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THE CREATIVE PHD
 THE CREATIVE PHD

Challenges, Opportunities, Reflection

TARA BRABAZON
Flinders University, Australia

TIFFANY LYNDALL-KNIGHT
Flinders University, Australia

NATALIE HILLS
Flinders University, Australia

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India

Malaysia – China
Emerald Publishing Limited
Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2020

© 2020 Tara Brabazon, Tiffany Knight and Natalie Hills.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any
form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without
either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying
issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright
Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst
Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald
makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application
and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83982-793-8 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83982-790-7 (Online)
ISBN: 978-1-83982-792-1 (Epub)
 CONTENTS

Prologue
Tara Brabazon

Introduction
Tara Brabazon

1 The Specificity of Creative-led Theses

Tara Brabazon

2 The Creative-led PhD: A Student’s Perspective

Tiffany Lyndall-Knight

3 Strategies for Students Considering a Creative-led Doctorate

Tara Brabazon

4 Multimodality: Reflection, Connection and Reframing

Tara Brabazon

5 Creative-led Examinations and the Administrator’s Perspective

Natalie Hills

Conclusion: Why the Creative Doctorate Matters

 Tara Brabazon

References

Index
 PROLOGUE
Tara Brabazon

I am 28 years of age and sitting in a university higher degree

committee as a faculty representative. Three examiner reports are
being discussed by the committee for a performance-based PhD. The
results were a B (minor corrections), a D (restructure and re-
examination), and F (predictably, a fail). The thesis was composed of
an artifact and exegesis, a live performance and 40,000 words of a
research frame to contextualize it. The examiners were sent a video
of the performance, and the D and the F results offered a
commentary about the quality – or lack thereof – of the recording.
Also, the exegesis appeared to re-tell the script of the performance
rather than explore why and how this performance created new
knowledge. The quality of the “art” was irrelevant. What was the
research? Where was the research? What was the object of
discussion? How was originality created, proven and verified through
such a doctoral thesis?
It was a mess and because of the nature of the performance, it
was impossible to re-create the event in a way that would satisfy the
examiners. How could a thesis such as this be “re-examined” – as
required by one of the three examiners? I was a young researcher
and early career researcher given an opportunity to be on a
university-level governance committee. I was inexperienced and
privileged to be learning from more weathered colleagues. Yet, there
was no resolution from these senior academics, gathered from an
array of disciplines. The problems were multiple: what was being
examined and what were the relationships between the two
components?
Cut to a decade later. I am 38 years of age. A PhD student has
been bounced around the University of Brighton where I am Chair of
Media. Supervisors have walked away from this project as if the
student is carrying a contagious, air-borne disease. Her four films
have been demeaned and dismissed as “lacking quality.” The
exegesis remained unread, but explained the nature of the films and
the research within them. As the document had never been read,
the films were being evaluated with profoundly subjective criteria.
Her institutional PhD file was thick with commentary from research
managers questioning the “quality” of the “art.” The student had a
different purpose and inflection. The candidate had written the
thesis with a very clear frame around the films. These visual and
sonic objects were not self-standing works of “art.” The sonic and
visual artifacts were ways of thinking.1 The student had produced
the films and written the exegesis concurrently, so they dialoged
tightly and effectively. The artifacts informed, framed and developed
practice and iteratively created knowledge, as demonstrated through
the exegesis. But even with my leverage as a professor, I could not
support the student through to completion at this university. Instead,
she submitted at a different institution and passed easily and without
corrections or caveats. Therefore, the research leadership at the
time was incompetent and wrong. Yet, the consequences of that
error – if the student’s supervisor had not been senior and
experienced enough to recognize the quality of the thesis and have
the capacity to recommend admission and submission at another
university – is that the student would have walked away, another
statistic in the overwhelmingly shameful attrition figures emerging
from doctoral education. But in this case, unsubstantiated
statements about “art” were used to demean the student and
research. A good outcome was reached through these conflictual
interpretations of cultural value by leaving one institution and
submitting at another.
 The clock hands circle one more decade. I am 48 and the Dean of
Graduate Research at Flinders University. PhD students – their
admission, candidature and examination – are now my responsibility,
focus and priority. Once more, I see a soap opera of assumptions,
errors, flaws and debates about “quality” in the discussion of
creative-led thesis. The difference this time is that I can do
something about this situation. What has been revealed through my
academic career is that silos of “creatives” have been built, filled
with (over) confidence and dated assumptions of cultural value. The
research has been lost through the propulsive focus to create “art.”
There are proxies for these problems. Long candidatures. Mental
health issues from the students. Multiple changes in supervision.
Attrition. Yet, the goal remains: blame the student for the “failure.”
Each individual student is to blame for their own inability to
complete, rather than the institution, supervisor or system.
That individualization of student blame ceases in this book. Three
people – an academic and dean of graduate research, a creative-led,
successfully graduated PhD student and experienced and awarded
actor, and a professional staff member who heads doctoral
examinations in a university – have aligned to create the book in
your hands. Whether you are an administrator, academic, student or
supervisor, the time has come for all of us as a community to
improve the situation of the creative-led, practice-led, practice-based
PhD. The conflation and bagginess of phrasing is challenging
enough. How we implement standards and international protocols of
accountability, rigor and transparency remains even more complex.
Unfounded, ambiguous, class-ridden assumptions of “quality” and
“art” must be discredited. Theories of research and originality must
be centered. We are now post-post-poststructuralism. We are now
post-post-postmodernism. Indeed, we have never been
postmodern.2 Instead, we are supervising, learning and managing in
the simulacrum. We open the door to the post-art PhD and show
how research values will transcend and transform cultural value.
Artistic “quality” cannot be examined. Research can be examined.
This book guides scholars, students and managers through
implementing and understanding that difference.

NOTES

1. Ambrozic, M., & Vettese, A. (Eds.) (2013). Art as a thinking

process: Visual forms of knowledge production. Berlin: Sternberg
Press.
2. Redhead, S. (2011). We have never been postmodern. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
 INTRODUCTION

Tara Brabazon

This book has been decades in the making. Three professional

careers converge to enable this book. The differing positions and
perspectives are important. A dean, who is also a supervisor and
examiner and has worked around the world, offers one particular
lens. A successful student, an experienced and successful actor who
has translated her professional life into academia, offers another,
distinctive and remarkable view. Finally, the administrator of a
University’s higher degree examinations, a writer of regulations and
a daily engager with students, supervisors and examiners, reveals a
special, distinctive and frequently invisible and marginalized view.
Together, these views align, conflate and focus on the problems in
the doctoral space. The diverse voices, views and spaces have been
necessary to write this book because the focus is unusual, complex,
confused, conflated, marginalized, decentered or ignored. This
monograph focuses attention on the artifact and exegesis mode of
doctorate. This is the first book that aligns this challenging form of
research degree with the diversity of stakeholders in the process.
The timing is correct and appropriate for such a book. Higher
Education is moving through so many changes that an array of
scholarly monographs attach “zombie” to their title (Payne, 2016). A
dead structure, a university’s policies and procedures, imperatives
and purpose, seem to hang like dead flesh off a carcass. At such a
time, the PhD is a beacon of hope, of promise, of a better future.
Students in this program may move higher education – and
workplaces more generally – into a positive, proactive, innovative,
transformative knowledge economy. Such hopes may be utopic, but
it is timely to ponder the status and stature of a PhD in difficult
times for international higher education.
Through the impact of research assessment exercises such as the
RAE, REF and ERA, disciplines have retracted to their conservative
cores. “Impact” and “engagement” are measured and assessed.
Citations are counted. Journal rankings are evaluated. For a PhD
student trying to succeed in this system, they gain from fitting –
snugly – into a discipline, selecting a supervisor who can write them
an effective reference, and quietly building their CV.
Interdisciplinarity, postdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are not
rewarded.1 Intellectual silos are validated by the research
ecosystem: journal gatekeepers, academic publishers and even the
coding of publications in research management portals. While
Siomonn Pulla and Bernard Schissel rightly summon the “applied
interdisciplinary researcher” (Pulla & Schissel, 2016), the question
remains how this scholar is positioned in a research culture where
“outputs” are measured and managed through disciplinary codes.
This market-driven, economic focused research and educational
formation is often described as the neoliberal university. That
ideological description is not quite accurate. There is no doubt that
market forces have gained a primacy in universities that have not
been witnessed in their history. The irony that higher education is
deploying such ideologies at the point where their failure has been
so clearly demonstrated through the Global Financial Crisis remains a
moot point. But the reason neoliberalism nestled so comfortably into
higher education is because universities through the twentieth
century were lacking a purpose, mission, agenda or aim. As more
students gained a degree, what was the point of a university beyond
credentialing for the workforce? If the university had a clearly
marked and disseminated “project,” then neoliberalism would not
have been as successful in its migration into the institution and
organizational structure. Instead, the university is a husk, an empty
vessel, a zombie organization. It can be invaded and infiltrated with
ease by the ideologies that are fashionable during a particular time.
There are hopes and opportunities beyond this assembly line for
degrees. Richard Hill was both disingenuous and generalized.

The ideological foundations of higher education, and the

work-place relations, practices and organizational systems
that define them, have turned universities from public
institutions into money-making corporations, sites of mass
consumption and industrial training centres suited to the
requirements of the neoliberal economy. (Hill, 2015)

His premise is based on a nostalgic vision of the university that

never existed. Through its institutional history before neoliberalism,
it was a colonizing, patriarchal institution that enabled those with
wealth to perpetuate it. Nostalgia is not the answer to the lack of a
“project” in the contemporary university. Hill argued that this
marketized system has revealed a profound impact on doctoral
education. But the “evidence” used and shape of his argument were
unconvincing.

Many of the students I spoke to attributed much of their

stress to the pressure placed on them by supervisors eager
to secure completion. Invariably, the upshot is a
dehumanized, functional experience in which students are
regarded more as purveyors of outcomes than people with
feelings and genuine intellectual aspirations. (Hill, 2015, p.
175)

It does not enter his argument that students gain from rapid
completions. Is he recommending that students remain in the
university year after year as unpaid or underpaid research assistants,
never able to move on to the next stage of their lives?
A better case is made when probing neoliberalism in the academy
through tracking the commitment to particular methods. Daniel
Saunders, Ethan Kolek, Elizabeth Williams and Ryan Wells argued
that the methodologies enacted to research higher education
overwhelming deploy quantitative methods.

