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Kathryn Owler
A 'problem' to be managed? : Completing a PhD in the Arts and Humanities
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[289]
A problem to be managed?
Completing a PhD in the Arts and
Humanities
kathryn owler
AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand
abstract
Driven largely by efficiency imperatives, many universities have come to adopt a
managerialist approach to research over the last several years. University admin-
istrators have become actively concerned with the traditionally long times taken
to complete a PhD and high attrition rates. Consequently, the PhD, and PhD
students experience of struggle when writing a PhD, is now often framed by
universities as a problem to be managed. This framing is problematic if we con-
sider that, for many students, the personally demanding nature of the PhD is
central to the research process. In the first part of this article I discuss the con-
temporary administrative response to the PhD. I then go on to discuss the lived
experience of writing a PhD, from the students point of view, drawing on my
own and other students accounts. I utilize the writings of Maurice Blanchot in
my analysis, who views the personal ups and downs of writing as integral to
knowledge production.
ke ywor ds academic writing, Blanchot, managerialism,
PhD experience, PhD research
i n t r o du c t i o n
Over the last ten to fifteen years the administrative context for the
PhD has changed dramatically. As a result of a growing managerial approach,
universities have become actively concerned with the perceived problematic
nature of the PhD, including long times to complete a PhD and high attrition
rates. There has been much attention paid to why this occurs, and policies
have been put in place to turn apparently poor statistics around. Most of this
concern and attention has occurred as a result of efficiency imperatives. One
advantage of this attention is the support that PhD students may now receive
that has never existed in the past. However, on the flipside, one of the dangers
is that the PhD degree and PhD students come to be seen primarily as a
problem to be managed.
I began my PhD in Australia in the mid nineties at a time when changes
were starting to be made as a result of managerial directives. On a personal
level I was becoming aware that doing a PhD required a good deal of passion,
enthusiasm and commitment, as with any other significant attempt at knowl-
edge creation (Phipps et al., 2007: 236). However, it seemed to me that much
of the attention paid to the PhD by university management (such as the
Faculty, Dean and Vice Chancellors Office) was purely administrative,
being concerned with such things as finishing times and completion rates.
As a way of making sense of my own PhD candidature and the changes
taking place around me, my own thesis therefore became a homage to the
actual, lived experience of doing a doctoral degree. In other words, I wrote a
PhD on the PhD degree.
My PhD focused primarily on the experiences of students in the Arts and
Humanities in Australia. This model of the PhD is similar to the European and
UK models and involves independent study towards the completion of a
dissertation. The research used a mixed-method approach which included
auto-ethnography, observations, interviews with other PhD students,
1
other
research sources, PhD guidebooks (Frow, 1988; Giblett, 1992; Noble, 1994;
Peters, 1995; Phillips and Pugh, 1987; Powles, 1988; Pusey, 1993; Salmon,
1992) and critical philosophical and sociological texts. This allowed me to
critically explore the personal and cultural forces shaping a students invest-
ment in the doctoral process (Denzin, 1997; Fleming and Fullagar, 2007).
What I discovered was that, for many students in the Arts and Humanities,
writing a PhD was not always a smooth, efficient process. On the contrary, it
was one that they struggled to come to grips with and found demanding on a
personal level.
In the first part of this article I discuss the administrative response to the
PhD over the last fifteen years in Australasia and Europe. This response has
tended to view the personally difficult component of the PhD as problematic.
In contrast, in the second part I go on to discuss the PhD experience and argue
that the personally demanding nature of the PhD may, for many people, be an
essential part of the process. In order to provide a framework for this discus-
sion, I draw on Maurice Blanchots account of the writers life in The Space of
Literature (1989 [1955]). Blanchot was a French novelist and philosopher who
explored both the excitement and challenges of writing and claimed (as I and
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 9(3)
[290]
many others have found when writing a PhD) that these may be an integral
part of the process of knowledge production.
t h e p r o b l e m o f t h e p h d
While the PhD may not have been regarded by the university administration
as problematic in the past, today there is a burgeoning administrative and
policy literature on doctoral research (Green, 2005). The PhD has become
the subject of universities attention for a variety of reasons. Since the 1990s
many universities have come to adopt a managerialist framework that assumes
research outputs can be managed toward strategic ends. Over this period,
universities have become concerned with the traditionally long times taken
to complete a PhD and with high attrition rates (Booth and Satchel, 1996; Lee
and Green, 1995; Noble, 1994; Threadgold, 1995; Turpin and Curtis, 1995;
West, 1998). As a result they have begun to investigate ways that PhD research
might be made more efficient. One consequence is that doctoral education has
become more formalized, resulting in more tightly defined expectations relat-
ing to submission rates (usually four years) (Park, 2007: 17, 25).
