Dear All,
David's comments (below) deserve care and attention.
One of the problems in any emerging discipline is the challenge of overcoming the incompetence of the first generation of professors that are granted the right to award a PhD despite the fact that they themselves have not earned a PhD, and despite the fact that they may not even be researchers. This means that the first generation of researchers lacks appropriate training, a problem that adversely affects everyone they train and teach.
We've debated this problem on the PhD-Design list, and earlier on the DRS list in the run-up to the La Clusaz conference, so I won't review the issues. Writ large, I note that the increasingly competitive nature of research funding and research training will begin to make a huge differences to those schools that hope to be in the research business a decade from now. From time to time, I've drawn a comparison between design education today and medical education in the years just before and after the Flexner Report of 1910. The problems were quite similar. Medical education was vocational training in craft schools of varying quality. North America had 150 medical schools, nearly none of them research based. In the wake of Flexner's report, 120 of those 150 schools closed, and medical training made a decisive shift from vocational training to professional education.
As I see, design education and design research training are in the process of such a transformation. While it is unlikely that 80% of today's design schools will close, it is quite possible that many schools now awarding doctoral degrees will either be forced to raise their standards or stop awarding research degrees. This involves some of the issues that Don, Chris, and David point to.
For those who do not know about Abraham Flexner and his remarkable work as an educator and educational reformist, I will post a copy of a 2003 book review on Thomas Neville Bonner's biography. The review gets into some of the issues under discussion here, with a reference list on these issues that may be helpful.
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean
Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
--
David Durling wrote:
... it is the peer review system that grants the award of the PhD. In one sense, whatever we think here, it is the examiners who are persuaded by the argument of the candidate (irrespective of the number of words, artefacts, exhibitions or anything else) based on THEIR understanding of what constitutes a PhD.
If an examiner believes that a pot and an essay constitutes rigour suitable for the award of PhD, then the degree may be awarded. In an emerging research field we must never forget that some examiners may have gained their PhDs from establishments with robust training and clarity about the nature of the PhD, and some will not have this advantage. Therein may lay at least some of our problems with PhDs which resemble a good masters degree, awarded more for the development of design practice than research practice. The robustness of peer review - whether applied to student or staff research - is vital to us all.
|