Introduction
In this chapter I explore, using a sociological perspective, possible connections between debates about university purposes, changing academic cultures and a high incidence of doctoral researcher mental health. Following on from this and drawing upon Locatelli’s work about education for the public good and Burawoy’s work on public sociology (Burawoy, 2005; Locatelli, 2017), the chapter makes some suggestions about activities which doctoral researchers could use to develop interactions within civil society but which also utilize their academic expertise. The discussion about connections of different things currently happening in the academy involves considering the effects of higher education’s global contexts, debates about the purposes of higher education (HE) and contemporary academic cultures, on the wellbeing of those studying for a doctorate. Then, after looking at the broader positioning of higher education institutions (HEIs), including the rise of (largely right-wing) political movements critical of ‘experts’ and how twenty-first-century purposes of universities are conceived, as well as shifts in predominant academic cultures, I go on to examine the issue of the poor mental health of large numbers of doctoral candidates. The current period is seen as one in which the incidence of mental illness amongst doctoral students in many countries, particularly clinically certified anxiety and depression, is rising fast (Flaherty, 2018). Yet few explanations of this phenomenon take a broad social science approach (Levecquea, Anseela, De Beuckelaerd, Van der Heyden, & Gislef, 2017), with the dominant discipline being psychology. Although remedies are being put forward to improve wellbeing (Metcalfe, Wilson, & Levecquea, 2018), most interventions focus only on individuals, not the broader context of higher education or the actual skills that doctoral students acquire during their studies. I suggest how it might be possible, by focusing on doctoral education as a force for public good rather than doctoral education as a public good (Locatelli, 2017), to support wellbeing amongst doctoral candidates, using an approach somewhat along the lines of what is termed ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy, 2005). The latter concentrates on the use of academic knowledge to engage academics and members of the general public in dialogue about a range of issues, including topical controversial matters and community-focused lifelong learning. Using such an approach could also question the predominant mode of operation of many universities in the early twenty-first century.
The Global Context of Universities and Doctoral Education
Many universities worldwide are in intense competition with each other, for prestige, international staff and students (including doctoral researchers) and research reputation, based on outputs and citations. The growth of university international league tables and rankings (Hazelkorn, 2011) has exacerbated this competition, as has the gradual emergence of the concept of the world-class university (Deem, Mok, & Lucas, 2007; Mok, 2005). Recent work on world-class universities has either focused on the development of world-class universities in countries outside the global north (Song, 2018) or on how higher education institutions are now taking social and ethical responsibility for serving both their own locality and society, as well as the global common good (de Maret & Salmi, 2018). The latter is at a time when the relevance of academic or other experts and the role of universities in the world are increasingly being questioned by far right political grouping and movements. There are, of course, many researchers, including doctoral students, whose research encompasses such concerns as local and national social priorities, the global south or a global common good. However, we have to set against this, the many research projects in universities across the globe funded by organizations whose work has destructive consequences both for individuals (e.g. the tobacco industry) and the environment (e.g. multinational oil companies). The backdrop to universities’ attempts to engage in more social responsibility and sustainability sits alongside (albeit not comfortably) a recent political shift to the extreme right in both Europe and North America (Lazaridis, Campani, & Benveniste, 2016; Norris & Inglehart, 2019) as well as in Brazil (Giroux, 2018). This shift includes not only political parties but also grassroots movements such as the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ who have been active on the streets in France and Belgium in 2018–2019. The extreme right do not seem to like universities and tend to attack both ‘experts’ as well as some specific fields such as climate change research and gender studies. The latter is seen as an ideology, not an academic discipline (e.g. in Hungary gender studies degrees can no longer be validated, hence the Central European University’s move to Vienna), despite the evident hard work and grant-winning capacities of gender studies scholars (Pereira, 2017). Such political developments make life uncomfortable for higher education institutional leaders but also for academics and students, including doctoral researchers.
There are also some other shared features of the broad HE landscape, though national cultures, economic prosperity or indebtedness and the nature of particular HE systems still make a difference. The common features include competitiveness, quality auditing of teaching and research (Cruickshank, 2016) and massification of the undergraduate intake (Giannakis & Bullivant, 2014; Mok & Jiang, 2018). The latter has taken the spotlight off postgraduate education and arguably starved it of resources. Doctoral education too has been massified, though to a much lesser extent than undergraduate education, particularly in relation to international students and professional doctorates where these exist (Jones, 2018), though recruitment is often still predominantly from higher social groups (Wakeling & Hampden-Thompson, 2013; Wakeling & Laurison, 2017). However, doctoral education is still free in a few countries, including Finland. In many countries, whether HE is fee-paying or not, there are active debates about the costs of HE and who should pay those (governments, students, employers?). In countries like South Africa, strong opinions about university fees, alongside concerns about colonial curricula and attainment gaps between white and black and minority ethnic groups students in HE, have turned into violent protests on university campuses (Keet, Nel, & Sattarzadeh, 2017). An enduring 2018 UK pensions strike, which began as a dispute about academics’ pension benefits, ended with both staff and students questioning the idea of corporate universities as well as holding teach-outs and ‘Why is my curriculum white?’ debates. In France school students have protested about exams needed for university entrance being made harder and excluding less well-off students. Of course, doctoral researchers are not always engaged in such struggles (although a good many undertake poorly paid teaching of undergraduates) but they are certainly aware of them.
There is also a significant turbulent element in many HE systems. It is not just about fees, as even in countries with low or no fees, universities have still become more like businesses (Bok, 2004), permeated not only by new managerialist ideologies and practices which favour manager-academics over academics (Deem, 2017; Deem, Hillyard, & Reed, 2007; Magalhães, Veiga, & Videira, 2017) but also by ‘boardism’, which places emphasis on the power of university lay governing body members rather than collegial governance by academic staff (Veiga, Magalhães, & Amaral, 2015). Increasingly, research, teaching and supervision are driven by their usefulness for the economy, not by their social and cultural relevance (Gumport, 2000). The employability of former undergraduates becomes paramount, despite the problematic nature of the concept of graduate employability (Boden & Nedeva, 2010). Students themselves are becoming increasingly instrumental in their approach to higher education (Budd, 2016), though as Budd’s comparison of undergraduates in England and Germany shows marketized systems encourage a consumerist approach to a greater extent than quasi- or non-marketized systems. Doctoral researchers may be less obviously i...