Creative Education, 2009, 9-17
Published Online September 2009 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ce)
Copyright © 2009 SciRes CE
1
Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning
Universities with the Creative Economy
ABSTRACT
During the 1980s and 1990s, the university was posed as an underutilized weapon in the battle for industrial competi-
tive and regional economic growth … At university after university, new research centers were designed to attract cor-
porate funding, and technology transfer offices were started to commercialize academic breakthroughs. But we may
well have gone too far. Academics and university officials are becoming increasingly concerned that greater involve-
ment in university research is causing a shift from fundamental science to more applied work … Universities have been
naively viewed as engines of innovation that pump out new ideas that can be easily translated into commercial innova-
tions and regional growth. This has led to overly mechanistic national and regional policies that seek to commercialize
those ideas and transfer them to the private sector. [1]
Keywords: Creative Doctorates, Creative Education, Creative Economy
1. Introduction
In a recent book, Richard Florida marked twenty years of
transformation in the university’s purpose. Following on
from his analysis, the 2000s can best be represented
through convoluted debates detailing how universities are
implicated in diverse modes of economic and social en-
gagement. The palette of achievement, assessment and
validation has been brushed with words and phrases like
innovation, creativity, lifelong learning and the knowl-
edge economy. These imperatives probe the traditional
structures and ideologies of higher education. Richard
Florida found ‘naivety’ in tethering university research to
commercialization. However, while tracking a movement
from fundamental to applied science, the changes to the
humanities generally and media, communication and
cultural studies specifically were unmentioned in his
comments. The role of the humanities and social sciences
as content providers that feed screen and sonic media is
increasingly significant via the transformation of delivery
platforms through digital convergence [2]. In fact, when
assessing Florida’s full published research portfolio, the
commodification of scholarly research in the humanities
has been a minor part of his commentary on the creative
industries, often slotted into discussions of his ‘three T’s’
–technology, talent and tolerance. Florida’s Cities and the
creative class included only one chapter – ‘The univer-
sity, talent, and quality of place’ – that offered a presen-
tation of the enmeshed relationship between the new
economy and higher education. Perhaps recognizing this
absence, he addressed this link a year later when, with
Gary Gates, Brian Knudsen and Kevin Stolarick, he pub-
lished a research project funded by the Heinz Endow-
ments, titled The University and the Creative Economy.
In response to this document, which was released in
December 2006, our article for Nebula has a single ob-
jective. Our goal is to evaluate how the rise of the profes-
sional doctorate in universities aligns with – or discon-
nects from – ‘the creative economy.’ Over the last decade,
the institutional diversification of doctoral candidatures
has operated in parallel with the burgeoning – in policy
documents at least – creative industries. Our work takes
the release of Florida’s The University and the Creative
Economy as an opportunity to reevaluate and recontextu-
alize the two words ‘professional’ and ‘doctorate.’ [3]
Florida wanted the purpose of a University to be more
than ‘pumping out new ideas.’ While he is now consid-
ering the multiple roles of higher education in his more
recent publications, the place of postgraduate education
in facilitating technology, talent and tolerance is still
Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning Universities with the Creative Economy
10
unmentioned in the most recent report. Instead, he re-
mains interested in the concentration of students and the
number of academics in particular cities. [4] Subject or
discipline specialities, the number of postgraduates or the
type or mode of masters or doctorate were not deemed
relevant to his research. While revealing the number of
students, academics, universities, patent applications,
license income and invention disclosures [5] that build
into the Bohemian Index and the three Ts, greater preci-
sion is needed when aligning the postgraduate experience
and the creative industries. There is indeed much to dis-
cuss. Universities such as Deakin are offering a Doctor of
Technology and managing what Tom Maxwell describes
as “a negotiated compromise between the demands of the
workplace and the requirements for academic rigour,
especially in the need to relate the work to the literature
and in the quality of the exegesis.”[6] Reflecting upon
such a statement, it seems that the imperatives of work-
based case studies and problem solving can be awk-
wardly tethered to scholarship. Therefore, our paper
teases out the costs, gains and consequences of ‘work’
framing postgraduate ‘scholarship,’ ‘the creative’ in-
flecting ‘the industrial,’ and ‘the professional’ connec-
tivity to ‘the doctorate.’ We explore the creative ap-
proaches to research, and the consequences of housing
them in the directives of a professional doctorate.
