical episode, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, we need anyway to consider it within the bigger, theoretical picture. The pandemic landed on us all and affected what were considered to be normal behaviours and processes, through various disruptions to the former business-as-usual management and general conduct of doctoral programmes, various according to location around the globe, but often leaving something to be desired. To use the trio of categories for a typology of innovations in higher education articulated by Harold Silver (1998, p. 9), the pandemic initially had impact at the level of organisation and management, then having implications respectively for curriculum and for teaching and learning.

Regarding organisation and management, there are well-documented disruptions to institutional arrangements such as going from face-to-face to online for university meetings, research events to which participants would have travelled, teaching, supervision and the doctoral viva-voce (or oral defence). More drastically, some doctoral candidacies, especially those that were laboratory-based, along with the funding for the research projects they were linked to, had to be suspended (EUA-CDE, 2020), with fieldwork and archive-based research also affected. The reader can find a collation of empirical study-based literature regarding the various effects of the pandemic on early career researchers by means of a review paper in a recent issue of this journal (Lokhtina et al., 2022).

The matter of the pandemic remains, of course, by 2024 still a topical concern. The outcomes of a re-think about doctoral education do not have to be inevitable effects of nor entailments from the pandemic and events around it. The intention of the Special Issue, then, is not to repeat the reports of the effects of nor strict entailments for action arising from the pandemic and surrounding events, even if contributions in this collection variously do include certain specific reporting. The Special Issue aims instead to present reflections on what is valuable and what to champion in and around the doctorate in post-pandemic times, to look beyond the situation in 2020–2021 and to remain topical, since the ongoing response of the world’s higher education systems to the pandemic can and should come under continuous longer-term critical scrutiny.

Five of the 12 invited webinar presenters have developed their work into papers, one remaining single author with the rest co-authoring, which are also selected for and constitute this Special Issue. The collection thereby retains the international scope of the webinar series, with Global North, South, West and East represented, and covering important questions about the place of different epistemologies and cultures. Holley and Joseph write from within the USA system and the nature of the relationship between the general variability in governance of higher education institutions and the Federal Government’s presiding over aspects of doctoral education more pervasively. As a result, their contribution is most obviously centred around Silver’s category of organisation and management, as well as devoting more space than most in this collection towards explaining the immediate effects of the pandemic, with a focus especially on the treatment of international students (c.f. Doyle, 2021). Zhang, Gao, Hong and Coates point our attention to China’s ever-increasing presence in global higher education. Writing from within Europe are Skov and Bengtsen; from Australia are Manathunga and also Holbrook, Spray, Burke, Shaw and Carruthers.

Further contrasts between the papers in terms of their orientations allow this collection to raise perennial questions at the heart of the purpose of doctoral, as well as all of higher, education. The theme of “career relevance” of doctoral programmes and the employability of their graduates is the common focus of Zhang and co-authors, with one thesis and of Holbrook and co-authors, with another thesis on this issue. The main point of difference between them is that the former argues for greater attention to general employability in the aims and structure of doctoral education, whereas the latter sees value in attention to what the doctorate offers already by way of skills and other abilities useful for life and work, with a view to graduates being able to represent what of this they have learned to, for instance, prospective non-academic employers.

The theme of employability lies at the heart of considerations under Silver’s categories of curriculum and of teaching and learning (for which from now on we use the term pedagogy). These categories circumscribe respectively the following; firstly, what are the legitimate limits of scope and the priority elements of knowledge (graduate attributes as well as field of enquiry) which a doctoral programme should encompass; secondly, the delivery of programmes with emphasis on how to instil certain ways of thinking.

Curriculum and pedagogy underpin strongly Skov and Bengtsen’s contribution, which considers the “Impact Agenda” in Global North Humanities doctoral programmes, how academic research-active staff, articulating their stances in the midst of the pandemic when expectations of the Academy that would contribute to new societal needs would be higher, variously take on board or resist this Agenda. The authors find that some individuals adopt different approaches, on the one hand for themselves in their general research work, and on the other hand specifically in their role as doctoral supervisors. This is, for instance, when they are, on the one hand, giving at least the appearance of endorsement as regards limits imposed from outside their discipline by the agenda to the legitimate boundaries of their discipline’s curriculum; and, on the other hand, then adopting a pedagogical orientation to keep the Agenda at bay from interference in the freedom to manoeuvre for doctoral candidates within their thesis enquiries.

