I'm reading this, of course, with curiosity, anticipation, fear, hope... as I imagine what may transpire over the next few years. And I noticed similarities in the patient-physician relationship, particularly in primary care, as I reflect on the many relationships I participated in over those years. Similar dynamics, similar concerns related to virtual care. Thank you for sharing.
I’m reading this as someone who’s never experienced doctoral supervision and likely never will. I’m what academics might call an ‘independent scholar’ but what I’d call someone doing systematic cultural work accountable to community rather than institution.
So when you write about ‘passing through the gate,’ I’m analysing gatekeeping from the position of someone that gate was designed to keep out.
You capture something real about the interpersonal complexity of these relationships - the dependence/independence, the professional intimacy, the mutual vulnerability.
I recognise these dynamics from twenty years managing hospitality teams, navigating power relationships where authority and care intertwine, where people must work together productively without necessarily liking each other.
But here’s what I see from outside: you present these paradoxes as universal features of knowledge development when they’re actually specific to gatekeeping institutions. What you call ‘becoming a disciple of the discipline’ before finding your voice - that’s not how informal researchers work. We develop voice through community accountability, not institutional submission. We become ‘ripe’ or ‘ready’ through material necessity and political urgency, not through supervised dependency.
The ‘chain of relationships’ you describe - supervisor was supervised, who was supervised - that chain deliberately excludes people like me. Not because we lack intellectual capacity or cultural curiosity, but because we can’t afford years of dependent relationships with middle-class gatekeepers who determine when we’re ‘ready.’
The paradoxes you identify aren’t philosophical - they’re material. They describe how institutions maintain control over knowledge production whilst claiming to democratise it.
When you ask ‘Does it go without saying that fruitful supervision requires both parties finding the research compelling?’ - that question reveals everything.
For informal researchers, the work being compelling isn’t leisure preference, it’s survival necessity. I research class and institutional gatekeeping because these systems are crushing my community, not because I find them intellectually stimulating.
The middle-class luxury of pursuing knowledge for its own fascination - that’s exactly the privilege this supervision model requires and reproduces.
I appreciate your attention to relational complexity because these dynamics are real. But your analysis needs class infrastructure. The contradictions you describe aren’t universal; they’re produced by specific institutional arrangements that privilege some students whilst systematically eliminating others.
What would knowledge production look like if we designed it around community accountability rather than supervisory chains? What analytical possibilities emerge when ‘readiness’ means political urgency rather than institutional patience? What happens when ‘finding your voice’ doesn’t require prior submission to disciplines that were never designed for voices like mine?
Perhaps I'd best start with clarifications and begin an exploration of where i differ.
When I used the term 'passing through the gate' I meant it much more simply than you have it here. It was an echo of a Buddhist term meaning that the principal qualification for being a supervisor is that you have been through the experience yourself. Another way this is sometimes expressed is that someone has previously entered the stream: they have walked through the river of life so might be able to advise on how to keep your footing as you do so. So I hadn't thought about gates as in gatekeeping, but I appreciate absolutely what you mean.
Would I be right in thinking that practising the way you do, as an independent scholar, there are also people you turn to for advice, for counsel, as mentors? You do so presumably because they are longer in the tooth than you, have been round the block a bit, and your respect them. That's the kind of relationship I am trying to describe which is not unique to doing a doctorate.
Next, I definitely don't mean submitting to the discipline of the institution, but to the discipline of the discipline. On my programme we tend to draw a lot on philosophy and sociology, and there are plenty of philosophers and sociologists in the canon who made their way outside academic institutions. In that sense you are in good company with Socrates, Nietzsche, for a large part of his life, Norbert Elias amongst many others. So submitting to the discipline is mostly about acknowledging what has come before and the work that predecessors have put in. Without this acknowledgement we either repeat what we already know and/or talk off the top of our heads. In a way, you have tor earn the right to an opinion, which first involves understanding the opinion of others. I think this is true not just in an academic setting. In your description of the way you work currently there is a form of submitting to the community, although I would have to say that in my own experience of community work in the uK and overseas, that can be a formulation which covers over as much as it reveals. Who speaks for 'the community'?