The Doctor of Philosophy programme, at its most basic,
enrols scholars who have been successful in an under
graduate degree and grants them the opportunity to de-
velop research expertise within a specialist subject. Bob
Hodge has referred to these as “disciplinary doctorates”
in “hierarchically organized knowledges.” [7] The objec-
tive is to make an ‘original’ contribution to knowledge.
In the United Kingdom from the late 1980s – and through
the direct influence of the Research Councils – the PhD
began to incorporate notions of ‘research training,’
changing the character of the enterprise While many of
these candidatures, particularly in the sciences, are
funded by industry partnerships, the social sciences and
humanities reveal a greater diversity of funding sources
and enrolment patterns. A concrete and rapid commodi-
fication of intellectual property in the humanities and
social sciences is rare, as is the production of scholarly
monographs from theses. The transformation of the pub-
lishing industry has resulted in textbooks, with their revi-
sions and editions, swamping more specialized academic
publications. Notable exceptions include publishers such
as Ashgate, Pluto and university presses. Yet because of
this shrinking space for academic monographs, theses are
often read by examiners, lodged in libraries or released as
digital documents, but rarely accessed or cited. A few
refereed articles may emerge, but the outcomes of this
scholarly effort are often difficult to track, measure or
assess individually or institutionally. As a resource for
research development and commodification, doctorates in
the humanities and social sciences are an underutilized
resource.
In this underused and yet historically and academically
verified scholarly space, professional doctorates jut into
relevance, opening new spaces for learning, writing and
thinking. But the justification of education through the
ideologies of vocationalism, generic competencies, skill
development and work- related training also shrinks the
domination of disciplinary doctoral candidatures in post-
graduate education. In the last decade, there has been a
proliferation of different modes of doctorates, with Ste-
phen Hoddell, Deborah Street and Helena Wildblood
locating five distinct categories or modes.
traditional, research-based PhD
practice-based doctorates
professional doctorates
new route doctorates
PhD by publication [8]
The problem emerging through such a diversity of of-
ferings is how to ensure equivalence, as they all lead to a
doctoral qualification. In the United Kingdom, the QAA
in 2001 inferred that the learning outcomes for these di-
verse modes of doctorates should be the same.[9] This is
a difficult and – frankly – impossible task. For example,
Bill Green and Adrian Kiernander asked a series of ques-
tion about how a Doctor of Creative Arts – as a prac-
tice-based doctorate - transforms the status, process and
agenda of postgraduate scholarship.
What counts as and constitutes research? What counts
as and constitutes a doctorate? What is the relationship
between ‘research’ and the ‘doctorate,’ as a specific aca-
demic-educational credential? What relationship is there,
or perhaps should there be, between ‘research’ and doc-
toral education? And finally: what are the specific cir-
cumstances and challenges for the Creative Arts in this
context? [10]
These questions resonate awkwardly when assessing
the emerging – and often productive - gaps between a
conventional PhD in the Creative Arts, a Doctor of Crea-
tive Arts and the possibilities of professional doctorates
in the Creative Industries or Creative Arts. Through
their study, Green and Kiernander confirm that creative
arts “might well go either way.” [11] Like all liminal
formations, a space for professional doctorates in creative
arts – rather than practice-based work - raises a serious
epistemological issue: what ‘profession’ is actually being
discussed, labeled and described in and through this
Copyright © 2009 SciRes CE
Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning Universities with the Creative Economy11
qualification? While the ‘outcomes’ or ‘results’ are often
challenging to existing concepts of artistic creativity and
cultural production, they do not often have any immedi-
ate practical application in the way required by profes-
sional doctoral theses. Unlike nursing, medicine, engi-
neering, accountancy or management, there are no pro-
fessional bodies that accredit, examine or assess the
competency or excellence of ‘the professional.’ In re-
sponse to this absence, Gillies limited his definition of
Creative Arts to the visual and performing arts, including
design, music, drama and dance [12]. But the adjacent
‘field’ or ‘area’ that can be more strongly tethered to the
workplace and ‘the professions’ - creative industries - is
historically, theoretically and politically distinct from
creative arts, involving branding, design, skill develop-
ment and – more importantly – the commodification of
creativity through intellectual property rights and patents.
