Competencia discursiva y funcional a Eficacia comunicativa

It is of little doubt that the introduction of graduate schools has been a very important tool for changing the PhD landscape in Denmark. The old-fashioned PhD training, where the PhD students followed an individual track and mostly relied on one single advisor, has been substituted with a planned, organised learning landscape. The organisational construction of the “graduate school” focuses on creating a peer-student learning setting, integrating national resources, and creating new working

relationships between universities and the broader society. This represents movement in a very promising direction. A secondary effect can be seen in the creation of trans- or multidisciplinarity.

From an international perspective, this is certainly cutting-edge development in higher education. The report from the PhD evaluation commissioned in 2000 had the very striking title A good start. The title characterised the situation very precisely. Whether this good beginning results in a strengthened PhD education in Denmark will depend on the ability to develop this model further. The idea that a small country with limited economic and human resources could compete with elite universities in the US is

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illusory, if the goal is to copy these universities in full scale. As an illustration, the endowment (funding basis) for Harvard University is DKK 150 billion and every US academic has his/her travel bag already packed if he or she ever should receive an offer to teach at Harvard. Danish PhD education has to seek its competitive edge in arenas other than playing in the field of elite US and British universities. The real challenge accordingly will be how to enable a dynamic and developmentally oriented PhD system of world class that can offer opportunities that cannot be created in the segmented and hierarchical US and British educational system.

Graduate schools have another very important feature: they are well suited to cope with the transition of the PhD that we described in Chapter 2. The graduate school gives a broader and thus more flexible education than does the traditional, discipline- based training that occurs in an isolated departmental setting. This has been a major feature of European doctoral education. In many countries there are reports of a growing disjunction between the traditional purpose and the actual use of the Doctorate. This is natural as more and more doctoral degree holders leave academe and seek work elsewhere. The problems tend to be linked to a growing concern about the high level of specialisation and the limited number of skills of the traditional PhD graduate. Doctoral studies are considered to be too narrow or even increasingly irrelevant for a rapidly changing job market.10 _{The graduate school is better equipped}

to prepare students for a broader range of career opportunities, and it could also make that particular kind of preparation into a special comparative advantage and develop it in form and content.11

In the self-evaluation, we raised the question “How does the institution judge the possibilities for further developing the PhD education given the current legislation and funding system?”. The general picture of the responses is that the current system is flexible enough to facilitate experimentation and developmental activities. Obstacles in the current funding system are pointed out but not seen as major constraints for development. A reasonable conclusion is that it will be up to the institutions to create enough momentum to take the graduate schools to the next stage. It is evident that there are large differences between graduate schools. In some locations there are very successful innovations while other graduate schools have turned into experiments that did not lead to their desired outcome. All of these experiences are equally important and valuable from the perspective of development and innovation. It would be very beneficial for the continued development of the Danish PhD system to enable a cross- institutional learning system, where experiences from current graduate schools could be shared. Building a national learning system for improvement of PhD education would be one of the most promising roads that could keep the Danish PhD education at the international cutting edge.

10 _{Doctoral Studies and Qualifications in Europe and the United States: Status and Prospects, ed. Jan}

Sadlak (Bucharest: UNESCO, 2004), p. 296.

11 _{The Responsive Ph.D.: Innovations in U.S. Doctoral Education, The Woodrow Wilson National}

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Recommendation:

> Create a dynamic learning society that incorporates all graduate schools and ensures that the schools take on the responsibility for innovation and development. This should lead to a coordinated national effort in making PhD education a learning system.

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As was made clear in the previous chapter, the panel advocates a gradual move towards a higher density of fully fledged graduate schools in Danish universities. Unless this is prescribed through central decision making, which is a drastic move that we do not advocate (for reasons that will be given), graduate schools in Denmark will be established in a process that is likely to take several years and will progress more rapidly in some universities than in others. Some universities may not even find it useful or appropriate to establish any graduate schools at all. In particular, smaller universities or faculties with very limited resources or a narrow range of disciplines will probably be better off avoiding the demanding graduate school concept and continuing to organise PhD training in departments/disciplines and programmes. For this specific reason, issues of structure and organisation are important to discuss for Danish PhD education as if there had been no graduate schools at all. Regardless of organisational form, there are always certain key issues concerning admission, supervision, quality control, programme structure (coursework, research, teaching duties), funding, publishing, and career structure that must be addressed. These issues are discussed below. It should be stated that several, if not all, structures and

principles are as valid under a small-scale discipline-based graduate training as within a graduate school.