One of the greatest joys and simultaneously greatest sources of confusion (and sometimes, frustration) is that mysterious pact that gets made between a PhD candidate and their guide. Okay, it’s not a pact, it’s never quite worded as that, but it is an agreement of sorts. It’s a relationship. But like parenting, it’s slippery and shape-shifting twin, it is something we rarely learn through instruction and more often by experience and emulation. That’s what makes it tricky. If we’ve been parented well (or, more correctly, in healthy ways—my, what loaded words!) we may ourselves parent well. But there are an infinite number of variables that might intervene and moderate our translation of being parented into the act of parenting. Supervision is something like that, but on a much smaller scale and much more limited in temporal and spatial terms—even though some might say that it can be as life-transforming a phase for the supervisee.
But then is that even the appropriate analogy? There are millions of books on parenting, and everyone and their grandparent is ready with tons of advice. Google “Parenting tips” and you get over 18 million results, while “How to be a parent” fetches a staggering 69 million. In contrast, “academic supervision tips” gets you 5.78 million and “how to guide a PhD student” racks up 16.3 million. No surprises, there are many more parents in the world than doctoral supervisors (thank goodness for that), and many more qualified to give advice on parenting than doctoral supervision.
Still, I think there is something to the comparison. Just as a new parent is nervous and tense, always worried about doing the right thing, the right way, and hoping that some minor lapse will not lead to trauma of some kind (“oh no, I slept through my child’s non-stop bawling and now he is going to have this memory of being abandoned and neglected!”), a new supervisor may be anxious and uncertain, unsure of exactly what to do and wondering about the right measure of authority and confidence with which to do it. Some of us have the good fortune to have had excellent mentors, from whom we have learned not only about the subject, but also about how to get others to learn. And there are autodidacts among us, those who are able to watch themselves go through life, reflect upon and learn from their own actions, and apply this learning to their teaching and mentoring. But what if we are not particularly reflexive and have not had good models to learn from, how do we prepare for the responsibilities of supervision? Research is hard enough to do and having to guide another person through it can be quite daunting. There’s so much expectation, and so much responsibility!
But then, also, there’s also challenge, excitement and the promise of learning in an entirely different way.
By and large, the Indian academy does very little to prepare new teachers to be research guides (in fact, it does little to prepare research scholars to be teachers). Apart from the UGC-mandated orientation and refresher courses that are a requirement if one is to move up from the entry-level assistant professor position but their focus is more on teaching and developing one’s own research profile. And while the quality of these programmes varies across the country, the fact that they exist offers some hope for improvement under inspired—or even efficient—managements. But these courses give little or no attention to developing research mentorship skills. Young faculty therefore learn willy-nilly about how to handle this delicate act of leading someone else into a research career. It can be a tall ask, especially when most teachers have emerged from the same flawed system that they are now charged with stewarding to the “next level” of quality (if we are to take seriously the vision expressed by the Ministry of Human Resources Development).
This is complicated by the fact that our standards for admitting research scholars are uneven; people enter with different degrees of preparedness or awareness of research aptitude; there is little flexibility in terms of ensuring some level of correspondence between the interests of faculty and the incoming student. Admissions are based on narrow eligibility criteria rather than what one might call “academic resonances” or affiliations—although, admittedly, this might be considered a luxury in a country where access to higher education is still a privilege and criteria veer toward inclusion rather than selectivity. Once admitted, few institutions have clearly laid out programmes of study that give students enough grounding to become independent researchers. This journey toward independence becomes then primarily the responsibility of the supervisor. In many developed countries, the doctoral journey is supported by a variety of mechanisms—a robust structure of coursework, comprehensive or qualifying examinations, teaching apprenticeship, and a culture of regular writing and presentation. Even if the candidate is expected to be self-directed, there are many routes to learning how to do research and getting a sense of where one is within a peer network.
The UGC now mandates course work for PhD students but this too tends to be patchy, particularly in the social sciences. The science streams, particularly disciplines that are built around laboratory work or driven by grants, are better organized at least in terms of having a set of expectations of what a student is supposed to do from day to day. While the politics around this also can be exploitative and extremely hierarchical, the longer history of research programmes in science leads to some level of transparency.
So this is the context within which research supervision happens. The advisor becomes a one-stop shop for all things academic, but then not all students are equally positioned to come shop. They don’t all necessarily have the currency—the social, cultural and academic capital that could give them the means to make full use of all the academic resources in a university. This could extend even to the means (language, confidence, savvy) to developing a good working relationship with their supervisor. A master’s student once told me that he didn’t take seriously my invitation to “drop in and chat about issues, both academic and other” because he had the sense that this was “just the sort of thing people say but don’t mean”. Sometimes the cultural or social distance between faculty and students makes it difficult to establish an easy relationship that is built on trust and understanding—both of which are necessary to have stimulating academic discussions. We’re not even talking right now of the complexities of gender or caste (or disability) politics.
