{"id":246,"date":"2010-07-15T10:56:56","date_gmt":"2010-07-15T09:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=246"},"modified":"2010-07-15T10:56:56","modified_gmt":"2010-07-15T09:56:56","slug":"jury-service-in-barcelona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2010\/07\/15\/jury-service-in-barcelona\/","title":{"rendered":"Jury Service in Barcelona"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In Barcelona last week sitting on a PhD jury \u2013 one of these public defences that are literally and metaphorically foreign to the UK. \u00a0The thesis was in Catalan with a presentation to an audience of about 35 in that language, with Spanish and English interludes. \u00a0I had read a 50 page English summary of the thesis, and was familiar with the research over a 6 year involvement between Bath and the Catalan university. \u00a0When the candidate had finished his 50 minute presentation, and his supervisors had had a say (a novel twist, I thought), we three jurists had ours. \u00a0I spoke about the international context of the research and its potential contribution. \u00a0The last to speak (in Catalan) was the president of the jury, and I had a translator whispering in my ear. \u00a0I thought the learned and venerable professor was making some quite critical points to do with neglected literature, omitted data, and un-nuanced argument, etc, and so I kept asking my interpreter: \"Is that a critical point?\" \u00a0 \"Yes\", she'd always respond, \"but not a negative one.\" \u00a0 Oh, I thought, and where do you draw <em>that<\/em> line?<\/p>\n<p>In the end, we graded it \"<em>Excellent cum laude<\/em>\", everyone was happy, and cava was splashed about. \u00a0Later, I asked another venerable and\u00a0learned professor, this time someone whom I had known for a while, what was all the critical but not negative stuff from the president of the jury: \"Just showing off\" they said; \"illustrating how clever they are and how little the candidate really knows.\" \u00a0 Experience suggests that this a tendency also found here, but in Barcelona, on that occasion at least, it wasn't allowed to get in the way of the outcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Barcelona last week sitting on a PhD jury \u2013 one of these public defences that are literally and metaphorically foreign to the UK. \u00a0The thesis was in Catalan with a presentation to an audience of about 35 in that...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}