While the Northern Hemisphere spends two weeks in Provence / renting a quaint clapboard beachhouse “upstate” (delete according to what continent you’re on), I’ve been on a winter work blitz to try to get ahead…so a long time since I’ve posted here.

This brings me to that gold mine of interesting news Down Under, the Higher Education pages of The Australian…

This week they’ve been taking a pot-shot at “universities which have a laissez-faire approach to their management, allowing research supervisors to extend [PhD] candidatures for their cheap labour or letting candidates drift along without strong management”.

This prompted a response in the reader comments section: “Laisere-fair [sic] attitude is required to foster the student’s cretivity [sic] – an essential part of scientific training, beingtragicall [sic] eroded by the bean-counting attitude of the goverment to PhD studies.”

Clearly the person writing that comment took a laissez-faire attitude to spelling, managing to maul both English and French in one sentence, but never mind…

When you take on the role of teacher don’t you have to accept your bean-counting responsibilitities – even if this means getting tough and telling students what to do?

After all, who’s footing the bill? The poor old Australian tax payer.

Besides, since when was laissez-faire the way to foster creativity in education? Will the knowledge “trickle down” from teacher to student?

Where does everyone else stand on the bean counting vs. laissez-faire continuum, in terms of supervision of PhD students?