Feature Interview
Interview with Professor Thomas Lee
Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages
Q: In your experience, what are the major strengths and weaknesses of CUHK’s research students? If there’s one thing you want them to change, what would it be?
Our students have the benefit of a sound basic training in their respective disciplines, and are familiar with the norms of academic research. They enjoy rich library resources, and reasonably good funding support for conferences and field trips, etc. Our students acquire skills in the operation of research facilities and equipment relatively early.
The weaknesses of our students are a lack of general intellectual curiosity about ideas, an extremely low amount of reading in the classics, and a commonly observed myopia in their research scope, focusing only on the issues that bear directly on their theses. Our students also lack intellectual ambition.
Q: If there are a few things that your own research students must have, knowledge, skill, attitude, character trait, etc., before or during your supervision, what are they?
I would expect my students to take the pursuit of truth seriously and not just get by to secure a degree. They need to do a lot of background reading, and then come up with research issues that they find genuinely interesting and engaging. They need to be honest with themselves, and in their attitudes toward knowledge, and be able to withstand hardship.
Q: Do you find research students’ conception of research an issue? Specifically, do you see any common and major misconceptions?
Many graduate students are satisfied with merely replicating what other researchers have done, perhaps merely extending earlier results in a small way, and get published quickly. This is fine, since much of scientific research consists of mopping-up operations, as Thomas Kuhn put it, and establishing a publication record early is important for survival these days. But clearly, research that primarily consists of replication is deeply unsatisfying.
It is also very difficult for a novice researcher to assess whether a research issue is meaningful or significant, and whether a solution to a problem is a good one. It seems to me difficult to develop this kind of judgment without a broad exposure to ideas and results, not just in one’s field, but also in other fields. The history of my own discipline—linguistics—is full of examples of cross-disciplinary influence, for example, the use of formal logic and set theory in the characterization of grammar and meaning, or the use of social cooperation principles in explicating the dynamics of communication, or the use of signal processing methods in the analysis of speech, etc. That’s why I consider it crucial for research students to have a broad intellectual interest.
Q: In your opinion, what would a good supervisor-student relationship be like? For instance, how “close” would you want your students to get to you? How do you see your responsibilities towards them?
The supervisor-advisee relationship is clearly a mentor-mentee relationship or a master-apprentice relationship. It is necessarily an intimate relationship as the teacher and the student naturally share a lot of values about approaches to research, the role of scholarship and ultimately what counts as a good life. They work together to produce new knowledge.
I think Noam Chomsky put it very nicely:
"Studying is more a form of apprenticeship than anything else. It's kind of like learning to be a skilled carpenter. You work with somebody who knows how to do it. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't get it. If you get it, you're a skilled carpenter. How it's transmitted, nobody can say. Science is a lot like that. You just sort of have to get it. The way you get it is by interacting."
Personally I share with my students not only my interests and experiences in my own field, but also things that I care about a lot, including my aesthetic interests (for example, my interest in literature and film), and perhaps also my very ill-informed views of society and history. I also learn a lot from my students about their perceptions of the world, which could be sharper and more enlightened than mine, as in areas such as the environment and gender.
As a teacher, I care about the psychological well-being of my students, but I also recognize that there is a limit beyond which I may be overstepping the line. I am generally not very interested in the details of my students’ personal life, except at the level of ideas and knowledge.
Q: There seems to be a major difference in research supervision practice on the distinction between faculty research and graduate research. The distinction may be made more or less, as a matter of personal preference, or general practice of the field. What do you think?
There is a great diversity of research and pedagogical styles among teachers. Some professors may lecture in a very structured and organized way, with long handouts to help the students. Other professors may prefer to be spontaneous when expressing their ideas in seminars, and emphasize student initiative and classroom interaction, leaving the students to pick up the organized information on the lecture topics by themselves. It is hard to say which style of teaching benefits the students more.
Likewise, I’ve seen different modes of interaction in research supervision. Some supervisors require students to follow a strict regular schedule and expect a steady output from students. Other supervisors are more permissive, giving a lot of freedom to students as long as in the end they produce decent research. Some supervisors involve students in their own projects and publish papers with students; other supervisors encourage students to come up with their own research topics and take the research entirely in their hands.
An important part of their training as graduate students is to learn to adapt to professors and researchers of different styles, and be able to benefit from all of them.
Q: Are there major factors out of your control here that make research supervision complicated, or even difficult?
Factors such as the size of the research student quota assigned to one’s department, which depends on KPI figures such as the number of GRF grants awarded to a department, are beyond our control. The university policy to encourage admission of doctoral students over MPhil students will work against the grooming of local students to become researchers. The best of our undergraduates may not be able to decide whether they want to commit themselves to a full-time research career. They may not want to enrol in a doctoral programme at the time of graduation. The MPhil degree provides a basic research training for students of this type.
Q: Do you have any further comments on the challenge of supervising research students in CUHK?
The ultimate challenge is to cultivate in students a strong level of intellectual curiosity, boldness in critical thinking, a deep commitment to their disciplines, particularly in the context of the disciplines’ development in Hong Kong and China, a solid grounding in the basics of their field, and an ambition to excel in their field. I would say the number of graduate students that we have who carry these traits is the best KPI of our postgraduate education.
Chomsky, N. (1996). Class Warfare: interviews with David Barsamian. Maine: Common Courage Press.
|
“ I would expect my students to take the pursuit of truth seriously and not just get by to secure a degree... ”
“ It is very difficult for a novice researcher
to assess whether a research issue is
meaningful or significant, and whether a solution to a problem is a good one...”
“ Personally I share with my students not only my interests and experiences in my own field, but also things that I care about a lot, including my aesthetic interests...”
“ An important part of their training as graduate students is to learn to adapt to professors and researchers of different styles, and be able to benefit from all of them”
“The ultimate challenge is to cultivate in students a strong level of intellectual curiosity, boldness in critical thinking, a deep commitment to their disciplines...” |
