Dr. Kevin Haggerty has been added to my committee as a co-supervisor. Kevin is a very good sociologist and currently the editor of the Canadian Journal of Sociology. He will be very helpful with my theoretical orientation drawing on the work of Foucault. Now I just have to get writing again….

For anyone interested in universities, there is some really good stuff on Dalhousie University’s dean’s blog (Faculty of Graduate Studies). One of the posts tackles problems with the PhD process, which is great to see discussed openly within the administrative realm of academia.

In a broader sense, its refreshing to see university personnel and academics demonstrating what public dialogue and discussion can look like, using some of the new technological tools of Web 2.0, such as blogs in this case. Often the admin side of the university is treated as an obstacle to undertaking academic work, yet here they are demonstrating what better accountability and transparency might, in part, look like within the academy. It would be nice to see some departments and faculty members undertake similarly inspired initiatives, aside from the traditional dissemination activities we’re all aware of and inevitably tied to.

To no one in particular, except those who often ask about my progress in my PhD, there are many (many) hoops to jump through. Briefly, it looks something like this:

 - year 1 - 3 full-year courses (one outside your department), one required professional development seminar. research assistant for two terms. In my department, this required sitting in fairly large classes of up to 15 students.

- year 2 - 3 more courses, two required un-graded courses, specialization exam (often called comps). and research assistant for supervisor. One course had to be a quantitative course. The comps are your responsibility to put together; so you recruit the committee members, propose the reading list and push for deadlines and meetings. You have one week at home to answer the committee questions and it is a stressful and demanding exam.

- year 3 - You are on your own. In my case, I moved back to Nova Scotia from Alberta. So sit at home and try to dream up a disseration area for your candidacy proposal. Write a bit, attend some conferences or meetings, pretend your interested in whatever it is your supervisor happens to be studying. Thankfully I was funded so could almost “afford” to sit at home until that became detrimental and counter-productive.

In year 3, my supervisor left the university for a private sector practice and dropped me because of a “lack of discretionary time.” This despite the fact that I declined the university funding I had for grant funding tied to the supervisor and a project we were working on together which was to form the basis of a dissertation. 3 trips to Quebec and a solid year studying labour process theory and writing were pretty much wasted in terms of progressing through the process, if you follow.

Year 4 - look for a new supervisor and topic from 3000 miles away, in a department of 80 - 90 PhD students and 20 or so MA grad students. Thankfully a very good and well-respected faculty member comes to the rescue, and we come up with a new dissertation area - the trajectory of Canadian higher education. Funding also comes to an end, so time to find a full-time job to pay the bills and get on with life.

Year 5 - present (year 6). While working, begin writing a position paper for the new dissertation area. Currently on draft 5 of my candidacy proposal, with a new co-supervisor potentially coming on-board the committee. The goal is to complete this exam in spring 08. The exam is a five person oral examination.

And so it goes - once I’m through the candidacy, then I move to data collection (at least one year) and then writing the dissertation (at least one year) - likely longer given I’m working full-time and have a family now, with a son and expected new baby on the way. This is how a PhD ends up taking close to a decade to complete - I remember a very good professor I had was finishing up her dissertation around the decade mark and my mind just couldn’t compute that figure…..and now here I am. Alongside these many hoops and gate-keeping hurdles are of course the demands of publishing and building a competitive cv in a very tight academic labour market, even tighter if you’re committed to staying in a small province like Nova Scotia. In any case, I’ve been in touch with others in my class and I’m not aware of any of the students in my cohort who have finished. Personally I think there is something systemically wrong with the PhD process; one study reported a 40 percent completion rate in the social sciences, which sounds about right, perhaps even a little high. By the way, this is not to be read as a complaint, it is just a brief review my progress and experience through a PhD program to date, for anyone who might be interested.

T

Okay so I changed the title and focus of this blog. Blogging around theories of governmentality and Foucault don’t really lend themselves to five minutes of time here and there to post anything remotely decent. Commenting on the process of working full-time and completing a PhD is likely a better fit for a blog. Like I said, I can’t seem to delete this thing and its linked on a bunch of websites so its just easier to talk to myself occasionally than have it sit here un-attended and out-of-date. Nothing looks worse a really out-of-date website, blog, or whatever.

Well….these blog things are brutal…..they don’t seem to go away even after trying to delete them. So I might as well update it on the off chance someone drops by and thinks I’m a loser or lazy.

I’m thinking of changing the blog to be a log of my PhD progress - or spectatular lack of progress. I could teach many people out there a thing or two about how not to do a PhD. If you did the opposite if what I’ve done, for example, you’d likely be a tenure track faculty member with a doctor in front of your name right now. I’m now in a race with my son Duke on who will finish up school first. I’ve got a 31 year head start, but he’s a quick learner so it could be a tight one.

Anyway, for anyone that does happen to stumble by this thing, leave a comment.

Ted

 I warned you it wouldn’t very funny….