One term that we use in my particular research group is 'community of inquiry'. So the task is not to convince your bourgeois supervisor when you are ripe in their eyes according to criteria that they make up, but to convince your community of inquiry, be that a community in society, or a group of professionals you aspire to being recognised by, that you understand what has been, and is being talked about and you want to offer something additional or different. The question will always be: who are you to have an opinion? Your supervisor acts as a proxy for a community of inquiry in the same way I would guess, some community leaders sometimes act as proxy for the community as whole. You couldn't consult the whole community on an ongoing basis about everything you are doing.
Another note about my particular community of inquiry: I am a director of a professional doctorate where what someone is doing at work, or in their community, is the subject and object of their research. So it's not learning for its own sake per se, although i have to say I don't have a particular problem with that, and I'll explain why a bit further on, but in order to better understand their practice and that of the people they are engaged with. It's about developing better understanding of what's going on for a fuller and more ethical engagement in the politics and cleavages of going on together.
Another characteristic of my programme is that we don't require people to be highly credentialed in order to come. We have had professors as well people who don't have a degree attend and get their doctorates. Yes, it is still elite in the sense that it costs a lot to come, and I wouldn't have gone through the programme myself without having benefitted from a small inheritance and lots of overtime (and a partner who also earned a wage).
To be honest, it is hard to maintain the discipline of undertaking doctoral study unless the subject matters to you, and probably to others too. The way you express it, it sounds an incredibly effete and narcissistic undertaking. But rather, I have students who are researching bringing lived experience into mental health services in the NHS, are researching burn out, shame, recognition, dealing with conflict. These are all things which are relevant to pretty much any community of inquiry you find yourself part of.
Going back to your central argument that class has to inform any understanding of the supervisory relationship and the role that academic institutions play in social exclusion and the production of knowledge. I wholeheartedly agree. Having worked in conflict situations overseas I absolutely get the idea that knowledge production is a necessity for marginalised and sometimes besieged communities. It isn't a luxury add-on. But I would also say at the same time that knowledge does have to be pursued for its own sake because it matters to the pursuer. This should also be a characteristic of a 'liberated' community, that they are able to pursue the topics of interest to them, irrespective of what they are expected to want to know. One of my biggest critiques of the current university system is that tries to instrumentalise knowledge, which is the opposite of the problem you describe. You're supposed to get a degree so you can earn more and get a better job, a promise which universities cannot deliver on. Instead I would encourage people to study because they can't not, because it matters to them and those they care about, because it makes a difference and because it makes them more themselves.
There are always exclusions. I look at my own university, the University of Hertfordshire, and think it does pretty well in general if you think that university education is right for you (and I think we don't do enough in terms of other sorts of education like apprenticeships). Graduation day is quite a spectacle with a great deal of diversity, race and class, and families celebrating the graduation of a child who is clearly the first generation to go to university. Whether this is a benefit overall in an economy where there are more graduates than graduate jobs is another question entirely.
Thank you for this detailed response - I appreciate the time and care you’ve taken. Your clarifications help me see where I’ve misread your intentions.
Your programme sounds like it’s genuinely trying to open space, reduce barriers, centre practice over credentials. That matters enormously.
The paradoxes you identified aren’t universal features of knowledge development - they’re symptoms of asymmetrical class relationships, even in supervision genuinely oriented toward justice. Where I think we’re identifying different problems: you’re describing how supervision should work, I’m describing how it does work as class filtration.
There’s more to explore here about knowledge as survival documentation versus intrinsic or instrumental pursuit. Would welcome continuing this conversation.
In Germany they call a promotor ‘ein Doktorvater’, which expresses very much how I experienced the relationship during my journey becoming a PhD (in The Netherlands btw).
The supervisory relationship does call out parent-child dynamics, but I try to deflate them wherever possible to try to keep it on track as an adult to adult relationship.
