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

ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION
In this provocative paper, James Applegate presents a vision of what disciplinary societies can and should do to support the Preparing Future Faculty Program and similar educational reform agendas at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. The main thesis is that college and university initiatives to improve the quality of education should be reinforced by comparable initiatives in the disciplinary societies. Improvements in the quality of education are most likely to come about, the essay argues, by changing “both campus and disciplinary cultures.”

The Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program was launched in 1993 to develop new models of doctoral preparation for a faculty career by including preparation for teaching and academic citizenship as well as for research. Through a series of national competitions, grants have been awarded to forty-three doctoral-producing universities and their departments to develop and implement such model programs that bring expectations for undergraduate professors into the graduate preparation of future academics. One stipulation of grants has been that the universities cannot do this work by themselves. They were required to form a cluster of diverse institutions—now numbering 252—so that the graduate students could have direct, personal experience with faculty life, as it is lived in institutions with different missions, student bodies, and expectations for faculty.

Starting in 1998, PFF developed partnerships with eleven professional societies in the academic disciplines of biology, chemistry, communication, computer science, English, history, mathematics, physics, political science, psychology, and sociology. Leaders of learned societies in these fields were eager to encourage broader preparation for their faculty members, and each conducted national competitions to award grants to departments to develop model PFF programs. Each of the societies has been highlighting PFF ideas and the work of the new PFF programs in their national and regional meetings, in their print and electronic communications, and their special action initiatives.

James Applegate has the perfect set of credentials to call for improvements in the quality of education. He is vice president for academic affairs for the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, having been professor of communication and chair of the department at the University of Kentucky. When he formulated this essay he was the president of the National Communication Association (NCA), where he was able to provide leadership for the work of his professional society. He has been working on both institutional and disciplinary initiatives of PFF and other educational reform agendas. Most of this essay was contained in the keynote speech he delivered on June 22, 2001 at the PFF Summer Conference in Boston.