Neoliberal ideology presupposes the quantification and

inherent commensurability of all individuals, actions and
outcomes, and approaches social, cultural or political
problems as individual issues with technical solutions … As
such, knowledge creation in neoliberalized spaces centers
around quantitative analyses based on sophisticated models
and advanced statistical procedures. (Saunders, Kolek,
Williams, & Wells, 2016)

This functionalist knowledge creation attempts to demonstrate

that political imperatives do not shape research. The key tropes of
research methods – accountability, transparency and repeatability –
have been stretched to an extreme. Quantitative methods are more
“representative” and therefore more accurate. Through quantitative
methods, the truth is revealed to researchers. At this point, a
commitment to the empirical spills into empiricism. Furthermore, not
only are qualitative projects demeaned and decentered, but
theoretical projects must fight for space and currency. This is not a
humanities issue. Theoretical physics, pure mathematics and
research into financialization in Business faculties and disciplines all
require complex and intricate engagement in and production of
theory. Theory remains demeaned through the clichés hooked into
our language. It is “just a theory.” There is nothing “just” about
theory. It is a propulsive formation. It shapes. It contours. It
configures. In theoretical times (Redhead, 2017), theory is the
strategy to reimagine and revision not only the “project” of the PhD,
but the “project” of the university.
One area of the university has particularly suffered through the
focus on quantitative methods, industry, impact and engagement:
the humanities. Through vocational ideologies in the twentieth
century, the humanities became the ugly stepsisters in the STEM
Cinderella narrative. Clumsy, needy, gobby and delusional, Minerva2
and Brigit3 stumble through the contemporary university, baying
their worth and value. Yet, cultural value is not an absolute variable.
It is a debateable ideology. Post-poststructuralism, post-
postmodernism, after the wars on an adverb (“Terror”), and the
Global Financial Crisis that confirmed the arrogance, self-absorption
and greed of a few to the cost of many, what is the humanities
“for”? In response, instead of answering this question with rigor,
clarity and consideration, the arts has entered its silo –locked inside
its Virilian bunker – and commenced echo chamber conversations
within increasingly misshapen and shrunken disciplines. Assumptions
have replaced arguments. We – as scholars and citizens – require
those arguments. They must be robust, expansive and stretch the
parameters of knowledge. The comprehensive university is fighting
for its place and worth. Without the humanities, higher education
transforms into a different institution, one guided by vocationalism,
empiricism, laboratories, clinical environments and quantitative
methodologies. It is important that this moment of change be logged
and understood. If more is required of knowledge, scholars and
expertise than bench-derived knowledge, then the path back to that
meaningful intellectual landscape will require evidence, debate and
considered commentary, rather than arching back to nineteenth
century conversations with a metaphoric Matthew Arnold validating
“sweetness and light ” (Arnold, 1986).
Vocationalism takes a particular form in undergraduate education
and manifests overtly into “employability” through doctoral education
(Sin & Amaral, 2016). Graduate employability is measured and used
in institutional rankings and league tables. Through the Bologna
Process’s third cycle, employability was also one of the areas added
to the doctoral program as of importance (Bologna Process Third
Cycle, 2009). All these debates are founded on the assumption that
higher education providers are “responsible” for the employability of
their graduates. In other words, university degrees and academics
must train – not educate – students into the needs of the labor
market. Termed by Neave “entrepreneurial utilitarianism” (Neave,
2013), teaching, education and learning are collapsed into training.
 Universities remain a space apart. For all the affirmations, policies
and hard work aligning gown and town, universities are a place
where the minority of each generation attend classes, complete
assignments and then graduate, rarely returning to the institution
after the attainment of a degree. Frank Furstenberg revealed an odd
surprise in the preface to his book: “I am always amazed at how
little newcomers know about what goes on behind the academic
curtain” (Furstenberg, 2013). The inverted question is much more
interesting. Why would there be detailed knowledge about
universities generally, and a PhD specifically? The identity label of a
“student” – even a doctoral student – is a transitory one.
Contemporary political policies and funding decisions reshape and
retexture the university with every funding cycle. But this means that
every undergraduate – and every PhD student – enters a program
with little socialization, literacy, context or a frame to understand
what they will experience and what will be required of them.
Academia is unstable as an industry and workforce. Universities are
also increasingly diverse and reveal a long tail in terms of quality and
priorities. The University of British Columbia has little in common
with the University of Bolton, beyond featuring the word “university”
in the title.
The reasons and motivations that guide a student into a PhD
rarely sustain them through the program. As Michael Fennell stated,
“starting out on a PhD is a life-changing event and achieving it will
come at a cost” (Fennell, 2013). Yet, the program remains difficult to
understand because of its diversity and complexity. Every student
arrives into their program with different hopes and expectations.
There has never been more PhD students in the history of our
universities than right now. There has never been a greater diversity
of students –in terms of age, race and educational background –
than in our present. Therefore, to cite Lenin, “What is to be done?”
(Lenin, 1902)
This book will focus on one component of the doctoral program:
the creative-led thesis. Deploying many titles and names, it is the
most unusual mode in which the doctorate exists. An artifact, which
can include a sonic or visual presentation, a novel, an epic poem,
design, art installations or a performance, is “submitted” to
examination with an attendant exegesis. From the Greek and
meaning “explanation, ” it is a written text that demonstrates and
confirms the research and originality of the artifact. The slippage
between these modes and objects creates challenges for students,
supervisors, examiners and professional staff managing the process.
This book is “about” the creative-led thesis. But it is also “about”
a great deal more. These theses are proxies, they are canaries in the
intellectual mine. They capture the complexities and confusions of
doctoral education and summon a provocative meta-question. What
are we doing in doctoral education? What is the point? Who is it for?
Through the oddly tangled space of the artifact and exegesis, some
tropes and tools to reinvigorate and regenerate our universities may
be discovered.

NOTES

1. While recognizing the profound value of transcending disciplines,

we also wish to log the importance of understanding the discourse,
context, history and trajectories of disciplines. It is impossible to
transcend disciplines without understanding their boundaries and
borders. While under-developed particularly for doctoral education,
there is incredible potential in the research of Lent (2016).
2. Minerva was the Roman Goddess of Art.
3. Brigit was the Celtic Goddess of Poetry.
 1

THE SPECIFICITY OF CREATIVE-LED

THESES

Tara Brabazon

The Doctor of Philosophy is an international qualification, with

international currency and mobility. Yet, the trans-local distinctions
between the programs are vast. Indeed, the complexity and diversity
of the doctorate means that it is not – and never will be – one
“thing.” The key challenge is to create a culture of equivalence that
confirms quality and standards. The United Kingdom, Aotearoa/New
Zealand and Australia maintain a similar system with a three-year
candidature and no coursework elements, unless enrolled in a
professional doctorate. The dissertation is between 70,000 and
100,000 words in length. The North American model incorporates
coursework, compulsory or mandatory elements and testing, then
culminating in a thesis. Other national systems deploy a diversity or
combination of modes. For example, the University of Lancaster has
a campus in Ghana. That partnership means that the British model
for doctoral education is deployed. Regulatory models are as distinct
in these jurisdictions as the examination protocols. Most systems
feature some form of oral examination or public event. Currently, the
majority of Australian universities do not feature a viva, with the
manuscript being assessed as a self-standing document by
examiners. Students may publish and attend conferences, but most
systems and regulations allow a PhD to be examined and passed
without publications emerging through the candidature.
One characteristic spans these national systems. The PhD must
make an original contribution to knowledge. The masters’ research
holds a distinct and distinctive place in the higher degree portfolio,
providing a synthesizing research function. The other characteristic
of a PhD is that it is guided research. It is constructed by a student
with the support of expert, academic supervisors or advisors.
Regular meetings are held and feedback is offered on the research.
Diverse modes of supervision are also in place, with most systems
requiring some form of mandatory training and professional
development for both the students and the supervisors/advisors.
Adding to this trans-national complexity is a diversity of doctoral
modes. There are six distinctive modes of doctorate.

Traditional doctorate, composed of 70,000–100,000 words

Practice-led/creative-led research, composed of an artifact and

exegesis

PhD by prior publication

PhD by publication

Professional doctorate

Higher doctorate.1

All are different. The challenge for supervisors, administrators,

examiners and regulators is creating standards, protocols and
strategies to ensure that originality and rigor are intact through the
diversity of modes. We often fail, but the goal is to ensure there is a
parity of quality and standards. Applied research often moves to the
professional doctorate, like the Doctor of Education or the Doctor of
Public Health. Blue sky research enfolds into the traditional
doctorate. At its best during the candidature, the PhD student
experience encompasses a customized and effective professional
development program, a diversity of teaching experiences,
conference presentations, publications and public engagements and
communication of research.
Yet, our universities are not isolated institutions. The twin impacts
of widening participation and vocationalism have left their
fingerprints on higher education and tightened the priorities within a
doctoral program. The PhD through its relatively short history was an
educational pathway to governmental bureaucracy and academia.
Yet currently, the majority of graduating PhD students do not remain
in higher education. Therefore, issues of employment, employability
and professional development attend doctoral programs like an
eager if discarded lover. There are generational shifts. How a
supervisor was supervised is not appropriate or relevant supervision
in the current system. The political economy has transformed,
alongside the workforce inside and outside the university. Experience
is not enough. Expertise in andragogy is required. Yet, singular
systems or standards will not suffice. The key problem is based on
an assumption: it is possible to create a culture of equivalence when
admitting, supervising and examining the diverse doctoral forms. To
use two outlier and minoritarian modes, how can the very specific
regulations for a PhD by prior publication be evaluated against the
professional doctorate, which often include coursework requirements
that are often “double-badged” as master courses? How do these
modes then operate in the artifact and exegesis thesis where
ideologies of “art” and “quality” flutter around the regulations? How
do these outlier doctorates impact on the traditional PhD? The
problem remains that through the literature on the creative-led PhD,
particularly the creative-writing PhD, the focus has been on how
distinctive and special the students and scholars are within this
cohort. Actually, the intent of a PhD mode is not to be distinctive,
but to conform to regulations and reach international standards. A
PhD is assessed. It is examined. It must be assessed against viable
and clear criteria, policies and procedures. Yet, Derek Neale noted
“an alarming variation in quality of regulation, supervision and
provision for Creative Writing PhD study across the sector” (Neale,
2017). This variation is a problem and a well-deep challenge for
quality assurance in each individual institution and also national
systems.
Raymond Williams, the affable godfather of Cultural Studies,
described culture as “one of the two or three most difficult words in
the language” (Williams, 1976). That phrase was used in his
remarkable Keywords, published in the 1960s. Now, there is another
word that claws with controversy and has become equally difficult to
deploy with clarity: “creative.” A noun and an adjective, it can refer
to people, objects or processes. But, it creates separation from the
practices and behaviors of daily life. This word is a wedge or an
intellectual moat that blocks theorization and commentary. If
something is “creative,” then it is disconnected from scholarship,
industrialization, money and critique. Even creative industries,
although as a phrase vying with the Fourth Industrial Revolution as
an opaque cliché of our time, refers to how money can be made
from creativity. But the word “creativity” itself floats through
discussions, without anchor or definitive interpretation and precise
recognition of the word’s difficult etymology. Creativity is now part of
self-help, which only adds to the ambiguity. Mark McGuinness
published his 21 Insights for 21st Century Creatives in 2018. It is a
book of passion, desire and belief. Highlights of the prose include, “if
you don’t love your work, you can forget it as a creative”
(McGuinness, 2018) and “forget discipline. Focus on desire”
(McGuinness, 2018, p. 380). Such mantras are antipodally
disconnected from the requirements of research. Discipline, slog,
persistence and resilience are required. Desire and love will not
sustain research projects more generally, and doctoral programs in
particular. Being “creative” has become a space apart, disconnected
from the actual work required, as demonstrated through creative
industries theories, to manage “portfolio careers” and the “gig
economy.” These phrases are used to mask unstable work, zero-hour
contracts and precariat labor. Such ideologies do not stop at the
gates of a university and such assumptions spill into teaching,
learning and research.
While creative “silos” have been created, this is a rational and
reasonable response to a neglect of this paradigm, field, theories
and methodologies. When reviewing the textbooks on qualitative
research, the absence is clear. For example, Lisa Given’s 100
Questions (and Answers) About Qualitative Research has no section
on creative-led methods (Given, 2016). Question 53 asks about
visual methods. The answer presents “textual methods,” without
semiotics or social semiotics mentioned, and “photographic
methods” which was described as “participants use still or video
cameras to document their experiences” (Given, 2016, p. 38). Visual
ethnography, creative-led methods or photovoice were not
discussed. Therefore, with these creative-led methods invisible and
marginalized even within a textbook on qualitative research
methods, it is logical, rational and understandable to create a silo –
an intellectual ghetto – where there is some scholarly literacy about
these fields.
These paradoxes and problems raise foundational questions for
anyone working in higher degrees and doctoral studies. The
challenges are myriad, including the analytical language to summon
research. When reviewing the issues emerging through artifact and
exegesis theses in the portfolio of doctorates, a Times Higher
Education article conveyed concerns with existing academic
protocols.

