Professor Helena Barnard of the University of Pretoria’s (UP’s) business school, the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), was recently honoured for her work in shaping the GIBS doctoral programme’s winning trajectory.

Prof Barnard, who is the academic head of the GIBS doctoral programme, was announced as the second runner-up for the 2024 South African Women in Science Award for Distinguished Scholar in Humanities and Social Sciences in August.

The award recognises the output of the GIBS doctoral programme under her stewardship. Prior to her taking control of the programme in July 2012, GIBS had produced four doctoral graduates. Twelve years after Prof Barnard stepped in, the business school is close to producing its 100th doctoral graduate.

Although she has won many awards during her distinguished career, she says she is especially proud of this one – because it is local. “My international recognition has been extensive, but normally you get international recognition after the local recognition,” she says. “I serve on international panels to support doctoral students, and on global doctoral academies. I do this partly to benchmark our doctoral quality; I believe we have to be top-tier. But it has to be our stories; we cannot be telling the stories of other people. And I’ve done this work, which the rest of the world thinks is great stuff, and it's the first time it was recognised in South Africa.”

She is still touched by what her current and former doctoral students said in their nominations – that she saw potential in them which they had not seen, and that she pushed them to become the person that she saw.

Prof Barnard attributes the doctoral programme’s success to a focus on the end goal. “I say to students, ‘You want to get into the programme; I want you to get out of the programme.’”

Besides the brag factor for GIBS – whose Master of Business Administration (MBA) boasts the best throughput rate in South Africa – increasing the number of doctoral graduates also has an external value for the country. “It's a national priority. People who are doctorally qualified are highly skilled at challenging, at not taking things at face value, at writing, at reading, at problem-solving. Doctoral students develop a very robust set of cognitive capabilities.”

Her strategy for producing more PhDs includes encouraging doctoral students to spend the first year of their studies developing their proposal – identifying a question that matters, and the methodology to answer it. Their second year is about gathering the data, whether through interviews, surveys or archival research, and the third is writing the actual thesis.

“We broke it into three deadlines. And if people are not progressing adequately in one of the phases, we can catch them and do remedial work.”

One of these tactics is offering the services of a coach. GIBS uses coaches who have a doctorate and thus understand the pressures.

Prof Barnard is grateful for having an academic role model of her own early in life. Her maternal grandmother’s sister, ‘Tant Salie’, graduated with a doctoral degree at UP in the first half of the 1900s – before she even had the right to vote. Her topic was on Jan van Riebeeck’s diary and how it influenced the development of Afrikaans as an official language. She says it was very motivating to grow up with a doctoral role model in her family, and a woman at that. “I never doubted my right to have a voice.”

A stay in the US allowed her to get business experience – she still speaks fondly of Home Depot, where she worked for five years – and to experience how Americans structure doctoral work. She has adapted some of those practices for the South African context. “We have such important research questions in this country. I figured we could do world-leading research if we could develop our students like I was developed over there.”

Prof Barnard’s passion for the doctoral programme is clear. Does she ever switch off? “I walk,” she says. Seven days a week she racks up 8 000 to 10 000 steps during her early morning walk, which takes about 90 minutes. “It's how I relax. It's like meditation.”