Not all drivers for change to the PhD degree have been economic. Others
include a confusion over the purpose of the PhD and a concern as to whether
it adequately prepares individuals for the job market (academic and otherwise).
In some instances it has also become harder to attract students to doctoral
research, which has implications for universities wishing to foster a healthy,
robust research culture (Gilbert, 2004; Golde, 2005; Golde and Dore, 2001;
Nyquist, 2002; Nyquist and Wulff, 2003; Park, 2007). Nevertheless, over the
last several years internal and external policy in relation to university funding
and research has, in general, become increasingly output driven (Park, 2007;
Phipps, 2009; Phipps et al., 2007).
One advantage of all the notice now paid to the doctoral degree is the
number of initiatives that have been put in place to support students within
many universities. These include departmental programs, efforts to build com-
munities of thought, support groups, career envisioning initiatives, e-training
and support, counseling and training programs for students and support and
training for supervisors (Davis et al., 2006; Emilson and Johnsson, 2007;
Frame and Allen, 2002; Park, 2007; Wisker et al., 2007).
However, the danger of a managerialist agenda is that the PhD and PhD
students come to be seen as a problem to be managed. Students who expe-
rience the PhD degree as passionate and complicated are seen to be at fault,
when they are actually experiencing the inevitably personal and often
demanding process of writing and knowledge production. In the rest of this
Owler: A problem to be managed?
[291]
section I discuss the impact of this administrative response on PhD students
and their supervisors who have themselves in many cases come to be viewed
as problems to be subsequently managed.
Prior to the nineties, there seem to have been two major views of the PhD
held by universities: one formal, the other informal (Noble, 1994: 87). On the
one hand, the doctorate was conceived as making pragmatic demands of the
candidate as an apprentice researcher. This was the approach taken in univer-
sity regulations which tended to stress formal and practical matters such as
entry requirements, standard completion and review times, presentation of
theses, the examination process, and so on. On the other hand, the PhD
has been understood to demand originality from the student (originality
being the defining characteristic of a PhD), of a kind which cannot simply
be taught. In this guise the PhD became a mysterious rite of passage. The
student was involved in a journey from student to academic, in search of a
higher self, coping with the attendant pain, anxiety and ecstasy that such a
process of destruction and re-production inevitably involves (Deegan and Hill,
1991; Frow, 1988). While this personal aspect of dissertation writing has not
been formally recognized by the university institution, it is possible to argue
that this kind of struggle has nevertheless been an unwritten requirement of
the doctorate. The PhD has needed to be hard-won, to legitimize the acqui-
sition of higher knowledge and transition to an academic or other professional
role. How could someone realistically earn the title of Doctor, for instance,
without having earned their stripes?
While in the past the PhD struggle may have been seen as a badge of
honor, under managerialism it has come to be viewed as the result of mis-
management. McWilliam and Hatcher (1999: 212) expressed a concern that,
under managerial imperatives, what they call the PhD trauma, while no longer
ignored, was being refigured as a skill deficit on the part of supervisors and/or
students. Rather than being viewed as the result of postgraduate pedagogical
relations in a particular sort of academy, the PhD experience was viewed as
what they astringently referred to as evidence of low emotional
intelligence. McWilliam and Hatcher refer here to theories of emotional
intelligence (EQ) popular in the late 1990s and adopted by human resource
practitioners. They argue that, to overcome the difficulties of the doctoral
process, students and supervisors were now being trained to handle their
emotions more appropriately. They point, for instance, to the process
provided by human resource managers, staff developers and consulting psy-
chologists whose job it is to re-inscribe academics and academic managers as
active, enterprising human resources. Importantly, McWilliams and Hatcher
point out that emotions and the personal activity of knowledge production
were no longer ignored in this process. The call was no longer merely to
[292]
rationality, they claim, but rather to the right sort of [responsible] irrationality
(1999: 212).
