Winter is Coming : Doctoral Supervision in the Neoliberal University

Doctoral Education Studies, particularly in its North American manifestations, emphasizes quantitative methods. The resulting research is empirical and occasionally empiricist. The challenges revealed through this mode of research is that the highly ideological, volatile environment of higher education is flattened, framed and justified. My research offers an alternative view and perspective of doctoral education through a post-empirical, theoretical article. Within my piece, the PhD and doctoral supervision are framed by the post-Global Financial Crisis to understand the very specific – and volatile – context for research and research training.

Education has fundamental connections with the idea of human emancipation, though it is constantly in danger of being captured for other interests.In a society disfigured by class exploitation, sexual and racial oppression, and in chronic danger of war and environmental destruction, the only education worth its name is one that forms people capable of taking part in their own liberation.
Robert Connell (1982, p. 48) The success and reputation of universities is dependent on the calibre and excellence of doctoral programmes.Yet this excellence is founded on more than rules, regulations, protocols and procedures.It is based on rudimentary, daily, consistent and careful conversations, negotiations and authentic partnerships between supervisors and postgraduates.The relationship between a supervisor and doctoral candidate is a determinant of a successful PhD.Obviously "success" in doctoral education has many definitions, but a timely completion, exciting and exhilarating candidature, and teaching and publishing experience are all effective starting points for both discussion and research.What operational strategies and guidelines can create this experience?How can supervision be configured for the "new" knowledge economy?Is the supervisor a teacher, requiring an array of andragogical theories to enable learning cultures?Is the supervisor a guide, reminding the student that it is "their" thesis?Is the supervisor supervising so that the postgraduate can complete research that features the supervisor"s name on refereed scholarship?(Chiappetta-Swanson &Watt, 2011).
Teacher.Guide.Exploiter.Such stark words are mitigated and managed by Hockey"s research (1994Hockey"s research ( , 1995)), where he probed the challenges of under and over supervision.Such a balance is difficult to determine as these levels are often personal, contextual and institutional.Yet discussing this balance and ensuring it is productive for the candidate, supervisor, university and quality assurance agencies is the key to both compliance and excellence.This supervisory relationship is also a determinant of many later career successes, challenges, opportunities and blockages in and to an academic or professional career.Every supervisor can be outstanding.Every supervisor can kill a thesis.Every student can be successful.Every student can walk away from an outstanding research project with little cause.The diversity of student projects, expectations andmost importantly -the calibre of the institution"s administration, management and leadership must be recognized and understood.
Globalization has left its fingertips on doctoral education with stark unevenness (Altbach, 2003, p. 5-8;Marginson, 2006, p. 1-39).The Bologna Process has traction and credibility (Bologna Working Group, 2005), the North American coursework model still dominates that continent, and most Australian universities still do not enact an oral examination as part of the assessment process, even though all New Zealand universities now conclude a PhD with a viva.While noting these differences, trans-national conversations matter.Academic mobility of both staff and students alongside synchronous media platforms such as Skype and social media opportunities through Twitter, Academia.eduand LinkedIn means that it has never been easier to commence productive dialogues about differences and opportunities in international doctoral education and ensure thateven though the pathways to submission may be differentshared strategies can be created to build collaborative and robust definitions of excellence and success, particularly via oral examinations.This article summons, acknowledges and applies Lynn McAlpine and Cheryl Amundsen"s monograph, Doctoral education: research-based strategies for doctoral students, supervisors and administrators (2011a).They argued that "the experience of doctoral education is very much locally situated through day-to-day interactions amongst doctoral students, supervisors, other academics, and academic-related staff" (McAlpine and Amundsen, 2011b, p. 2).My article probes these daily interactions and askslike a canary in a minewhat they reveal about the ideologies of higher education.
The title of this presentation -Winter is Comingis derived from the television phenomenon Game of Thrones, which in turn emerges from George R.R. Martin"s book series A Song of Ice and Fire.There is intent, energy and compulsion carried on the dragon wings of this reference.Game of Thrones, as a literary and televisual saga, captures a passion for domination and the ruthlessness required to achieve it.The multiple games for power in the contemporary universitythrusting, jousting, jostling and intrigue are ruthless in their application.Popular culture in such a context is andragogical and can lead the theory.Rhian Jones realized the intricate dance between pop and politics: "over the past twenty years, a queasy time of class confusion, class elision, and class erasure, neoliberalism has been asserted as strongly in British pop as in British politics" (2013, p. 2).I probed this relationship between pop and politics, theory and application in my book Thinking Pop (Brabazon, 2008).Steve Redhead has described this mode of discourse as high popular culture (2015).Indeed, programmes such as Breaking Bad (Koepsell and Arp, 2012), Twin Peaks (Weinstock & Spooner, 2015), The X-Files (Sauder, 2013), Star Trek (Reagin, 2013) and Star Wars (Brooker, 2002) have triggered a large research literature in philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, media studies and criminology.Such studies offer andragogical pathways through an array of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives and topics (Manathunga et al., 2006) that includes higher education studies.Popular culture, theory and politics dialogue, entwine, echo and bounce at increasing speed.
Such diverse insights are required as doctoral education, doctoral supervisors and doctoral students are players in a wider game of attack, retreat and domination by neoliberal managers in universities.Therefore the subtitle of this article -Doctoral supervision in the neoliberal universityprovides a pathway through the power, the lies, the fabrications and the disappointments of contemporary higher education, assessing the costs to doctoral education and the relationships between students and supervisors.As Littlefinger tells Varys, "Chaos isn"t a pit.Chaos is a ladder."Therefore, this article captures and probes the challenges of doctoral education, offering ten diagnostic tools to provide a ladder to a stable experience for supervisors and their students.
