Preparing future faculty
Thoughtful observations on some aspects of doctoral education
by Sunny Marche
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| The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century by George Walker, Chris Golde, Laura Jones, Andrea Conklin Bueschel, and Pat Hutchings |
While navel-gazing is not the unique province of the academy, it does seem to be a core competency. We are aided in this obsession by private think tanks (among others), the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching being one of them. The foundation made a significant investment in a five-year project – the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, or CID – which reviewed doctoral education in six disciplines: chemistry, education, English, history, mathematics and neuroscience. This effort resulted in a number of publications, including this, The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century.
The book begins with a brief history of doctoral education, especially in America, and ends with a short synopsis of its current state. The summary quickly identifies the ongoing issues of increased knowledge competition, falling government investment, high student attrition rates, long times for student completion, and the like. I suspect that a fair share of readers will benefit from this overview, more than might care to admit it. The authors correctly identify the barriers to the effective formation of scholars, primary among them being the short-term concerns of faculty to make tenure, get promoted and win grants. The chapters then progress to talking about the purpose of doctoral education, forming new scholars, the need to reconsider the apprenticeship model, creating and maintaining intellectual communities, and finally a call to action.
By the standards of such matters, this is a relatively thin volume – some 155 pages (excluding appendices, foreword, table of contents and bibliography but including endnotes, which frequently add material value to the content). Despite having five authors, the book’s overall structure, style, tone and argument are highly consistent. The text begins with the observation that “academics are very careful with words.” While that is not my general experience, it very fairly describes this work.
The vocabulary of the book, as carefully chosen as it appears to be, resonated with me in a very clear way. The term “old-fashioned” is not quite the right word but I cannot find a more accurate one. For example, the authors intentionally chose the phrase “formation of scholars” in marked contrast to perhaps more predictable terms such as “education,” “training,” or even “development.” They have an extensive section on “intellectual community,” a phrase that those outside the university setting would likely find quaint. The authors use the word “stewardship” with a very clear moral connotation with biblical connections. A 21st-century sensibility might have encouraged them to use “sustainability” instead, but stewardship is a richer and more complex idea. They are quite clear in their position: “scholarship entails moral obligations.” They want us to think about “character” and the “habits of heart and mind” when thinking about the formation of scholars.
The final chapter is a call to action, but it is difficult to feel encouraged. The faculty evaluation and reward systems at most universities will continue to act as a disabler rather than an enabler for best practices. The authors’ observation about increased competition for resources and greater accountability does not make me feel any better about prospects for institutionalized implementation of their ideas by people who will not have the same framework of values as the one that informs this work.
The greatest weakness of the book, and I suspect of the project as a whole, is the assumption that the “formation of scholars” has one primary objective – the preparation of future faculty (or PFF as the movement is sometimes known). As Appendix A makes clear, the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate began by seeking academic partners with a specific set of criteria, one of them a “track record of placing PhD graduates in tenure-track faculty positions at doctorate-granting institutions.” In light of the evidence about what successful PhD students do following graduation, this is a disappointment. More than 50 percent of doctoral graduates will not get work in such a position, and many of them (the majority of engineering scholars, for example) do not seek to. There is a compelling argument that these people should have been included in the discussion, too.
While there is a brief mention of non-PhD doctorates in this work (the Ed.D. sometimes found in the Faculty of Education), there is virtually no discussion of the professional doctorate as a growing component of doctoral education in this century.
One other thing troubled me about the work. I wondered how it could be necessary to devote a complete chapter to “creating and sustaining intellectual community.” After all, this is hardly a novel idea to most readers, or a new factor for the doctorate of the 21st century. But more troubling to me is how much I learned from this very chapter about the obvious and not-so-obvious requirements for such a community.
This is an interesting and thought-provoking book worth the attention of everyone involved in the formation of scholars – students, faculty members, departments, administrators and, one might hope, policymakers too. But it is not the whole story by any means.
The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century by George Walker, Chris Golde, Laura Jones, Andrea Conklin Bueschel, and Pat Hutchings, Jossey-Bass, 2008, 232 pages.
Dr. Marche is associate dean of graduate studies at Dalhousie University.