But let’s set aside those complexities for the moment and get back to the complex task of building that academic relationship, even as we acknowledge that this happens within the larger context of higher academics in India, fraught as it is with multiple issues. To my mind, academic supervision comprises (at least) four aspects: guiding the student through the appropriate literature in the field, honing the student’s critical and analytical faculties, and providing a cushion of intellectual, serving as a time-keeper and standard setter, and providing emotional and psychological support through what is often a lonely and hazy path to completion. The first two are drawn from our own academic experience, while the second two are derived from our life experience, and the insights we have gained through the multiple interactions that make up our professional and social lives. And alongside this, a supervisor should have the ability to contextualize the life of each individual student—where they come from, their academic history, their life stage (dealing with mature students returning to academics after a long professional stint is very different from handling those who have been on a direct unbroken academic track), their aspirations and their specific strengths and weaknesses.
Clearly, no two doctoral journeys are alike, and no two relationships are comparable. A PhD dissertation, almost by definition, explores new questions or problems, and even where it might be couched in familiar literature, takes off in uncharted directions. So no supervisor is—or is expected to be--an expert in a candidate’s specific area; that’s something the supervisor helps the candidate become. This is where the mysterious core of the academic pact lies: how does one coach one to become an expert in an area in which no one else has established expertise? How do you push someone to find answers to questions on their own, when at best you can only gauge the process, not the product? And this is what often confounds new supervisors—how does one do this? That is why we have the second set of supervisory duties—to offer support, to be a touchstone of sorts, to offer the encouraging word, that firm but gentle guiding hand on the elbow when needed.
Almost every day, we hear of PhD students dropping out or disappearing from their supervisor’s radar, for a variety of often unfathomable reasons. Even more tragically, we hear of PhD scholars committing suicide, sometimes attributed (fairly or unfairly) to institutional factors, among which the quality of supervision is one. It’s hard to pinpoint any single cause for dropping out of a PhD programme or giving up on life; it’s a combination of so many things, personal, environmental and a variety of social issues and mental health states that could precipitate an event. But often the supervisor is left feeling helpless and wondering what she could have done differently.
Even when the circumstances are not so extreme, supervision is a challenge.
What’s the right combination of pressure to apply and space to give? How involved should/can you be without limiting the scholar’s ability to think independently? How do you guage which students need you more and which, less? How do you make yourself available to those who are not used to receiving or expecting help, having floundered alone in an unfriendly, often hostile, social and academic environment? In the Indian context, there is the added complication of having to write a complex academic treatise in an unfamiliar language—English. Even the brightest students from non-English academic backgrounds struggle to produce clear, persuasive papers in this language. Should supervision involve editorial assistance as well? What are the limits of academic guidance? At what point can a supervisor say: “I can only take you thus far and no further?”
Then there is the converse problem. How does one develop the detachment to watch a scholar emerge from under your metaphorical wings (or so you might think) and fly away, with no backward look? Should one even expect anything from the relationship other than a line or number on one’s academic CV or progress report? Here I turn to the parental analogy again. We’re often told as parents that our children are not our own, that we are only caregivers for a brief period, that we should have no expectations from them. Perhaps the attitude to cultivate with research scholars is similar. Research supervision is a job, and when it is done well, a scholar emerges, independent, confident, and with the ability to hold their own in the academic world. That should be the reward in itself.
The other perks are a bonus: when you develop a truly collaborative academic relationship, one that is productive and rewarding both professionally and personally. Or when you’ve made a friend out of those years, days, and hours of mind-bending discussions and after those hundreds of mandatory signatures on forms.
Personally, research supervision has been my favourite aspect of a relatively short academic career. Each of the dissertations I’ve guided has been an exciting journey into new intellectual terrain. I have always learned more than I have known before, been exposed to new ways of thinking, of seeing the world. Sometimes it’s an introduction to a whole new vocabulary, even sensibility.
There’s no play book for research supervision, although the skeletal “rules of engagement” (number of meetings, required sign-offs, meeting of milestones) are spelt out fairly clearly. The other, softer stuff, we need to figure out along the way. It could help for academic institutions to offer a little more guidance on what the supervisory relationship is all about and how one goes about building it, rather than letting it become something that one learns by trial-and-error
I’ve realized that one of the keys to enjoying supervision rather than getting anxious about it, is to see it as a shared journey, to focus on the interpersonal relationship (we are just two people, after all, studying something that we enjoy), and to lighten up a little bit. Yes, it’s also about tough love, about pushing and drawing boundaries, but inside that space, there is opportunity for laughter and, above all, for discovery.
Comments