Institutional in/stability particularly matters to doctoral education as neoliberalism is corroding higher education through budgeting principles that apply theories from finance capitalism to publically-funded institutions, resulting in short termism, temporary contracts for staff, intimidatory behaviour, bullying and arbitrary control of junior colleagues and students.Neoliberalism has both a complex history and a resonant and agitated contemporary application.At its most basic, neoliberalism, as an ideology, validates anti-statism, deregulation, and a domination of the market over governance structures.Such attributes pose great risk to the stability, standards and quality of doctoral programmes.As John Halliday confirmed, "the most easily globalised commodities are information and finance" (2003, p. 200).The knowledge generated in universities encompasses and enables the movement of both information and finance.However the Global Financial Crisis demonstrated the ease to which money and impropriety can move across national borders when under-regulated.Digitization has demonstrated the ease with which information, disrespect, xenophobia and bullying can travel when under-regulated.The question is what happens to knowledge and higher education in such an environment, particularly in the advanced and specialized tier of our universities: doctoral education.To answer such a question requires understanding the history and historiography of academic capitalism, including the changes to academic labour and the decline in public funding.In response, this paper presents ten diagnostic triggers to probe the transformations of doctoral education through neoliberalism.

Negotiate Expectations
Tyrion Lannister reminded viewers to "understand the way the game is played."Doctoral education is similar.The most important decision a doctoral candidate makes is the selection of supervisor, because they can enable, assist, warn, frame and improve the topic.They can also provide a trajectory for an academic career.The most important part of a doctoral enrolment is the first month, where the expectations of the candidature are presented.Supervision is frequently based on unstated assumptions, not honesty, respect and trust.Importantly doctoral education is a mode of teaching and learning.Therefore, ensuring the supervisor has configured and maintains a supervisory philosophy that is shared with the student is a key moment of accountability.
Similarly, an overt expectation must be in place that the supervisor reads and improves written work and offers advice about reading, writing and research.Anthony Pare realized that, "in a very real sense, doctoral supervisors are writing teachers" (2011, p. 59).Therefore students should not be embarrassed or reticent in asking for help with the configuration of their prose because doctoral education requires discipline-specific writing modalities (Cossett, 2016).In many ways, doctoral education is configured through a series of intimate, intense series of tutorials that runs over three years.
Academic integrity is a key phrase in higher education.Plagiarism is the folk devil.Academic integrity signals an adult conversation about words, rights and ownership.Does the supervisor demand coauthorship rights?On what basis and foundation are these rights either demanded or negotiated?How is the power differential between the PhD student and supervisor mitigated so that the disempowered participant in the conversationthe candidate -is able to claim their intellectual property and negotiate their rights?To provide one example, Australia has in place the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2007).Section five of the code addresses authorship.The Code states that "authorship must be based on substantial contributions in a combination of (1) conception and design of the project (2) analysis and interpretation of data (3) drafting or advising the work to augment the interpretation of information (Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, 2007).
Much is significant about this document and the Code outlining authorship.Firstly, the assumption that supervisors must be added to the papers written by their doctoral candidates is discredited."Lab courtesy" is not enough (Korenman & Shipp, 1994).Also, the supervisor must be involved in all stages of the research, including crafting the interpretation of the information, rather than merely editing the prose.Even with such a seemingly overt Code, there is still ambiguity.If a supervisorwho has been paid to supervise via a workload modeldid their job and taught the student through the candidature to produce a thesis, then what is their status on any research produced outside of the doctoral candidature?If the supervisor assisted the student to craft research questions for the thesis, does that suggest that all subsequent work must acknowledge that origin through "conception and design"?Particularly if the Australian Code removes the "in a combination of" caveat, then supervisors maythrough the research design clauseclaim long-term authorship of post-PhD research.Therefore, it is integral that these dialoguesand the issues they may revealare early in the candidature so that if irreconcilable differences are reached, then moderation can take place from senior academics or the dean of graduate research and/or a new supervisor can be found.
Another pressure point early in the candidature involves a negotiation about the frequency of meetings, including the mode of discourse within those meetings and how digitization will be deployed through the PhD.It is always wise at the start of a candidature to consider its ending.Discuss the challenges and IJSSES hurdleswhether they be personal or professionaland the goal and timing of the examination.Through such conversations, a decision is made to finish in the minimum time.Expectations summon a reality.Significantly, if a supervisor (only) supervises to gain an unpaid research assistant, then the longer the candidature, the better (for the supervisor).
It is understandable that expectations and assumptions punctuate the doctorate.Frank Furstenberg stated that, "despite a large and ever-growing number of studies on academia and "how-to" books and blogs, I am always amazed at how little newcomers know about what goes on behind the academic curtain" (2013, p. 1).However the inverted questions perhaps provide more insight.Why would there be detailed knowledge about doctoral programmes?The qualification remains rare.Supervision is conducted one on one, often behind closed doors, and universities jealously guard the uncomfortable and embarrassing statistics for completion rates and times and withdrawals from the programme.
Examination is individualized and the reports are confidential.It remains a degree of secrets, a "dark art" (Brabazon 2016).Unless the words are spoken and the rules, imperatives and goals outlined, then serious concernsabout supervisory commitment, writing and drafting, examination, candidature length and authorship of paperswill emerge, often at the most stressful and difficult time for the candidate.
Regulation remains the key touchstone in such discussions.If the university maintains a "light touch" regulation of supervisors, then institutional expectations do not frame behaviour.Therefore arbitrary and experiential ideologies revealed by individual supervisors are granted greater weight than research from higher education studies and international regulatory benchmarking.The discursive clash between the public accountability of doctoral educationnoting that most universities in most nations are completely or partially funded by taxationand neoliberalism is starkly revealed.Neoliberalism, via its deregulated, anti-statist imperative, relies on individuals to produce outcomes based on competition and the free market.The applicability of such principles on doctoral education -which must be founded on public accountability, scrutiny of quality assurance, transparency and evaluation of supervisors to ensure strong outcomes and andragogy for PhD students -is opposed to such neoliberal maxims.