My theoretical approach to studying higher education draws on ‘studies of governmentality, in which a philosophical and a policy analysis approach are combined. These studies are based on a series of lectures and interviews by Michel Foucault in the late seventies. Governmentality is an analytical framework referring to a genealogical assembly of rationalities and forms of thought (mentalities), which come to be formed through specific strategies and technologies to govern (Dean 1999). It asks to consider higher education as an area of inventions and assemblages for exercising power and intervening upon particular problems, “concerned with the conditions of possibility and intelligibility for certain ways of seeking to act upon the conduct of others, or oneself, to achieve certain ends” (Rose 1999: 19).

To employ governmentality as a theoretical framework, like any theoretical framework, takes a commitment to understand an object of study in a particular way. Most analyses of higher education employ a classical political-economy approach, which requires a commitment to seeing education as being inscribed with a certain kind of ontological character, demarcating its public character as embedded within a historical and philosophical trajectory of capitalist development in which the ‘public’ was accomplished through contestation and struggle with the economic or private. This understanding commits us to see subsequent developments in education as a ‘crisis’, evidenced through the state and economy altering their functions in relation to education which is conceptualized as an ‘attack’ on education in the wake of a further ‘retreat from governance’ by the state. In this analysis, the state and education are at odds since the state is seen to be becoming compromised in a shift to neo-liberal policies, and Education is left to struggle against the historical march of private capital, commodification, and labour degradation. This is the rational narrative inherited since the Enlightenment bound up in the “critique of reason by reason” (Blake et al. 2003). Phenomenology, existentialism, neo-Marxism and the Frankfurt school all stand as rational critiques of the overly ambitious Enlightenment project of rationality to this end, but they do not depart from it.

Alternatively, to use a governmentality framework is to approach higher education with an orientation towards a distinctive and different set of questions. It places higher education within the domain of ‘actually existing liberalism’ (Rose 1999), of a constituent feature, method and process that is not best understood by attending to its subordinate relation to the central powers of a regulating and controlling state. Rather, governmentality asks to consider higher education as a particular ‘stratum of knowing and acting’, as a regime of truth concerning the ‘conduct of conduct’, and as an invention of governance shaped up by assemblages and apparatuses for the exercise of power designed to intervene upon particular kinds of problems (Rose 1999).

By attending to the strategies and techniques of governance we open a space for critical thought about higher education that welcomes us to consider those practices that shape, sculpt and mobilize through the choices, desires and aspirations of individuals and groups (Dean 1999: 12) in relation to the academy. In connection to an investigation of higher education then, the cultural dimension of governing opens up in relation to government, such that the shift from welfare state models of education to nascent corporate or entrepreneurial models cannot simply reflect a domination of neo-liberal ideology (Tikly 2003).

Dean, Mitchell. (1999) “Dependency and Empowerment: Two Case Studies,” in Dean Mitchell (Ed.). Governmentality. London: Sage Publishing.

Rose, Nikolas. (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tikly, Leon. (2003). “Governmentality and the study of education policy in South Africa,” Journal of Educational Policy, Vol. 18(2). Pp. 161-174.

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“As soon as you start writing, even if it is under your real name, you start to function as somebody slightly different, as a “writer”. You establish from yourself to yourself continuities and a level of coherence which is not quite the same as your real life… All this ends up constituting a kind of neo-identity which is not identical to your identity as a citizen or your social identity, Besides you know this very well, since you want to protect your private life.”

“Michel Foucault, (2004) ‘Je suis un artificier’. In Roger-Pol Droit, ed., Michel Foucault, entretiens Paris: Odile Jacob. p. 106.

I came across this quote the other day and it about sums up my hesitatancy around beginning to blog. Negotiating text is always tricky, because how you present yourself is, as Foucault notes, differently than how you know yourself, and others know you, in your routine everyday experience. Dorothy Smith writes, “Texts are the medium of knowledge that is a property of organization rather than the individual.” This means that text articulates a consiousness that is traceable to broader aggregate realities, what she calls social relations. When you write you cannot help but make visible these social relations, whether you want to or not. Blogging is of course textually mediated, so the tension in producing a blog is bound up in having to articulate ’something to say.’ Writing is always underpinned by that process of forming a sort of empheral neo-identity whereby you demarcate yourself from yourself. It involves a constant vigilance negotiating around how you are choosing to represent yourself in text, of which that text is not yours alone, but a consitutent part of broader social relations and organizational realities. As Foucault notes, it is about the creation or augmentation of a neo-identity both privately (to yourself) and publicly (to others).

This blog will be all about higher education. It won’t be very funny, it might be informative, and it will be driven by my experience in higher education as both an academic and an administrator. Increasingly, these two realms are seemingly one and the same. Personally, I enjoy the administrative side of academia, and my interest in where higher education is going is situated in a trajectory of academic work around notions of citizenship, democracy and the public sphere. My PhD work is in many ways just an extension of what interests me politically, but necessarily confined to higher education as a research site. Again, a great fit since I am employed at a university as a manager on a research project. Many of my posts will explore the emerging tensions of adminstration and academia, something I see first hand on a regular basis - which now that I think about can be funny sometimes. So, for a first post, I hope this isn’t too lame. Check back soon more…..

 Ted