Managing the complexities of providing doctoral supervision for colleagues in the academy

Managing the complexities of providing doctoral supervision for colleagues in the academy

The pursuit of a doctoral qualification is a high-risk strategy which is undertaken for various reasons including improving career prospects, personal development, professional competence and intrinsic interest in a discipline area. Higher education institutions are increasingly expecting academics to either have a doctoral qualification or to be enrolled in a doctoral program as a condition of their employment. Subsequently, academic staff who are encouraged to enrol in doctoral programs are often supervised by colleagues at the same institution. Although there is extensive research on how universities manage the supervisor/doctoral candidate process and the importance of this relationship, there has never been a commensurate interest in exploring doctoral supervision provided by colleagues located at the same university as a distinct subgroup. This is further complicated by the various status and working conditions of doctoral candidates across the Higher Education system. The gap that exists in the literature is unusual given that it has the potential to be one of the most complex and vulnerable of doctoral supervision arrangements, a situation exacerbated by increasing pressures on the higher education sector inherent in the global neo-liberal climate and exacerbated by COVID-19. This paper explores the complexity of providing doctoral supervision for colleagues through in-depth interviews with doctoral supervisors from two universities. The findings identified numerous challenges, notably the lack of clarity over roles, communication break-down, and workplace politics. This paper provides a series of recommendations to assist universities to effectively manage the colleague doctoral supervision process.