|
Article Excerpt
This article investigates how certain doctoral practices come to count as scandalous and with what effects on universities. To do so, it engages with a number of recent media allegations that relate to doctoral practice in Australia and elsewhere. The analysis of these allegations is developed in terms of three broad categories, namely allegations of silliness in relation to thesis content, allegations of softness in relation to entry, rigour and assessment, and allegations of suspect conduct and/or credentials. The impact of such allegations on university governance is then addressed.
Introduction
There is nothing like a public accusation directed at a doctoral program to mobilise university managers and academics. 'Super PhD Loses out to Blondes and Vampires' (1), 'Dumbing Down Charge Denied' (2), 'Academic Stripped of Doctoral Title' (3)--headlines such as these, whether they appear in the tabloid press or in more 'respectable' media sources, trumpet to all and sundry that something is rotten in that highest of higher education credentials, the doctorate. In so doing, they strike at the heart of any university's claim to quality research and teaching. Little wonder then that such headlines so often evoke a spate of defensive denials (including predictable counter-accusations about the erosion of academic freedom) and/or a rush of re-assurances on the part of the university in question, followed closely by a flurry of quality assurance paperwork within the said university, and a frisson of nervousness in other universities on guard against guilt by association.
In this article, we are seeking to provide an account of doctoral education that is unusual in that it is focused on the seamy side of doctorates--on scandal and its minimisation. Our interest is in what counts as scandal, and what is done either to ensure against the danger of scandal or to control reputational damage to a doctorate once it has occurred. Before moving to a thematic reading of the doctorate-as-scandal, we provide a conceptualisation of risk as an organisational logic for producing the practices of reputational management, and we briefly recover the 'forgotten history' of doctoral education in Australia, focusing on the doctorate as a controversial newcomer to the academy. This historicising move, when taken together with contemporary theorising of rationalities of risk, allows for a thematic reading of current risks for doctoral education that is knowing rather than naive, situated rather than self-evident.
Risk and higher education
Scandal is one effect of the failure to manage risk. As Giddens (2002) reminds us, the idea of risk--of 'hazards that are actively assessed in relation to future possibilities' (p. 22)--is a modernist notion necessary to a society that 'lives after the end of nature' (p. 27), that is, after magic, cosmology and the fates have given way to scientific calculation and/as insurance. Giddens understands the modernist notion of risk as giving rise to 'a new moral climate' in which social organisations are increasingly focused on danger--the danger of failing to perform in ways that are morally and politically, as well as organisationally, acceptable.
This risk consciousness does important work as a focus of organisational knowledge and thus for staff development and performance. As Beck (1992) argues, risk society is characterised by negative logic, a shift away from the management and distribution of material/industrial 'goods' to the management and distribution of 'bads', i.e., the control of knowledge about danger, about what might go wrong and about the systems needed to guard against such a possibility.
Concerns about the capacities of Australian universities to self-manage around risk--its identification and its minimisation--have been a theme of successive governments in recent times. They are made explicit in government bureaucrat Michael Gallagher's (2000) summation of outcomes of discussions between the Australian Federal Government's Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA, now DEST) and senior university executives. He states that these discussions pointed to 'a number of failures' (p. 38) that he links to the 'trial and error dimension' of university management practice to date. According to Gallagher, it is the lack of uniformity of practice within universities that is the key culprit in producing failure. 'The next phase of development', Gallagher concludes 'can be expected to be more formalised and professionally risk managed' (p. 38). This sentiment is echoed in the Higher Education Management Review Committee in Australia (Hoare, Stanley, Kirkby, & Coaldrake, 1995) and in the Dearing Report (1997) in the UK. Both committees foreground the failure of universities to develop the sort of management culture necessary to self-regulation in relation to organisational performance.
Risk management-as-risk-minimisation has now achieved the status of a high priority, institution-wide system of communication in all Western organisations, including universities. It is a system into which the local, disciplinary-specific or 'craft' knowledge of academics, administrators and auxiliary others must be plugged in order to count as the proper knowledge of the truly professional worker. It is not that local knowledge is being displaced altogether. Rather it is being made over as 'professional expertise' through a process that Ericson and Haggerty (1997) describe thus:
[P]rofessionals obviously have 'know-how', [but] their 'know-how' does not become expertise until it is plugged into an institutional communication system. It is through such systems that expert knowledge becomes standardised and robust enough to use in routine diagnosis, classification, and treatment decisions by professionals. (p. 104)
As 'professional experts', academics know, among other things, how to manage their teaching and research so that scandal is highly improbable. In the unlikely event of an accusation becoming public, the clear audit trail that is the hallmark of the true professional can be put to work to shore up institutional and individual reputation against the slings and arrows of outrageous and damning publicity.
The idea that academe is being made the subject of 'routine diagnosis, classification, and treatment decisions' may well be viewed as an Orwellian development in education. However, we are not seeking in this article to make any moral or ideological judgement of this type. Thus we are not seeking to point the finger at 'managerialism' or any other sort of 'ism'. Nor are we seeking to advocate 'more effective' risk management. We are seeking rather to...
|
