Let's Keep the Dean After All
A study of doctoral education found that savvy deans can push for real reforms, even on a tight budget.
By Robert Weisbuch
The Responsive PhD, an initiative the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation launched in 2000, set out to explore the place of the PhD in society and the university. Over the previous decade, national studies and projects had identified a mismatch between the kinds of training PhDs receive in graduate school and the careers available to them. We aimed to build on a consensus that was emerging from national data by developing recommendations for change that would, we hoped, provide a richer purpose and population for doctoral education.
We chose fourteen graduate schools to participate in the initiative based on their records of innovations in doctoral study and with an eye toward variety in terms of geography and institutional type.1 The Pew Charitable Trusts and Atlantic Philanthropies provided a budget of just under $1 million, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation supported one aspect of the effort, that on diversity.
During the course of the project, both of our major funders decided to leave the field of higher education, just as several other large foundations cut back or suspended their higher education programs. Many of us worry that this general decline in foundation support for universities arises from a dangerous notion that foundation dollars will create far more change in other areas, such as birth control and aging, and that habit and narrow self-interest in higher education defeat dramatic institutional change on campuses.
The level and quality of participation among faculty in our study, however, disproved the foundations’ assumptions about faculty and universities, as did the study’s results. In fact, we at Woodrow Wilson came to see the project as a powerful refutation of the characterization of universities as intransigent. We found that modest funds can improve higher education tremendously when a project is constructed with faculty involvement rather than imposed by a distant authority.
Our most important finding would probably seem self-serving if it had come from the graduate deans who participated in the study. But it came from administrators at Woodrow Wilson who managed the project, and it is this: doctoral education is in fact meaningful as a unified concept, which argues for the existence of graduate schools and deans with real authority and sizable budgets.
Such a notion, we found, is by no means self-evident to those who study the state of graduate education in the United States today. Many doctoral-granting universities, after all, have no autonomous graduate deans; institutions assign supervision of graduate programs to research vice presidents. That seems sensible enough, given the highly localized nature of doctoral programs. The experience of doctoral students in, say, medieval history and chemical engineering will vary so vastly—in coursework, in the very notion of a course, in what one field calls scholarship and another research, in disciplinary conventions and capstone projects—that their PhDs hardly seem to be the same degrees.
Administrative units reinforce the separations among graduate departments. Graduate programs are run by the faculty members of a particular department and overseen by the deans of their college or school. A graduate dean may seem a useless appendage, a view reflected in the number of graduate deans who have no budgetary authority.
But, as our study found, graduate deans can go a long way toward linking a university with its local community and toward breaking down unproductive barriers between graduate departments. The fourteen graduate deans initially involved in our study took that slim budget of just under $1 million and created more than forty initiatives dealing with public scholarship, pedagogy, and diversity. They also helped to strengthen the self-evaluation practices of their respective graduate programs, encouraging both innovation and complex assessment of the innovations.
The project began by identifying four themes from the reform-minded research on the doctorate of the previous decade. Within the context of these themes, we offered a paltry few thousand dollars to each participating graduate school to facilitate roundtables among faculty members, administrators, and students in which they would identify their major interests and plan a project. Often, alumni and local leaders also participated.
The first theme, New Partnerships, picked up on complaints of a bad fit between the training and the actual work of new PhDs. Reformers called for more dynamic and continuing discussion between faculty mentors and employers from different sectors—all kinds of colleges and universities, business, government, nonprofits, and public education.
The second theme, New Paradigms, focused on multidisciplinary study, asking how we can accommodate new ways of organizing knowledge that transcend disciplinary boundaries. Such new kinds of study—women’s studies is an obvious example—are the open window to the world of interests beyond the academy.
The theme New People concerned the doctoral cohort—especially the next generation of scholar-teachers and nonacademic experts—in all fields where a doctorate is required or advantageous. One-third of the doctoral-age population is African American, Hispanic, or Native American, yet considerably less than 10 percent of the doctorates awarded in 2003 went to students with these origins. Although some progress can be shown over the past two decades, recent court challenges have engendered a disheartening institutional retreat from active promotion of diversity.
The final theme, New Practices, focused on pedagogy, including teaching, internships, and other means to encourage partnerships between the academy and various social sectors. The project rejected the notion of scholarship as the evil empire, but it did insist that the pedagogical development of graduate students be considered with the same seriousness as the development of abilities in scholarly research.
