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Interview: ‘Education is the goal’

Pieter Drenth

Pieter Drenth still remembers each of the forty PhD stud-ents he supervised in the last forty years by name. About half of them were members of the Psychology faculty, where he himself was appointed lector [roughly equivalent to Associ-ate Professor], shortly after his own PhD and a brief appoint-ment in the United States. When he later became Professor and later still rector [president] of the vu University Amsterdam, he began supervising PhD students morę from a distance as the promotor, together with a daily supervisor who provided the direct contact. The other half of his PhD students were external PhD students, not employed by the vu but, for example, working in business or affiliated to a foreign university. He still knows exactly who graduated cum laude, who had problems with getting on and who, unfortunately, had to terminate their project prematurely.

‘For the people who were working for me, I was always very strict: the thesis must be completed on time. They had a position with obligations after all. For external PhD students it did not matter. They often wrote a thesis in their spare time, while also pursuing a job. What you see is that when the regular PhD students have not completed the bulk of their thesis within four years, the work usually becomes very difficult. In my field, Industrial Psychology (later Labor and Organizational Psychology), a lot of the PhD students are already working in the corporate world, have their own business or are starting one.

‘Thesis research has changed in character over time. It is morę limited and morę a part of the research program of the department now. Nowadays, the subjects are often no longer chosen by the PhD student. Previously you agreed on a topie and sometimes it took ages before you finalized a detailed research plan. Previ-ously there was also less pressure on the PhD process because it was not yet a reąuirement for academic Staff to hołd that title. Nowadays it is, however. I was one of the first to implement that in my department, because I think you cannot train people as academics if you do not have a PhD yourself. I think the focus of the PhD today should be on the educational aspeets. It is no longer a lifes work, but part of the training through which the PhD student demonstrates independent thinking, the ability to carry out research and to write about it clearly. ‘In my experience, the combination of a PhD program and work is the hard-