Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) is an independent policy and research center with a primary mission "to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education." CFAT is located in Stanford, California.

George Walker is a senior scholar at CFAT, where he directs the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. Walker, a theoretical physicist, was Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at Indiana University before joining CFAT. He has been active in many national organizations working on graduate education, including?the Council of Graduate Schools, an AAU Task Force, and the Council on Research Policy and?Graduate Education of NASULGC.

Chris Golde has been a senior scholar at CFAT since 2001, working?on the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. Prior to CFAT, she was a scientist and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the principal investigator of the national Survey on Doctoral Education and Career Preparation, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and released as a report in January 2001.

Pat Hutchings is vice president of CFAT. Hutchings joined the Foundation in February 1998 after serving as a senior staff member at the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE). She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Iowa and was chair of the English department at Alverno College before joining AAHE.

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Doctoral Education for Future Generations

"Improving doctoral education is the lynchpin for higher education reform, and in this spirit The Formation of Scholars was built from an unusual process in which faculty-student teams from corresponding departments in participating institutions were brought together to share experiences. The results provide new guidance toward creating teaching and research scholars who are also 'stewards of the discipline.' This book should be required reading for those who care about higher education."
DON KENNEDY, president emeritus, Stanford University and former editor-in-chief, Science

"The strength of doctoral education in the U.S. lies in its willingness to continually reinvent itself. That reinvention hinges crucially on performance of both the faculty delivering the program of study and graduate deans who structure the right incentives and generate the right resources to ensure the highest possible quality experience for students. The Formation of Scholars provides extraordinarily rich insights into the thinking of students and faculty across six fields as they reflect on program goals, program effectiveness, and the program's capacity to reinvent itself in positive and productive ways. The CID project has made a lasting contribution to the toolbox of graduate deans as they do their part to reinvent doctoral education to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century."
DEBRA W. STEWART, president, Council of Graduate Schools

"The ideas in The Formation of Scholars are great conversation starters with faculty and administrative colleagues involved in doctoral education. This terrific volume is delightfully written, informative, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. It will be a wonderful resource for effecting change in one of the most dynamic and important parts of the educational enterprise preparation of the Ph.D."
SUZANNE ORTEGA, vice provost and graduate dean, University of Washington

Aus dem Klappentext

The Formation of Scholars

In the fast-paced twenty-first century educational environment--with new technologies, mounting global competition for students and scholars, blurring of boundaries between traditional disciplines, and growing pressures for accountability--doctoral programs face fundamental questions of purpose, vision, and quality.

Sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, The Formation of Scholars distills the results of a five-year project to develop creative solutions and approaches for transforming doctoral programs. The authors outline the processes, tools, and opportunities through which faculty and graduate students can turn their habits and skills as scholars--their commitment to hard questions and robust evidence--on their purposes and practices as educators and learners.

This groundbreaking book explores the current state of doctoral education in the United States and offers a plan for increasing the effectiveness of doctoral education. Programs must grapple with questions of purpose. The authors examine practices and elements of doctoral programs and show how they can be made more powerful by relying on principles of progressive development, integration, and collaboration. They challenge the traditional apprenticeship model and offer an alternative in which students learn while apprenticing with several faculty members. The authors persuasively argue that creating intellectual community is essential for high-quality graduate education in every department. Knowledge-centered, multigenerational communities foster the development of new ideas and encourage intellectual risk-taking.

The Formation of Scholars issues a call to action for administrators, faculty, and students to ensure that the United States' doctoral education continues to be the envy of the world.

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The Formation of Scholars

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

-Will Rogers

AS YOU READ THESE WORDS, some 375,000 men and women are pursuing doctoral degrees in institutions of higher education in the United States. Most are young adults-many with family commitments, and some juggling careers as well-but PhD programs are also populated by the occasional octogenarian and precocious teen. Some are in their first semester of work; others have been toiling for twenty years. Over 43,000 will graduate this year from the 400-plus institutions that offer the degree.