There has – so far – been no Doctor of Creative Indus-
tries.
Applying the concept of the professional doctorate in
relation to different notions of ‘the creative’ is a useful
way of opening up new scholarly spaces, but it may also
confine and compress humanities research into the tran-
sitory and changeable economic needs of the ‘creative
industries.’ There are opportunities in viewing proposals
for professional or practice-based doctorates in the arts
and media as choices to be fought over and new terrain to
be developed and occupied, rather than as developments
simply to be resisted in the name of the traditional role of
the academy.
This rise of the professional doctorate has been part of
a movement to align industry and the academy and is
now being met with disquiet from Florida. This mode of
doctorate not only captures a collective economic and
educational transformation, but is meant to slot into an
individual’s career. As the Council for Graduate Educa-
tion confirmed, the professional doctorate “is the per-
sonal development of the candidate (either in preparation
for professional activity or to advance further personal
skills and professional knowledge) and advancement of
the subject or profession.” [13] While most of these doc-
torates are not in the commercial sector – with the Doc-
torate in Business Administration being rarely awarded –
they are undertaken for career progression and to have a
more rounded view of a profession, becoming a ‘reflec-
tive practitioner.’ Such a focus on the ‘individual,’
‘skills’ and ‘personal development’ mobilizes language
and goals distinct from the original contribution to
knowledge that is the benchmark for the conventional
‘disciplinary’ doctorate. A danger of this movement is
that current institutional/professional practice is codified
and validated as knowledge which is then seen as either
challenging or trumping the abstract book-learning of
unworldly academics. As early as 1993, the British gov-
ernment expressed its concerns with the Doctor of Phi-
losophy.
The Government welcomes the growth of postgraduate
courses. It is concerned, however, that the traditional PhD
is not well-matched to the needs of careers outside re-
search in academia or an industrial research laboratory
[14].
This White Paper probed the industrial relevance of
research degrees, and was encouraging what Florida’s
critiqued: that Universities arch beyond the academy and
facilitate the commodification of ideas. More than a dec-
ade after the White Paper, the shape of much university
research has moulded to the immediate needs of industry.
Before 1992, when all polytechnics were bound by the
research degree regulations of the Council for National
Academic Awards (CNAA), research degrees were fash-
ioned as either a PhD or M. Phil. Since that year, institu-
tions have been permitted to deploy their own research
titles and curriculum. Yet a study in the late 1990s by
Bourner, Bowden and Laing revealed that – at that time -
few of the new universities were transgressing beyond
the two conventional qualifications. They argued that
“the new client groups lie outside of academia and indus-
trial research laboratories; in our study they lie in the
professions of engineering, education and manage-
ment.”[15] They proposed the benefits of a professional
doctorate that ensured a distinction from the PhD, but
allowed the development of new modes and forms of
scholarship for groups for whom PhDs serve little pur-
pose. In other words, the Doctor of Philosophy would not
be fractured by the professional doctorate, but separated
through distinct goals, methods and modes of learning.
New ‘markets’ of students would be attracted. Nearly a
decade later, in reassessing this earlier research project,
our goal is to reconfigure and reframe the suite of post-
graduate offerings within the discussions about a creative
economy emerging in the last three years. Perhaps the
professional doctorate can continue to serve the needs of
industry and personal development while the PhD can
reclaim and retain its function in wider scholarship based
in the disciplines. Yet Florida’s critique is important:
perhaps industry-led or channeled research will not create
the most innovative scholarship. It may reinforce already
existing practice, methods and agendas. Now that the
professional doctorates have gained a strong foothold in
both British and Australia universities, it is appropriate to
recognize the diversity of doctorates and programmes
while asking who are they for and the value of their ap-
Copyright © 2009 SciRes CE
Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning Universities with the Creative Economy
12
proaches to research.
