. . . AND SO ON AND ON IT GOES

I stepped out of the barrister’s office feeling less queasy than before the meeting. I glanced over my right shoulder, beyond to the other side of the park on Symonds Street, and sighted a lone, park bench perched atop the grassy knoll. I sauntered over and sat down on the wooden slabs. I could see the apple core I had tossed, mostly eaten, lying on the leafy mulch carpet beneath the maple tree, a disheveled layer of dead leaves that had piled up as the autumn season dwindled slowly into an indecisive winter.

Unlike New England, the seasons on the North Island aren’t separated by harsh differences in temperature, in which summers can reach as high as 90 degrees Fahrenheit and winters plunge to sub-zero. Rather, the North Island seasons are gentler, each easing into the next, barely noticed until one steps into the outside air and senses the chill that suddenly seeps into one’s pores.

I checked the time on my cell phone and could see that more than an hour had passed. Although the meeting was brief, the length of time it took to clarify my questions was long enough to get the information I needed. My head felt much clearer, less confused, and there was a pleasant lightness in my step. The dark, foreboding shadow, which had begun to represent my doctorate future, gave way to slits of rays of light, bringing optimism. The barrister reassured me that the policies regarding academic conduct, which I had culled from various pages of the University of Auckland website, were accurate and not dated, as one person had said. About four weeks ago, the Graduate Centre sent me three packets of information regarding academic standards and integrity to which doctorate students and academic staff are to adhere. 

The barrister’s reassurances informed me that my interpretation of the statutes were correct. The document clearly outlining the guidelines for completing and grading the PhD thesis, Statute and Guidelines for the Degree of Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD), now contain numerous yellow highlighted lines, bringing attention to the statues, which prove that I had followed the rules. The university is obviously interested in producing qualified academics, and their guidelines on the quality of the doctorate thesis are clear testaments to the institution’s goals. However, these policies also reinforced to me that the conduct and guidance of my committee was incorrect, that is, in violation of the statutes. My meeting with the barrister simultaneously convinced me that the conduct of the School of Architecture and Planning regarding my provisional year is truly baffling.

Back at the house now, in the room I am renting, at my desk, where I placed the sheaths of pages containing e-mail communications between my supervisors and I dating back to June 2013, I now read through the contents of various e-mails. My eyes skim the communications, which refer to the contents of my research proposal, my fingers slowly leafing through the printed pages containing the most incriminating messages. I sight where I had submitted all the drafts of my doctorate thesis, where I had submitted various drafts of my research proposal, where I had explained having already included the information my committee thought should be in the research proposal, and read through the research proposal yet again in its different draft stages. From my readings, I could see that the same questions had been reconciled over and over in my proposal, albeit worded and reworded differently in order to make it easier for the reader to understand. I could also see where their comments contradicted earlier ones. For instance, in a February e-mail, my supervisor acknowledged reading the pertinent definitions requested by them for clarity, but soon after in a separate e-mail, claimed that I needed to include these same definitions in the proposal. I had never taken out these definitions since his acknowledgement and, moreover, have been included in the proposal since September or October last year (2013). This communication typifies the nature of my committee’s feedback on my research proposal over the last ten months. Keeping in mind that I wrote this proposal using the teaching sample guidelines as well as that of the School of Architecture and Planning, it is truly interesting to me, if not peculiar, that despite having followed these guidelines my committee still found shortcomings in the proposal. And yet, their feedback has not in fact improved it considerably, either. Furthermore, from having again reviewed these comments for the umpteenth time, I could see that these “issues” could have been resolved in early October 2013.      

In a most recent comment, my supervisor sent readings to me to help me write the methodology - more than a year after I had completed the draft of the methodology chapter. I had even revised this chapter in September 2013 and got it to a point where I was able to condense the chapter to the most relevant, if not informative, contents. I pointed out that the methodology I selected were most appropriate for this study (consisting of two case studies), communities that had never been researched before on the topic of resilient food systems (and, therefore, exploratory case study is most appropriate), and will use a combination of research tools to obtain my data. Verification of data is a necessary part of the analysis, but it is not necessary to enter into a lengthy discussion in the research proposal about the points that I will be verifying. And yet, despite the work that I had put into discussing the methodology and my application of readings, which justify the methodology I selected to design my study, my committee decides to now send me readings that do not really improve the methodology.

One committee member even asked me in a recent e-mail that he does not know how I am going to operationalise my study, although this information has been present in the research proposal from the very beginning. Because I had first sent the draft chapter to them on 28 June, 2013, why they are giving these readings to me now – towards the end of my provisional year – and enquiring how I will operationalise the field collection is baffling to me. After all, they had all of July, August, and September 2013 to advise me on the contents of the methodology chapter, and then again in the months, thereafter.

Over the months of my provisional year, I noticed that this committee appeared to be intent on having me use certain methods or theories, and even dictating the direction of my research (in spite of the fact that neither of my committee members have published on resilience theory or food systems), but have failed to answer my questions of “why?” when the theory I selected and methodology I designed were more appropriate for the purpose of understanding learning and adaptive capacities in the food system community. Although I had explained more than once my reason for using the learning-adaptive capacity dimension of resilience theory and why I am using the exploratory case study to do my research, they in turn failed to exposit their reasons to me for why they thought I should pursue action network theory (ANT) or why I should discuss at length triangulation (i.e. verification). They do not seem to be satisfied with the rationales I have given, but the University of Auckland statutes support the fact that doctorate students engage in their research independently. This aspect of the doctorate program, after all, is part of the training to becoming a career academic capable of independently designing and conducting research. The nature of the feedback from my committee demonstrates to me an unwillingness to move my provisional year forward, despite testaments to the contrary.

Since I began openly discussing these breaches of university statutes, I began to see the light regarding the comments made to me from other international students. Back in August 2013, one international student told me that “they” would give me problems, while another informed that they give many students problems. In January, after meeting with an academic staff not connected to my department or committee to get another perspective on the contents and organization of my research proposal, a doctorate student from Germany told me that he has been enrolled in his provisional year almost two years and still has not received permission to leave for his fieldwork. And then, last month, a person at the Botany library informed me about a man from Chile, who was invited to do his PhD at Auckland University. After completing components of his research, following his return from his fieldwork, he was suddenly told that his funding ended, which eliminated the possibility of completing his doctorate program and obtaining the qualification to teach. How convenient. Such obstacles created for doctorate students, I now understand, are the “problems” to which the other students referred.

Such occurrences make me suspicious about the university’s true intentions behind accepting international students. Because of these issues, my mind reverts back to the student from India, who had begun his doctorate studies at Massey University only to find that his research had been hijacked at the end of his program, possibly by someone at the university. That this goes on at all at respectable institutions is ironic, as some senior staff have earned degrees in international universities (as highly regarded as Princeton, Yale, and Harvard), indicating that they were probably treated with dignity. I wonder how these academics would feel if they had been treated in the same way that I and other international doctorate students have been treated here at Auckland and Massey.

Save for the brief euphoria elicited by my pleasant visit with the barrister – a reprieve from the melancholy moods that had settled into my days - I silently wondered what good would come out of the meeting. If the university cannot even enforce its own policies on its academic staff, who would be able to do so? Dare I say that my academic experience with the university, especially when weighed along with those of other international students, exhibit signs of taking advantage of international students?