If one believes that the emotional and personal side of the PhD experience
can be properly managed, those individuals who have not yet succeeded in
this process come to be regarded as emotionally limited, or even immature.
More recently, Kearns et al. (2008) describe a successful program which they
have developed at Flinders University, Australia, to support and aid PhD
students towards timely completion. While the program has appeared to
help many people, the focus of this kind of program makes the PhD student
themselves the party responsible for a problematic candidature. What is
it,they ask, that makes a PhD such a difficult process, and prevents candidates
from completing on time? It seems that self-sabotaging behaviors, including
overcommitting, procrastination and perfectionism have a key role to play
(Kearns et al., 2008: 77).
The article starts off with a slightly comedic portrait of a typical day in the
life of a typical PhD candidate, who finds constant ways to procrastinate. This
sort of story, Kearns et al. explain, is in our experience, typical of some PhD
students. Theyre busy, but at the end of some days, they dont seem to have
made much progress on their PhD (2008: 78). The aim is to generally
improve students psychological hardiness and resilience through the
development of self-management skills such as time management and seeking
regular feedback from their supervisor on written work:
[T]his study appears to support what most supervisors probably experience that it is
the hardy who flourish when completing a PhD. Hopefully, we now have some
small insight into building hardiness in those who do not naturally possess it so that
the secret and painful life of a PhD student can be brought to an end! (Kearns et al.,
2008: 87)
In this model the deeply personal component of knowledge production,
particularly if it involves difficult emotions, is reframed merely as a lack of
self-management skills. There is no acknowledgement here that trials and
hardships may have traditionally been required of the doctoral candidate.
Nor is there any recognition that knowledge production is often, if not
always, a passionate process.
Amongst the growing body of research into PhD education, there are some
thoughtful accounts that privilege and explore the unique PhD experience
and what it means to candidates themselves (see, for instance, Barnacle, 2005;
Green 2005; Lee and Williams, 1999; Leonard et al., 2005; McCormack,
2004; McCormack, 2005). This was not the case when I was writing my
own dissertation on the PhD in the late 1990s. In one example
McCormack (2005: 234) argues that, while todays performance-driven
[293]
model of higher degree research has constructed student withdrawal or non-
completion as a failure, students can view withdrawal or non-completion
quite differently. She interviewed four women who have either withdrawn
from higher degree research or taken a long time to complete. Each had an
acute sense of mismatch between the institutions view of postgraduate
research and their own. At least one woman experienced a tension in
todays higher education research context between research as a process of
personal transformation and research as a product with measurable outputs.
For me, this thesis is more than just [. . .] about fulfilling criteria . . . I dont
want to produce a piece of work thats just about jumping through hoops.
My research is a really personal process to me . . . I mean it is my work and it
is my lifes purpose. Its not just, Oh yes that would be an interesting
thing to research. Its just part of my life. She goes on to explain that her
passion was to make a difference (Grace, in McCormack, 2005: 241). Nor do
students themselves necessarily see not completing or slow completion as a
failure on their part to develop self-management skills. McCormack (2005:
243) explains that [r]ather than stories of loss, failure and withdrawal . . . each
of the women wrote beyond this expected ending to reconstruct non-
completion/slow completion of their research as a beginning to a positive
re-storying of their lives. Their story ending was not one of closure but one
of beginning.
These accounts of doing postgraduate research suggest that the personal side
of thesis writing can be as important to postgraduates as gaining their degree.
They also highlight the fact that student motives for completing a PhD can
differ at times from university motives. The traditional model of thesis writing
involving independent study could be associated for many students with a
desire to pursue research for their own personal satisfaction (Leonard et al.,
2005). As the PhD changes in countries like Australia and the UK, becoming
more formalized within a strict time-frame (generally of four years) and
increasingly involving a focus on skills training, student expectations may of
course change, and so too might the experience of writing a doctorate. My
own research (Owler, 1998) certainly suggested that the motives a particular
student had for doing a PhD influenced their experience. Some students who
viewed the PhD process strategically (as a means to an academic job)
completed the process quickly, and at least one did not describe the PhD as
particularly demanding on a personal level. However, most students, even
those who were clearly focused on an academic career, experienced a good
deal of challenge and growth as a result of PhD dissertation writing. In the
next section I will be discussing the experience of writing a PhD in more
detail, drawing for assistance on the work of Maurice Blanchot.