The first Doctor of Philosophy awarded by an English
university was made in 1920. A DPhil at Oxford, [16] it
was followed by a PhD awarded from Cambridge the
following year. [17] Harvard awarded a Doctor of Educa-
tion in 1921. A much wider gap awaited the first PhD
awarded in Australia, which was in 1948 from the Uni-
versity of Melbourne. The University of Sydney followed
three years later [18]. Of most significance for this pro-
ject, Australia’s first professional doctorate was the Doc-
tor of Creative Arts at Wollongong in 1984. It predated
the qualifications in law (1989) [19] and education
(1990). In other words, while Australia was much later
in introducing a Doctor of Philosophy, the nation’s uni-
versities were much earlier initiating innovative and di-
versified higher degrees. This early establishment of a
DCA led to structural change in postgraduate administra-
tion. The U.K. would ollow in the diversification of these
awards after 1992. The first Ed.D emerged in England
that year at the University of Bristol, the same year as the
University of Warwick, the University of Manchester
Institute of Science and Technology and the University of
Wales introduced the Doctor of Engineering. By the end
of the 1990s, three quarters of the pre-1992 universities
and one third of the post-1992 universities delivered pro-
fessional doctorates.[20] A decade later, the function of a
professional doctorate was summarized by the UK Coun-
cil for Graduate Education (UKCGE).
A Professional Doctorate is a programme of advanced
study and research which, while satisfying the University
criteria for award of a doctorate, is designed to meet spe-
cific needs of a professional group external to the Uni-
versity, and which involves members of that group in the
design, development or delivery of the programme [21].
The Australian Vice Chancellors’ Committee offered a
similar determination: “the Professional Doctorate is spe-
cific to a discipline, aimed primarily at practitioners in
the field. The programme of study would be expected to
include advanced coursework, project activity and a re-
search component.”[22] Their imperative was for the
qualification to be specifically aimed at workers in a field,
with the curriculum designed through a partnership be-
tween professional groups and universities. Research is a
part of the submitted degree, but coursework and projects
are integral to the methods of delivery and assessment.
This narrative of professional doctoral development
shadows the emerging ‘requirements’ for skill develop-
ment in the creative economy. As Bowden, Bourner and
Laing reported, the increase in the number of these spe-
cialist and often industry-inflected doctorates has been in
the areas of education, business administration and engi-
neering.[23] But there has been a more productive and
provocative shift in the determination of research in the
professional doctorate degree, with methodological in-
novation in practice-based research, the deployment of
action research and reflexive consideration of the role of
the scholar in scholarship. Bowden, Bourner and Laing
describe, a shift in the role of the doctoral researcher
from spectator to agent. We hear much today of the im-
portance of evidence-based practice. The new generation
of professional doctorates in English and Australian uni-
versities offer the prospect of practice-based evidence.
This is an important development as it allows a new
tributary to flow into the stock of knowledge, one that
flows from the advancement of professional practice
[24].
While recognizing this innovation, a provocative ques-
tion still remains as to whether this alignment of engi-
neering, education and management with higher degrees
at universities cannibalizes – rather than proliferates -
already existing forms of scholarship. In this earlier re-
search, Bourner, Bowden and Laing recognized a distinc-
tion in the English university sector: pre-1992 universi-
ties ‘protected’ the doctorate, while post-1992 universi-
ties denied the diversification of doctorates.
Whereas the ‘old’ universities have been concerned to
protect the ‘gold standard’ of the PhD by allowing the
development of alternative titles for professional doctor-
ates, the ‘new’ universities have been more concerned to
avoid proliferation of new doctoral titles so that variants
have been squeezed into the PhD. This may reflect the
greater self-confidence of ‘old’ universities as
long-established awarding bodies [25].
Significantly, the decision of ‘old’ universities con-
flates with Florida’s recognition that university research
should offer more than industrial and work-related goals.
The difficulty for the ‘new’ universities was that they had
packed diverse programmers and agendas into the ‘tradi-
tional’ doctorate. Our earlier discussion of the creative
arts shows the intricate and ambiguous nature of these
decisions and definitions of disciplines, practices and
professions, and the impact on inter-disciplinary and
liminal areas of study. Provocatively, we therefore raise a
critical question in our creative approach to research
doctorates.
2.
