The University of Ottawa has updated its academic regulations pertaining to master’s and doctoral theses (Academic Regulation II-7 Theses) and it’s bad news for current and prospective uOttawa graduate students.
The update is part of a recent overhaul of University policies and regulations, which were rolled out sometime between mid November and late December 2021.
The update requires submitted MA and PhD theses (both monograph and article based formats) to contain a preface – perhaps in lieu of the Acknowledgments section.
The problem is that the language used to define the preface amounts to a power grab at the expense of graduate students.
Before we dive in, you’re invited to read my letter to uOttawa President Jacques Frémont about how to easily implement policy reforms to prevent supervisor bullying of students: Letter to uOttawa President Jacques Frémont. You may also be interested in How to end supervisor bullying at uOttawa.
The preface “specifies the approvals obtained to conduct the research, clearly identifies the student’s contribution and distinguishes it from those of collaborators, co-authors or other researchers, if any” (Section 7.3. Thesis format, Subsection 7.3.1 General format).
Bad wording or is something more sinister going on here?
The wording emphasizes a collective or distributed authorship equally for monograph and article based theses and frames the work of students as “contribution” on par with the contributions of collaborators, co-authors and researchers.
Subsection 7.3.1 rules that “The same ethical and quality standards apply to all theses, regardless of the format they assume.”
I’ve never heard of such a thing, co-authors of a PhD thesis. In a monograph thesis?
Excuse me, the last time I checked the whole thing should be the student’s contribution and any minor contributions from their academic supervisors or thesis advisory committee members should be identified.
If a PhD thesis (especially) is not the student’s contribution, they don’t deserve to get it.
This just sounds like another mechanism to usurp student work and intellectual rights.
Already what gets written in the Acknowledgments section is a hyperbole of expressions of gratitude and gratuitous exhalations, because this is what people write in this section. And because the students need to flatter their supervisors for future support. If a supervisor dictated the Acknowledgments section to a student, the student will almost certainly oblige. Of course it’s usually more subtle than this. Though sometimes it’s not.
My former uOttawa PhD thesis supervisor Rocci Luppicini told me to say in my PhD thesis Acknowledgements section that the idea of me interviewing subject matter experts from both academia and industry came from Professor Liam Peyton. When it most certainly came from me.
Rocci did not want me to look good.
Rocci explicitly told me you have to add the sentence that interviewing from academia and industry was Professor Peyton’s idea, in front of his ethics and information society class on February 11, 2020, during a presentation he’d invited me deliver to his class about my PhD thesis work.
For at least a couple of minutes I tried to dissuade him, saying it was my idea. But he insisted. I caved in eventually. But this coercion was unethical and unfair.
Bullying has no place in respectable academia. The emotional scars and professional harm last a lifetime.
I had written an email on January 16, 2019 (an update of my research activities – see highlighted sentence) to my PhD thesis advisory committee, which includes professors Rocci Luppicini, Liam Peyton, and Andre Vellino, that unambiguously states that the data collection methods of my PhD research will be comprised of “in-depth interviews with industry and academic subject matter experts and key stakeholder groups, and organizational documentation”.
In fact, I got the idea of Teaching vs Practice for my PhD thesis on January 7, 2019, from a wall poster by Kate Polle and Lynne Bowker titled Crossing Borders: Translation Studies and Information Science hung in uOttawa’s Department of Communication on the 11th floor of the Desmarais Building.
The increasing commercialization of higher education and the culture of entitlement and impunity for tenured university professors is a dangerous mix.
Reforming supervisor-student power relations in academia is an idea whose time has come.
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