The profound paradox is that light touch regulation, a lack of deep knowledge, monitoring and review of institutional practices, has emerged at the point of increasing internationalization, competition for international students and global university ranking systems.Education is a product that is sold, yet the quality of that product is volatile and debateable.That is why commercialmarket-drivenranking systems such as from the Times Higher Education (2016) are replacing state-based regulation and review.Importantly, the stratification of the sector increases.The elite increase their elitism and the universities lower on the rankings, often from small post-industrial cities, are given few rewards for widening participation.In such a context, governance becomes a complex word to specify, define, locate and apply.Joseph Zajda and Val Rust realized that it is approached in three different ways or "levels": ideologies, discourses and situated practices (2016, p. 7).Governance transforms into a way to create "employment ready" graduates with transferable skills (Sin & Amaral, 2016), rather than democratic reforms to education.Yet are transferable skills part of a "quality" doctoral programme (University of Michigan, 2016)?Such complex discussions are needed because of the increasing mobility of students, staff and institutions.The challenge is clear: at the very point that national regulatory systems need to communicate about quality between systems, neoliberalism has clawed discussions of intellectual quality back to individuals, skills and employability.

Is There an Advocate for Graduate Education and Doctoral Candidates?
Graduate education makes money for the contemporary university, also attracting international students.
But it is often a deeply neglected component of an institution, only gaining attention when it is underperforming financially or is confronting quality assurance breaches with consequences for the wider university community and budget (Lawrence, 2013).Graduate education exposes the lie that a university is a business like real estate, groceries or banking.Therefore, "academic managers" within the post-expertise university mask, decentre and demean doctoral education because it is the one area of the institution that requires intellectual credibility.
This credibility is earned.A dean of graduate studies / students / research is a special and singular role.
A combination of outstanding teacher and researcher, he or she must manage a department while maintaining international standards of scholarship alongside a deep duty of care for students and supervisors.Frequently, such roles report to the research leadership of a university, such as a pro vice chancellor or deputy vice chancellor research, rather than the academic portfolios.While such a positioning is understandable, it creates structural, institutional amnesia, overlooking that doctoral supervision is a mode of teaching and learning, with andragogy and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) that informs practice.Such institutional oversight through the separation of portfolios means that prospective and actual supervisors confuse the experience of supervision with expertise to supervise.Such phrases as "supervisory training" only continue to increase an anti-theoretical and antiresearch approach to supervision.The dean occupies a key rolein a university sector that is increasingly fragmenting and differentiating between teaching and researchto align, mesh and meld these functions.
Conditions are not kind for deans of doctoral programmes because they rarely fit into lines of reporting, Key Performance Indicators or short-term cycles of budget planning.A PhDat bestis a three or four year programme that must maintain international standards of quality and excellence while always monitoring the individual student and supervisor"s experience of policies, procedures, patterns and daily behaviours.Therefore, neoliberal management is inappropriately applied or executed on PhD programmes.These degrees are not banal, automated, deskilled and cheapened.The risks involved in cutting funding and reducing the expectations of supervisors are high for the university, including its overall institutional branding and ranking.Therefore the practices that work in a bank or in food retail cannot operate at the highest levels of doctoral management.There is a point where the efficiency dividend creates dumbed-down supervision, slack institutional practices that undermine transparent and rigorous examination, and a breach of quality assurance.Assumptions about the rationality of economics and the logic of markets mean that academic managers lack an analytical tool kit for understanding the very specific eventslike doctoral examinationor social structureslike supervisory behaviours in universityin a desire to remove the state and regulation from education.
In such a context, it is difficult to determine which ideology is either first or dominant: anti-statism or pro-business.If Thorstein Veblen is to be believedand his prescient scholarship predicted many of the economic undulations of the twentieth century -then the integration of "business principles" into education is the key first knight"s move.
The indirect or incidental cultural bearing of business principles and business practice is widereaching and forceful.Business principles have a peculiar hold upon the affections of the people as something intrinsically right and good ... Their presence, is an element of common sense, in the counsels of the "educators" shows itself in a naive insistence on the "practical" whenever the scheme of instruction is under advisement."Practical" means useful for private gain ... The primary test is usefulness for getting an income.The secondary test, practically applied where latitude is allowed in the way of "culture" studies, is the aptness of the instruction in question to fit the learners for spending income in a decorous manner (2005, p. 181).
This commentary was written in 1904.Veblen argued that such ideologies create "a system of scholastic accountancy" (2005, p. 181) which results in a checking of competency, compliance and usefulness, rather than excellence, achievement and scholarship.Such an analysis is profound and provocative for doctoral education.It is important to trust the expertise of doctoral supervisors.However, the challenge now emerges that a large group of university academics have been appointed "by invitation," without competitive processes or scrutiny.The irony of anti-competition methods being deployed to ensure that "scholars" create a market-oriented business university is clear.Under-qualified and under-published "academics" are now a sizeable slice of our universities, hired by academic managers, many of whom are themselves under-qualified and under-published.Regulation of supervision and supervisors is the only way to discriminate between two people holding a professorial title, one gained through a competitive and transparent process and the other through patronage and politics.Such regulation can include a supervisory register and minimum standards of research activity required to remain on it.