What
is
Education
for? [26]
Tom Bentley asks a crucial question about the purpose of
education. A more specific inquiry that undergirds this
paper is to assess how this plurality of higher degrees
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Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning Universities with the Creative Economy13
impacts on the arts, humanities and social sciences, and
how this diversification may dovetail into the creative
economy. Of attention is how creative arts, creative in-
dustries and media studies are transforming the role and
purpose of higher degrees. There is a cost of vocational-
ism and interlinking education with work-related learning,
including the fragmentation of logical patterns in the de-
velopment of expertise, the de-centering or displacement
of areas that may not be of direct economic benefit, and
an implicit critique of traditional degree structures and
methods. For example, Usher was clear in his determina-
tion that the knowledge economy ‘replaces’ – rather than
enhances or diversifies - other directives for education.
The first thing that can be said about this is that it [the
knowledge economy] replaces an epistemological with an
economic definition of knowledge. Knowledge becomes
a factor of production, more critical in the production
process as economic performance comes to rely more and
more heavily on knowledge inputs … Economic growth
is now seen to be vitally dependent on the development
of an infrastructure that facilitates and enables sustainable
knowledge development [27].
Even in the EdD, the vocabulary from the creative in-
dustries palette - of partnership, outcomes and experi-
ences – permeates the discourse.
The EdD is based on a partnership between the Uni-
versity and the educational employers to provide candi-
dates with an integrated set of experiences enabling them
to demonstrate, through research scholarship, a set of
outcomes reflecting the qualities prized in modern pro-
fessional educators [28].
Experiences enable - and scholarship produces - a set
of outcomes for professionals. Underdiscussed in the
literature is how affirmations of lifelong learning and
professional/personal development can also mask a dis-
cussion of the commercialization of education. Terry
Flew reported that, learning, creating and applying
knowledge have become a continuous imperative for in-
dividuals and organizations, giving rise to a new idea –
lifelong learning. This means that people will need to
return to formal education more often during their life-
time and that learning will become a more explicit goal in
activities not formally designated as education, especially
work.
There is now more knowledge, and more demand for it,
than can be contained within a public sector infrastruc-
ture. New modes of access and knowledge creation are
required [29].
Terry Flew was resident in Australia when writing
these words. The context for the crispness and clarity of
his argument – without caveat - needs to be acknowl-
edged. A decade of neglect in humanities and social sci-
ence research in universities had reached such a scale that
Mike Kent reported that “it might be that it is too late
now to act to save the higher education sector in Austra-
lia as it now exists.”[30] The introduction of the Research
Quality Framework in Australia, which was a flawed
reproduction of the Research Assessment Exercise, de-
centres peer review and evaluation of scholarship in fa-
vour of ‘impact’ assessment through qualitative met-
rics.[31] Therefore, the success of the professional doc-
torate in Australia must be analyzed in a context where
research is being assessed for its impact and relevance to
industry or organizational performance, not disciplinary
innovation or recognition by peers.
Mark Tennant, like Flew, wrote about higher education
from the crucible of Howard’s Australia. He argued that
affirming a division, difference or distinction between
PhDs and professional doctorates is not an adequate
mechanism through which to convey the costs and con-
sequences of framing postgraduate education within the
creative industries and the knowledge economy. Tennant
contends that this analytical separation of the doctorates
in the research literature overshadows a more significant
discussion about the shift from ‘autonomous student’ to
‘enterprising self.’ [32] The words and phrases ‘flexible,’
‘reflexive,’ ‘managed information,’ ‘entrepreneurial,’
‘collaborative’ and ‘situated knowledge’ have hooked
into policies, curricula and mission statements. While
many of the battles about the legitimacy of a non-voca-
tional purpose for education have been lost in the under-
graduate curriculum, the doctorate remains a site of de-
bate, conflict and questioning about the role of economic
and work-related objectives in scholarship.
In the United Kingdom, the private sector already
spends more on training and education than government
[33]. In response, universities have become competitive
and market-oriented, using web-based platforms to sell
their courses beyond the geographical limits of student
catchment areas. Yet there has not only been a transfor-
mation in the mode of delivery, but also in the curriculum
itself.
Mark Tennant confirmed the scale of this change.
