Chapter 5 - The Ph.D. defense

Summary

The Ph.D. defense, oral examination, or “viva” is a very interesting genre and only partly because it presents another opportunity to consider the repurposing of genres, as discussed in Chapter 3. Are dissertation defenses, on the one hand, just “meaningless rituals,” mere epideictic celebrations, simple instances of “just going through the motions”? Or are they, on the other, tough and true oral examinations of the submitted work, consisting of carefully prepared but unpredictable interrogations of the texts under review and thoughtful and intelligent responses by the candidates? Or are they sometimes both, or at least sometimes more and sometimes less one or the other? Unfortunately, our primary knowledge of the discoursal properties of this genre is limited to a massively investigated instance of a single sociology defense recorded in a complex manner at Indiana University in 1975 (Grimshaw, 1989; Grimshaw et al., 1994). In addition to this, I have studied the four dissertation defenses that have been recorded as part of the MICASE project.

Defenses Outside the United States

Before we look at the discoursal characteristics of the U.S. defense itself, it is particularly important to put this event type into a broader geographical context. Elsewhere, oral examinations of the Ph.D. can take very different forms and have different names, such as “viva,” “viva voce,” and “disputas” (Norway). In Britain, and in countries influenced by British academic traditions, the assessment of the Ph.D. thesis, as it is normally called, is carried out in a closed room and conducted by an external examiner from another institution, and an internal examiner, who is not the candidate's supervisor/advisor.