Veblen"s analysis was profound.Higher education studies and researchers have continued his imperative by shadowing these neoliberal movements.It is fascinating to dip into a particular historical periodfrom 2001 to 2006to view the twisting of ideologies that materialized in and strangled our present.In 2003, Ulrich Teichler was predicting the ""post-managerial" or "post-entrepreneurial" higher education system."He was validating internationalization, knowledge transfer and diversity in higher education providers.National governments would no longer regulate on quality and new power structures would emerge in higher education to respect both freedom and creativity (2003, p. 179).Instead, in many universities, administrators outnumber academics (Jump, 2015), and managerialismthrough Key Performance Indicators, Strategic Plans and Vision Statementshas weathered regulation in the interests of competitiveness and responding to market forces.
The assumptions of growth and rationality in capitalism widens both inequality and injustice (Clark, 2004).Colin Cremin"s work has taken on this acidic corrosiveness and futility.He stated that "we are not in liquid modernity, reflexive modernity, a new economy or risk society" (2011, p. 3).He believed that "the financial crash was predictable" (2011, p. 25).Perhaps he is correct.Importantly, the neglect, disrespect and marginalization of regulation and governance provided a context for a financial collapse to emerge.Austerity has become a word thatafter post-the Global Financial Crisishas signalled the next stage of neo-liberalism, anti-statism and political amnesia to blame those who were blameless.The GFC isas Dimitris Sotiropoulos, John Milios and Spyros Lapatsioras described -a "financial crisis … without precedent in the post-war period" (2013, p. 1).Yet it still remains a "marginal moment, which unveils and enables scholars to rethink the workings of contemporary capitalism" (Sotiropoulos et al., 2013, p. 1).The recovery and intensification of neoliberalism after the GFC meant that the instability continued, unequal income distribution intensified and anti-developmental practices in public policy, infrastructure and development resulted.With attention placed on efficiency, risk was "managed" rather than addressed.
A lack of governance in our universities poses a serious threat to the work of scholarship from first year through to doctoral education.For doctoral candidates and academics considering enrolling or working in an institution, it is important to researchdeeply and with care -the University"s head of faculties that now have the title of Dean, Executive Dean or Pro Vice Chancellor.Assess their profiles: are these men and women research active?Are they scholars?Look at their resumes and assess their publications.If little has been achieved or published, and "outcomes" are measured by the most rudimentary of management "successes" which is frequently reified to restructuring already sound institutional structures, then the capacity for these "managers" to understand the specificity of doctoral education is debateable.Remember Lord Varys"s words: "Power resides where men believe it resides.It's a trick, a shadow on the wall.And a very small man can cast a very large shadow."Doctoral studies are founded on knowledge, scholarship, excellence and expertise, not a shadow on a wall.

Neoliberal University Cultures are Selfish and Narcissistic, Impacting on Doctoral Candidates and Their Publications
One of the consequences of neoliberalism is a celebration of a competitive individual grasping for power without the entanglements of regulations (or "red tape"), rather than community building for the greater good of scholarship and knowledge.Individual achievement is important, but it is often built on the foundation of exploitation.Tenure is based on publications in North America.The REF in the UK and the ERA in Australia are research monitoring exercises for staff.These systems encourage an environment where supervisors exploit their doctoral students and junior colleagues to snake their names onto publications.Sometimes this exploitative process is called mentoring, but this is a mask for a rapid and destructive colonization of junior scholar"s work.
All prospective doctoral students should be coached to discuss authorship and co-authorship at the moment of enrolment.Ask what a supervisor gains from supervising a doctoral student.Assess if and then how universities encourage collegiality and intellectual integrity.If university leadership is appearing straight out of the second series of Game of Thrones, mobilizing metaphoric armies to become king or queen, then find another institution.In such a context, competition has been validated over quality.The ranking of institutions on the basis of often arbitrary determinants does not guarantee a professional and respectful environment.Supervisors and doctoral candidates make a choice each day to behave in a way that either builds a positive and productive relationship or destroys it.As Orell Wildling reminded viewers in Game of Thrones, "People work together, when it suits them.They"re loyal, when it suits them.They love each other, when it suits them.And they kill each other, when it suits them."The ideal context is clear: students and supervisors gain from building a productive relationship.Institutional regulation must ensure that if flaws or inequalities emerge in institutional structures and procedures, then the problem can be addressed quickly so that the studentthe disempowered person in the relationshipcan be protected.

Demand Research Activity from Supervisors
A senior staff member of an Australian university recently commented to me that I demand too much of supervisors.For me, the base line for doctoral supervision is individual research activity.The definition of research activity varies by each institution.Often it can be as low as one refereed article a year, which includes co-authored publications.Multiply-authored article can count as much as a singly-authored piece in some systems.
However, doctoral candidates have a right to demand that their supervisor is assessed by referees and verified for their scholarship each year of their career.Therefore research activity must be transparently reported and shared with prospective and actual students.The challenge though is that doctoral candidates are increasingly sucked into the research activity and expectations of their supervisors.In other words, particularly in the sciences, an excuse for an academic not being research active is that they do not have doctoral students.This paradoxnot being research activity because they do not have doctoral students yet needing doctoral students to be research activeis a displacement exercise.Even in the laboratory-based sciences, there are an array of publications that are possible without a suite of doctoral candidates, including research ethics, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) or meta studies of earlier data sets.
Doctoral supervision is a privilege, not a right.This privilege is earned through research activity and research excellence.It is, as McAlpine and Amundsen described it, "workplace learning" (2011, p. 175).The goal is to enable identity development for both the supervisor and student through the candidature.

Governance Versus Autonomy for Supervisors
A great challenge in managing graduate education in the neoliberal university is to maintain the balance between respect and autonomy for supervisors and governance of standards and procedures to protect and assist students.It is important to believe in and trust the professionalism of supervisors, but such trust must be based on evidence and procedure.It is also necessary to remain current with best international practice, including professional development in such topics as social media and digital supervision, and be assessed by annual refereeing and publications.