Perhaps one of the most important shifts is that the
demand for the ‘relevance’ of university curricula and
credentials, while not new, has certainly taken on a new
turn in the knowledge economy. Relevance no longer
equates with the ‘application’ of knowledge ‘to’ the
workplace, rather, the workplace itself is seen as a site of
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Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning Universities with the Creative Economy
14
learning, knowledge and knowledge production, hence
the term ‘working knowledge.’[34]
The professional doctorate was formed and valued as a
method to bridge industry and university, professional
development and scholarship. But even in the sciences,
Partha Dasgupta and Paul David have recognized the
importance of separating academic science and science
geared for industry, as short-term benefits would be em-
phasized over long-term developments that may not im-
mediately be profitable [35].
Creative industries courses and degree programmes
emerge from media, communication, art, design and cul-
tural studies departments. The history of many of these
programmes before the 1980s was shaped by the legacies
of scholars such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart,
E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall. Raymond Williams in
particular aimed to transform education for working class
citizens [36]. Preparing students for the transition to work
was not the goal. The aim was to develop consciousness
about all aspects of their lives - including their experi-
ences of, and aspirations for, paid employment - through
the insights of education. Currently, this project has been
inverted, with universities ‘mirroring’ the workplace, not
challenging the workplace. Without recognizing this his-
tory, Linda Ball reported on ‘the role of higher education’
in industry.
For its part, higher education will need to understand
the future of creative enterprises to help students and
graduates to learn about the industry and how to access
training and development opportunities. The implications
are that staff need to update their knowledge about the
world of work, take more responsibility for preparing
students for the transition to work and encourage multid-
isciplinary working to mirror what is happening in the
workplace. This involves a shift towards an outward-
looking culture providing a bridge with the real world,
extending beyond the formal undergraduate curriculum
[37].
Many ideologies dance through these sentences. The
ivory tower of scholarship is invoked and opposed to the
assumption that micro-businesses, the ‘independents’ and
the ‘creative class’ are ‘the real world.’ Repressed no-
tions include the possibility that university academics
hold expertise that may have a value additional to the
workplace and its immediate demands, or even that they
are knowledge workers in and of themselves who hold a
clear-headed understanding of their student cohort and
their curricula objectives. For Ball, the three year under-
graduate curriculum in art and design becomes the place
where all the life skills required for the ‘world of work’
need to be provided.
There is a consequence of such statements for post-
graduate education. If ambition is capped at ‘training and
development opportunities,’ then professional doctorate
will alter the brief of the higher education sector. Clearly
the DCA is an attempt to build the relationship between
‘work’ and ‘university,’ ‘creativity’ and ‘scholarship.’
The question is why researchers in subject areas and
scholarly disciplines would wish to ‘mirror what is hap-
pening in the workplace.’ Florida, Gates, Knudsen and
Stolarick believe that researchers can aim too low in their
standards, innovation and curriculum because of such
assumptions about students, teaching, learning and the
‘world of work.’
The university’s increasing role in innovation and
economic growth stems from deeper and more funda-
mental forces. The changing role of the university is
bound up with the broader shift from an older industrial
economy to an emerging Creative Economy ... Innova-
tion and economic growth accrue to those places that can
best mobilize humans’ innate creative capabilities from
the broadest and most diverse segments of the population,
harnessing indigenous talent and attracting it from out-
side [38].
Their goal is to open out universities to the diversity of
the population, not to narrow its interests to business and
the professions. Indeed, what if the current ‘the world of
work’ is not the best practice for the next generation’s
innovators in art, design, architecture, popular culture or
screen and sonic-based media?
New knowledges, like media studies and cultural stud-
ies, do not erase old knowledges but they may change the
credibility granted to these knowledges. Mark Tennant
was rightly critical of the binaries that separate paradigms
and degree structures, desiring a more integrated ap-
proach.
By making a conceptual (and binary) distinction be-
tween different types of knowledge, different types of
doctoral degrees and different types of persons undertak-
ing such degrees, universities have attempted to incorpo-
rate ‘working knowledge’ as an important addition to
their more traditional and enduring role of working
within disciplinary boundaries. But this scenario is not
sustainable, largely because the incorporation of working
knowledge into universities essentially subverts discipli-
nary communities by challenging what constitutes le-
gitimate knowledge … Moreover, the incorporation of
working knowledge into universities
demands new
structures and new ways of ‘doing business’ which create
significant policy and practical tensions [39].