[294]
t h e e x p e r i e n c e o f w r i t i n g a p h d
The central point of the work is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached,
yet the only one which is worth reaching . . . Those who care only for brilliant success
are nevertheless in search of this point where nothing can succeed. And whoever writes
caring only for truth has already entered the magnetic field of this point from which truth
is excluded. (Blanchot, 1989: 545)
Blanchot was a French novelist and philosopher who was fascinated by the
process and experience of writing. He devoted an entire book to this subject
called The Space of Literature (1989 [1955]). In this book he examined the expe-
rience had by writers of literature who had recorded their thoughts and feelings
in personal diaries and other sources. Blanchot derives his approach in part from
the work of existential philosophers, such as Hegel and Heidegger, who were
concerned in the broadest sense with the nature of being and its relationship to
knowledge. Blanchot believed that the process of writing was integrally con-
nected to a writers own subjective process. It is possible to read Blanchots
writing according to a post-structuralist framework that assumes that knowl-
edge, and also to some extent a subject or person themselves, is a process
endlessly undergoing change. This is the approach I take in this article.
The process of writing a PhD in the Arts and Humanities and the process of
writing literature are certainly different in many ways. They have different
goals and are intended for a different audience. However, there are also
parallels between the two. These include the need to work on a project
over a long period of time and the often solo nature of writing work (in
contrast to the team work and camaraderie of the science laboratory, for
instance). One of the themes that emerged in my research on the PhD was
the personally demanding nature of thesis writing. This was also an experience
I found echoed in Blanchots account of the writers life. Blanchots writing is
often obscure. This is probably deliberate as he seems anxious to create an
impression of the writing experience, rather than being concerned to spell out
what he means in black and white. In my account of Blanchot below, I have
made an attempt to clarify his position, while still attempting to convey some-
thing of the subtlety of his approach.
In The Space of Literature, Blanchot suggests that, if we are to achieve any-
thing like a novel or piece of literature, we need to start with some kind of
question. This means that we inevitably start to some extent in the dark. We
are motivated to find an answer to that question, the truth of the matter,
emerging from the dark into the light in order that we can get something
written. We need this question or uncertainty because in seeking an answer it
enables or motivates us to move forward. However, just because we find an
[295]
answer and can finally write, we dont necessarily put an end to uncertainty.
Often we find the question comes back in another way, or perhaps a whole
new set of questions emerges. This can once again throw us back into the
dark. In Blanchots account there is a frequent oscillation between confusion
and clarity in writing. In my examination of the PhD experience I found
something similar, manifest for many students in a constant swinging between
anxiety and excitement as they engaged in the writing process.
Blanchot believes that the process of locating an answer or the truth in
writing is very much connected to the subjective process. In other words, as
we move forward in writing, we also change as people. And, when we are
stumped as writers, experiencing writers block or a confusing time in our
research, we experience a loss of self. Blanchots account suggests that it is
precisely as a result of the connection between writing and subjectivity that
writing can give us so much trouble, as we swing between arrival at a strong
sense of self and the loss of self-certainty. The defining requirement of the
PhD degree is that the candidate is required to do original research on their
own. This appears to generate a unique experience of aloneness for PhD
students that is at times manifest as a positive experience of autonomy, and
at other times as a more difficult experience of loneliness. I will discuss this
experience of autonomy and loneliness below, before going on to discuss the
PhD students experience of excitement and anxiety.
Autonomy and loneliness
I think the strength [of the PhD degree] is that you get to be by yourself, but thats
probably part of my peculiarity (laugh), some others might find that a weakness, but I
like being at home by myself with the cat . . . I didnt find it lonely (Jennifer).
Youre on you own intellectually and in a sense physically . . . its very lonely and I think
quite isolating (Peter).
2
One of the requirements of the PhD is that the student learns how to carry out
research on their own, through the act of doing so. In the words of the 2005
University of New South Wales calendar, the thesis must consist of an
account of the candidates own research [except in rare cases]. The traditional
PhD is definitely not a collaborative project. This requirement of independent
research entails a specific kind of aloneness or isolation for the doctoral student
that can be experienced at times positively as autonomy and at other more
difficult times as loneliness.