Practice-based PhDs, where doctorates are awarded for

“non-textual” submissions such as a work of art, are
becoming more common. Yet researchers in the creative
fields still lack a “properly developed language” to describe
what they are doing. (Corbyn, 2008)

To create, develop and disseminate this “language,” a conference

at Northumbria University was initiated with a provocative title: “All
Maps Welcome: doctoral research beyond reading and writing.” The
delegates explored how “non-textual” modes and forms of
communication were embedded into scholarly processes. This was a
positive and welcoming space. Yet, the challenging meta question
remained unasked: Should doctoral programs welcome “all maps”?
What happens to a PhD as a degree when “reading and writing” are
transcended? If scholars move “beyond” reading and writing, then
what is the point of research? An even more significant question is if
all maps are welcome, then how are the majority of doctoral theses
and research protocols impacted?
Reading and writing still matter. Indeed, the parameters of
acceptable reading and writing are broadening, and creative-led
theses are part of that movement and widening of the frame of
scholarship. But once more, the key problem is validating diversity
and multimodality while ensuring quality and standards. Louise
Ravelli, Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield presented this problem with
care.

The doctoral thesis in the creative and performing arts poses

significant challenges to universities, both for the institutions
themselves which need to supervise and examine these
theses, and for students who need to find a way to blend
their creative practice with more conventional notions of
research. (Ravelli, Paltridge, & Starfield, 2014)

The focus on “the blend” is significant and important. A blend

transforms both initiating compounds to create something different,
meaningful and worthwhile. This is a key verb, metaphor and trope.
The blend activated in creative-led research will not only transform
creative acts, but also the doctorate itself. Therefore, for supervisors,
students and examination managers, the pivotal task in the
contemporary university is interface management. Standards must
be set and met. Writing matters, particularly with regard to style. As
Steven Pinker confirmed, “every writer must calibrate the degree of
specialization in her language against her best guess of the
audience’s familiarity with the topic” (Pinker, 2014). That audience
includes the examiners. Finding the correct mode of expressing
research, connecting the artifact and exegesis, remains the specific
challenge.
The first Doctor of Philosophy was awarded by an English
university in 1920. A D. Phil. at Oxford (Noble, 1994), it was followed
by a PhD awarded from Cambridge the following year (Simpson,
1983). Harvard awarded a Doctor of Education in 1921. A much
wider gap awaited the first PhD awarded in Australia, which was in
1948 from the University of Melbourne. The University of Sydney
followed three years later (Johnson, Lee, & Green, 2000). Of most
significance for this book, Australia’s first professional doctorate was
the Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) from the University of Wollongong
in 1984. It predated the qualifications in law (1989) (Shanahan,
1996) and education (1990). In other words, while Australia delayed
the introduction of a Doctor of Philosophy, the nation’s universities
pioneered innovative and diversified higher degrees. Bourner,
Bowden and Laing noted a distinction in the English university sector
which survives to this day. Pre-1992 universities “protected” the
doctorate by proliferating other more descriptive and different titles,
while post-1992 universities denied the diversification of doctorates
favoring a single qualification.

Whereas the “old” universities have been concerned to

protect the “gold standard” of the PhD by allowing the
development of alternative titles for professional doctorates,
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. (Bourner & Laing, 2001)

What they recognized is that older universities have been more

satisfied to use diverse doctoral designations, while “new”
universities overloaded too many genres of original scholarship into
that title. Such under-confidence reveals profound problems for
international education. This meant that inappropriate methods,
approaches and presentations of research were squashed into a
singular qualification: the Doctor of Philosophy. By encouraging and
supporting a diversity of doctoral titles, with clear descriptions,
criteria and instructions for examiners, staff and students can make
informed selections about their enrollment. Examiner dissonance will
decline. Such a system is better for postgraduates, more effective for
staff and most importantly, offers a way to secure the future of the
academy in all its diversity, rigor and breadth.
The Doctor of Philosophy is special. It is still rare. Some sources
from the United States cite that 50% of people admitted to a
doctoral program do not graduate from the program (Lovitts, 2001).
This attrition problem is invisible and under-researched and rarely
logged in public documents because it is embarrassing. In spite of –
or perhaps because of – the scale and scope of this problem, each
individual student is blamed for their “failures,” their attrition and
isolation. Yet for such a scale of “failure” to emerge means that it is
not an issue of a single individual who cannot “cope” or “manage.”
Research has shown that the students who leave doctoral programs
and the students who graduate from them are equally intellectually
able (Lovitts, 2001). The case is made with greater effectiveness
when realizing that the attrition rate for women is higher than men
and racial minorities have a higher attrition rate than white men.
Therefore, there are problems: difficult, dense challenges that
require profound, social-justice infused interventions. Studies of the
American humanities programs have offered comparative studies of
completion rates, not only against the biological and social sciences,
but also within the humanities disciplines. The generalizability of this
data set is not clear, because of the coursework requirements for
US-based doctorates and the length of the candidatures. Also, the
survey set was small. However, the study confirmed that the
performing arts had the highest completion rates. Languages,
society and cultural disciplines in the humanities had the lowest. But
this study demonstrates that many individual disciplines throughout
the spectrum of knowledge have a completion rate below 50% of
admissions, while noting the long candidatures in the North
American system (Attrition in Humanities Doctorate Programs, &
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018). Obviously, the
longer the enrollment, the greater the degree of personal,
professional, intellectual and institutional challenges that can
emerge.
Universities rarely publicize this scale of attrition from the PhD.
But the scope, scale and individuated nature of this problem
remains. Is there “something” that defines the PhD internationally
and through all of its diverse modes? The research area of Doctoral
Studies is enhancing and improving the knowledge base around the
qualification. But there is still nostalgia, a summoning of the
supervisor’s singular experience as if it is generalizable. Frances
Kelly, a scholar in the School of Critical Studies in Education at the
University of Auckland, titled her monograph, The Idea of the PhD:
The Doctorate in the Twenty-first-century Imagination (Kelly, 2017).
This is an odd titling for a strange project. The word imagination is
always troubling. It summons a world of Willy Wonka and flights of
fancy. What is a PhD imagination? The controversies, vitriol and
debates in the doctoral space are aggressive and heated. The sexual
relationships between supervisors and students are being logged,
acknowledged and potently regulated (Australian Council for
Graduate Research, 2018). The authorship debate – debacle – where
supervisors “assume” co-authorship of their student’s work is now
being addressed through clear guidelines to protect the student
(National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), 2018).
Through such sharp, brutal and clear regulation, recognizing an
exploitative history of doctoral students that has been hidden from
the light and heat of governance, PhD candidatures appear like the
Red Wedding from Game of Thrones. Under the “light touch”
regulation and governance, supervisors rip off the research of their
students or add their names as authors without the requisite work.
Supervisors select loyal friends from their disciplinary Star Chamber
to examine their students. In such a culture, students are deeply
vulnerable. Academic jobs – and jobs more generally – are scarce.
Students must do anything and everything to secure reliable work, in
an era of casualization, part-time and zero-hour contracts. These are
ruthless, tough times that manifest devastatingly on our doctoral
students. Imagination is the least of their worries.
 Kelly’s book argues that the PhD is undergoing change. That is
accurate. But the obviousness of the argument does not enable or
assist contemporary supervision, governance or examination.
Arguing that the idea of the PhD is “culturally determined … within
and beyond the context of the university” (Kelly, 2017, p. 1), her
theoretical framework is weak and increases the obfuscation she
wishes to curtail. Describing the PhD as, “a set of ideas expressed
and perpetuated in stories, images and legends, held by PhD
students and graduates but also in the repertory of ordinary folk or
society at large, and which enable particular practices, regarded as
“normal” or how things usually go” (Kelly, 2017, p. 5), she has no
theoretical connection, relationship or link between iconography,
ideology and the lived experience of doctoral education. The
relationship between popular culture and doctoral education offered
in this book is presented as a literal representation rather than an
andragogical database of literacies. Instead, Kelly argues that “The
proliferation of PhDs in discourse, and the scale of interest,
highlights a need to deconstruct the PhD as it is currently
(over)represented” (Kelly, 2017, p. 7). Her use of deconstruction is
unreferenced and untheorized. It is also wrong: the book in no way
deploys deconstruction. Instead, it is a basic form of semiotics, a
reified structuralism that occasionally tilts into discourse analysis.
Doctoral studies requires more rigor, evidenced and theory from its
scholars, rather than self-evident statements, clichés, ambiguous
methods and tired textual analysis. This is an unevenly regulated
and governed qualification, with sparks and juts of globalization that
emerge and then ebb. The nationalism in the doctoral space is worth
deep research, incorporating how these often insular and random
national histories then travel. A PhD is mobile in the selection of
examiners, in some national systems, but also in the currency of the
qualifications. Students become academics who move. Students
write refereed articles that are submitted and assessed in
international journals. Therefore, an odd globalization punctuates
this space.
Particularly, Kelly blames “neoliberal ideology” (Kelly, 2017, p. 9)
for the attention on quality assurance and standards. She has made
a fundamental error. Neoliberalism is anti-statist and anti-regulatory,
the exact opposite of educational governance. Neoliberalism is
globalizing. Doctoral regulation is nationally constituted. Kelly argues
that neoliberalism is the cause of fixed completion times, and the
attention to regulations, policies and procedures. But what is the
alternative? The alternative is clear because we have lived it through
doctoral history: individual supervisors working with students
without transparency or accountability. The reason regulations exist
is that those individual supervisors have claimed authorship over
their students work, requiring concrete rules about when a name
can be “added” to a publication. Similarly, regulation of sexual
behaviors between students and supervisors is required because of
the normalization of the social-sexual power imbalance. These
regulations were not caused by neoliberalism. They were caused by
empowered academics behaving badly. Frances Kelly is against
regulation and standards as they are supposedly neoliberal. Instead,
she argues that, “the presence of diverse or even contradictory ideas
about what constitutes the PhD is, I believe, encouraging” (Kelly,
2017, p. 118). Clearly, conversations and research about the nature
of doctoral education are important. But diversity and contradictions
are problematic in this space because students have dedicated three
or more years of their lives to fulfill this degree. If “we” are uncertain
about the nature of the doctorate and the standards and
expectations required, then the students are attempting to achieve a
goal that does not exist. Furthermore, in what framework do
examiners evaluate the research?
This diversity and ambiguity – assumptions without verification –
travel through the examination system for doctoral education. Each
national system reveals complex and frequently inconsistent
examination protocols. For example, in the United Kingdom, internal
and external examiners are used for a PhD. The “internal” is – at
best – the third expert in a university, behind the two supervisors.
The “external” is rarely external to the United Kingdom. Frequently,
they are a train ride away from the examining university. So of all
the systems, the United Kingdom is internally consistent, but with
digitization and the capacity of Skype, clearly not deploying the best
international experts. The colonial arrogance of assuming that all the
experts for all the disciplines and topics are within the United
Kingdom is a nineteenth century fantasy that should be critiqued.
Conversely, the Australian system uses two or three international
examiners, sending the thesis beyond the national boundaries, for
international assessment. But still, the majority of Australian
universities do not deploy an oral examination. Therefore,
internationalization is present, but without the key moment of oral
evaluation of the research, research integrity and the candidate.
Each system has its quirks and complexities. The artifact and
exegesis doctorate remains the square peg in round holes when
configuring quality assurance. Made more complex through the
diversity of titles and descriptions, all connoting a slightly different
emphasis – creative-led, creative-based, practice-led, practice based,
arts-based, arts-led – methodological ambiguity and assumptions
about cultural value summon reified and rarefied expectations of
research, including the examinable objects. The word “creative” is so
ambiguous in its meaning that it is useless, and indeed
obstructionary for students, supervisors and examiners. A range of
behaviors can be justified through the word “creative” that can be
the antithesis of research and scholarship.
Innovative if ambiguous research is emerging in this area. Patricia
Leavy has developed, through two editions of her monograph,
Method Meets Art: Arts-based Research Practice (Leavy, 2015).
While assumptions proliferate in these books about the arts, with
that “value” assumed rather than a case being made, she is more
open to the diversity of textual formations beyond high culture.
Some of the problems that emerge in practice-led research reappear.
She describes “the natural affinity between research practice and
artistic practice” (Leavy, 2015, p. 103). Any naturalized assumptions
or ambiguous proxies must be avoided in research, enabling
transparency, accountability and repeatability. More troubling in her
monograph is the anti-intellectual arc, where she disrespects
intellectuals for being intellectuals, and researchers for conducting
specialist research. She described her commitment to arts-based
research as “moving beyond the prohibitive jargon and limiting
structures that characterise much traditional research practice”
(Leavy, 2015, p. 103). The use of the term “jargon” is pejorative.
Many disciplines require specialist knowledge and a distinctive
vocabulary. Postcolonialism is a clear example. Furthermore, those
“limiting structures” may be necessary to uphold ethics, academic
integrity and research integrity. Leavy is transposing some analog
assumptions about research into the digital environment. These
should be critiqued, particularly when theorizing new modes of
research dissemination.

