ENGAGED GRADUATE EDUCATION: SEEING WITH NEW EYES
by James L. Applegate

FOREWORD
If changing higher education is like trying to move a battleship with your bare hands, I am not sure what metaphor captures the difficulty in changing graduate education. Still, it is being done campus-by-campus, program-by-program through initiatives like the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program. My goal here is to place PFF programs in the context of a larger national reform agenda that promises to change the nature of the relationship between society and higher education, particularly graduate education. I write from two perspectives. One is as immediate past president of the National Communication Association (NCA), the largest association of communication scholars. I am proud that our discipline is one of the leaders in developing PFF programs in the disciplines, and I applaud the leadership of PFF for engaging the disciplinary societies in this effort.

Academic disciplinary societies have been slow to rise to the challenge of higher education reform. While many well-intentioned provosts, deans, and faculty members talk of campus reform, they are often not supported by similar reform efforts from the disciplines. Disciplinary societies signal what is important and define quality in their fields by the content of their journals, the programs at their conferences, and the special activities they sponsor. If it is important for the academy to do a better job of preparing future faculty, creating socially engaged campuses, or embedding the scholarship of teaching and learning into campus classrooms, these agendas need to be embraced by disciplinary societies. If faculty members scan their journals, conference programs, and other intellectual activities of their disciplines and see none of these innovations, they will be reluctant to embrace these initiatives, no matter how much campus administrators may exhort them. They will continue with safer traditional practices that are recognized by their disciplines. Only through changing both campus and disciplinary cultures will we succeed in our efforts to change graduate education and higher education as a whole.

In addition to my role as former president of NCA, I am also vice president for academic affairs for the State of Kentucky. Thus, the perspective I bring is formed by an understanding of how states across the nation, the primary funders of higher education, are altering their expectations for higher education in ways that support Preparing Future Faculty program goals, but the states also require broadening that work. In Kentucky, for example, we have created an endowment of over $400 million focused on our two doctoral-granting institutions. The primary goal of this substantial investment is not to raise the disciplinary status of those doctoral programs, although that may be an important side effect. The goal is to increase the number of students enrolled in higher education by 50 percent. This increase will require future faculty to be prepared to teach a more diverse set of students from varied ethnic backgrounds, adult students, and many more students who are first-time college-goers in their families. We expect our graduate programs to do a better job of preparing future faculty to ensure the learning and success of that increasingly diverse group of students.
We also look to our doctoral programs and our faculty in those programs to help provide an infrastructure for a “new economy” initiative in Kentucky. Faculty must be prepared to engage their expertise with the public and private sectors to develop intellectual properties and patents, and generally to provide the research infrastructure necessary to drive a new economy in the state.

In short, Kentucky, like so many states, is asking doctoral programs to focus less on improving disciplinary status and more on equipping faculty to improve the lives of citizens. States across the country are demanding that this nation's multibillion dollar investment in higher education provide significant short- and long-term benefits to every level of society.

Higher education is contributing to the common good. Alan Greenspan has credited a great deal of the current success of the U.S. economy in a global society and American leadership generally to the contributions of higher education, especially since World War II. However, our contributions are a trickle compared to a broad river of good that we can do if we reenvision our role and commit to being engaged public intellectuals.