Blanchot makes reference to a unique kind of solitude that accompanies
writing. This is not only the absence of an other who might recognize and
affirm the writers self. It is also an acute experience of the absence of a self who
might be recognized. In Blanchots account, the writer herself feels she never
[296]
belongs solely to the realm of clarity. Rather, in turning towards the absence
or darkness touched on earlier, where she aims to find an answer, she can face
confusion, disorder and even a kind of death (Blanchot, 1989: 23).
The self that speaks to the writer is what Blanchot describes as the third
person substitute for the I, solitude; the I isnt anyone any more: The third
person is myself become no one, my interlocutor turned alien; it is my no
longer being able, where I am, to address myself (1989: 28). Blanchot suggests
that our solitude as writers means that what happens to me happens to no
one (1989: 33). Given the need to pose a question and face uncertainty in
writing, the writer can no longer lay claim to his or her experience or to any
sense of self-certainty. The self the writer thought he knew so well becomes
suddenly experienced as alien. This is pertinent to the PhD experience.
Undergraduate students may certainly look up to PhD candidates and imagine
them to be knowledgeable. However, during the process of writing a
dissertation the PhD student frequently wonders whether they now know
less than what they began with. Often the PhD student experiences confusion
over what she is actually writing about. The reasons for her writing are no
longer clear, even to herself. At such times the student somehow does not
know herself, including her very own motivations and passions. All she knows
is that something, somehow keeps her writing. It is as if she has no choice but
to keep attending to and working at her doctorate, so that perhaps she may
come to know herself again.
Blanchot goes on to examine the claim that is often made of the writers of
fiction: that they try to escape from the demands of the world by creating a
fantasy world for themselves in their writing (1989: 52). When I was
completing my PhD I was often asked the question, when are you going
to get a job in the real world? and was put in a position where I was required
to defend myself and my decision to study. Blanchot argues that such com-
ments fail to recognize the risk the writer takes. He contends that in the
work, the artist protects himself . . . against the requirement that draws him out
of the world (1989: 53) and therefore also out of himself.
For Blanchot, there can be enjoyment and struggle in the solitude that
writing requires. During a PhD it is intimate and comforting to be with
oneself and ones books, especially when things are going well. This is the
pleasure of being alone which the candidate quoted above experienced, at
home by myself with the cat. At the same time this intimacy can just as easily
abandon the student when he is confused, frustrated and suffering from a lack
of direction and purpose. In such cases the writer does
not feel free of the world, but, rather, deprived of it; . . . [the writer] does not feel that he
is master of himself, but rather that he is absent from himself and exposed to demands
[297]
which, casting him out of life and of living, open him to that moment at which he
cannot do anything and is no longer himself. (Blanchot, 1989: 53)
At such times an individual feels absented from the regular world and social
life, which he views only externally, perhaps outside the window.
In a similar experience the PhD student poses a question for analysis which
engages him in a direct confrontation with that which he does not know. He
often works on that question, quite alone, for many years. Consequently, he
can experience an acute sense of insecurity. However, the student who persists
inevitably returns to a point at which he can achieve some clarity. For
Blanchot this is because the work is pure circle where, even as he writes
the work, the author dangerously exposes himself to, but also protects himself
against, the pressure that demands that he write (1989: 52). In other words, by
writing in an attempt to answer a question we are to an extent protecting
ourselves from that question. If the writer keeps writing, he is sure to find
intimacy (and clarity) once again, even if only fleetingly. Perhaps this occurs
during a breakthrough in writing, or the completion of a chapter or when
coming across a new and inspiring idea, for instance.
Excitement and anxiety
The PhD process is frequently described as an anxious one, an intense
oscillation between excitement and fear. As one student explained, [the
PhD means] lots of research and discipline, yes, its fantastic as well. Its full
of ups and downs. I think thats the main defining feature of the PhD process
for me . . . pleasure and pain (Annabella). Some accounts link anxiety during a
PhD degree to a fear of failure, others to the ill-defined limbo which students
experience while writing a thesis (Wason in Phillips and Pugh, 1987: 10,
reprinted and amplified several times since). One popular university guide-
book argues that anxiety doesnt leave us when writing a PhD:
The most pervasive of all the psychological aspects of doing a PhD is the anxiety that
accompanies you through all the stages. At first it is very high and exemplified by such
concerns as amI clever enough?, will they realize what a fraud I am? And so on. As you
progress, you go through periods of higher or lower anxiety but you are never completely
free of it . . . one of the reasons for feeling that a great weight has been lifted from you once
you have successfully completed your PhD is that nagging anxiety that has been your
constant companion for so long has finally been lifted (Phillips and Pugh, 1987: 70).