Researchers can say what they like, but the fact is that
traditional peer-reviewed journal articles are totally
inaccessible to the public. They are jargon-filled, geared
toward academic peers, and circulate in highly specialized
journals in academic libraries. (Leavy, 2015, p. 814)

Once more the word “jargon” appears, rather than specialized

vocabulary. But the open access movement, and the thousands of
open access journals, ensure that high-quality research is totally
accessible to the public. For free, research on any topic in any
discipline is available to the public that pays for high education
through taxation. The artificial division between arts-based and
traditional research is arbitrary and incorrect. Further the notion that
“the arts” are democratic, collaborative and participatory, while
traditional research is aloof, cold and calculating, is both wrong and
unhelpful.
Art is not research. Artistic practice can enable research activity.
Similarly, an experiment in a lab is not research, but it can enable
research activity. The processes and the outputs of those processes
can and do form research and can enable a doctoral thesis. The
ambiguity of the terms – practice-based,2 practice-led, practice-
centred, studio-based, arts-based and arts-led to name only a few
terms – can create a confusion between practice and research.
Practice can exist without research and research can exist without
practice. Lindsay Candy offers a significant distinction between
practice-led and practice-based (Candy, 2006). The former can
report outcomes without the presentation of an artifact. Practice-
based research ensures that the foundation of the research is the
artifact. In other words, the new knowledge is created through the
practice. Therefore, originality must be configured through the
artifacts, which the exegesis then frames. This difference is not
seismic, but the former tends to deploy the artifact as a
demonstration of the research, whereas the phrase practice-based
describes an artifact more deeply embedded into the cycles of
scholarship. Smith and Dean have been particularly focused on
questioning the trajectory and field of practice-led research, arguing
for the need for an “iterative cyclic web” (Smith & Dean, 2009a).
The evocative application of this phrase can be seen between the
two parts of Stephen Scrivener’s argument.

The visual arts community places great significance on the

art object and the art making process. Consequently, many
visual artists wish to see a form of research in which art and
art making are central: that is to say, the art making process
is understood as a form of research and the art object as a
form of knowledge. If one takes this position and accepts
the common understanding of research then one must be
able to explain how visual art contributes to knowledge.
(Scrivener, 2002)

Scrivener has captured the steps in logic (and method) required

when configuring practice-led research. As an object-driven process,
the focus is on the process and the “art.” This means that process
overlays method and “art” becomes an outcome. Such a confluence
of terms is not actually accurate or inevitable. The crucial final
sentence from Scrivener captures the key problem. There are so
many, perhaps too many, assumptions about art “as” research and
art “as” scholarship. This is an unproductive slippage. More
theoretical and empirical work is required so that the relationship
between these words is tracked and mapped rather than assumed.
Simon Biggs realized that such a course of action “may render … art
practice utilitarian” (Biggs, 2009a). That may be accurate, but it will
also render transparent and accountable research.
The great strength of these robust and productive conversations
about practice-led research, particularly when elitist notions of art
are displaced or bracketed from the discussion, is that they ask that
all of us as researchers, supervisors and students should arch
beyond our practices, behaviors and protocols and consider the
context and systems of our research. Sharon Bell captured the
consequences of a too easy and glib splicing of art and research,
creativity and scholarship.

As an academic, I have been in the habit of commencing my

CV with a statement that emphasises the marriage of
creative and academic interests – specifically film-making,
research in the fields of anthropology and ethnographic film,
and tertiary teaching and administration. If recited quickly
this sounds credible, perhaps evoking an effortless
combination of scholarly and creative interests with
academic leadership. In reality this has often been a
“marriage of inconvenience” as I have struggled to
accommodate creative interests in tandem with the
development of a “credible” research profile and increasingly
demanding roles as a senior academic leader. (Bell, 2009)

The question is, should the Doctor of Philosophy title be widened

further to incorporate a range of creative practices? Another option
already exists to accommodate these differences: the Doctor of
Creative Arts (DCA). This qualification enables the specificity of
methodologies, objects and outcomes to be logged, verified and
examined through the regulations. There are fewer assumptions or
misaligned cross-disciplinary justifications by differentiating between
the modes of degree. Most DCAs do not have an exegesis, so the
presentation of an artifact is assessed on its own terms. The
meaning of “on its own terms” is not clear. The capacity to insert,
align or enfold the DCA into the doctoral suite is very difficult to
determine. The strength of the exegesis is that it connects an object
to a research culture and environment. If a self-standing cultural
object is presented “as” research without confirming or
demonstrating the research within it, then the focus and purpose of
the doctorates are questioned. Greater precision in terms of the
descriptive potential of doctoral titles emerges and clear criteria for
assessment can be assembled. The success of the Doctor of
Education exemplifies this premise.3 The key is to ensure that
instead of cramming an even greater array of practices, approaches,
methods and structures into a Doctor of Philosophy, that the
differences can be noted by a change in nomenclature.
Generalizations – that can often spill into pretensions – are then
avoided. For example, Colin Renfrew extemporized that:

Today, I would claim, the visual arts have transformed

themselves into what might be described as a vast,
uncoordinated yet somehow enormously effective research
programme that looks critically at what we are and how we
know what we are – at the foundations of knowledge and
perception, and at the structures that modern societies have
chosen to construct upon those foundations. (Renfrew,
2003)

Phrases like “looks critically” are marked as an error in the first-

year papers. Similarly, “modern societies” is so general that it is
analytically useless. Significantly, such a statement was made in
2003, before the arrival of the digitally convergent, mobile visual
platforms. Because of the hyperbole, there is little mechanism for
change, critique or extension in such a statement. Ian Biggs
investigated “the pedagogic potential of a particular model of
creative practice-led research in the context of the “politics” of
doctoral study and submission” (Biggs, 2009b). Biggs has realized
that there needs to be more discussion about the form and content
of the document/object/text and how it is submitted. Therefore, it is
important to configure the role, function and positioning of practice-
led research so that an honest, reflexive and coherent case be
made. If taken seriously, then all modes of doctorates will transform
through the added clarity in outcomes and purpose.
The Doctor of Philosophy enrolls scholars who have been
successful at undergraduate study and are granted an opportunity
for future scholarly development. The key distinction between a
research on masters-level qualification and a doctorate is the original
contribution to knowledge. The lower-level qualification can
demonstrate a strong synthesis of ideas and a good understanding
of a discipline. The Doctorate offers something new in method,
source material, approach, argument or interpretation in a specialist
subject. Bob Hodge referred to these as “disciplinary doctorates” in
“hierarchically organized knowledges” (Hodge, 1998). In the late
1980s in the United Kingdom – and shaped by the Research Councils
– the PhD began to include phrases and imperatives for “research
training.” This imperative has rendered British doctorates heavier on
methods and lighter on originality. It is not uncommon for British
doctorates to deploy half of their wordage in discussions of method
and a literature review. These chapters are lost from a scholarly
monograph and are more difficult to publish in any form. Such a
structural emphasis on more basic knowledge of processes, along
with the volatile (if exciting) new spaces available for academic
monographs to gain a publisher and audience, means that most
theses are read by examiners, lodged in libraries and/or archived
digitally, and are rarely cited or read. While a few refereed articles
may emerge, the outcomes of this scholarly effort are decreasing in
their visibility. Particularly in the humanities and social sciences,
which are underfunded and disconnected from industry, doctorates
are an underutilized source. This is not inevitable. It does not have
to be this way. A revisioning of the doctorate must also include
reorganization of post-thesis dissemination.
In this under-used, yet historically and academically important
space of the “traditional” qualification, both practice-based and
professional doctorates have propelled into popularity. New
opportunities are available for diverse modalities of writing and
presentation of original scholarly ideas. The diversity of media
creates spaces for new forms, discourses and innovation. The
problem emerging through such diversity is how to ensure
equivalence. In the United Kingdom, the QAA in 2001 inferred that
the learning outcomes for these diverse modes of doctorates should
be the same (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, & The
National Qualifications Framework, 2001). Such a task is frankly
impossible. More criteria and scaffolding are required to manage the
differences (and similarity) between a practice-based Doctor of
Philosophy and a DCA. This is the rub. This is the challenge. Bill
Green and Adrian Kiernander asked a series of question about how a
DCA 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
academic-educational credential? What relationship is there,
or perhaps should there be, between “research” and doctoral
education? And finally: what are the specific circumstances
and challenges for the Creative Arts in this context? (Green
& Kiernander, 2001)