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Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning Universities with the Creative Economy15
The separation of worker and scholar is unhelpful.
Through these binary distinctions, there remain simi-
larities between the ‘modes’ of doctorate. They still
require the supervision of a student by an expert in the
field. But the separation of the worker-earner-learner
from the scholar-discipline- specialist has impacted on
all postgraduate education. In Australia, the Council of
the Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies issued a
Statement of Generic Skills for Doctoral Candidates,
with a Joint Statement of the Research Council/AHRB
(now AHRC) Postgraduate Skills Requirements
emerging in the United Kingdom. All doctorates are
changing, beyond the demarcation of professional or
disciplinary doctorates The permeation of ‘generic
skills,’ rather than specialist knowledge, is having an
effect. There is motivation and reasons to enrol in a
professional doctorate. Jerry Wellington and Pat Sikes
found that their students in the EdD enjoyed the struc-
ture of the degree and how it fitted into the pattern of
their lives [40]. They became “researching profession-
als,” [41] forging a new work-based identity. Yet other
modes of identity formation through education can be
lost, denied or underwritten in such a narrative.
3. The New University?
The new economy seems to offer most people rather little.
Society is becoming more unequal. Experience of failure
is becoming widespread. More of the economy resembles
Hollywood: only a handful of the hundreds of projects
under development become films, only one in six films
released makes money and fewer still become hits [42].
4. Charles Leadbeater
Leadbeater’s argument about Hollywood is even more
decisively applied to Higher Education. Many forms and
modes of doctoral qualifications are being offered. Ex-
aminations are taking place and testamurs have been re-
leased. Yet there are few doctorates that contribute in a
measurable and quantifiable way to social, economic or
political change. They may provide professional devel-
opment for employees. They may improve productivity
and efficiency. But they also raise important questions
about the point and purpose of higher education and
scholarship. If our piece has an agenda, then it is to indi-
cate a danger and as a warning to proceed with caution.
The issue is not just – or indeed mostly – about the sub-
servience of universities to the commercial sector or the
need of industry. Most professional doctorates, unlike
much applied research, are in public or service sector
areas. The issue is whether the power/status of the ‘pro-
fessional’ is reinforced at the expense of non profession-
als, and through the promotion of an a priori dominance
of ‘real world’ knowledge drawn from current practice
over new theoretical or research-based empirical knowl-
edge.
Terms such as ‘the economy,’ ‘work,’ ‘industry’ and
‘vocation’ may too easily be conceded to a reductive
rendering of the university’s role. There is important
work to be commenced in this debate that is blocked
through the premature retreat to a moral/intellectual high
ground. It is more effective to investigate the ambiguities
and challenges of educational history. The study of ear-
lier modes and rationales for doctoral education is not
only productive but politically revelatory. The current
system, punctuated by the vocabularies of skill develop-
ment, work-based training, fees and debt, is distinct from
the humanist model offered by Henry Newman. His
‘idea’ of the university has little tether to our current in-
stitution. Much creative industries analysis has been
based on the university being the backbone and founda-
tion for economic development, but this structural role
lacks actual content. Through the industrial revolution,
the split between tradition and practicality foreshadowed
the division between education and training in the twenty
first century. The dual purposes of universities – teaching
and research – have consequences for the management of
both.
The relationship between professional doctorates
and/ in the creative industries can be over-simplified
through valuing of the ‘world of work’ over the acad-
emy. Of more significance is how we respect and de-
velop the social processes of education, health care,
material production and reproduction, sustainable de-
velopment and cultural production. The seizure of the
terms ‘economic,’ ‘wealth-creation’ and ‘innovation’
by a narrow market economy vision (one which would
have amazed and appalled Adam Smith) has com-
pressed the complex goals of university research into
only being valuable if the postgraduate earns a high
individual salary (the ‘graduate premium’) or if it fur-
thers Gross Domestic Product. If a qualification does
not fulfill this criterion, then it is discarded as of little
or no value. In 1994, Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny,
Schwartzman, Scott and Trow described this new
knowledge society and tracked the movement of
knowledge production away from universities. [43].
