Breadcrumbs
- Home
- Events
- Previous events
- Vitae researcher development conference 2010
- Conference blog 2010
- The Future of the Doctorate
The Future of the Doctorate
04 September 2009
By Jeffrey Defries
I am delighted that this Vitae conference will be conducted in part on-line - conferences are good for gaining and sharing information and even better for meeting people. But new on-line facilities allow people to put forward funky and crazy ideas, express fears, doubts and concerns and establish networks that can continue long after the farewell rituals have been conducted. This year we put our toe in the water; next year....who knows!
I chair a session on 9 september where I'm joined by a panel of distinguished speakers to consider the future of doctoral education. The doctorate has come a long way since its origins in the 9th century when it provided a "license to teach and issue legal opinions"- what does it mean today and what should/will it look like ten years from now?
Let me know if there are any questions you'd like me to put to our panel and/or give me your views so that I may put them forward to the plenary session (sorry, just seen that it's called a "half-plenary"- I don't know what this means but I promise we won't give you 50% value!)
Jeffrey Defries
Tim Brown05 September 2009 at 02:16 PM
permalinkreport this comment
Sorry I won't be at the conference but a big question I'd ask is that the funding of PhDs is changing, particularly for overseas such that it is less of funding from UK to bring students here but rather that students coming here are beings sent by their country and funded by them. This therefore hands over the control in a sense of finding the best students, since that is no longer so much our discretion who are the best students. If the quality of students being sent becomes less than we are "used to" what does this mean for admissions, standards, researcher development? Also what are the destinations of these students, why are their countries sending them to do a doctorate? I'd argue the answers are different to students coming from the UK/EU. Hope you understand what I'm getting at anyway as I think it reflects many similar concerns brought up in THE in recent days and from where I am sitting as a supervisor these are the challenges ahead.