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In Indonesia, PhD students blow the whistle on bad supervision
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PhD students at Indonesian universities say that the quality of supervision in the nation is often poor, and that many supervisors engage in inappropriate behaviour.Credit: epsgalery85/Shutterstock
When Rully Charitas Prahmana went to the United States as a visiting lecturer, the academic culture shock was extreme. “I was surprised to see an academic supervisor go cycling with his PhD students on the weekend,” says Prahmana, a mathematics lecturer at Ahmad Dahlan University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and a visiting researcher at the Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.
Prahmana can’t imagine that kind of interaction at home, describing himself as being in the minority for occasionally holding informal discussions with students in a warung, small street-food stalls or restaurants that are common across Indonesia. Many of his colleagues never meet their students in casual settings, he says.
PhD candidate–supervisor relationships in the southeast Asian archipelago nation are often less centred around direct scientific supervision in a laboratory or throughout a research project than in much of the rest of the world’s PhD programmes. Many early-career researchers instead say that they only meet supervisors for brief formal discussions, to sign research proposals, or to sign off on their dissertations. Students at larger and more prestigious institutions sometimes have more direct supervision, but “mostly, what we have is power asymmetry”, says Prahmana.
“I met my supervisors routinely but instead of supervising me, they were gossiping about other lecturers,” says one of 11 PhD students interviewed for this article. Several individuals requested anonymity to protect their careers.
Some described being asked to take on tasks at personal expense. One interviewee, for example, said that she had to pay for access to sampling sites before doing her wet-lab research. “I need to take out 200,000 rupiah [around US$12] every week for a year per sampling site,” says the student. All told, she was spending around $1,700 a year on her sampling work. The average monthly salary in Indonesia is around $200.
“I am sure there are many professors who treat students unfairly,” says an anonymous student in Semarang, Indonesia.
“But we are forced to accept what our supervisors say because we just want to graduate soon,” says another.
Some young academics argue that the problem of bad supervisors stems from poor management of PhD programmes in Indonesia, which aims to increase its population of doctoral graduates from around 75,000 to 125,000 by 2045. Brian Yuliarto, the nation’s minister for higher education, science and technology, says that this ambition will drive economic growth. National statistical data are patchy, with broad censuses every ten years, but Indonesia has an estimated 64 million people between the ages of 16 and 30. Yuliarto describes this group — 22% of the country’s population — as “a demography bonus”, telling Nature that the nation needs “to transform them into highly qualified human resources”.