The Value of the Doctorate: In Conversation with Professor Ema Sullivan-Bissett

Looking back now, what value do you think doing a doctorate has brought to your life?

Most obviously it positioned me to enter the academic job market, and, to my great fortune, succeed in being appointed to a permanent position. And, back then, that was the reason I did the doctorate, because I wanted to have a career in academia.

Less obviously, and something I didn’t really appreciate at the time, completing the doctorate forced me into being intellectually responsible for something substantial. I had to have an idea significant enough to sustain 80,000 words, and the confidence to develop that idea into a doctoral dissertation.

I think that having completed the doctorate gave me so much more confidence in my ability to do difficult intellectual work than I’d have had without that experience. At the time, there were difficult chapters or arguments that caused me a lot of angst, but I always managed to figure a way through. I now go into projects with the confidence that, even if an issue comes up that I don’t immediately know how to resolve, I’ll be able to figure a way through. And that’s a confidence that’s incredibly helpful in academia, whether it’s thinking about how best to teach a topic to undergraduates, helping a postgraduate researcher puzzle out an issue in their dissertation, or of course as part of navigating the various tasks involved in leadership roles.

You’ve spoken to me before about coming from a first-generation and working-class background. How, if at all, has that shaped your experience of doing a doctorate and subsequently building a career in academia?

I think I wear my first-generation and working-class background fairly visibly now, although that wasn’t always the case. Certainly, as a student, and even early in my career, I was very alive to the things I didn’t know because of the background I had, and I sometimes carried some shame about that. I often felt quite alienated from academic environments, and like I’d found my way there through tremendous luck or accident alone.

Over time, I’ve quite radically changed my position on this, and I’m very happy to acknowledge the things I don’t know. For example, I was state educated and had never come upon Latin phrases until I started studying undergraduate philosophy. I also didn’t grow up with some of the kinds of cultural capital that were, and I think less so these days, taken for granted in academic contexts. The flip side of that is that I have familiarity with parts of culture that might be understood as typically working class. I am, now, unapologetic about not concealing these things. In fact, I use them as reference points in my working life, particularly in my teaching.

It’s also really clear to me that lots of what I used to find alienating in academic contexts wasn’t an explicit class prejudice, although there is that too. It was much more implicit. There are assumptions made, ways of speaking, and ways of understanding how universities work that aren’t always explained. If you’re a first-generation student or a working-class student (or both), these are things that you have to figure out yourself.

Overall, going through the doctorate and indeed a career in academia as someone with my background has made me want to be really open about these things with students and other early career academics. I want to be part of a change in academic culture that resists the idea that there are certain class-coded things one ought to already know when one arrives, or that there are aspects of one’s working-class background which are unwelcome or inappropriate in academia.

Has your understanding of the value of a doctorate changed now that you are a professor and supervise doctoral researchers yourself?

Yes, I think so. Less obviously, and something I realise only now, is that completing the doctorate was a real lesson in intellectual ownership, the development of independence, and also having the confidence that the project was credible, worthwhile, and that I could complete it.

But I look back at that time now and I don’t recall things being all that daunting whilst in the midst of it. I don’t remember being cognisant of what completing the doctorate required of me in terms of intellectual ownership and having the confidence to deliver the thing, I just recall doing the work. Now that I supervise doctoral projects, I see what a big step change it is from undergraduate and master’s study, and this has influenced how I think of supervision. I want doctoral students to develop the skills of intellectual ownership, independence, and confidence, but I want them to do that through doing the work first and foremost.

So, I think of my role as an enabling one, as supporting early career scholars to do the work they’re excited about; to help them shape their projects and to offer challenge where necessary so that the project is delivered at quality. But what I really want to be able to do as students progress through the doctoral programme is get out of the way, to properly enable the intellectual ownership and confidence to take hold. That’s because the most valuable thing [about] doing a doctorate is the experience of becoming someone who can deliver ambitious and fairly large-scale work independently. Of course, the dissertation itself is the thing you end up with, but I think the real value of the process lies in the intellectual independence one develops.