A supervisory register is a compliance mechanism for supervisors, but a welcome one because it guarantees a minimum standard for doctoral candidates.The goal is excellence, but the pathway to excellence is compliance.A university at its best is a learning environment.The Vice Chancellor of City University, Paul Curran, stated that, IJSSES We want our students to learn from academics who are themselves learning.This means that the majority of our academic staff need to be engaged with research, enterprise and professional practice and bring their enthusiasm and up-to-date subject knowledge back to our students (2008, p. 6).
It is from this foundation of compliance that continual professional development can spiral into excellence and autonomy is a right of supervisors when configuring the teaching and learning for their students.However a great deal goes wrong in the supervisory relationship.Supervisors leave.They neglect students.There are also challenges emerging from doctoral candidates.They stop reading.They ignore emails.They miss meetings for weeks or months.Governance is required to provide a structure for negotiation and dialogue to bring supervisors and students together if something goes astray.
Each institution manages this balance between autonomy and governance in different ways.While doctoral candidates may be over-administered, with too many forms and interventions, the alternative of no governance or regulation so that students are at the mercy of a supervisor and his or her power is also not a viable option.As Littlefinger confirmed, "Sometimes those with the most power have the least grace."Supervisors must start with personal excellence, but successful supervision is powered by intellectual generosity, institutional transparency, scholarly rigour and international standards.

Beware the PhD by Publication
Currently, there are (at least) five doctoral modes: the traditional doctorate, artefact and exegesis, the professional doctoral suite, the PhD by prior publication (sometimes described a PhD by published works) the PhD by publication.
The PhD by prior publication had a particular origin, impetus and cause.As an array of polytechnics and non-university institutions moved into university status, research active scholars who had never enrolled in a conventional PhD needed a way to recognize and credential their expertise.The PhD by Prior Publication provided that pathway.It was particularly useful for womenor men -with careers interrupted by children.Therefore, this mode of doctorate was a "fixer" for a moment in the history of universities in the 1990s.The key issue to remember is that publications are different from a PhD thesis.They are different in form, content, origin and output.However the PhD by prior publication was understandable in that particular historical period.It is currently a rare mode of candidature.
The PhD by publication is fuelled by a different set or arguments.The candidate has not produced any research before enrolment and the argument is that a series of publications can be submitted as equivalent to a traditionally-constituted doctorate.It is key to recognize that refereed publications and a doctorate are different modes and modalities of scholarship.The justification has been that in an increasingly competitive academic environment, publications position the candidate for a university post.
However some under-researched problems are emerging in this PhD by Publication.Firstly, supervisors are exploiting their students.Citing the Vancouver Protocol (Norwegian Committee of Ethics, 2016)a thirty year old agreement about authorship in medical science journalsis used to justify supervisors "sharing" authorship with their postgraduates during a PhD programme.Instead of a PhD student writing a doctorate, submitting it for examination and then being able to publish from their thesis, candidates must write articles during their enrolment and share authorship with their supervisors.
There are many supervisors who only agree to supervise via PhD by publication.They demand this enrolment so that they can gather easy co-authorships through these publications.Intriguingly, after an initial burst of enrolments, these same supervisors now struggle to attract enrolments.There are many reasons for this rise and fall, but prospective doctoral students have worked out the ruse of this mode of enrolment.It seems convincing to stress the value of publications to doctoral students.However the PhD must always contain more than publications.It must carry the seed of a decade"s work beyond it.I recently conducted a performance management meeting with a staff member who was just about to submit her PhD by prior publication, with her supervisors claiming co-authorship for all five chapters.Her problemnowwas how to be research-active beyond the doctorate.All the publications from the thesis were in the thesis, so she had to start again on a new project, knowing that it would take time as an early career researcher to build momentum.
This practice of supervision is concerning and under-regulated.One supervisor of a PhD by publication reported to me that she needed the student to confirm that co-authorship was in place because she would not read the piece without this guarantee.This staff member receives workloadthat is paymentfor the supervision, the credibility through a doctoral completion on the CV, but also demands coauthorship.This is triple dipping, and of great detriment to students.Our PhD students are not unpaid research assistants for their supervisors.Secondly, if the conversation is framed in terms of enabling doctoral students to produce publications, then the reality of this goal is much more uncertain.While publications are produced through the doctorate, that means they are not released at the conclusion of the doctorate.This leaves students with no momentum following graduation.Their research has been published.Therefore they must start again on a new project and without support.If students are considering a PhD by publication, it is essential that they receive a full and frank briefing of who gains and who loses through such an enrolment.

The Priority is a Rapid Completion
Beginnings matter.Endings matter more.The number one priority for a PhD student, supervisor and university is a rapid completion, examination and graduation.Three to four yearsdepending on the system -should be the aim.This target is achievable if in the first two months, careful framing of the project is enacted.While empirical projectsparticularly with fieldwork -are more unpredictable in their trajectories and timeframes, the goal is to keep the thesis statement, research questions, methods and trajectory tightly constituted and defined.Experienced supervisors stop students driving into lengthy cul-de-sacs that chew up time.The key is to maintain the motivation and focus on the completion.The challenge is that motivation to complete a PhD is contextually dependent on the state of higher education and the calibre of supervision.Methods for supervising are individualized and atomized."Light touch" regulation cannot monitor the quality of supervision.Quality can be assumed, but with unstable university contracts and budgetary conditions, these assumptions are unfounded.
