Letter: Constructive neglect
Barbara Tomlins complains about some PhD supervisors, no doubt with
reason (Letters, 12 May). I was lucky. I had, in Professor Patrick Buxton
at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the perfect supervisor.
He believed in ‘constructive neglect’. He was available to be consulted,
he could be devastatingly critical when this was appropriate, he made useful
suggestions, but he left his research students to get on with their work.
He never wrote students’ theses for them. He encouraged us to publish our
work, and he was a severe critic of what we wrote, but he insisted that
we did all the writing, and our papers were generally accepted by reputable
journals.
The most dangerous supervisor is not the lazy exploiter described by
Tomlins, but the one who spoonfeeds students. This results in people successfully
obtaining a qualification for which they are unsuitable; this is demonstrated
by the way quite a number of those holding PhDs never produce anything original
after qualifying. As one who has examined many candidates, my most embarrassing
experience has been to find that I am examining the supervisor rather than
the candidate. It is with some shame that I confess that I have generally
allowed these candidates to pass.
Kenneth Mellanby Cambridge
Letter: Constructive neglect
I was surprised by Barbara Tomlins’s letter. Each of her complaints
against supervisors was quite disturbing. But it was their number which
I found most surprising. I was expecting many more. She should see the length
of my list! However, I have no desire to exchange horror stories concerning
poor supervision. No. I wish rather to ask: what are we doing about it?
In fact I’d like to raise several questions.
How many universities and polytechnics monitor the quality of their
research student support system (of which supervisors are just a part),
and have an active improvement programme? How many ask students to identify
problems (or strengths) and make suggestions? How many have any form of
training for supervisors? It need not be much, but ‘One can’t teach research
or how to supervise’ is too often an excuse for doing nothing. At least,
given that there are many good supervisors, how many departments promote
learning and actively spread best practice? These are all questions which
have concerned Cambridge University Graduate Union as problems make us aware
of increasing pressures on the system and our members. In our experience,
at present the answer to all of them is: ‘precious few’.
It is all very well to leave these matters to individuals, to rely on
informal systems. But surely experience has taught us that there are better
ways to add to knowledge than isolated, unstructured, trial and error. At
least one should obtain feedback on results, publish and encourage discussion.
All departments do this for the research they produce; few do anything similar
for the researchers.
Doing a PhD can be hell. It may be that this furnace is necessary to
refine those that are pure enough in spirit for research. But that is no
reason not actively to study and improve the process. Even if the results
are not improved, reducing the heat a little may achieve the same results
with less wasted energy and money.
Rather than saying how hot it is, can we not together try to open a
window?
A. C. C. Brennan Graduate Union Executive Cambridge University
Letter: Early learning
Alan Handyside is rather wide of the mark in suggesting that the Victorians
were the first to recognise sex-linked diseases (‘Sex and the single cell’,
21 April). The Talmud, in the early centuries AD, described the inheritance
of haemophilia with great accuracy, even exempting the sons of women with
haemophiliac brothers from circumcision, but not the sons of unaffected
brothers.
They may not have known why but they did at least appreciate the facts
of X-linkage.
Natalie Danford Swansea
Letter: Private science
I am sure that many other science teachers at independent schools were
as dismayed as I was at John Galloway’s somewhat frivolous article ‘Working
class honours: the not-so-glittering prizes’ (28 April). Galloway seems
to have extrapolated from figures for university admissions the conclusion
that sciences in independent schools are an unpopular option which few pupils
follow. I can assure him that the opposite is the case. Often I have heard
the cry from humanities teachers that the sciences ‘cream off’ the best
pupils. Most independent schools have flourishing science departments which
attract at least their fair share of pupils into A-level courses. This is
not surprising since many independent schools have been at the forefront
of developments in science teaching from the mid-19th century to the present
day.
The problem comes when choices for higher education and careers are
made. It is certainly true that many science A-level pupils in independent
schools decide to enter careers in finance, law and medicine, rather than
scientific research. Why is this? Not, I feel, because their science teaching
has put them off; perhaps it is because they see that the rewards their
well-off parents have achieved are not matched by the rewards of a career
in scientific research. I am sad that pupils are basing their decisions
on pecuniary considerations, but that seems to be the way of our society
today.