These questions offer an opportunity to consider the spaces

between a conventional PhD in the Creative Arts, a DCA and the
possibilities of professional doctorates in the Creative Industries.
Through their study, Green and Kiernander confirm that creative arts
“might well go either way” (Green &Kiernander, 2001, p. 112). 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 qualification? The
“outcomes” or “results” do not often have any immediate practical
application in the way required by professional doctoral theses.
Unlike nursing, education, medicine, engineering, commerce or
management, there are no professional bodies that accredit,
examine or assess the competency or excellence of “the
professional” creative artist. In response to this absence, Gillies
limited his definition of Creative Arts to the visual and performing
arts, including design, music, drama and dance (Gillies, 1998).
Significantly, and applying a reified configuration of cultural value,
popular cultural interfaces and platforms are absent from such a
barricading of “creative arts.” Film and digitally convergent screen
and sound platforms have a more complex positioning in a
postgraduate environment. These platforms and interfaces can
emerge to be deployed in all modes of doctorate.
The professional doctorate has been part of a movement to align
industry and the academy. As the Council for Graduate Education
confirmed, the professional doctorate, “is the personal 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” (United Kingdom Council
for Graduate Education (UKCGE), 1997). While most of these
doctorates are not in the commercial sector – with the Doctorate in
Business Administration being rarely awarded – they are undertaken
for career progression and to develop a more rounded view of a
profession, becoming a “reflective practitioner” (Kerrigan &McIntyre,
2018).4 The status and function of a practice-based doctorate,
particularly in film, can also be useful for career progression or
reflection on process. The difficulty is that media-oriented and
sourced doctorates rarely fit concisely into the needs of the
knowledge economy.
In 1993, that key period in the United Kingdom after the
formulation of “new universities” from polytechnics and before Tony
Blair’s widening participation agenda, the British government was
concerned about the future of the Doctor of Philosophy.

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 research in
academia or an industrial research laboratory. (Office of
Science and Technology, 1993)
 This White Paper demanded an increased commodification of
ideas. The debates since this period have moved to
“entrepreneurship” being central to doctoral professional
development programs (Hoppe, 2016). With the infiltration of
research training into the discourse of doctorates, there is a
substantive distinction between the resultant doctorates in the
United Kingdom when compared to the United States, Canada,
Australia and New Zealand where the focus is more strongly on the
original contribution to knowledge rather than the more basic
restatements of methods and literature reviews that prevails in the
United Kingdom.
The artifact and exegesis theses emerge through a range of
disciplines and paradigms: design, performance, creative writing,
sonic media and screen media. Design is particularly diverse,
incorporating interior design, furniture design, fashion and
architecture to name a few of the disciplines (Archer, 1979). The
diversity adds to the complexity, particularly in examination. Each
examiner may emphasize the artifact, the exegesis and/or the
relationship between them. Their priorities vary, often widely. There
are more working parts in this mode of doctorate than any other.
Issues of “artistic quality” rather than research originality also
summon diversity of expectations, assumptions and examination
results. High culture and assumptions of cultural quality serve to
limit the wider applications of this mode of doctorate, beyond the
high humanities or the creative arts. It is a method not a mode of
cultural value, and health studies are particularly ripe for this way of
conducting research and mode of presenting it.
Such an ideology is present in the oddly titled Jenny Wilson
monograph, Artists in the University: Positioning Artistic Research in
Higher Education (Wilson, 2018). The assumptions about high
culture and cultural value frame and structure this book. There is no
sense that “culture” and “art” are historical categories, holding bias
and perpetuating discrimination and prejudice. The “world of art”
(Wilson, 2018, p. vi) is offered and the higher education research
ecosystem is questioned because it “operates to create inequities for
artistic research” (Wilson, 2018, p. 3). So, by this argument, high
culture, which is reified into the category of “art,” is not evaluated
with the respect it deserves in higher education. There are
assumptions being made in this slice of literature that “art” is not
important. But obviously, the assumption that “art” is intrinsically
important is the flawed argument. This is a particularly disrespectful
argument considering that “art” and “artists” have demeaned and
dismissed the spectrum of popular culture beyond “value” and
“quality,” and –indeed – is located outside of the conversation about
the place of artifacts in research and higher education. Popular
culture has equal importance, value and use in research as “art.”
There is nothing in “art” that renders it special because it does not
attract a wide audience. Quality is an ideology, not a static,
ahistorical determination. Therefore, our arguments in this book are
as relevant to popular music as to orchestral pieces, street
performance and theatre-based performance, graffiti as studio-
generated art and industrial design as much as architecture.
University research management practices – the research
ecosystem – is a structure of measurements, databases and data
sets. It is a reporting machine. Therefore, research variables must fit
into it, rather than the system being both porous and flexible enough
to grasp the diversity of scholarships. Publications, funding, research
rankings and citations are easy measures to track. All of these apply
to the humanities and theoretical social sciences, but in different
proportions and scales when compared to the lab-based sciences
and engineering. Books – monographs – matter. The PhD in the
humanities – in all its forms – targets a monograph as a key
dissemination tool. These differences are important and should be
lodged and understood in their specificity. Drawing long bows to find
parallels between disparate disciplines is not politically useful. Wilson
stated that, “there are similarities between the research undertaken
by the artist in the studio and the scientists in the laboratory”
(Wilson, 2018, p. 7). There are no similarities. One
person/researcher is a singular enterprise. The other model in a lab
is collaborative and collective. Effective experiments have a pre-
configured order and parameters before the commencement of the
data gathering. That is rarely the case in a studio, beyond the
selection of the medium and materials (Bamberger & Schon, 1991).
The only similarity is that researchers are in a room doing research.
Therefore, the doctoral space – and research more generally – must
find a way to acknowledge the diversity of modes, theories,
methods, outcomes and dissemination strategies while implementing
a quality assurance procedure. In other words, such a model affirms
standards, rather than standardization.
There are other reasons for differential results between doctoral
modes. Practice-led PhDs are flooded with assumptions about art,
cultural value and quality. It is like postmodernism never happened.
Too often, supervisors, examiners and managers of postgraduate
programs confuse and conflate art with technical skill to develop
material or digital objects. These judgments are of a distinct order
from evaluating the caliber of research. To be clear: competency in a
medium – words, sound and/or vision – must be a condition of entry
into any candidature. The capacity to abide by scholarly protocols is
a similarly crucial imperative. Technical expertise with hardware,
software, vocabulary and grammar are necessary. But it is important
not to confuse technical competency in a media or form and a value-
laden determination of art. These assumptions sideline a more
robust discussion of academic standards.
Instead of commencing this honest discussion about the
examination protocols of mixed platform doctorates, it is fascinating
when reviewing the literature “celebrating” practice-led research.
There is a focus on “newness,” “innovation,” “excitement” and
“creativity.”

The turn to creative practice is one of the most exciting and

revolutionary developments to occur in the university within
the last two decades and is currently accelerating in
influence. It is bringing with it dynamic new ways of thinking
about research and new methodologies. (Smith & Dean,
2009b, p. 1)
I have argued that “new” knowledge in creative arts
research can be seen to emerge in the involvement with
materials, methods, tools and ideas of practice. (Bolt, 2007)
 PhDs, practice-led or otherwise, may be described as “art” outside
a university. That is not a designation or label for an examiner or a
research manager, student or supervisor to use. In procedural terms,
candidates submit two or more components that – when combined –
create an original contribution to knowledge. The media object is
tethered to the exegesis and has no independent role beyond
developing evidence. Estelle Barrett offers an informative if
disturbing description of “creative arts enquiry”: “We propose that
artistic practice be viewed as the production of knowledge or
philosophy in action” (Barrett, 2007). There is a slippage between
methodology and epistemology in such a maxim, along with a
confusion of evidence and interpretation, object production and
knowledge production. Even if her statement is taken as true, then
an odd relationship emerges between the resultant exegesis and the
artistic practice that has “produced knowledge.” Barrett extends her
argument however, affirming difference, separation and distinction
from “traditional” research.

Rather than attempting to contort aims, objectives and

outcomes to satisfy criteria set for more established models
of research, I believe there is a need to generate appropriate
discourses to convince assessors and policy-makers that
within the context of studio-based research, innovation is
derived from methods that cannot always be pre-
determined, and “outcomes” of artistic research are
necessarily unpredictable. (Barrett, 2007, p. 3)

There are many comments to make as a result of such a

statement. Firstly, all research outcomes are unpredictable. If the
results are predetermined then the research question is not only
redundant but also superfluous and flawed. Secondly, there is a
problem with the affirmation of “innovation from methods.” Research
– particularly doctoral theses – that focus on methods rather than
theory or results is a more basic form of scholarship than theses that
are theoretically rich. Spending analytical time on “the how”
operates at a lower level than projects probing “the why.” When
comparing research projects that are practice-based, the candidates
spend much of the exegesis unraveling process, “how” they created
the artifact. Method substitutes for analysis. While some fine and
innovative scholarship can emerge through method-based projects,
more incremental knowledge is generated. The other question for
“assessors and policy-makers” is if innovation in method creates
sufficient impact. The other problem with an argument such as
Barrett’s is that by desiring to enlarge the criteria by which
scholarship is assessed, she is questioning the value of academic
standards. While such a discussion may be innovative and beneficial,
there is a cost. Practice-based research becomes ghettoized,
disconnected from a wider research environment, focusing on “the
how” and not “the why.” At that point, different standards and
regulations are applied to diverse doctorates. A hierarchy must
result.
When applying such arguments to an institution’s entire doctoral
program, the consequences become clearer, if more worrying.
Stephen Goddard, who completed an exegesis and creative work for
a doctorate, outlined the systemic processes of practice-led research.