The challenge remains that 50% of those who start a doctorate do not graduate from it (Lovitts, 2001).While this failure is generalized and epidemic, the cause of these failures are blamed on individual students.It remains, as Barbara Lovitts described it, "the invisible problem" (2001, p. 1).Yet this problem has a sociology: women and students of colour in the United States leave doctoral programmes at a higher rate than white men.Universities have "addressed" this problem by intensifying the admissions process.This focus on selection, "suggests that universities believe the problem lies not with graduate school but with the students themselves" (Lovitts, 2001, p. 20).The problem remains invisible because the cause is dispersed to individual failures.Dissatisfied students express their unhappiness silently: by leaving the programme.Neoliberal management practices intensify this blame on the individual.Without clear regulation and evaluation of doctoral programmes and supervisors, doctoral candidates will continue to leave and universities will continue to intensify admissions criteria, displacing the problem away from the institution"s behaviours, practices and protocols.
The longer the candidature, the less likely the student is to finish.A characteristic of students who do not complete is that they take leave of absences.Therefore the goals should be succinct and clear, creating milestones to a rapid completion.Stability matters in the supervisory relationship.Predictability, honesty and integrity make the difference.Through performance management or other modes of monitoring it is important to remove supportive university infrastructure that validates poor or mediocre supervisors that allows students to enrol year after year, paying fees and not moving on with their professional career.
I recognize Richard Hill"s critique of the focus on completion.He argues that universities have become "industrial training centres suited to the requirements of the neoliberal economy" (2015, p. 1).The doctoral programme is particularly a focus of his attention.He stated that, "Many of the students I spoke to attributed much of their stress to the pressure placed on them by supervisors eager to secure completion.Invariably, the upshot is a dehumanized, functional experience in which students are regarded more as purveyors of outcomes than people with feelings and genuine intellectual aspirations" (2015, p. 175).My questioning of such an argument is that the supervisors gain from long enrolments because the supervision continues to attract workload points and therefore pay.So there is no benefit to the supervisor in moving the student to submission at speed.It is much more effort and time to truncate a supervisory processthrough weekly meetings, rapid turnaround of student writing and using the capacity of asynchronous media to provide professional development programmes that can weave around the student candidature.However it is beneficial to the student to finish quickly to avoid years of their life being lost without a doctorate, with their family life being in limbo and the associated loss of income.Hill"s recognition of feelings and intellectual aspirations are important, but neither are managed or mitigated if a PhD is not completed.

Ask the Difficult Questions about your Supervisor's University Contract
The neoliberal university is volatile.Guy Standing"s The Precariat (2013) now staffs higher education.This is a post-tenure environment.Such a framework and labour model reveals many challenges and issues in terms of academic freedom and the development of research cultures, but is particularly destructive for doctoral education.With the labour force volatile (Adsit et al., 2015) doctoral programmes are destabilized.With tenure in place, students can move through their undergraduate and postgraduate career, working with a single scholar in a safe and engaging environment.They can build knowledge together.Alternatively, students can move to work with key scholars in their field, making a decision on the basis of stable appointments.However the nature of the short-term contracts is that supervisors are not appointed for a long enough period to complete a candidature.
This is an under-researched challenge and a masked problem in higher education.While the casualization and closure of many jobs and industries has been studied, the transitory contracts in higher education have been rarely recognized by those outside of the sector.
The international economic upheaval unleashed by the 2008 banking crisis, an occasion seized upon by neoliberal economists, bosses and politicians as an opportunity for further privatisation, forcing down of wages and greater job insecurity, has accelerated the spread of precarious working from the margins to the core of the workforce and widened the gap between wage levels and the cost of living, making socioeconomic inequality far more difficult to deny (Jones, 2013, p. 10).
Neoliberal ideologies of choice, self-sufficiency and agency do not map well over higher education.
From the first year to the completion of a degreeat besttakes seven years.Overlaid over these qualifications is supervisory training, experience and expertise.To be an outstanding doctoral supervisor is a rare and specialized portfolio of skills, abilities and knowledges.These skills are not replaceable and are not generic competencies.Once a supervisor has left the university, that specific expertise cannot be replaced.The attempt to create a jig-saw puzzle of supervision based on the goodwill and volunteer employment of adjuncts and visiting professors is profoundly unstable.The lack of research expertise in academic managers means that the needs of PhD students are much lower than short term budgetary requirements.Because of short term and unstable contracts, doctoral students will not have a continuity of supervision.This is a particular problem as a characteristic of students that do not finish is that they have had a change in their supervision.This is a major change.We only have to return to distinguished progressive scholars who gained their fame in the previous century.Howard Zinn commented on the nature of education in terms of power and influence.
The educational environment is unique in our society: It is the only situation where an adult, looked up to as a mentor, is alone with a group of young people for a protracted and officially sanctioned period of time and can assign whatever reading he or she chooses and discuss with these young people any subject under the sun (2005, p. 87).IJSSES This is why education, and particularly higher education, is configured as dangerous by those who wish to maintain the current distributions of wealth, power and privilege.This is also why tenure is threatened or extinguished, contracts are provisional and performance management reviews are in place.
The Socratic imperative to shape, provoke, question and convince is crushed through such surveillance.
A Howard Zinn could not emerge in the current university system.He would not be hired.His contract would not be renewed.Certainly Zinn suffered greatly during his career with his first post terminated for political reasons and the continual attacks by the hierarchy at Boston University.But tenure protected him, as did his intelligence, creativity and ability.
