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Peer Review, Spring 2004
From the Editor
David Tritelli |
By the time they earn their degrees, doctoral students are
generally well prepared as researchers and scholars in their
fields, but are they similarly prepared for other faculty
roles and responsibilities? Are they prepared to teach and
advise undergraduates, for example, or to perform academic
service? The answer, according to a national survey of doctoral
students, is probably not. "For nearly every role or task
performed by a faculty member," Chris Golde reports in this
issue, "there is a significant gap between the proportion
of students reporting interest and the proportion reporting
preparation."
Whose responsibility is it to prepare new faculty? The fact
that a majority of doctoral students express interest in pursuing
a faculty career would seem to point to a clear need for doctoral
programs to broaden their conception of preparation. And many
are doing just that.
But are graduate programs alone responsible for the
preparation of future faculty members? Is it necessarily
appropriate to build faculty training into graduate programs--possibly at the expense of disciplinary content--or
would this task be better left to faculty development programs
at hiring institutions? What of the students who do
not plan to pursue a
faculty job?
Surely graduate
students' own institutions
have a stake
in this preparation,
since many graduate
students teach
undergraduates at
some point in their
graduate careers--and many continue
to do so as adjuncts.
Further, what are
the responsibilities
of colleges and universities
that
employ graduate
students from other
institutions as adjuncts? Would they be safe in assuming
these faculty are well prepared? These are just some of
the
pressing questions being addressed through an ongoing
conversation between graduate and undergraduate education
--both across sectors and within individual institutions.
Together with the disciplinary communities and
selected departments, The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, a key interlocutor in this conversation,
has encouraged exploration of a foundational
question: what is the purpose of doctoral education? The
ongoing work of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate
(CID) proposes an answer: "to educate and prepare
those
to whom we can entrust the vigor, quality, and integrity of
the field." Those so prepared are termed "stewards
of the
discipline," and this issue includes reports on the
programmatic
innovations underway in three departments participating
in the CID.
For its part, AAC&U hopes this dialogue between graduate
and undergraduate education will also focus on the core commitments
of a liberal education (see sidebar). For, as Carol Geary
Schneider notes in the lead article, the next generation of
faculty members enters an academy in transition. In order
to provide all students with an education of lasting value,
an education that empowers participants --in the dynamic twenty-first-century
economy; in a diverse, democratic society; in the global community--stewards
of the disciplines must also assume stewardship responsibilities
for liberal education.
With this issue of Peer Review, cosponsored by The Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching, we
hope to advance the conversation between
graduate and undergraduate education. In
addition to thanking The Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching for supporting this issue, I would
like specially to thank Chris Golde for not
only contributing two terrific articles but also providing me with invaluable counsel as the issue went from our heads to your hands.
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