This entry is prompted by a suggestion from one of my senior colleagues, recommending that we invite EU (= non-Spanish) researchers to the examining boards of our doctoral students. At UAB we do have something called ‘Doctorado con mención europea’ (European Doctorate), which entails quite a complicated system of validation for dissertations: a three-month stay abroad for the candidate (self-financed!) tutored by a local researcher; two reports once the dissertation is completed by two other non-Spanish researchers and a fourth EU specialist, invited to the board. The four non-Spanish EU specialists get nothing for their pains (well, one gets invited to Barcelona…), which makes finding them a matter of appealing to friendship or flattery. Although the internet suggests this scheme is active all over Europe, still today, after asking repeatedly the corresponding administrators, I can’t say whether this is a UAB, Spanish or European validation system. No one seems to know…
Here’s a sample of my experience with European doctorates. I tried to set up an exchange with a British university I won’t name. I send one of my doctoral students to study with a specialist, who is, indeed, very willing to help (because she knows me, not because she’d heard about the European Doctorate) and I get one of theirs to tutor. Sending my student is no problem at all, but the student I was supposed to tutor at UAB was told by this British university that a) they’re not aware that the European Doctorate exists and b) the stay at UAB would not be considered part of the study time for his dissertation. When he asked whether I could be an external examiner on his board (with the full support of his supervisor), the answer was that foreign specialists are only invited for linguistic reasons (i.e. if the dissertation deals with a foreign language). So much for reciprocity.
This might be unusual, or pure bad luck, but I witnessed recently yet another example of European miscommunication that left me reeling. A colleague invited to the examining board of a doctoral student who had fulfilled the expensive, demanding requirements for a European Doctorate two non-Spanish EU specialists (French, I think). I have no idea why but one of them decided it was the right time and place to teach a lesson in European assessment strategies and, after quite an ugly debate, awarded the candidate a lower mark than she deserved. Why? Because, in her own words, this is what the dissertation really deserved using a European grading scale. This clearly hinted that we, Spaniards, overvalue our PhD dissertations -which might be the case?- but also that we are NOT European. By the way: there’s no such thing as a European grading scale for PhD dissertations, although in view of this incident we might urgently need one, as national grading traditions clearly differ from each other.
My two examples might just be examples of very bad luck but I worry that by calling foreign specialists to our examining boards here in Spain we’re sending out the wrong message: that we need them to validate what we do, for we are not good enough. I have seen websites by other British universities with the same rules we use for European Doctorates but I wonder who is invited to their boards (German and French specialists?). Are we going to build yet another hierarchical system by which the aim of reciprocity results in having a jet set of top European specialists (German, British, French…) validating what their less efficient neighbours do? Am I simply too pessimistic, as usual?