Cheerleader, Coach, Counselor, Critic: Support and Challenge Roles of the Dissertation Advisor

Although many handbooks inform doctoral students about how to successfully complete the dissertation, few resources exist that discuss how faculty might help students through the dissertation experience. In the absence of such work, professors, particularly those new to the ranks, are left without conceptual frameworks to guide good practice. This article conceptualizes the roles of the dissertation advisor using the framework of support and challenge. The support roles played by the dissertation advisor are Cheerleader and Counselor; the challenge roles are Coach and Critic. Within each of these four roles, strategies that can be employed by advisors are described. While challenge roles may be more familiar to faculty, these must be balanced with support roles in order to facilitate a successful dissertation learning process. ********** Almost everyone in the halls of academia can tell a horror story about the dissertation process-either their own or a friend's. Often, the difficulty lies with the dissertation advisor who at one extreme provided too little assistance leaving the student to flounder alone, or at the other, exerted too much control by micro-managing all aspects of the process and product. The purpose of this article is to discuss the role of the dissertation advisor, and to propose one way to conceptualize the advisor role in relation to students. There are four major sources of information about the role of the dissertation advisor: policy statements of professional organizations, "how to write your dissertation" books addressed to students, conceptual work including theoretical analyses, and empirical research. In all of these sources, there is widespread agreement that the dissertation advisor is central to the entire dissertation experience. The Council of Graduate Schools, an association of U.S. universities offering advanced degrees, issued a policy statement discussing the nature of the doctoral dissertation and providing recommendations for improving doctoral education (Council of Graduate Schools, 1991). This report asserted that the dissertation advisor plays a "crucial role" in the dissertation process, and the relationship with the advisor is "pivotal" for a student's progress. In addition, this organization has issued two reports on the responsibilities of the doctoral advisor, further emphasizing the importance placed upon this position (Council of Graduate Schools, 1990; 2003). Most how-to books aimed to doctoral students include a section providing guidelines about selecting and working with the dissertation advisor (Cone & Foster, 1993; Glatthorn, 1998; Madsen, 1992; Mauch & Birch, 1998; Rudestam & Newton, 2001). All of these sources concur most strongly that, from the student's point of view, the advisor is the make-or-break factor in the dissertation process. Within this genre, the handbook written by Mauch and Birch (1998) makes a distinctive contribution because it is addressed to both faculty and students, recognizing the bilateral nature of the experience. In spite of widespread concurrence by participants that the advisor's role is crucial to the dissertation process, little scholarly work has been done in this area. Indeed, while this omission was noted in the 1983 first edition of the Mauch and Birch manual, the same lament is reiterated in the 1998 fourth edition. Some of the available research describes the dissertation process as experienced by students. For example, Lenz (1997) studied the experiences of nontraditional-aged women doctoral students, both those who completed and did not complete the dissertation. She found that one of the major differences between the two groups centered around the selection of an advisor and the continuity of that relationship. There is also research analyzing the relationships between dissertation advisors and students. Heinrich (1995), for instance, studied relationships between women doctoral students and their women dissertation committee advisors. …