What characterises creative arts research practice in

universities that offer doctoral degrees is the requirement
not only to understand a substantial practical project, but
also a reflective exegesis that contextualises the
methodologies and significant contributions of the research.
The specific components of the exegesis are defined by each
institution and re-negotiated by each candidate according to
different emphases. Fortunately, and by design, the function
of each candidate’s exegesis can be redefined in relation to
the practice it seeks to elucidate. (Goddard, 2007)

The problems in such a process are obvious. Goddard suggests

that doctoral examinations should be an individualized process,
customized for the specific candidature. Obviously, this is incorrect.
There must be regulations, processes and protocols to ensure not
only professionalism and parity within an institution but also the
maintenance of standards between institutions. While there is a
national disparity, along with intra-national distinctions, the aim and
aspiration of international doctoral research is that a doctorate
submitted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) should be
equivalent in standard to a PhD examined in Auckland or Sunderland
Universities. While debates – or secretive university corridor
conversations – may emerge questioning the transferability of
national standards for a PhD beyond a location, the logistics are
clear. The assumption must remain – the trust must remain – that a
university with self-accrediting powers, verified through cyclical
national audits for its curriculum, processes and procedures
produces doctorates at an international standard. The imperative for
an original contribution to knowledge, with accountable, transparent
and repeatable methods, remains the non-negotiable components of
the degree. The problem when conflating practice-based methods
with often-unspecified statements about art and quality means that
institutional protocols are seemingly individualized. Therefore, it is
harder to validate and verify the standards of a program. Goddard
makes the statement that “it is possible (within enlightened
institutions) for creative arts researchers to re-interpret and make
sense of the specified requirements of the exegesis” (Goddard, 2007,
pp. 113–114). There is nothing enlightening, democratic or
empowering about individualizing scholarly standards. The
consequences of such a statement on examination and examinations
are deeply worrying. If a doctoral researcher “re-interprets”
requirements (regulations?) for an exegesis, then what precisely are
examiners’ examining? Again, the focus is placed on “the how”: how
the postgraduate “re-interprets” the form of a doctorate, instead of
developing a doctoral-level dialog between form and content to
generate an original contribution to knowledge. Without clear criteria
and internationally validated regulations, examiners are offering
much more personal, opinionated and unanchored judgements
about doctorates. Actually, doctoral candidates are protected from
irrational, opinionated or biased examiners if the guidelines, criteria
and regulations are clear. A fundamental shift in approach is
required: rather than entering the program resentful that the artist’s
Another random document with
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 Whereas, The Independent Greenback party, and other
associations more or less effective, have been unable, hitherto, to
make a formidable opposition to old party organizations; and
Whereas, The limiting of the legal-tender quality of the
greenbacks, the changing of currency bonds into coin bonds, the
demonetization of the silver dollar, the exempting of bonds from
taxation, the contraction of the circulating medium, the proposed
forced resumption of specie payments, and the prodigal waste of the
public lands, were crimes against the people; and, as far as possible,
the results of these criminal acts must be counteracted by judicious
legislation:
Therefore, We assemble in national convention and make a
declaration of our principles, and invite all patriotic citizens to unite
in an effort to secure financial reform and industrial emancipation.
The organization shall be known as the “National Party,” and under
this name we will perfect, without delay, national, state, and local
associations, to secure the election to office of such men only as will
pledge themselves to do all in their power to establish these
principles:
First. It is the exclusive function of the general government to coin
and create money and regulate its value. All bank issues designed to
circulate as money should be suppressed. The circulating medium,
whether of metal or paper, shall be issued by the government, and
made a full legal-tender for all debts, duties, and taxes in the United
States, at its stamped value.
Second. There shall be no privileged class of creditors. Official
salaries, pensions, bonds, and all other debts and obligations, public
and private, shall be discharged in the legal-tender money of the
United States strictly according to the stipulations of the laws under
which they were contracted.
Third. The coinage of silver shall be placed on the same footing as
that of gold.
Fourth. Congress shall provide said money adequate to the full
employment of labor, the equitable distribution of its products, and
the requirement of business, fixing a minimum amount per capita of
the population as near as may be, and otherwise regulating its value
by wise and equitable provisions of law, so that the rate of interest
will secure to labor its just reward.
Fifth. It is inconsistent with the genius of popular government that
any species of private property should be exempt from bearing its
proper share of the public burdens. Government bonds and money
should be taxed precisely as other property, and a graduated income
tax should be levied for the support of the government and the
payment of its debts.
Sixth. Public lands are the common property of the whole people,
and should not be sold to speculators nor granted to railroads or
other corporations, but should be donated to actual settlers, in
limited quantities.
Seventh. The government should, by general enactments,
encourage the development of our agricultural, mineral, mechanical,
manufacturing, and commercial resources, to the end that labor may
be fully and profitably employed; but no monopolies should be
legalized.
Eighth. All useless offices should be abolished, the most rigid
economy favored in every branch of the public service, and severe
punishment inflicted upon public officers who betray the trusts
reposed in them.
Ninth. As educated labor has devised means for multiplying
productions by inventions and discoveries, and as their use requires
the exercise of mind as well as body, such legislation should be had
that the number of hours of daily toil will be reduced, giving to the
working classes more leisure for mental improvement and their
several enjoyments, and saving them from premature decay and
death.
Tenth. The adoption of an American monetary system, as
proposed herein, will harmonize all differences in regard to tariff and
federal taxation, reduce and equalize the cost of transportation by
land and water, distribute equitably the joint earnings of capital and
labor, secure to the producers of wealth the results of their labor and
skill, and muster out of service the vast army of idlers, who, under
the existing system, grow rich upon the earnings of others, that every
man and woman may, by their own efforts, secure a competency, so
that overgrown fortunes and extreme poverty will be seldom found
within the limits of our republic.
Eleventh. Both national and state governments should establish
bureaus of labor and industrial statistics, clothed with the power of
gathering and publishing the same.
Twelfth. That the contract system of employing labor in our
prisons and reformatory institutions works great injustice to our
mechanics and artisans, and should be prohibited.
Thirteenth. The importation of servile labor into the United States
from China is a problem of the most serious importance, and we
recommend legislation looking to its suppression.
Fourteenth. We believe in the supremacy of law over and above all
perishable material, and in the necessity of a party of united people
that will rise above old party lines and prejudices. We will not
affiliate in any degree with any of the old parties, but, in all cases and
localities, will organize anew, as united National men—nominate for
office and official positions only such persons as are clearly believers
in and identified with this our sacred cause; and, irrespective of
creed, color, place of birth, or past condition of political or other
servitude, vote only for men who entirely abandon old party lines
and organizations.

1879.—National Liberal Platform.

Cincinnati, Ohio, September 14.

1. Total separation of Church and State, to be guaranteed by
amendment of the United States constitution; including the
equitable taxation of church property, secularization of the public
schools, abrogation of Sabbatarian laws, abolition of chaplaincies,
prohibition of public appropriations for religious purposes, and all
measures necessary to the same general end.
2. National protection for national citizens in their equal civil,
political, and religious rights, to be guaranteed by amendment of the
United States constitution and afforded through the United States
courts.
 3. Universal education, the basis of universal suffrage in this
secular Republic, to be guaranteed by amendment of the United
States constitution, requiring every state to maintain a thoroughly
secularized public school system, and to permit no child within its
limits to grow up without a good elementary education.

1880.—Independent Republican Principles.

I. Independent Republicans adhere to the republican principles of

national supremacy, sound finances, and civil service reform,
expressed in the Republican platform of 1876, in the letter of
acceptance of President Hayes, and in his message of 1879; and they
seek the realization of those principles in practical laws and their
efficient administration. This requires,
1. The continuance on the statute book of laws protecting the
rights of voters at national elections. But national supremacy affords
no pretext for interference with the local rights of communities; and
the development of the south from its present defective civilization
can be secured only under constitutional methods, such as those of
President Hayes.
2. The passage of laws which shall deprive greenbacks of their
legal-tender quality, as a first step toward their ultimate withdrawal
and cancellation, and shall maintain all coins made legal tender at
such weight and fineness as will enable them to be used without
discount in the commercial transactions of the world.
3. The repeal of the acts which limit the terms of office of certain
government officials to four years; the repeal of the tenure-of-office
acts, which limit the power of the executive to remove for cause; the
establishment of a permanent civil service commission, or equivalent
measures to ascertain, by open competition, and certify to the
President or other appointing power the fitness of applicants for
nomination or appointment to all non-political offices.
II. Independent Republicans believe that local issues should be
independent of party. The words Republican and Democrat should
have no weight in determining whether a school or city shall be
administered on business principles by capable men. With a view to
this, legislation is asked which shall prescribe for the voting for local
and for state officers upon separate ballots.
III. Independent Republicans assert that a political party is a co-
operation of voters to secure the practical enactment into legislation
of political convictions set forth as its platform. Every voter accepting
that platform is a member of that party; any representative of that
party opposing the principles or evading the promises of its platform
forfeits the support of its voters. No voter should be held by the
action or nomination of any caucus or convention of his party against
his private judgment. It is his duty to vote against bad measures and
unfit men, as the only means of obtaining good ones; and if his party
no longer represents its professed principles in its practical
workings, it is his duty to vote against it.
IV. Independent Republicans seek good nominations through
participation in the primaries and through the defeat of bad
nominees; they will labor for the defeat of any local Republican
candidate, and, in co-operation with those holding like views
elsewhere, for the defeat of any general Republican candidate whom
they do not deem fit.

1880. Republican Platform.

Chicago, Illinois, June 2.

