The final step in getting a doctorate is the viva voce; the conversation between the examiners and the PhD candidate when they defend their thesis – several hundred pages of work that can take up to six years to complete. The stakes are high. And so it was today that I walked up the stairs to the committee room and opened the door to meet the other examiner for the first time. There is tension here too, you never quite know how the relationship with the other examiner will go. We exchange views and agree on an approach and the questions that we will ask. A few moments later the candidate is brought into the room and the chair formally starts the viva voce. Ninety minutes later we are finished and my head is buzzing – we have had a fantastic conversation and we are in agreement that the thesis is a significant contribution to the field of social sciences and education (subject to a few changes). We finish the paperwork and depart. The candidate’s carefully written thesis is the artefact, the downloadable object that will soon be available from the British Library. It can be easy to lose sight of what mattered in bringing the ideas and careful argument to life, namely hundreds of hours of conversation between dozens of people. The name a few these will include – formal doctoral supervision meetings, conversations with other students and the wider academic community in the university, seminar sessions, interviewees who took part in the study, the librarians, family, friends and partners, conferences, and candidate’s workplace conversations. The list goes on in planned set-piece meetings but also in casual discussions that both explicitly and implicitly address the research. And all of this is mirrored by the conversations that the research will enable in the future. But how do we value these conversations only a tiny percentage of which any of us will be aware of?
James Traeger and I have started a new project on relational critical thinking. Our aim is to focus attention away from the idea that the individual is solitary intellect and the source of his or her thinking towards a recognition that we spark off the people around us and our environment (physical and non-physical). We are talking about an emphasizes not absolutes, in other words, we are not entirely relational or entirely solitary – we are both at the same time. However, there is an important question as to what we pay attention to as this defines what we value and prioritize as a society. In a recent conversation James and I got onto the subject of labour, work and action, a collection of ideas from Hannah Arendt (Arendt, 2000), the twentieth-century political theorist, about the contemplative and active life that was published in the Human Condition. It is dangerous to distill Arendt’s ideas, to do so loses the meticulous argument she builds with other philosophers and ideas. That said, in essence, labour is what we need to keep us alive: food, fuel and shelter. Work is what we create and build, they are the artifacts around us in physical and non-physical form that stand the test of time. However, action is ephemeral, it is what we do together but then evaporates as soon as we walk away, it has no legacy other than in the minds. It is how we reveal who we are to others and how they reveal who they are to us – and in doing so we develop, learn and move on.
Going back to the viva, the work is in front of me, with brightly coloured post-it notes highlighting key pages I am keen to talk about. However, it is the action that is of value in that 90-minute conversation and the fact that as we leave, we all see the world in a slightly different way. And as I said this is just one conversation of hundreds that have happened over the last six years to create our newly appointed doctoral colleague. This is what university life is about. It is this action that creates new knowledge and develops people in social and relational processes with each other, along with important outcrops of work along the way. The question is: how is action valued? Whilst work is counted in important board meetings in universities and is measured in government metrics (in the UK we have REF, KEF, TEF etc that control what universities do and how much money they get) where is the voice for action?
People need time to ponder, read, talk, and think. I am not advocating a taxi-type meter that clocks up time at the start of each conversation. The relationship between action and work is not guaranteed, action needs to be supported and nurtured with its own conversation at those important meetings in universities and government. In short, action needs its own advocates when it comes to recognizing the value of university life.
Arendt, H. (2000). The Vita Activa. In P. Baehr (Ed.), The Portable Hannah Arendt. Penguin.
Metis 