HDR Supervisor of the Month

Professor Emeritus Paul Hutchcroft
Department of Political and Social Change 
Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs 
ANU College of Asia and the Pacific 
 

Paul's supervisory approach:
"There is of course no one-size-fits-all approach to the practice of supervision, as each student brings distinctive prior experiences, talents, and characteristics to the enterprise of doctoral study. They also each have their own distinctive goals, which may or may not include proceeding onward from PhD to academic career. And there will always be some who, as part of their individual journeys, discover that doctoral study is not for them.

Across this diversity, one critical common ingredient of a successful supervisory relationship is mutual understanding. As ANU regularly rejiggers HDR rules and regulations, there is one reform that I have found particularly valuable: the agreement that candidate and supervisor are asked to forge together at the beginning of candidature. This provides a formal opportunity to work out mutual understandings—seeking to ensure, among other things, that students won’t have excessive expectations of the role of the supervisor and that supervisors won’t adopt an overbearing approach that disregards the autonomy of the student. After all, the goal of supervision should be to nurture scholars able to develop their own independent research initiative into the years and decades that follow. Seeing this develop is one of the many wonderful joys of being a doctoral supervisor. Indeed, it provides rich reward across the multi-faceted roles required of a supervisor, who offers guidance and feedback and advice of various types from admission onward to submission.

A second critical common ingredient of a successful supervisory relationship is mutual respect. It is good that we regularly assert the virtue of nurturing early-career researchers, but sometimes these declarations (especially in their more misty-eyed variants) seem to project attitudes that are borderline patronising. While there are still students who proceed directly from undergraduate honours degrees into doctoral programs, a significant cohort—as is the case with many of my students, both at Wisconsin and ANU—arrive with M.A.’s combined with significant prior work experience: some have served as assistant deans and department chairs in their home institutions, with important publications already on their c.v., and others bring a wealth of professional experience outside the academe (working with international NGOs, polling organisations, professional associations, and the like). Those able to draw on such experiences tend to undertake doctoral studies with a much greater degree of focus and direction. This emphasises once again the need to appreciate and celebrate the range of backgrounds that our students bring to doctoral study at ANU, as well as the range of goals that underlie their pursuit of a PhD."

Find out more about Paul's work by visiting Paul's profile on the Research Portal webpage.