Many of those who receive PhD's will assume positions of leadership and responsibility in arenas that directly shape the lives we lead. A remarkable number of Nobel laureates from around the world received degrees at U.S. universities. Four of the ten most recent secretaries of state have been doctoral degree holders, as are five of the six current members of the Federal Reserve Board, and numerous world leaders. PhD's develop life-saving medical interventions, shape social programs and policies, and turn their talents to entrepreneurial ventures in the global economy. Approximately one-half of those who receive doctorates this year will join the ranks of college and university faculty who educate today's undergraduates, some of whom will become teachers themselves, in the United States and beyond, shaping the futures of our children and grandchildren. And some will prepare new PhD's, so the effects of doctoral education ripple out across nations and generations.

The importance of doctoral education to this country's current and future prospects can hardly be overestimated. The questions are: What will it take to ensure that the United States continues to be, as many have observed, "the envy of the world"? What will it take to meet the challenges that doctoral education faces today and to make the changes those challenges require?

Some of the challenges are long standing and well known. About half of today's doctoral students are lost to attrition-and in some programs the numbers are higher yet. Those who persist often take a long time to finish and along the way find their passion for the field sadly diminished. Many are ill-prepared for the full range of roles they must play, be they in academe or beyond, and often the experience is marred by a mismatch between the opportunities available to students as they complete their work and their expectations and training along the way. In most disciplines, women and ethnic minorities are still underrepresented among doctoral students. And what makes all of these challenges yet more challenging is that few processes for assessing effectiveness have been developed in graduate education, and it is difficult to muster ambition or urgency for doing better in the absence of information about what needs improvement. Thus, one finds attitudes of complacency ("Our application numbers are strong and so is our national ranking, so where's the problem?"), denial ("We don't have problems with gender or ethnic diversity here"), and blame ("Students these days just aren't willing to make the kinds of sacrifices we did to be successful").

Complicating matters is a set of newer challenges, many of them emerging as we write, and only partly recognized and understood. New technologies are altering and accelerating the way knowledge is shared and developed. And the marketplace for scholars and scholarship is now thoroughly global. Much of the most important, pathbreaking intellectual work going on today occurs in the borderlands between fields, blurring boundaries and challenging traditional disciplinary definitions. The need for firmer connections between academic work and the wider world of public life is increasingly clear, as well. And graduate education, like higher education more generally, faces shifting student demographics, new kinds of competition, growing pressures for accountability, and shrinking public investment. In short, expectations are escalating, and doctoral programs today face fundamental questions of purpose, vision, and quality. The Will Rogers quip that opens this chapter seems made to order: "Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."

The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate

The good news is that doctoral education is, by its nature, in the business of asking hard questions, pushing frontiers, and solving problems, and over the past several years the five of us have been privileged to work closely with faculty and students from doctoral programs that have made the decision to not "just sit there." The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID) has involved eighty-four PhD-granting departments in six fields-chemistry, education, English, history, mathematics, and neuroscience (for the full list of departments, see Appendix B). Our emphasis in this book, and in the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, was on the PhD, although many of our participating education departments also grant the EdD. By concentrating on a limited number of disciplines and interdisciplines rather than on doctoral education in general, the CID aimed to go deep and to work very directly with faculty and graduate students from the ground up. Thus, although the support and assistance of administrators, graduate deans in particular, and disciplinary societies was vital, the work was done by departments on matters within the control of departments-which is, after all, where the action is in graduate education.

* * *

Over the five years of the program, participating departments made a commitment to examine their own purposes and effectiveness, to implement changes in response to their findings, and to monitor the impact of those changes. Many used their participation to continue plans and activities that were already begun but would benefit from the structure, prestige, and interaction provided by a national initiative. Our role, in turn, included visiting the departments, interviewing campus team members, and bringing project participants together (sometimes by discipline, sometimes by theme) to report on their progress, learn from one another, and help us make sense of their experiences in ways that others can build on. (See Appendix A for a summary of the CID project.) In addition, both faculty and students participated in projectwide surveys, the results of which served as rich grist for discussion and debate about the preparation of scholars in the broadest sense, whether they work in industry, government, or academe. (See Appendix C for an overview of the CID surveys.)

Certainly there was much to discuss. Not surprisingly, in a project sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, an organization whose mission is to "uphold and dignify the profession of the teacher," a recurring theme was the need for practices that will better prepare tomorrow's PhD's to be teachers, equipped with the knowledge and skills to convey their field's complex ideas to a variety of audiences, not only in the classroom, but in the many...