The Republican party, in national convention assembled, at the
end of twenty years since the Federal government was first
committed to its charge, submits to the people of the United States
its brief report of its administration:
It suppressed a rebellion which had armed nearly a million of men
to subvert the national authority. It reconstructed the union of the
states with freedom, instead of slavery, as its corner-stone. It
transformed four million of human beings from the likeness of things
to the rank of citizens. It relieved Congress from the infamous work
of hunting fugitive slaves, and charged it to see that slavery does not
exist.
It has raised the value of our paper currency from thirty-eight per
cent. to the par of gold. It has restored, upon a solid basis, payment
in coin for all the national obligations, and has given us a currency
absolutely good and equal in every part of our extended country. It
has lifted the credit of the nation from the point where six per cent.
bonds sold at eighty-six to that where four per cent. bonds are
eagerly sought at a premium.
Under its administration railways have increased from 31,000
miles in 1860, to more than 82,000 miles in 1879.
Our foreign trade has increased from $700,000,000 to
$1,150,000,000 in the same time; and our exports, which were
$20,000,000 less than our imports in 1860, were $264,000,000
more than our imports in 1879.
Without resorting to loans, it has, since the war closed, defrayed
the ordinary expenses of government, besides the accruing interest
on the public debt, and disbursed, annually, over $30,000,000 for
soldiers’ pensions. It has paid $888,000,000 of the public debt, and,
by refunding the balance at lower rates, has reduced the annual
interest charge from nearly $151,000,000 to less than $89,000,000.
All the industries of the country have revived, labor is in demand,
wages have increased, and throughout the entire country there is
evidence of a coming prosperity greater than we have ever enjoyed.
Upon this record, the Republican party asks for the continued
confidence and support of the people; and this convention submits
for their approval the following statement of the principles and
purposes which will continue to guide and inspire its efforts:
1. We affirm that the work of the last twenty years has been such as
to commend itself to the favor of the nation, and that the fruits of the
costly victories which we have achieved, through immense
difficulties, should be preserved; that the peace regained should be
cherished; that the dissevered Union, now happily restored, should
be perpetuated, and that the liberties secured to this generation
should be transmitted, undiminished, to future generations; that the
order established and the credit acquired should never be impaired;
that the pensions promised should be paid; that the debt so much
reduced should be extinguished by the full payment of every dollar
thereof; that the reviving industries should be further promoted; and
that the commerce, already so great, should be steadily encouraged.
 2. The constitution of the United States is a supreme law, and not a
mere contract; out of confederate states it made a sovereign nation.
Some powers are denied to the nation, while others are denied to
states; but the boundary between the powers delegated and those
reserved is to be determined by the national and not by the state
tribunals.
3. The work of popular education is one left to the care of the
several states, but it is the duty of the national government to aid
that work to the extent of its constitutional ability. The intelligence of
the nation is but the aggregate of the intelligence in the several
states; and the destiny of the nation must be guided, not by the
genius of any one state, but by the average genius of all.
4. The constitution wisely forbids Congress to make any law
respecting an establishment of religion; but it is idle to hope that the
nation can be protected against the influences of sectarianism while
each state is exposed to its domination. We, therefore, recommend
that the constitution be so amended as to lay the same prohibition
upon the legislature of each state, to forbid the appropriation of
public funds to the support of sectarian schools.
5. We reaffirm the belief, avowed in 1876, that the duties levied for
the purpose of revenue should so discriminate as to favor American
labor; that no further grant of the public domain should be made to
any railway or other corporation; that slavery having perished in the
states, its twin barbarity—polygamy—must die in the territories; that
everywhere the protection accorded to citizens of American birth
must be secured to citizens by American adoption. That we esteem it
the duty of Congress to develop and improve our water-courses and
harbors, but insist that further subsidies to private persons or
corporations must cease. That the obligations of the republic to the
men who preserved its integrity in the day of battle are undiminished
by the lapse of fifteen years since their final victory—to do them
perpetual honor is, and shall forever be, the grateful privilege and
sacred duty of the American people.
6. Since the authority to regulate immigration and intercourse
between the United States and foreign nations rests with the
Congress of the United States and its treaty-making powers, the
Republican party, regarding the unrestricted immigration of the
Chinese as an evil of great magnitude, invoke the exercise of that
power to restrain and limit that immigration by the enactment of
such just, humane, and reasonable provisions as will produce that
result.
That the purity and patriotism which characterized the early career
of Rutherford B. Hayes in peace and war, and which guided the
thoughts of our immediate predecessors to select him for a
presidential candidate, have continued to inspire him in his career as
chief executive, and that history will accord to his administration the
honors which are due to an efficient, just, and courteous discharge of
the public business, and will honor his interposition between the
people and proposed partisan laws.
8. We charge upon the Democratic party the habitual sacrifice of
patriotism and justice to a supreme and insatiable lust for office and
patronage. That to obtain possession of the national and state
governments, and the control of place and position, they have
obstructed all efforts to promote the purity and to conserve the
freedom of suffrage; have devised fraudulent certifications and
returns; have labored to unseat lawfully-elected members of
Congress, to secure, at all hazards, the vote of a majority of the states
in the House of Representatives; have endeavored to occupy, by force
and fraud the places of trust given to others by the people of Maine,
and rescued by the courageous action of Maine’s patriotic sons; have,
by methods vicious in principle and tyrannical in practice, attached
partisan legislation to appropriation bills, upon whose passage the
very movements of government depend; have crushed the rights of
the individual; have advocated the principle and sought the favor of
rebellion against the nation, and have endeavored to obliterate the
sacred memories of the war, and to overcome its inestimably
valuable results of nationality, personal freedom, and individual
equality. Equal, steady, and complete enforcement of the laws, and
protection of all our citizens in the enjoyment of all privileges and
immunities guaranteed by the constitution, are the first duties of the
nation. The danger of a solid south can only be averted by the faithful
performance of every promise which the nation made to the citizen.
The execution of the laws, and the punishment of all those who
violate them, are the only safe methods by which an enduring peace
can be secured, and genuine prosperity established throughout the
south. Whatever promises the nation makes, the nation must
perform; and the nation can not with safety relegate this duty to the
states. The solid south must be divided by the peaceful agencies of
the ballot, and all opinions must there find free expression; and to
this end honest voters must be protected against terrorism, violence,
or fraud. And we affirm it to be the duty and the purpose of the
Republican party to use all legitimate means to restore all the states
of this Union to the most perfect harmony which may be practicable;
and we submit to the practical, sensible people of the United States
to say whether it would not be dangerous to the dearest interests of
our country, at this time to surrender the administration of the
national government to a party which seeks to overthrow the existing
policy, under which we are so prosperous, and thus bring distrust
and confusion where there is now order, confidence, and hope.
9. The Republican party, adhering to a principle affirmed by its
last national convention, of respect for the constitutional rule
covering appointments to office, adopts the declaration of President
Hayes, that the reform of the civil service should be thorough,
radical, and complete. To this end it demands the co-operation of the
legislative with the executive department of the government, and
that Congress shall so legislate that fitness, ascertained by proper
practical tests, shall admit to the public service; and that the power
of removal for cause, with due responsibility for the good conduct of
subordinates, shall accompany the power of appointment.

1880.—National (Greenback) Platform,

Chicago, Illinois, June 9.

The civil government should guarantee the divine right of every
laborer to the results of his toil, thus enabling the producers of
wealth to provide themselves with the means for physical comfort,
and facilities for mental, social, and moral culture; and we condemn,
as unworthy of our civilization, the barbarism which imposes upon
wealth-producers a state of drudgery as the price of a bare animal
existence. Notwithstanding the enormous increase of productive
power by the universal introduction of labor-saving machinery and
the discovery of new agents for the increase of wealth, the task of the
laborer is scarcely lightened, the hours of toil are but little shortened,
and few producers are lifted from poverty into comfort and
pecuniary independence. The associated monopolies, the
international syndicates, and other income classes demand dear
money, cheap labor, and a strong government, and, hence, a weak
people. Corporate control of the volume of money has been the
means of dividing society into hostile classes, of an unjust
distribution of the products of labor, and of building up monopolies
of associated capital, endowed with power to confiscate private
property. It has kept money scarce; and the scarcity of money
enforces debt-trade, and public and corporate loans; debt engenders
usury, and usury ends in the bankruptcy of the borrower. Other
results are—deranged markets, uncertainty in manufacturing
enterprises and agriculture, precarious and intermittent employment
for the laborer, industrial war, increasing pauperism and crime, and
the consequent intimidation and disfranchisement of the producer,
and a rapid declension into corporate feudalism. Therefore, we
declare—
First. That the right to make and issue money is a sovereign
power, to be maintained by the people for their common benefit. The
delegation of this right to corporations is a surrender of the central
attribute of sovereignty, void of constitutional sanction, and
conferring upon a subordinate and irresponsible power an absolute
dominion over industry and commerce. All money, whether metallic
or paper, should be issued, and its volume controlled, by the
government, and not by or through banking corporations; and, when
so issued, should be a full legal tender for all debts, public and
private.
Second. That the bonds of the United States should not be
refunded, but paid as rapidly as practicable, according to contract.
To enable the government to meet these obligations, legal-tender
currency should be substituted for the notes of the national banks,
the national banking system abolished, and the unlimited coinage of
silver, as well as gold, established by law.
Third. That labor should be so protected by national and state
authority as to equalize its burdens and insure a just distribution of
its results. The eight hour law of Congress should be enforced, the
sanitary condition of industrial establishments placed under the rigid
control, the competition of contract convict labor abolished, a bureau
of labor statistics established, factories, mines, and workshops
inspected, the employment of children under fourteen years of age
forbidden, and wages paid in cash.
Fourth. Slavery being simply cheap labor, and cheap labor being
simply slavery, the importation and presence of Chinese serfs
necessarily tends to brutalize and degrade American labor; therefore,
immediate steps should be taken to abrogate the Burlingame treaty.
Fifth. Railroad land grants forfeited by reason of non-fulfillment of
contract should be immediately reclaimed by the government, and,
henceforth, the public domain reserved exclusively as homes for
actual settlers.
Sixth. It is the duty of Congress to regulate inter-state commerce.
All lines of communication and transportation should be brought
under such legislative control as shall secure moderate, fair, and
uniform rates for passenger and freight traffic.
Seventh. We denounce as destructive to property and dangerous to
liberty the action of the old parties in fostering and sustaining
gigantic land, railroad, and money corporations, and monopolies
invested with and exercising powers belonging to the government,
and yet not responsible to it for the manner of their exercise.
Eighth. That the constitution, in giving Congress the power to
borrow money, to declare war, to raise and support armies, to
provide and maintain a navy, never intended that the men who
loaned their money for an interest-consideration should be preferred
to the soldiers and sailors who periled their lives and shed their
blood on land and sea in defense of their country; and we condemn
the cruel class legislation of the Republican party, which, while
professing great gratitude to the soldier, has most unjustly
discriminated against him and in favor of the bondholder.
Ninth. All property should bear its just proportion of taxation, and
we demand a graduated income tax.
Tenth. We denounce as dangerous the efforts everywhere manifest
to restrict the right of suffrage.
Eleventh. We are opposed to an increase of the standing army in
time of peace, and the insidious scheme to establish an enormous
military power under the guise of militia laws.
 Twelfth. We demand absolute democratic rules for the
government of Congress, placing all representatives of the people
upon an equal footing, and taking away from committees a veto
power greater than that of the President.
Thirteenth. We demand a government of the people, by the people,
and for the people, instead of a government of the bondholder, by the
bondholder, and for the bondholder; and we denounce every attempt
to stir up sectional strife as an effort to conceal monstrous crimes
against the people.
Fourteenth. In the furtherance of these ends we ask the co-
operation of all fair-minded people. We have no quarrel with
individuals, wage no war on classes, but only against vicious
institutions. We are not content to endure further discipline from our
present actual rulers, who, having dominion over money, over
transportation, over land and labor, over the press and the
machinery of government, wield unwarrantable power over our
institutions and over life and property.

1880.—Prohibition Reform Platform,

Cleveland, Ohio, June 17.

