RESPONSIVE PHD > AGENDA                                               Updated Jan 2004

Over the last decade, national studies and projects conducted from varying perspectives have identified a mismatch between the kinds of training Ph.D.s receive in graduate school and the careers available to them. The Re-envisioning the Ph.D. Project, led by Jody Nyquist at the University of Washington, brought this issue to the national forefront by bringing together the producers and consumers of the Ph.D. to voice their concerns about doctoral education and identify strategic partnerships to address those issues.
 
Building on the consensus emerging from the national data, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation organized an effort to sharpen the findings into major recommendations for change. With a beginning grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts in 2000, and continuing support from Atlantic Philanthropies, the Responsive Ph.D. Initiative set out to create a model for innovation that will provide a richer purpose and a richer population for doctoral education.


PILLARS OF INQUIRY

   Four principles emerge from new questions being asked about doctoral education:

• Through what new paradigms can the learning associated with the highest degree in academic disciplines encourage adventuresome and innovative scholarship to more fully inform the life of the nation?
• By which new practices can the doctorate more perfectly represent scholarship as challenging, intensive and versatile, to be applied beyond the academy?
• How can new people from a wide variety of backgrounds aid in the diversification of the American intellect?
• How can new partnerships create a powerful, permanent dialogue between the producers and consumers of the Ph.D.?

New Paradigms

   Interdisciplinarity: Within the university, coexistence among disciplines can sometimes be uneasy, especially as the promise and praise of interdisciplinary learning and discovery challenges their status as discrete organizations of knowledge. A clear articulation of disciplinary definitions and forms of interdisciplinary work remains to be undertaken - for instance, training in multiple disciplines or in a working group of experts from different disciplines; among arts-and-science disciplines or between a liberal-arts discipline and a professional school. The project seeks to define those practices in doctoral education that encourage adventuresome research within and across disciplinary boundaries.

   Scholarly Citizenship: If the goal of the doctorate is redefined as scholarly citizenship, rather than only to replenish the professoriate, its full potential for educational and social good can be realized and students can contemplate their professional contributions more creatively. While the PhD is already a powerful professional credential within the academy, it deserves a broader scope of influence in the world. For the scholar-citizen, the doctorate's real power consists of both rigorous scholarship and creative action throughout and beyond the educational realm. This new paradigm recognizes the responsibility of doctoral education to train a next generation of scholar-teachers as a centrally important role of scholar-citizens, while recognizing the need for focus on the ongoing life of the individual disciplines. However, it challenges academic inquiry - specializations do need to be well honed, but also they need to exercise more fully their value and impact in spheres beyond the academic department.
 

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New Practices

   Professional Development: To build a culture supportive of a new generation of scholar-citizens, doctoral students require more thoughtful professional training, so as to consider more profoundly the various opportunities for applying their learning in diverse careers within and outside higher education. While intellectual autonomy and the centrality of scholarship remain crucial, these virtues become problematic when doctoral training fails to consider real-world impacts. A surprising lack of real-world relations in the physical sciences and engineering was emphasized in the 1995 COSEPUP Report and these concerns are particularly acute at the doctoral level in the humanities and social sciences. The project seeks to promulgate practices in doctoral institutions that create opportunities for students to learn about, and test themselves in, a variety of academic and non-academic sectors.

   Pedagogical Training: While the research component of doctoral education is strong, the quality of pedagogical training is uneven. Data on the development of graduate students suggest they get little help in learning to be educators - not only learning effective classroom teaching, but putting together a course curriculum, thinking strategically about introducing a discipline or making connections among disciplines, or teaching to varied audiences. In many disciplines, doctoral students teach what the faculty does not want to teach. In others, teaching is the final resort for funding if a student is not appointed to a research position in a faculty lab. Finally, doctoral students often end up with little understanding of the fuller higher education landscape, much less of education in the schools, from which college students come. A broader, more systematic approach to the preparation of doctoral students as educators would respond to a national interest in improving the quality of teaching and learning at all levels of education.
 

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New People

   Diverse Populations: Graduate study in the arts and sciences lags behind other professional pathways in attracting and developing the full potential of a healthy number of people of color and, in some disciplines, women. Although the percentage of minorities making up the nation's population and entering our colleges and universities as undergraduates is on the rise, professors standing at the front of the class remain largely white and, in some disciplines, predominantly male. In English, as one example, the number of African American PhD graduates seems frozen at about 3.5%, no greater than 30 years ago. The number rises slightly in the social sciences and falls again in the physical and life sciences and mathematics. And, women are seriously underrepresented in engineering and physics. The lack of role models for students often means that lack of diversity perpetuates itself, and ultimately renders learning provincial, as new studies on the intellectual benefits of diversity have shown. Student retention at earlier stages of education is a crucial part of the solution, and doctoral programs must do their part to develop new recruitment and retention strategies to ensure role models for future students, and a cosmopolitan vibrancy for their disciplines.

   Diversifying the American Intellect: Many students of color have expressed interest in bringing their learning to bear upon social realities. Now, unfortunately, they frequently perceive they can achieve their goals better by pursuing an advanced degree in one of the professional schools or by entering directly into a career after college. To attract more students of color to the doctoral degree, graduate education must not seem a closed club, but instead an open door to new influences in method, knowledge base, and outcome.
 

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New Partnerships

To build a culture supportive of a new generation of scholar-citizens, doctoral education requires more active partnerships between constituencies that create the doctoral process and those who employ its graduates--everyone from the entire professoriate, including those at small colleges, four-year comprehensives, and community colleges, and leaders in sectors of business, industry, government, cultural and community institutions, and K-12 schools. In an era of increasing pressures for accountability, coupled with decreasing financial resources, partnerships must also be constructed in ways that more genuinely reflect the needs, interests, and opportunities of all stakeholders who influence the research and educational process-federal funding agencies and foundations, disciplinary and educational associations, and research universities. Engaging with new paradigms, new practices, and new people can only happen by developing truly synergistic collaborations among people from a broad array of institutions and sectors within and beyond the academy.
 

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Please e-mail questions and comments to:
ResponsivePhD@woodrow.org