Woodrow Wilson’s administrators judged that the first round of results from the Responsive PhD project went well beyond expectations. Yale University, for example, forged a wholly new relationship between alumni and graduate students in the humanities to engender a more creative sense of career opportunities within and beyond the academy. The University of California, Irvine, set up new partnerships with middle schools and high schools to improve the teaching of history. Howard University invented a bevy of pedagogical internships, including some with historically black colleges and universities. Duke University created new ways to evaluate the effectiveness of programs.
The University of Texas established a program that brought students from different disciplines together to confront urgent social challenges. The University of Colorado worked with regional businesses to develop internships. Arizona State University did much the same in a program called Preparing Future Professionals, a deliberate variant of Preparing Future Faculty, an initiative of the Council of Graduate Schools and the Association of American Colleges and Universities—and an acknowledgment that more than half of all doctoral students have nonfaculty careers.
We did have some notable failures, but, more often, our initial funding attracted internal institutional support many times greater. In the process, we learned much about assessment, a word that our deans at first reacted strongly against but that they came to embrace as we learned how to make assessment qualitative in ways suited to an intellectual community.
But to return to our general conclusion—that doctoral education is meaningful as a unified concept and that graduate schools and graduate deans ought to exist—the projects described above highlighted how graduate deans can help remove barriers between graduate departments. Graduate deans can cross the gridlines of the disciplines; they can create interchange among departments, influence campus culture, and help to link a university with its local community.
When deans facilitate interactions between graduate programs and outside employers, they help reinvigorate the role of academe in society. Academic disciplines should, after all, participate powerfully in constituting a society. We can do more than critique Main Street; we can help to construct it. We can combat sound-bite prejudices and short-range economics by encouraging longer-range experiments, analysis, and, yes, contemplation.
In addition, by insisting on the commonality of scholarly and scientific endeavor, the graduate school can maintain a sense of intellectual community. Starting from a sense of shared purpose would enable us to pursue a tremendously overdue examination of disciplinary differences. Some of us, for example, still wonder whether scientific methods and critical reading oppose, complement, or reinforce each other.
The graduate dean and the graduate school can be the connective tissue among the parts of the university and between academia generally and the worlds beyond it. But the deans must have some power. That means they need a budget, certainly, but it must be tied to rigorous evaluation. If universities resist change (and they do so, I would argue, to the same degree that public education is giddy for change, accepting a new reform each week), it may be because it is so hard to end a program once it’s begun. Sophisticated assessment, however—a process that begins before initiating a program and continues throughout to allow for midcourse alterations—can bring clarity, even to the raison d’être of the university itself. If a university can determine a set of values that apply to all of its graduate programs, and if that university measures and publicizes those values, quality is bound to improve mightily.
Another contribution the graduate dean can make is to ensure that our highest degree will not remain a bastion of white privilege. I employ that edgy phrase knowingly as a counterforce to all of the excuses and rationalizations offered over the years in defense of inaction. We continue to count Asian American students as “minorities” when we should instead be celebrating the fact that this cohort is no longer underrepresented, and we rely on the claim that minority dropouts from lower degrees leave us with an impossibly slender potential PhD cohort. If the graduate dean is not a leader for opportunity at all educational levels, she or he will always fail in terms of diversity. (For example, over 60 percent of Latinos in higher education are in community colleges, and most do not pursue the BA.) If those entrusted with the highest academic and professional degree were to take the institutional lead in encouraging further education for all, the results would be stunning.
The racial composition of graduate programs is a particularly difficult issue, at once largely social and specifically academic. But my point goes beyond the example of racial and ethnic diversity. I want to suggest that a graduate dean and a graduate school can have a unique and potentially huge role within the university and in the national culture.
A responsive doctorate does not mean letting the tail wag the dog, or that doctoral education must respond to every immediate social challenge. But we do have to let the dog out of its cage—to extend the reach and the responsiveness of academic learning. To accomplish this goal, we do not have to sacrifice higher education’s occasional distance from the immediate noise and broil of national life, a removal sometimes vital to far-flung thought. The disciplines do, however, have to become more responsive to the world. Graduate education should be more cosmopolitan, and becoming cosmopolitan, in this sense, is about becoming more fully human.
Note
1. The institutions were Howard, Princeton, and Yale universities and the University of Pennsylvania in the Northeast; Duke Universitiy and the University of Texas in the South; Indiana and Washington universities and the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin in the Midwest; and Arizona State University and the universities of California, Irvine; Colorado; and Washington in the West. Back to text.
Robert Weisbuch is president of Drew University. He served from 1997 to 2005 as president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, where he led a project on the doctorate with Earl Lewis, provost and academic vice president at Emory University.
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