The prohibition Reform party of the United States, organized, in
the name of the people, to revive, enforce, and perpetuate in the
government the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence,
submit, for the suffrage of all good citizens, the following platform of
national reforms and measures:
In the examination and discussion of the temperance question, it
has been proven, and is an accepted truth, that alcoholic drinks,
whether fermented, brewed, or distilled, are poisonous to the healthy
human body, the drinking of which is not only needless but hurtful,
necessarily tending to form intemperate habits, increasing greatly
the number, severity, and fatal termination of diseases, weakening
and deranging the intellect, polluting the affections, hardening the
heart and corrupting the morals, depriving many of reason and still
more of its healthful exercise, and annually bringing down large
numbers to untimely graves, producing, in the children of many who
drink, a predisposition to intemperance, insanity, and various bodily
and mental diseases, causing diminution of strength, feebleness of
vision, fickleness of purpose, and premature old age, and inducing,
in all future generations, deterioration of moral and physical
character. Alcoholic drinks are thus the implacable foe of man as an
individual.
First. The legalized importation, manufacture, and sale of
intoxicating drinks ministers to their use, and teaches the erroneous
and destructive sentiment that such use is right, thus tending to
produce and perpetuate the above mentioned evils.
Second. To the home it is an enemy—proving itself to be a
disturber and destroyer of its peace, prosperity, and happiness;
taking from it the earnings of the husband; depriving the dependent
wife and children of essential food, clothing, and education; bringing
into it profanity, abuse, and violence; setting at naught the vows of
the marriage altar; breaking up the family and sundering the
children from the parents, and thus destroying one of the most
beneficent institutions of our Creator, and removing the sure
foundation of good government, national prosperity, and welfare.
Third. To the community it is equally an enemy—producing vice,
demoralization, and wickedness; its places of sale being resorts of
gaming, lewdness, and debauchery, and the hiding-place of those
who prey upon society; counteracting the efficacy of religious effort,
and of all means of intellectual elevation, moral purity, social
happiness, and the eternal good of mankind, without rendering any
counteracting or compensating benefits; being in its influence and
effect evil and only evil, and that continually.
Fourth. To the state it is equally an enemy—legislative inquiries,
judicial investigations, and official reports of all penal, reformatory,
and dependent institutions showing that the manufacture and sale of
such beverages is the promoting cause of intemperance, crime, and
pauperism, and of demands upon public and private charity,
imposing the larger part of taxation, paralyzing thrift, industry,
manufactures, and commercial life, which, but for it, would be
unnecessary; disturbing the peace of streets and highways; filling
prisons and poor-houses; corrupting politics, legislation, and the
execution of the laws; shortening lives; diminishing health, industry,
and productive power in manufactures and art; and is manifestly
unjust as well as injurious to the community upon which it is
imposed, and is contrary to all just views of civil liberty, as well as a
violation of the fundamental maxim of our common law, to use your
own property or liberty so as not to injure others.
Fifth. It is neither right nor politic for the state to afford legal
protection to any traffic or any system which tends to waste the
resources, to corrupt the social habits, and to destroy the health and
lives of the people; that the importation, manufacture, and sale of
intoxicating beverages is proven to be inimical to the true interests of
the individual home, community, and state, and destructive to the
order and welfare of society, and ought, therefore, to be classed
among crimes to be prohibited.
Sixth. In this time of profound peace at home and abroad, the
entire separation of the general government from the drink-traffic,
and its prohibition in the District of Columbia, territories, and in all
places and ways over which, under the constitution, Congress has
control and power, is a political issue of the first importance to the
peace and prosperity of the nation. There can be no stable peace and
protection to personal liberty, life, or property, until secured by
national or state constitutional provisions, enforced by adequate
laws.
Seventh. All legitimate industries require deliverance from the
taxation and loss which the liquor traffic imposes upon them; and
financial or other legislation could not accomplish so much to
increase production and cause a demand for labor, and, as a result,
for the comforts of living, as the suppression of this traffic would
bring to thousands of homes as one of its blessings.
Eighth. The administration of the government and the execution of
the laws are through political parties; and we arraign the Republican
party, which has been in continuous power in the nation for twenty
years, as being false to duty, as false to loudly-proclaimed principles
of equal justice to all and special favors to none, and of protection to
the weak and dependent, insensible to the mischief which the trade
in liquor has constantly inflicted upon industry, trade, commerce,
and the social happiness of the people; that 5,652 distilleries, 3,830
breweries, and 175,266 places for the sale of these poisonous liquors,
involving an annual waste to the nation of one million five hundred
thousand dollars, and the sacrifice of one hundred thousand lives,
have, under its legislation, grown up and been fostered as a
legitimate source of revenue; that during its history, six territories
have been organized and five states been admitted into the Union,
with constitutions provided and approved by Congress, but the
prohibition of this debasing and destructive traffic has not been
provided, nor even the people given, at the time of admission, power
to forbid it in any one of them. Its history further shows, that not in a
single instance has an original prohibitory law been passed by any
state that was controlled by it, while in four states, so governed, the
laws found on its advent to power have been repealed. At its national
convention in 1872, it declared, as part of its party faith, that “it
disapproves of the resort to unconstitutional laws for the purpose of
removing evils, by interference with rights not surrendered by the
people to either the state or national government,” which, the author
of this plank says, was adopted by the platform committee with the
full and implicit understanding that its purpose was the
discountenancing of all so-called temperance, prohibitory, and
Sunday laws.
Ninth. We arraign, also, the Democratic party as unfaithful and
unworthy of reliance on this question; for, although not clothed with
power, but occupying the relation of an opposition party during
twenty years past, strong in numbers and organization, it has allied
itself with liquor-traffickers, and become, in all the states of the
Union, their special political defenders, and in its national
convention in 1876, as an article of its political faith, declared against
prohibition and just laws in restraint of the trade in drink, by saying
it was opposed to what it was pleased to call “all sumptuary laws.”
The National party has been dumb on this question.
Tenth. Drink-traffickers, having the history and experience of all
ages, climes, and conditions of men, declaring their business
destructive of all good—finding no support in the Bible, morals, or
reason—appeal to misapplied law for their justification, and intrench
themselves behind the evil elements of political party for defense,
party tactics and party inertia become battling forces, protecting this
evil.
Eleventh. In view of the foregoing facts and history, we cordially
invite all voters, without regard to former party affiliations, to unite
with us in the use of the ballot for the abolition of the drinking
system, under the authority of our national and state governments.
We also demand, as a right, that women, having the privileges of
citizens in other respects, be clothed with the ballot for their
protection, and as a rightful means for the proper settlement of the
liquor question.
Twelfth. To remove the apprehension of some who allege that a
loss of public revenue would follow the suppression of the direct
trade, we confidently point to the experience of governments abroad
and at home, which shows that thrift and revenue from the
consumption of legitimate manufactures and commerce have so
largely followed the abolition of drink as to fully supply all loss of
liquor taxes.
Thirteenth. We recognize the good providence of Almighty God,
who has preserved and prospered us as a nation; and, asking for His
Spirit to guide us to ultimate success, we all look for it, relying upon
His omnipotent arm.

1880.—Democratic Platform,

Cincinnati, Ohio, June 22.

The Democrats of the United States, in convention assembled,
declare:
First. We pledge ourselves anew to the constitutional doctrines
and traditions of the Democratic party, as illustrated by the teachings
and examples of a long line of Democratic statesmen and patriots,
and embodied in the platform of the last national convention of the
party.
Second. Opposition to centralization, and to that dangerous spirit
of encroachment which tends to consolidate the powers of all the
departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of
government, a real despotism; no sumptuary laws; separation of the
church and state for the good of each; common schools fostered and
protected.
Third. Home rule; honest money, consisting of gold and silver, and
paper, convertible into coin on demand; the strict maintenance of
the public faith; state and national; and a tariff for revenue only; the
subordination of the military to the civil power; and a general and
thorough reform of the civil service.
Fourth. The right to a free ballot is a right preservative of all rights;
and must and shall be maintained in every part of the United States.
Fifth. The existing administration is the representative of
conspiracy only; and its claim of right to surround the ballot-boxes
with troops and deputy marshals, to intimidate and obstruct the
elections, and the unprecedented use of the veto to maintain its
corrupt and despotic power, insults the people and imperils their
institutions. We execrate the course of this administration in making
places in the civil service a reward for political crime; and demand a
reform, by statute, which shall make it forever impossible for a
defeated candidate to bribe his way to the seat of a usurper by
billeting villains upon the people.
Sixth. The great fraud of 1876–7, by which, upon a false count of
the electoral votes of two states, the candidate defeated at the polls
was declared to be President, and, for the first time in American
history, the will of the people was set aside under a threat of military
violence, struck a deadly blow at our system of representative
government. The Democratic party, to preserve the country from the
horrors of a civil war, submitted for the time, in the firm and
patriotic belief that the people would punish the crime in 1880. This
issue precedes and dwarfs every other. It imposes a more sacred duty
upon the people of the Union than ever addressed the consciences of
a nation of freemen.
Seventh. The resolution of Samuel J. Tilden, not again to be a
candidate for the exalted place to which he was elected by a majority
of his countrymen, and from which he was excluded by the leaders of
the Republican party, is received by the Democrats of the United
States with deep sensibility; and they declare their confidence in his
wisdom, patriotism, and integrity unshaken by the assaults of the
common enemy; and they further assure him that he is followed into
the retirement he has chosen for himself by the sympathy and
respect of his fellow-citizens, who regard him as one who, by
elevating the standard of the public morality, and adorning and
purifying the public service, merits the lasting gratitude of his
country and his party.
 Eighth. Free ships, and a living chance for American commerce
upon the seas; and on the land, no discrimination in favor of
transportation lines, corporations, or monopolies.
Ninth. Amendments of the Burlingame treaty; no more Chinese
immigration, except for travel, education, and foreign commerce,
and, therein, carefully guarded.
Tenth. Public money and public credit for public purposes solely,
and public land for actual settlers.
Eleventh. The Democratic party is the friend of labor and the
laboring man, and pledges itself to protect him alike against the
cormorants and the commune.
Twelfth. We congratulate the country upon the honesty and thrift
of a Democratic Congress, which has reduced the public expenditure
$10,000,000 a year; upon the continuation of prosperity at home
and the national honor abroad; and, above all, upon the promise of
such a change in the administration of the government as shall
insure a genuine and lasting reform in every department of the
public service.
 Virginia Republican.

[Adopted August 11.]

Whereas, It is proper that when the people assemble in convention
they should avow distinctly the principles of government on which
they stand; now, therefore, be it,
Resolved, That we, the Republicans of Virginia, hereby make a
declaration of our allegiance and adhesion to the principles of the
Republican party of the country, and our determination to stand
squarely by the organization of the Republican party of Virginia,
always defending it against the assaults of all persons or parties
whatsoever.
Second. That amongst the principles of the Republican party none
is of more vital importance to the welfare and interest of the country
in all its parts than that which pertains to the sanctity of Government
contracts. It therefore becomes the special duty and province of the
Republican party of Virginia to guard and protect the credit of our
time-honored State, which has been besmirched with repudiation, or
received with distrust, by the gross mismanagement of various
factions of the Democratic party, which have controlled the
legislation of the State.
Third. That the Republican party of Virginia hereby pledges itself
to redeem the State from the discredit that now hangs over her in
regard to her just obligations for moneys loaned her for constructing
her internal improvements and charitable institutions, which,
permeating every quarter of the State, bring benefits of far greater
value than their cost to our whole people, and we in the most solemn
form pledge the Republican party of the State to the full payment of
the whole debt of the State, less the one-third set aside as justly
falling on West Virginia; that the industries of the country should be
fostered through protective laws, so as to develop our own resources,
employ our own labor, create a home market, enhance values, and
promote the happiness and prosperity of the people.
Fourth. That the public school system of Virginia is the creature of
the Republican party, and we demand that every dollar the
Constitution dedicates to it shall be sacredly applied thereto as a
means of educating the children of the State, without regard to
condition or race.
Fifth. That the elective franchise as an equal right should be based
on manhood qualification, and that we favor the repeal of the
requirements of the prepayment of the capitation tax as a
prerequisite to the franchise as opposed to the Constitution of the
United States, and in violation of the condition whereby the State
was re-admitted as a member of our Constitutional Union, as well as
against the spirit of the Constitution; but demand the imposition of
the capitation tax as a source of revenue for the support of the public
schools without its disfranchising effects.
Sixth. That we favor the repeal of the disqualification for the
elective franchise by a conviction of petty larceny, and of the
infamous laws which place it in the power of a single justice of the
peace (ofttimes being more corrupt than the criminal before him) to
disfranchise his fellow man.
Seventh. Finally, that we urge the repeal of the barbarous law
permitting the imposition of stripes as degrading and inhuman,
contrary to the genius of a true and enlightened people, and a relic of
barbarism.
[The Convention considered it inexpedient to nominate candidates
for State officers.]

Virginia Readjuster.

[Adopted June 2.]

First. We recognize our obligation to support the institution for the
deaf, dumb and blind, the lunatic asylum, the public free schools and
the Government out of the revenues of the State; and we deprecate
and denounce that policy of ring rule and subordinated sovereignty
which for years borrowed money out of banks at high rates of
interest for the discharge of these paramount trusts, while our
revenues were left the prey of commercial exchanges, available to the
State only at the option of speculators and syndicates.
Second. We reassert our purpose to settle and adjust our State
obligations on the principles of the “Bill to re-establish public credit,”