The Impact Agenda is one of the “business-as-usual” formal top-down political elements of the pre-pandemic doctorate needing re-thinking, especially so that it may then cease to threaten the academic freedom of enquiry within (Global North) disciplinary knowledge domains and, consequently, undermine the integrity of disciplines and their right to decide what the next problems and questions are which need enquiring into within their domains. We need to rediscover the spirit of the Haldane Principle (Holmwood, 2011, p. 14) as a point from which to re-vitalise research education in post-pandemic times. This is, in turn, necessary for rediscovery of the importance of having an argument-based thesis to attain a PhD (Barnett, 2020), and for traditionally less reflexive enquiry in the sciences to be able effectively to question itself critically and to enable humanity to understand its place in the ecosystem of the world alongside, for example, viruses (Torday, 2021).

However, such traditional “Northern” disciplinary knowledge domains raise their own issue of legitimate limits to the doctoral curriculum. Manathunga makes this a key concern, with the view to allowing more legitimate space within doctoral enquiry for non-“Northern” knowledge, such as of First Nations and transcultural communities and of People of Colour. A decolonisation strategy may reflect a genuine ethical concern for greater inclusivity and overcoming inequalities; and Manathunga wishes to see all traditions of enquiry flourish. But this, in turn, poses a critical challenge for us: how do we balance the interests of the increasing multitude of areas of enquiry? The critical decisions, particularly at national level about resourcing, may tend to be made by interests, of varying hue, outside the Academy. Apart from the risk of tending to reduce knowledge to knowers and their standpoints and debate on this question to the opposition of forms of “voice discourse” (Young, 2007, Chapter 1), such outside influence will be affecting freedom to manoeuvre for those assuming to be led primarily by the aim of furthering the knowledge of the discipline or area of enquiry, within which they set out to operate. The established Impact Agenda is just one example. Another example is the recently devised funding model of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council in its prioritisation of “specific strategic areas” (UKRI, 2023). The more time honoured employability and skills agenda (dating back at least as long as the 1980s as regards UK Government policy) has certainly threatened likewise to do so but its hegemony can be mitigated by uncovering the inherent potential of doctoral education managed according to academic aims, as Holbrook and co-authors demonstrate here, and which also reflects earlier enquiries on the topic (Cryer, 1998a, pp. 214–216; Cryer, 1998b; c.f. also Gough and Denicolo, 2007, Part 3).

Shifting from the macro and meso to the micro level of analysis, room given to the freedom to manoeuvre for the doctoral student would constitute a potentially very fruitful means to allow in influences, for instance, from Global South thinking into “Northern” knowledge domain-based projects. At this level this is more about supervisory pedagogy: supervisors and managers of doctoral education would need to be more “student-centric” (Porter, 2021), prepared to allow their supervisees to flourish through their own creative thinking.

Manathunga’s approach puts weight not just upon curriculum but also upon pedagogy, which are also two of Basil Bernstein’s trio of “message systems” with respect to the classification and framing of educational knowledge (Bernstein, 1971, p. 47). The third is “evaluation”, the assessment of learning and attainment. The adaptations made by institutions in the wake of the pandemic especially to doctoral assessment evidence a relative enhancement of doctoral attributes acquired by students generally through this period, as they variously took their own initiative and made personal adaptations and self-adjustments, and so this can be reinforced (Houston, 2021). Manathunga’s contribution, indeed, does particularly well in enabling the Special Issue to complete coverage of the Bernsteinian trio by giving a place to all three. Support for variations in supervisory pedagogy and doctoral assessment approaches which are more inclusive for non-“Northern” candidates than the increasingly regimented and ungenerous structures of Global North programmes allows Manathunga to avoid being mired just in the impasse of the question of opposing knowledge domains competing for priority in the legitimacy stakes, and instead to offer innovative practices for the benefit of all knowledge domains.

We conclude the case that this Special Issue, in accordance with all of the various arguments made by the authors contained here, prompted by the pandemic, for certain re-positionings of the institution of the doctorate, is informing practice for a revitalised doctorate and is, post-pandemic, giving a clear message that doctoral education practices should not simply return to business-as-usual. We claim, in turn, that this is also contributing to the ongoing wider research-informed international debates, theoretical and practical, about the future(s) of higher education and research education within it.