Dear Colleagues,

Keith Russell's recent note asking "when and how does the rigor
expected of a PhD announce itself in the undergraduate program?" has
had me thinking.

This was one of the topics of my paper for the Ohio conference on
doctoral education in design.

The short argument is that it is difficult to build a robust graduate
program and impossible to build a robust PhD program as an add-on to
an undergraduate program that fails to help students develop basic
skills in analysis, inquiry, and critical thinking.

Even though Keith's question appeared in the thread on design
criticism, critical thinking does not mean "criticism," or
"critique," and certainly not the exchange of assertion and opinion
that GK describes. Rather, I refer to specific intellectual skills
and habits of mind linked to reflective awareness and mindful
inquiry. In the case of practicing designers, this involves
reflective practice as Donald Schon used the term.

This is one reason for the advent of research-based education in
place of guild-oriented mechanical skills training.

The best undergraduate programs now help students to develop basic
research skills along with methodological foundations, introducing
them to a range of the research methods and practices that will help
them to shape a richer undergraduate education. The very best
programs also focus on the philosophical and theoretical positions
through which undergraduates can frame and problematize their
learning, interrogating written sources, teachers, and curriculum as
they do so.

Rosan Chow's note on supervision brought this into focus for me. The
problem of inadequate supervision involves more than the problematic
nature of what some label "the university of excellence." The late
Bill Readings famously deployed this term in his last book, The
University in Ruins. He used it to refer to the bureaucratic
discourse of excellence as a displaced notion without meaningful
content. In the world of bureaucratized excellence, there is little
difference between adequate supervision, inadequate supervision, and
no supervision at all.

This is precisely where we see the difference between robust
supervision on the on hand and inadequate supervision. Inadequate
supervision leaves doctoral students to struggle on their own. In
effect, therefore, inadequate supervision and self-supervision are
much the same.

Until recently, research skills have been transmitted entirety by
oral tradition and a form of apprentice system. In this sense,
research is a practice and the supervisor is a guild master helping
an apprentice to move from entry status to the doctorate and
journeyman status. This analogy is particularly apt in the sense that
one generally does not move directly from earning a doctorate to
working as a supervisor. Good doctoral programs recruit supervising
staff from the ranks of senior faculty whose ability to supervise is
anchored in significant experience practicing research and publishing.

The skills that supervisors transmit differed from field to field and
discipline to discipline. They often differ even among close
sub-disciplines or the same disciplines in different universities and
nations.

The enormous growth of universities in the late 20th century and the
explosion of research programs and doctoral programs mean that the
formerly intense and highly selective relationship between doctoral
mentors and their candidates has shifted.

As a result, many aspects of research formerly transmitted by oral
tradition and close relations between apprentice researchers and the
senior researchers who guide them have been lost. In many cases,
doctoral candidates graduate with significant gaps in the knowledge
and skills connected to research.

Much - often too much - depends on the luck of the draw in terms of
doctoral advisor.

Attempts to remedy these gaps take many shapes. Some seem to work
better than others do. A program that is too rigidly structured is
nearly as problematic as a program that leaves too much to chance.

These issues came up many times in a lengthy on-line debate that
preceded the second conference on doctoral education in design in La
Clusaz, France. This debate was titled "Picasso's PhD," reflecting a
humorous series of ideas and Chris Rust and I exchanged. The debate
lasted several months, and the full record can be reviewed on the DRS
list where we discussed doctoral education in design before migrating
these discussions to PhD-Design.

Those who wish to review the debate will find it on the JISCMAIL
archives of the DRS list at

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/DRS.html

The debate began in April 2000 and ended just before we left for La Clusaz.

I will not go into the discussion of adequate supervision and
inadequate supervision here. I will offer two brief comments, though.

One is that the doctoral supervision we see at many art and design
schools is even worse than the supervision available at the
"university of excellence." In many schools, we see art and design
teachers who are excellent in studio practice and studio teaching
attempting to teach research even though they have no experience of
research or research training themselves. Because they lack the
appropriate experience, they are proud of the fact that they are
graduating doctors rather than dismayed enough by their lack of
experience to seek expert help. In the last five years, this problem
has begun to cascade because these inadequate programs have begun to
graduate poorly prepared doctors who lack the requirements of good
research.

These requirements are the same requirements we see in the good
undergraduate programs that lay the basis of graduate work. These are
basic skills in analysis, inquiry, and critical thinking; basic
research skills; methodological foundations, including a reasonable
range of the research methods and practices; inquiry and study in the
philosophical and theoretical positions through which research
students frame and problematize their learning.

The difference between undergraduate programs and doctoral programs
is simple. An undergraduate program may be adequate without these
skills. Even when it is not good or very good in terms of
research-based education, it may yet be a good program for other
reasons. In contrast, a doctoral program that lacks these
characteristics is inadequate. These qualities define the basis of
doctoral education.

In the years since La Clusaz, I have developed a large file of
correspondence with doctoral students who request help and advice
because they have poor supervision at their home schools. Deep
interaction with some four dozen or so students has given me a
reasonable idea of what is missing in many doctoral programs. While I
am happy to help students with poor supervisors, I am annoyed that my
necessarily unacknowledged role in helping good students to succeed
in bad environments is credited to the supervisors and schools that
let them down. (From time to time, I am also invited to supplement
supervision for students who engage with me. This work is a different
matter, and many of us in different fields play an acknowledged
supplementary role for students at good schools.)

There is also a growing field of "rescue supervision" emerging in
which some of our colleagues work with students whose supervisors
have mucked things up so badly that even their schools recognize the
need for outside help. To name names would embarrass the innocent as
well as the guilty, so I will not. Many of us on this list know
people who do this work, and we hold them in high esteem.

Perhaps I will use another occasion to discuss these problems in depth.

Best regards,

Ken
--

Ken Friedman
Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management

Design Research Center
Denmark's Design School

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