Freud (1958: 1213) wrote that anxiety involved a preparation in anticipation of
a perhaps unknown, yet disruptive event. If the PhD involves an endless antic-
ipation, an on guard against some unspeakable and unnamable calamity, what
is it that the student both hopes for and dreads the loss of? One possible insight
[298]
into this question is offered in Blanchots reading of Mallarme, through which
he links anxiety to the writers fear and experience of death. While Mallarmes
fears are existential in nature, we can all relate to some extent to a fear of loss of
self, either in death or as a partial loss of self in relation to some other form of
crisis. For the PhD student these fears may be conscious or unconscious and
may include such things as the non-completion of a PhD, a supervisors critical
remarks, judgment by others, a lack of clear direction or loss of credibility.
Blanchot recalls Mallarmes quite touching experience of his writers anx-
iety: I felt the very disquieting symptoms caused by the sole act of writing
(Mallarme in Blanchot, 1989: 38). Through writing, Mallarme encounters
nothingness, or the absence of everything certain. Blanchot explains that:
Whoever goes deeply into poetry escapes from being as certitude, meets
with the absence of the gods . . . He cannot have truth for his horizon, or
the future as his element, for he has no right to hope (1989: 38). Yet at what
point does hope take over from such despair? For Blanchot, hope and despair
make each other possible. If we did not hope for the happy clarity of certitude
in the form of a more complete truth we would never take the risk of writing
which might expose us to the loss of truth. Anxiety, on the other hand, is not
necessarily enough to make the writer (and the PhD student) cease to write.
Indeed, perhaps it is the very thing that keeps the writer writing and hoping.
Any writer hopes at some point that the anxiety over writing will stop. The
writers inability to place themselves, or the ill defined limbo the PhD
student often finds themselves experiencing, generates a desire to arrive at a
stable and locatable identity, i.e. Dr Kathryn Owler. Strangely, then, it is the
anxiety which keeps a student creatively working at her project in order to
one day be done with such anxiety.
While we are immersed in the anxious process of writing, Blanchot claims
we can fail to look after ourselves, pushing ourselves to keep going, working
hard, yet lacking any clear understanding of why we are doing so. Blanchot
argues that we lose ourselves, shut ourselves in, can be cruel to ourselves,
castigate ourselves and become a miserable creature, our only support an
incomprehensible torment. Why do we do this to ourselves? In view of a
grandiose work? In view of a completely insignificant work? He [the writer]
has no idea, nor does anyone know (1989: 55).
This description for me is reminiscent of the doctoral experience. During
my PhD candidature I would often hear the exclamation by fellow doctoral
students: Why do I put myself through this process? One student who spoke
of this struggle explained:
Theres anxiety and then sometimes, theres a bit of depression I guess, especially when
you think well why exactly am I doing this and no-ones going to read it when all those
[299]
thoughts go round in your head No-ones going to read this, theres no job at the end
of it, why am I doing this, its a waste of time, I should be doing something else. But
then I come back to the, I am enjoying this. (Karena)
For Blanchot, as for this student, hope returns out of despair. This is because it
is our inability to ever truly find the absolute answer to our question which
makes it possible to have hope and begin again afresh. Of course it is possible
to arrive at certain answers and get some writing done. The PhD student does
frequently effect completions in writing: a sentence, a draft, a PhD thesis.
However, in Blanchots schema such completions are unstable, fleeting and
partial. Very soon any sense of certainty that they offered us is undermined and
we realize that we have not yet arrived and we have more work to do. If one
did ever truly arrive at the absolute truth of the matter, the act of beginning
over, and therefore the act of creation, would no longer be necessary.