The neoliberal workplace summons what Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio described as The Jobless Future (1994).While they were particularly concerned with the displaced blue collar and white collar workforce, enabled through technological change, it is clear when grafting their argument to Guy Standing"s The Precariat that all of us are one day and one contract away from underemployment and unemployment.The full time, tenured posts have been replaced by part-time, casualized contracts.Doctoral education has been different.It requires a sustained commitment over three to five years from highly skilled, knowledgeable experts in their field.Casualized labour cannot fulfil the role of supervisor.But perhaps it can.An increasing trend is that universities are inventing and enabling an array of labels -Visiting Professor, Visiting Professorial Fellow, Adjunct Professor and the established Emeritus Professorial titleto provide unpaid, high quality supervision.Staff, who are often older and in retirement, are providing free supervision to doctoral candidates.While such a service to higher education is laudable, it has consequences.The university managers do not have to confront the consequences of reducing full time, tenured staff because freeif olderacademics provide that "service."Secondly, such a system is volatile and unstable for the students.Because the supervisor is not being paid, their "service" can be terminated, truncated or removed at any time.
Without the continuity of contracts, this precarious supervision will only increase and impact on the quality of care and outcomes for PhD students.In Universities, this change has been rapid.After publishing The Jobless Future, Stanley Aronowitz went on to write The Knowledge Factory in the year 2000.The title is prescient.His argument was that a management class, group, tier or stream had emerged in universities.These were the men and women who had failed in teaching and research and entered management, ruling over those who had success in the spheres in which they had failed.Through the subsequent 16 years since this book was published, and building on his sociology of higher education, universities are now only a shell of compliance, conformation and exploitation.
Benjamine Ginsberg continued Aronowitz"s argument in the 2011 book, The fall of the faculty: the rise of the all-administrative university and why it matters.He recognize that "academic management" is now an occupation in and of itself, rather than part of a service role for academic staff.Ginsberg also recognizes that the use of corporate head hunters is causing many of the problems revealed in the neoliberal university.Because of 360 degree reviews, the candidates summoned for deans, pro vice chancellors, deputy vice chancellors and presidents are "boring and conventional" (2011, p. 5).But they are also corporate.Ginsberg recorded that, "In 2008, Virginia Commonwealth University faculty were astonished to discover that their administration had signed a secret agreement with the Philip Morris tobacco company that prohibited professors from publishing or even discussing the results of their research without the company"s permission" (2011, p. 8).A higher education establishment has been infected and replaced with processes and practices that operate in a bank or corporation.The reason is clear.Within a post-tenure environment, why would academic staff sacrifice mornings, nights and weekends for a semester, annual or three-yearly contract?When the university committed to the staff member through tenure, then loyalty would be reciprocated.However, with short term contracts, staff must be focused on attaining the next job.The only way a university can gain outcomes, results and accountabilities in such an environment is through staunch performance management reviews where cascading Key Performance Indicators are assessed at each layer of the organization, including the contracted staff.Such a system works becauseat the momentthere is a labour surplus of academic staff who need employment and are prepared to operate under these conditions.The group impacted by this anti-intellectual windand the most disempowered group to raise awareness of their situationare doctoral students and their supervisors.From a position of institutional weakness, doctoral students must ask the difficult question of their prospective institution: will the supervisors at the start of their candidature be the ones enabling them through the submission?

Doctoral Programmes Should Be Sustainable
A PhD programme should be in a healthy state upon a student"s arrival and through to the conferment of a degree.While studentsat bestonly requires the programme for three years before graduation, the best doctoral programmes are sustainable in the much longer term.They are maintained on care, respect, curatorship and kindness.Exploitation, short termism and narcissism kill them.That is why a dean of graduate studies / students / research is such an important role.He or she is a curator for the institution"s programme, tending the regulations, enabling high quality admissions and rigorous examinations.
Credibility matters in doctoral education.Therefore it is important to view an institution"s relevant statistics such as the number of postgraduate students, the speed of completion and particularly the failure rates.Failures are rare in doctoral programmes, but if they are present, particularly clustering in a particular discipline, school, department or faculty, then students should be wary.Prospective students should be introduced to existing students, discuss candidatures with a dean of graduate students and discover and interpret enough information to make an informed series of decisions.By gathering as much information as possible, students can avoid entering a burning building doctoral programme and assume that the fire will only do damage to other students after graduation.

Use the Technology: Consider a Post-Geographical Supervisory Relationship
The more regular the supervisory meeting, the more likely the postgraduate is to finish.The more regular the meetings, the faster the candidature.However while the analogue and corporeal experience of doctoral education, including meeting and working with other students on campus, is incredibly valuable, there are now an array of post-geographical options to enable a successful supervision.The key is to ensure that synchronous meetings take placeweekly if possibleand it does not matter if these meetings are analogue or digital.An array of social connections can be created through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, meaning that a postgraduate community can be formed.
Deterritorializationthe cutting away of physical spaceis a reality in doctoral education.It is a reality that poses great strengths and opportunities, but also warnings and challenges.Perhaps the earliest and most prescient study of deterritorialization of learning emerged in December 2000 in a Report of the Web-based Education Commission, in the United States.This commission, chaired by Senator Bob Kerrey, recognized how digitization transforms the delivery of education, particularly losing collectivity and community in and through learning (Kerrey, 2000).Significantly doctoral education has remained the most individualizedand isolatedof scholarly learning practices.Therefore these tendencies are intensified through online learning.All learning has a place and the consequences of deterritorialization on all levels and modes of education must be recognized and addressed with caution.The digital divide still exists, particularly between rural and urban areas and while "the internet" can move digital supervision into regional areas, the connections via Skype are unstable and irregular.Access is more than typing at a keyboard.It is based on reliable broadband.It is when considering the structural injustices in the imperative towards deterritorialization that Arjun Appadurai"s critique becomes clear and significant to log, recognize and apply (Appadurai, 2004).He described deterritorialization as, "exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state" (2004, p. 5).Such a disconnection can generate profound antagonisms and xenophobia.
these invented homelands, which constitute the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups, can often become sufficiently fantastic and one-sided that they provide the material for new ideoscapes in which ethnic conflicts can begin to erupt (Appadurai, 2004, p. 105).