> Peter Ellis Ryde School Isle of Wight
Letter: Wonderful biology
I hasten to assure Jerry Simon that he is not wrong to be studying biology
to further his interest in wildlife conservation (Letters, 12 May), but
maybe he has chosen the wrong place to do so. The successful conservation
of wildlife does indeed depend far more on detailed understanding of the
biology and ecology of species than on emotion and wonder, but a combination
of both approaches can be very effective.
It never ceases to amaze me how many academic biologists study the subject
without any apparent interest in whole, living organisms and continue to
despise ecology and conservation as ‘soft science’ in their ignorance of
the extent to which these branches of the subject have now developed their
own rigour. Perhaps this rejection of ecology and conservation biology arises
because these areas are too complex for their narrowly focused minds and
may help to explain why, in many institutions, these subjects have been
taken over by geographers, who traditionally take a wider view, but do not
really understand the biology of animals and plants as separate species.
Mary Burgis Ascot, Berkshire
Letter: Head and heart
I heartily agree with Robert Pritchard that freedom and responsibility
go hand in hand, and that accurate knowledge is an indispensable tool for
responsible choice (Forum, 12 May).
I fear, though, that he is too sanguine in imagining that a sound factual
knowledge base is all that is required for people to make and adhere to
wise decisions around HIV/AIDS.
Neither sexual desire nor drug dependence are primarily rational. All
of us (even professors) sometimes make risky choices that our ‘head’ warns
us against and our ‘gut’ impels us to. We cannot assume that knowing oneself
or someone else to be HIV-positive will end all unsafe behaviour.
Trained counsellors do not ‘manipulate’, ‘cajole’ or tell people ‘what
they should or should not do’. We use our skills to explore together with
our clients all the relevant aspects of their situation – and each individual’s
is unique – so as to enable them to arrive at their own preferred best answers.
Antony Grey London NW2
Letter: Cold comfort
I agree with much of what David Olivier says in his article ‘A cool
solution to global warming’
(12 May). However, I do not believe that he is right in saying that
quoting the electricity consumption in kWh per day is ‘unhelpful’ to purchasers
of refrigerators because it prevents them comparing ones of different sizes.
His alternative, of labelling appliances with their annual consumption in
kWh/litre, is actually more misleading.
All other things being equal, there is a substantial decrease in energy
consumption expressed in kWh/litre as refrigerators get bigger. Large ones
thus appear more efficient on this criterion than smaller ones, even though
the larger ones use more electricity in total. It would be very unhelpful
to the planet if people bought large energy-guzzling refrigerators on the
basis of a mistaken belief about their efficiency when smaller ones would
meet their needs.
John Feather London NW3
Letter: Cold comfort
David Olivier’s article on power-hungry fridges brought to mind a similar
situation in the marketing of gas fires. When buying a gas fire the consumer
is often denied easy access to information about the appliance’s efficiency.
Some manufacturers quote either an input or an output power only. Most other
manufacturers give the input in BTU/hr and the output in kW.
In fact, the efficiency of common gas fires varies from about 20 per
cent to 80 per cent depending on the type. Since of its very nature a fire
is a large energy user, this variation in inefficiency can correspond to
a difference in running cost that swamps the initial cost. Payback times
of more efficient fires can be very short. The saving in emissions is similarly
large.
Again in this area, good environmental policy requires that the consumer
be given more information. The benefits of such information are great compared
with the cost of providing it. Why is this an area where British governments
have to be pushed to act?
M. D. Ellse Monmouth, Gwent
Letter: Earthly powers
According to recent reports, one child in three thinks that the Sun
goes round the Earth while apparently two Sunday Times journalists out of
two and one Ariadne out of one (5 May) think that the Earth goes round the
Sun. Meanwhile, some of us are wondering what goes round in some people’s
heads. Since we can choose to describe motion from any frame of reference,
both viewpoints are equally valid. Heretics and believers alike, we are
all correct. The fact that a Sun-centred description may be simpler does
not make it truer and, since Earth is where we live, those maligned schoolchildren
were (perhaps unwittingly) showing more common sense than the journalists.
Dilwyn Edwards Thames Polytechnic, London
Letter: Westward ho
I have been a bit late in reading your correspondence on how to find
north or south using a wrist watch, as New 杏吧原创 has a fairly long distribution
list in the Royal New Zealand Air Force. However, with reference to locating
south (in your case north) with a digital watch (‘Digital manoeuvres’, Letters,
10 February 1990), the method is to whirl t around your head and let it
go, in which case it has gone west. A simple 90 degree turn in the appropriate
direction gives north or south.
J. C. Welch Blenheim, New Zealand