Each time we go through the process of deriving hope from despair, we do
seem to get closer to the completion of our PhD. Whether on completing a
project we actually complete our task as writers, however, is a specific and, I
believe, crucial question raised by Blanchot:
The writer goes back to work . . . Does he just desire a perfect product, and if he does
not cease to work at it, is it simply because perfection is never perfect enough? Does he
even write in expectation of a work? Does he bear it always in mind as that which would
put an end to his task, as the goal worthy of so much effort? Not at all. The work is never
that in anticipation of which one can write (in prospect of which one would relate to the
process of writing as to the exercise of some power). The fact that the writers task ends
with his life hides another fact: that, through this task, his life slides into the distress of the
infinite. (1989: 256)
Here Blanchot claims that the writer, and perhaps also the individual in general,
never ceases to write because they always have questions (either literally have
questions or are driven by questions at a deeper level). The fact that I sit here,
ten years on, still finely tuned to the PhD experience makes me think that
Blanchot might well be right. Which of us after completing a PhD degree can
say we have finished with it, in the sense of being finally free of the experience?
After all, if Blanchot is correct, didnt writing a PhD help to make us who we
are and wasnt it our own desire for (self) knowledge that drove the process?
c o n c l u s i o n
The administrative context for the PhD often frames it, intentionally or not, as
a problem to be managed. However, writing a PhD is a unique research
process, one that many people experience as a passionate process one that is
both rewarding and personally demanding. The PhD is unique amongst
other degrees in that it requires the production of original knowledge. It is
[300]
a time-consuming project and, for the Arts and Humanities student, is con-
ducted largely alone. For this reason it replicates something of the complex
experience of writing that Blanchot describes. Moreover, for many people,
the experience of writing is integral to the knowledge produced. My own
thesis is a case in point. If I had not found the PhD process so challenging
and the administrative context of the PhD so perplexing, I would never have
been moved to complete a thesis on a thesis.
I believe that developing an understanding of the unique experience of
writing a PhD can teach academics and universities a lot about the ways in
which knowledge is produced. This information can be useful in helping to
promote quality research and sustain a robust research culture. I certainly do
not promote struggle and suffering as routes to quality research. On the
contrary, I believe the supports and structures that have been made available
to PhD students over the last ten years are crucial and, in many cases, long
overdue. What I do suggest is that universities acknowledge and make space
for the inevitably subjective and often passionate process of knowledge
production. To bring home this point I want to conclude by paraphrasing
an experienced doctoral supervisor. Over the years Creme (2008) has repeat-
edly observed that doctoral students need sufficient space for play and for
meaningful and engaged learning before the requirement to be critical takes
over. This process of play allows the time for new and creative ideas to
germinate. It is these ideas that generate the kind of originality and good
quality research that universities seek. And, I argue, it might just be these
same ideas that do not have time to distill and germinate within a research
culture dominated by administrative concerns.
n o t e s
1. I conducted fifteen qualitative interviews with doctoral candidates (both past and present)
from the Arts and Social Sciences who attended four different Sydney universities, over a period
of approximately eight months. These interviews were conducted confidentially, in a friendly,
fairly informal manner. I asked the students open questions, pertaining to major themes discussed
in my thesis. Students were encouraged to elaborate as much as they wished in relation to
questions that resonated with their experience. These interviews were taped and later transcribed.
2. The experiences of PhD candidates quoted are excerpts from the interviews I conducted
while completing my PhD. All names have been changed to ensure confidentiality.
ac k n ow l e d g e m e n t s
I would like to pay tribute to the wonderful peers I interviewed while completing my own
PhD, who shared their insights and trials. Also more latterly to Dr Barbara Grant and Associate
Professor Simone Fullagar for their kindness in reading this article in its various incarnations and
their constructive suggestions.
[301]
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[303]
b i o g r a p h i c a l n o t e
kathryn owler is a Research Associate with the Faculty of Business, AUT University,
Auckland, New Zealand. She also runs her own research and training business. Kathryn com-
pleted her PhD in 1998 at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Her research
interests lie in post-structuralist analysis of work and leisure. Kathryn has published in the areas
of postgraduate studies and disability support. Her current area of research attention is well-
being at work. She is presently conducting research on fun at work in the Australasian context.
Address: Management Department, Faculty of Business, AUT University, WF Building
(level 10), 42 Wakefield Street, Auckland Central, Auckland 1010, New Zealand. [email:
kathryn.owler@aut.ac.nz]
[304]

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