Chris,
I'm reading this, of course, with curiosity, anticipation, fear, hope... as I imagine what may transpire over the next few years. And I noticed similarities in the patient-physician relationship, particularly in primary care, as I reflect on the many relationships I participated in over those years. Similar dynamics, similar concerns related to virtual care. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks Mike. see you soon.
Chris,
I’m reading this as someone who’s never experienced doctoral supervision and likely never will. I’m what academics might call an ‘independent scholar’ but what I’d call someone doing systematic cultural work accountable to community rather than institution.
So when you write about ‘passing through the gate,’ I’m analysing gatekeeping from the position of someone that gate was designed to keep out.
You capture something real about the interpersonal complexity of these relationships - the dependence/independence, the professional intimacy, the mutual vulnerability.
I recognise these dynamics from twenty years managing hospitality teams, navigating power relationships where authority and care intertwine, where people must work together productively without necessarily liking each other.
But here’s what I see from outside: you present these paradoxes as universal features of knowledge development when they’re actually specific to gatekeeping institutions. What you call ‘becoming a disciple of the discipline’ before finding your voice - that’s not how informal researchers work. We develop voice through community accountability, not institutional submission. We become ‘ripe’ or ‘ready’ through material necessity and political urgency, not through supervised dependency.
The ‘chain of relationships’ you describe - supervisor was supervised, who was supervised - that chain deliberately excludes people like me. Not because we lack intellectual capacity or cultural curiosity, but because we can’t afford years of dependent relationships with middle-class gatekeepers who determine when we’re ‘ready.’
The paradoxes you identify aren’t philosophical - they’re material. They describe how institutions maintain control over knowledge production whilst claiming to democratise it.
When you ask ‘Does it go without saying that fruitful supervision requires both parties finding the research compelling?’ - that question reveals everything.
For informal researchers, the work being compelling isn’t leisure preference, it’s survival necessity. I research class and institutional gatekeeping because these systems are crushing my community, not because I find them intellectually stimulating.
The middle-class luxury of pursuing knowledge for its own fascination - that’s exactly the privilege this supervision model requires and reproduces.
I appreciate your attention to relational complexity because these dynamics are real. But your analysis needs class infrastructure. The contradictions you describe aren’t universal; they’re produced by specific institutional arrangements that privilege some students whilst systematically eliminating others.
What would knowledge production look like if we designed it around community accountability rather than supervisory chains? What analytical possibilities emerge when ‘readiness’ means political urgency rather than institutional patience? What happens when ‘finding your voice’ doesn’t require prior submission to disciplines that were never designed for voices like mine?
Rob
Hi Rob,
There's much of what you say that I agree with.
Perhaps I'd best start with clarifications and begin an exploration of where i differ.
When I used the term 'passing through the gate' I meant it much more simply than you have it here. It was an echo of a Buddhist term meaning that the principal qualification for being a supervisor is that you have been through the experience yourself. Another way this is sometimes expressed is that someone has previously entered the stream: they have walked through the river of life so might be able to advise on how to keep your footing as you do so. So I hadn't thought about gates as in gatekeeping, but I appreciate absolutely what you mean.
Would I be right in thinking that practising the way you do, as an independent scholar, there are also people you turn to for advice, for counsel, as mentors? You do so presumably because they are longer in the tooth than you, have been round the block a bit, and your respect them. That's the kind of relationship I am trying to describe which is not unique to doing a doctorate.
Next, I definitely don't mean submitting to the discipline of the institution, but to the discipline of the discipline. On my programme we tend to draw a lot on philosophy and sociology, and there are plenty of philosophers and sociologists in the canon who made their way outside academic institutions. In that sense you are in good company with Socrates, Nietzsche, for a large part of his life, Norbert Elias amongst many others. So submitting to the discipline is mostly about acknowledging what has come before and the work that predecessors have put in. Without this acknowledgement we either repeat what we already know and/or talk off the top of our heads. In a way, you have tor earn the right to an opinion, which first involves understanding the opinion of others. I think this is true not just in an academic setting. In your description of the way you work currently there is a form of submitting to the community, although I would have to say that in my own experience of community work in the uK and overseas, that can be a formulation which covers over as much as it reveals. Who speaks for 'the community'?
