/ 29 April 2011

Who supervises the supervisor?

The quality of postgraduate supervision is a major concern for students and universities need to pay urgent attention to the pivotal relationship between postgraduate students and their supervisors.

That much was evident in the extensive feedback I received in my three-part series on postgraduate study in Getting Ahead last year. In those articles, I used my own experience of master’s and doctoral study to offer tips for postgraduate success. (For the full series, go to www.mg.co.za/postgradsecrets)

There are many excellent supervisors out there. I have benefited from outstanding supervision and know many others who have also had such positive experiences. But there are students who have had very negative and even traumatic experiences, as was clear from the feedback.

I know of students who moved to other universities in search of more affirming experiences with their supervisors, of students who suffered mental health problems because of their interactions with supervisors and of students who simply dropped out.

Last year’s landmark study on PhDs by the Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) demonstrated how poorly many of the country’s universities perform in this area. Given the national imperative to increase postgraduate numbers both steeply and quickly, the study should be a loud wake-up call to universities that they need to pay serious attention to factors that inhibit student success.

In 2007 South Africa produced 1274 PhD graduates, or 26 per million of the country’s population, the Assaf study showed. This figure pales in comparison with Australia’s 264 PhDs per million and Portugal’s 569 per million.

In a recently published paper Dr Chaya Herman, of the University of Pretoria’s education faculty, proposed some reasons for the low number of PhD graduates in South Africa. These include under-resourced schools, low university-entrance matric pass rates, the high dropout rates at school and from university undergraduate programmes, the difficulties black students often face in adapting to historically white universities, lack of funding and family pressure to get a job after graduation rather than proceed to postgraduate study.

My own focus is on the problems that often arise in postgraduate supervision. We need to have constructive conversations on this often uncomfortable issue if we are to determine possible causes and identify potential solutions.

Consider the following scenario. The student was black, the supervisor white and her master’s research focused on affirmative action. The supervisor took exception to certain research findings and asked the student to remove these from her thesis.

When the student declined to do so, arguing that it was important to retain those findings, the supervisor gave her feedback on her draft thesis chapters that she found belittling. She also felt the supervisor had taken issue personally — rather than professionally and academically – with what she had written.

The relationship between the student and supervisor deteriorated, the student complained to the head of department and she was allocated a different supervisor. However, the new supervisor repeated the former supervisor’s written feedback on the student’s thesis chapters verbatim – and in the same demeaning manner.

When the student complained again, she was moved to yet another supervisor and the whole process was repeated. The student has not yet had her thesis approved for submission to examiners.

The student told me she felt as though she had been “intellectually abused”. Her husband had this to say: “To an outsider, it would seem as if the problem was with my wife because so many supervisors had a problem with her thesis. However, they all clubbed together against her, as if they were defending the credibility of her first supervisor.

“It’s a self-preservation thing among some academics. Today you are challenged by a bright and critical student; tomorrow it could be me. I support you today and you support me tomorrow.”

In South Africa, given our history, it is perhaps not surprising that some supervisors, in their interactions with students who differ from themselves — for example, in race, gender or socioeconomic background – still allow their own baggage and prejudice to determine their relationship with their students.

But in the new South Africa, is this the kind of culture we wish to cultivate in academia — one in which, it seems, some supervisors’ prejudices determine what research gets disseminated? Whatever the merits of the dispute between the student and her successive supervisors in the scenario I sketched, it is clear the department lacked mechanisms to resolve it equitably.

The student’s trust in her supervisors and the department broke down, the head of department did not mediate the power differentials between supervisor and student appropriately and the supervisors were not held to account for their insistence that the student should remove particular research findings.

Postgraduate supervision often reflects the quality of undergraduate education. Sometimes, bad practices are transferred by academics from their undergraduate lecturing to their postgraduate supervision and lecturing.

For instance, the power dynamics and prejudices evident in supervisors’ interactions with postgraduate students can also sometimes be seen in these academics’ direction of undergraduate student learning.

To illustrate: several months ago I attended a lecture on pharmacology by a senior academic in which he repeatedly told students: “You would not give your professional patients a sedating drug. You don’t want your professional patients feeling drowsy.”

I was horrified. What he seemed to be implying was that patients he does not regard as “professionals” deserve a certain, perhaps impaired, quality of life — because sedation certainly affects your quality of life — but that others merit another, perhaps better, one.

If so, this prejudice is not only offensive but also potentially harmful: after all, “non-professionals” often perform more dangerous tasks than “professionals”, such as operating machinery or driving large vehicles long distances. A further problem with undergraduate training is that it sometimes does not promote the particular skills required for postgraduate success.

For example, if undergraduate teaching and assessment reflects and rewards linear thinking and stifles creativity, students can hardly be expected to demonstrate high-quality, independent, creative thought at the postgraduate level.

If students are left feeling they have been “intellectually abused” and have had their dignity eroded and if academics allow personal prejudices to cloud their ability to function in a diverse student environment or use their positions of power to perpetuate societal inequality and injustice, then the system is failing and educators bear a moral responsibility for such outcomes.

In Getting Ahead next month, (May 27), I will suggest how we might probe postgraduate students’ dilemmas more deeply and offer ways of addressing them meaningfully in a collective attempt to develop a more open research culture that promotes academic freedom and expresses the values embodied in the missions of our universities and in our Constitution.

Dr Layla Cassim lectures on pharmacology on an ad hoc basis at the University of Cape Town and is the managing director of Layla Cassim ERS Consultants. A registered pharmacist, she holds a PhD in pharmacology and is in the final weeks of her MBA. She writes in her personal capacity and can be contacted on [email protected]