Therefore, when aligning globalization with homogeneityparticularly the proliferation of American ideologiesit is important to block the affirmation of the easy alternative view: that deterritorialization enables heterogeneity.It is here that Leslie Sklair"s concept of "transnational practices" ( 2002) is of great value.The key is to create smooth, productive and robust dialogues between national regulatory systems, enabled through international doctoral education studies and higher education studies.
Alongside deterritorialization, doctoral education encases one more digital challenge and opportunity: disintermediation.An array of direct links, emails and tweets can be sent and received between postgraduates and supervisors, alongside researchers around the world.The most innovative universities create virtual coffee shops for students andthrough Skype or Adobe Connectboot camp writing sessions for postgraduates.Also, a podcast or vodcast library of seminars, training or ideas for reading, writing and completion can be accessed as required.The key is to focus on synchronous meetings with supervisors, to create the micro deadlines for the completion of work, and then deploy an array of asynchronous resources when they are required to keep the candidature fresh and exhilarating.The key attribute of disintermediation is that it flattens power structures (Darling-Hammond, 2010).Therefore neoliberal management can be circumvented through such disintermediated media, with chains removed in the supply of information, knowledge and expertise, particularly in the case of doctoral education.This means that Deans of Graduate Studies / Research can communicate directly with their students through portals such as YouTube.Morley Winograd and Michael Hais argued that, "[YouTube] IJSSES significantly lowering the cost of creation and providing an inexpensive way for the aspiring artists to share their work" (Winograd & Hais, 2008, p. 169).This content creation can build social relationships and also corrode brittle university hierarchies.
Digital doctoral supervisionfrom the initial skype meeting of prospective supervisors through to email exchange of PhD writing through tracked changeshas increased the nodes of connectivity possible during a candidature.The key is for the student and supervisor to assess the digital resources that are available and select the platforms, software and hardware, while also being aware that such digital supervision extends an already long working day for the supervisor (and student).As Daniel Miller confirmed, "What email achieved (a position then reinforced by subsequent media such as texting) was the overthrow of more than a century of infrastructural reinforcement of a strict division between work and non-work" (Miller, 2016, p. 37).That flexibility is useful for part-time students, but particularly challenging for already full-time academic staff.While the working day extends for academic supervisors, there remains value in placing the emphasis on learning and the learning cultures of doctoral students.Neoliberal universities place the emphasis on efficiency and cost cutting in teaching and learning, with its most obvious manifestation being casualization of academic staff.Similarly, when the focus is on educational technology and how it is administered, the focus on learning moments and teaching excellence is decentred (Bennett, 2003).Whitehead"s warning remains significant: "teaching you will come to grief as soon as you forget that your students have bodies" (Whitehead, 1942, p. 78).
Even when deploying digital supervisory strategies, the corporeality of supervisor and studentalongside an understanding of their working dayis necessary.
Supervising doctoral candidates against globalization and neoliberalism (McLaren, 2001), while validating international standards and scholarship achievement, remains the great challenge of this decade.Oppositional andragogy is more complex to execute, because international standards must be maintained.Therefore, international mobilityof standards, examination, supervisors and studentsis important.International mobilityof money, management models and Key Performance Indicatorsis not relevant to maintaining the quality of a doctorate.Diverse and complex interpretations of globalization are summoned (Lechner & Boli, 2004) that do not discredit governance protocols and rely on international companies and "commodification" to determine the standards of scholarship.
Particularly, those of us attempting to create an emancipatory, radical and progressive doctoral education mustand this is the counterintuitive componentaffirm regulation of our programmes.Recognizing and validating the standards of supervisorsverified via a supervisory register, research training programmes (Pearson & Brew, 2002) and professional development and continual evaluation of their research activityworks against downsizing, casualization, outsourcing and flexible labour.Doctoral candidates are more than the fees they pay to a neoliberal, globalizing economy.We need to summon counter-narratives to create alternative and contested models of excellence and achievement.
The structure, theory and method of this article was unusual.This structure was selected with intent.In higher education research generally, and doctoral education in particular, the quantitative methodologies dominate.Daniel Saunders, Ethan Kolek, Elizabeth Williams and Ryan Wells have argued that the there is a link between the managerial imperatives of neoliberal ideologiesparticularly in the United States IJSSES higher education system -and quantitative methods that present "facts" about the sector (2016).Empiricism and positivism frame such assumptions.Functionalism is the punctuation of the research.Therefore theoretical papers are rare, because "knowledge creation in neoliberalized spaces centers around quantitative analyses based on sophisticated models and advanced statistical procedures" (Saunders et al., 2016, p. 2).This paper haswilfullytaken a different approach.Occupying a critical stance towards neoliberal ideologies, I have created alternative languages, structures and ways of "doing knowledge" in doctoral education.
Daenerys Targaryen reminded us in Game of Thrones that "People learn to love their chains."Scholars in higher education studies become used to particular ways of thinking and modes of presenting that research.Similarly, supervisors become accustomed to particular structures of supervision.If exploitation, bullying (Morris, 2011), discrimination or inequality (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010) enters that supervisory space then the hopes, expectations and aspirations of doctoral students are destroyed.But there is a greater cost.Our universities are cheapened.We as scholars are judged by how we treat the weakest in our community, rather than the strongest.Philip Mirowski realized that, "One of the oddities of contemporary everyday neoliberalism is that people rarely get worked up anymore when encountering overt cruelty to the poor or marketing or endless scams consisting of privatized schemes of self-improvement" (2013, p. 148).It is important to cut the chains that tether our doctoral candidates to their supervisors and build ladders.These ladders will ensure that the next generation of scholars can continue to fight for excellence, transformation and passion, rather than compliance, conformity and mediocrity.