One term that we use in my particular research group is 'community of inquiry'. So the task is not to convince your bourgeois supervisor when you are ripe in their eyes according to criteria that they make up, but to convince your community of inquiry, be that a community in society, or a group of professionals you aspire to being recognised by, that you understand what has been, and is being talked about and you want to offer something additional or different. The question will always be: who are you to have an opinion? Your supervisor acts as a proxy for a community of inquiry in the same way I would guess, some community leaders sometimes act as proxy for the community as whole. You couldn't consult the whole community on an ongoing basis about everything you are doing.
Another note about my particular community of inquiry: I am a director of a professional doctorate where what someone is doing at work, or in their community, is the subject and object of their research. So it's not learning for its own sake per se, although i have to say I don't have a particular problem with that, and I'll explain why a bit further on, but in order to better understand their practice and that of the people they are engaged with. It's about developing better understanding of what's going on for a fuller and more ethical engagement in the politics and cleavages of going on together.
Another characteristic of my programme is that we don't require people to be highly credentialed in order to come. We have had professors as well people who don't have a degree attend and get their doctorates. Yes, it is still elite in the sense that it costs a lot to come, and I wouldn't have gone through the programme myself without having benefitted from a small inheritance and lots of overtime (and a partner who also earned a wage).
To be honest, it is hard to maintain the discipline of undertaking doctoral study unless the subject matters to you, and probably to others too. The way you express it, it sounds an incredibly effete and narcissistic undertaking. But rather, I have students who are researching bringing lived experience into mental health services in the NHS, are researching burn out, shame, recognition, dealing with conflict. These are all things which are relevant to pretty much any community of inquiry you find yourself part of.
Going back to your central argument that class has to inform any understanding of the supervisory relationship and the role that academic institutions play in social exclusion and the production of knowledge. I wholeheartedly agree. Having worked in conflict situations overseas I absolutely get the idea that knowledge production is a necessity for marginalised and sometimes besieged communities. It isn't a luxury add-on. But I would also say at the same time that knowledge does have to be pursued for its own sake because it matters to the pursuer. This should also be a characteristic of a 'liberated' community, that they are able to pursue the topics of interest to them, irrespective of what they are expected to want to know. One of my biggest critiques of the current university system is that tries to instrumentalise knowledge, which is the opposite of the problem you describe. You're supposed to get a degree so you can earn more and get a better job, a promise which universities cannot deliver on. Instead I would encourage people to study because they can't not, because it matters to them and those they care about, because it makes a difference and because it makes them more themselves.
There are always exclusions. I look at my own university, the University of Hertfordshire, and think it does pretty well in general if you think that university education is right for you (and I think we don't do enough in terms of other sorts of education like apprenticeships). Graduation day is quite a spectacle with a great deal of diversity, race and class, and families celebrating the graduation of a child who is clearly the first generation to go to university. Whether this is a benefit overall in an economy where there are more graduates than graduate jobs is another question entirely.
Good rapping with you.
Chris,
Thank you for this detailed response - I appreciate the time and care you’ve taken. Your clarifications help me see where I’ve misread your intentions.
Your programme sounds like it’s genuinely trying to open space, reduce barriers, centre practice over credentials. That matters enormously.
The paradoxes you identified aren’t universal features of knowledge development - they’re symptoms of asymmetrical class relationships, even in supervision genuinely oriented toward justice. Where I think we’re identifying different problems: you’re describing how supervision should work, I’m describing how it does work as class filtration.
There’s more to explore here about knowledge as survival documentation versus intrinsic or instrumental pursuit. Would welcome continuing this conversation.
Rob
In Germany they call a promotor ‘ein Doktorvater’, which expresses very much how I experienced the relationship during my journey becoming a PhD (in The Netherlands btw).
The supervisory relationship does call out parent-child dynamics, but I try to deflate them wherever possible to try to keep it on track as an adult to adult relationship.