From the Editor: Unthemed
Paula M. Krebs
I don’t generally favor theme issues for Academe because I figure that if readers aren’t interested in the theme, they won’t open the magazine. So although you may find clusters of articles around a particular topic, you won’t find entire issues devoted to one topic. Instead, I am looking for a wide variety of articles for each issue. I welcome feedback on the question of theme issues, although I warn you that I’m not easily swayed. Now, on to the content of this issue.
If you’ve ever fumed while the speaker on your right droned on through the time allotted for her paper as well as your own, you will welcome Timothy Madigan’s how-to guide for conference session chairs. Photocopy it and distribute it at your next conference.
David Cope helps us to understand the implications for our own classrooms of the latest court cases related to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Know your options, he counsels, so you can make informed decisions about how to accommodate the needs of your students.
There’s hope for achieving a consistent standard of faculty governance in state university systems—just have a look at Richard Veit’s article about how faculty did it in North Carolina. His article complements Robin Matross Helms and Tanya Price’s examination of the faculty governance struggles at Boston College, with its historical antipathy toward the idea of a faculty senate.
In addition, this issue of Academe features a group of articles that address graduate education in the United States, calling for recognition of the serious changes, in recent decades, in that sector of American higher education.
Philip Cohen calls for more federal funding for graduate schools, which are, he argues, the necessary foundation for all good undergraduate education. Quality graduate programs produce quality undergraduate educators, top-notch research, and, ultimately, a better national workforce. But graduate education does not have the national profile it needs to garner support for the twenty-first century. Robert Weisbuch, the former president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, sings the praises of graduate deans who have been reinvigorating doctoral programs around the country on a shoestring. Read his report on the successes of the foundation’s Responsive PhD initiative.
Joseph Heathcott and Barbara Lovitts suggest changes in doctoral education in recognition of new social and educational conditions. Heathcott calls for graduate programs to recognize that training our doctoral students to be college professors may be doing them a disservice. He suggests that graduate programs look beyond the academy and expose graduate students to different models of satisfying vocations and professional lives. Lovitts tackles the question of the dissertation—how do we know whether it’s good? She asks graduate departments to “make the implicit explicit” by deciding on explicit standards for dissertations and then helping students to meet those standards. Ted Youn lays out the recent shifts in the job market for doctoral candidates, showing how inequities are increasing rather than decreasing as hierarchies among institutions become more stark.
Don’t forget to send us your academic freedom success stories, how-to articles about faculty governance or other aspects of academic life, and reflections or rants about the state of any aspect of higher education today.
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