What exactly is a doctoral school? I am hardly alone in asking this question when the term appears in calls for proposals, and when doctoral students – and sometimes I myself – are invited to participate in a doctoral school. The Doctoral School in the Humanities has been part of Stockholm University since 2016. The doctoral school is open to all of the faculty’s doctoral students (as well as doctoral students from other faculties and higher education institutions, space permitting) and has extensive activities.
The aim is to make it easier for doctoral students to achieve their degree objectives, for example by offering more courses with different specialisations, and to promote scientific and social contacts and networks through a varied range of courses. Similar objectives can be found in the subject-specific doctoral schools that exist at several other higher education institutions and at our university. Some of these are relatively well defined, with clear start and end dates and a limited number of participants. Some are networks built over many years of collaboration between higher education institutions – including institutions outside of Sweden’s borders.
Doctoral schools can be established with research grant funding or with external grants – as a result of major research projects or programmes. The Swedish Research Council has supported doctoral schools on several occasions, and now has two open calls in the humanities, law and social sciences. At least nine doctoral students must be part of the doctoral school, and at least two higher education institutions must participate in the application. There are a wealth of possibilities for the applicant institutions in terms of how they design the doctoral school, but I wonder what the actual application assessment process is like, and how it will be possible to grade and rank something that has long had so many differences in form and content.
It may be that transparency is necessary in order to safeguard the diversity of research within each doctoral school. Perhaps our doctoral schools simply reflect the diversity that exists and should exist in universities and colleges? And then the concept of a doctoral school may well remain open, multifaceted and dynamic.
This is a text written by Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre, Deputy Vice President and Professor of German, under the subject line “Words from the University's Senior Management Team”, where different members of the university’s management team take turns writing about current issues. “Words from the University's Senior Management Team” is included in each issue of “News for Staff”, a newsletter that is sent to all university employees.