Professor Chrissie Boughey’s response two weeks ago to my article in Getting Ahead on April 29 raised questions about the example I used to illustrate intellectual abuse and misuse of power in postgraduate supervision.
The example concerned supervisors who insisted a student remove certain “findings”, and Boughey suggested the word “findings” may be inappropriate in disciplines such as the social sciences where truth or reality is a constructed and contested category. It is not that theoretical framework that concerned me. And I found encouraging the peer review system Boughey described, in which she often asks colleagues to read her own postgraduate students’ work.
If such reviewing is conducted in a genuine spirit of constructive engagement, that is fine. But peer review is inappropriate if it becomes an internal mechanism of validation that academics use when their views are challenged by students. If Boughey also meant to imply that my understanding of the dispute in my example is compromised because I am not a social-science scholar, my response is that I do not need expertise in social science to know personal insults when I see them or to identify a lack of substantive engagement with what a student has written.
I saw the thesis I mentioned, which was for a labour law master’s degree, and the supervisors’ written comments. Those comments had very little to say about the theoretical frameworks and ways of interpreting truths or producing knowledge that Boughey discussed. That is all beside the point, though, because the merits of the dispute between the student and her supervisors was not my primary concern and I indicated so in my article. (See paragraph 16).
My primary focus was to show the need for universities to mediate the “events in the complexity of the human interaction of teaching and of producing valid ‘truths'” (as Boughey put it) when there are power differentials between supervisor and student. That is particularly so in a society that is as racialised and unequal as ours and in which there is a lamentable lack of transformation at higher-education institutions.
At the end of the day, it is not about whether students refuse to be guided or do not have sufficient depth of understanding to appreciate their supervisors’ wisdom — alluded to by Boughey as sometimes being the case. It is about creating mechanisms to ensure that when conflicts between supervisors and students do arise, these can be mediated Âconstructively and effectively.
In the example I gave, the student had made the head of department aware that she objected to her first two supervisors wanting a large part of her thesis removed. Yet no meeting was ever held between the student, supervisors and a (hopefully neutral) third party as a mediator — a meeting at which both the student and the supervisors would have had to justify their stances on the sections of the thesis in question.
The student, therefore, had no recourse – at a departmental level or higher — to debate the content of her thesis, the outline of which had already been approved in her research proposal, and was simply expected to remove a large part of it. I was not implying that all supervisors are poor or that students are never at fault.
I was fortunate enough myself to have an excellent PhD supervisor. In my article, however, I was specifically dealing with situations in which supervisors abuse their authority over students and I highlighted the absence of recourse that the student in my example had to resolve her problem with her supervisors.
I have witnessed several instances in which this has occurred and I have also received a number of emails from students highlighting grave problems between themselves and their supervisors. These range from supervisors failing to attend prearranged meetings to verbally Âharassing students. It is important that we examine the unarticulated assumptions we make about students and supervisors alike.
One concerns the example Boughey raised of students who sometimes refuse to be guided. Why? Because they are wilful, unreasonable people who do not understand the complicated, learned theories and processes of knowledge production? Because the supervisor is rude and arrogant and has done little to earn the trust of the student?
It may be either of or both these reasons — or neither. But it is this complexity that suggests exactly why effective mechanisms are necessary to resolve difficulties. Their absence can lead to the institutional actor with the most power being supported by the institution.
It becomes all too easy for a culture to develop in which it is always the student’s stubbornness or lack of understanding that is the problem, rather than the supervisor’s poor interpersonal skills, inadequate diversity-management skills and sometimes even his/her lack of understanding of theoretical frameworks and the student’s use of such frameworks.
By no stretch of the imagination can the personal prejudices and bias of supervisors, when used from a position of relative power to silence students, be construed as a misunderstanding of “events in the complexity of the human interaction” in the process of teaching and learning.
Dr Layla Cassim received her doctorate in pharmacology from Rhodes University in 2008 and has recently completed her MBA.