Application and development, not innovation and ex-
ploration, became the imperative. Such a model depleted
the role, function and purpose of a university. Perhaps the
professional doctorate was a way to reclaim some terri-
tory through aligning application with knowledge and
Copyright © 2009 SciRes CE
Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning Universities with the Creative Economy
16
work with learning. But the consequences of proliferating
doctorates have been stark. Both the 1996 Harris report
[44] and the 1997 Dearing report [45] expressed disquiet
about the state and rationale of postgraduate qualifica-
tions.
For Florida, Gates, Knudsen and Stolarick, universities
remain a “creative hub,” [46] the basis for developing
technology, talent and tolerance. However they also
stress the necessity for framing regional strategies and a
willingness to “mobilize and harness creative energy.”
[47] Such phrases are difficult enough to translate into
curriculum for undergraduates. It is not only complex but
perhaps unproductive to codify such objectives into a
skill set for doctoral education. However it is clear that
creative approaches to research remain a project and
agenda for not only this journal, but the university sector.
Is it the time for pragmatic compromise or a moment to
reclaim words like originality, scholarship and excellence?
Our role as workers in the field is to ensure that universi-
ties remain relevant, but that relevance is tempered and
shaped by much more than only work-based skills. Per-
haps by emphasizing the priority of use-value over ex-
change-value - in a new, fresh and broad vision of the
‘real world’ - universities can productively align their
purposes with not only those of the professions and the
new creative economy, but also those of the broader
population, whose needs all these organizations should
seek to serve.
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[1] Richard Florida’s Cities and the creative class, (New York:
Routledge, 2005), pp. 143–4.
[2] Stuart Cunningham charted this realization in his article
“Social and creative disciplines in ascent,” The Australian
Higher Education Supplement, July 10, 2002, pp. 33. He
stated that “we can no longer afford to understand the so-
cial and creative disciplines as commercially irrelevant,
merely civilising activities. They must be recognized as
one of the vanguards of the new economy.” Therefore, a
productive tension emerges between Cunningham’s wel-
coming of a ‘vanguard’ and Florida’s caution at Universi-
ties ‘pumping’ out new ideas.
[3] We also note and acknowledge the literature tracking the
transformation of the professional doctorate. Please re-
fer to TomMaxwell, “From first to second generation
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28, No. 3, August 2003, pp. 279–291.
[4] R. Florida, G. Gates, B. Knudsen and K. Stolarick, The
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Table nine in this document focuses on “Students con-
centration.” This heading refers to the proportion of stu-
dents in a specific city and region, not - with a missing
apostrophe - the capacity of scholars to understand their
lectures, tutorials or readings.
[5] ibid. Table six reports “University Licensing Income and
Startups,” and table seven reports the “Correlations be-
tween University and regional technology measures.”
[6] Maxwell, pp. 281.
[7] B. Hodge, “Monstrous knowledge: doing PhDs in the
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[8] S. Hoddell, D. Street, H. Wildblood, “Doctorates – con-
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[11] ibid., pp. 112.
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Copyright © 2009 SciRes CE
Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning Universities with the Creative Economy
Copyright © 2009 SciRes CE
17
[17] R. Simpson, How the PhD came to Britain: a century of
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[24] ibid., pp. 21.
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[33] Flew, pp. 83.
[34] Tennant., pp. 431
[35] P. Dasgupta and P. David, “Toward a new economics of
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[36] R. Williams, Politics and Letters, (London: New Left
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[38] Florida, Gates, Knudsen and Stolarick, op. cit., pp. 2.
[39] Tennant, pp. 434.
[40] J. Wellington and P. Sikes, “A doctorate in a tight com-
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[41] ibid., pp. 729.
[42] C. Leadbeater, Living on thin Air, (London: Viking,
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[43] M. Gibbons, C. Limoges, H. Nowotny, S. Schwartzman,
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dynamics of science and research in contemporary society,
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[44] M. Harris, Review of Postgraduate Education, 1996,
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[45] R. Dearing, Higher education in the learning society, The
National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education,
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[46] R. Florida, G. Gates, B. Knudsen and K. Stolarick, The
University and the Creative Economy, Heinz Endow-
ments, December 2006, pp. 1.
[47] ibid., pp. 3.