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

Seeing with New Eyes
Marcel Proust, the philosopher/novelist, said that the real act of discovery lies not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes. If we are to maximize our contributions to society, we must begin to see our basic work of teaching and research with new eyes.

Another great philosopher, hockey's Wayne Gretzky, said that the secret to
success was not in skating to where the puck is but to where the puck will be.
We must create doctoral programs that prepare faculty not to accommodate higher education as it is, but to be agents of change, helping higher education play its proper role in a twenty-first century global society. We must help our future colleagues skate to where the puck will be.

Preparing Future Faculty's challenge is to help our current and future colleagues understand and commit to the connection of work in all disciplines to the creation of a healthy, civil, humane, and participatory society. Faculty members have a role in the creation and sustenance of a “public,” as John Dewey defined that term: a public fraught with differences but committed to common goals and the promise of communication as a means of creating the common ground to accomplish those goals; communication across disciplines, communication among institutions at all levels, and communication between the academic community and society at large.

From biology and chemistry to psychology and communication to English and the arts, current faculty members and our next generation of colleagues must reject the vision of “the well frog.” The well frog lives its life at the bottom of its disciplinary well. It believes the sky is limited to what it can see from the bottom of its well. We must break out of our disciplinary wells and discover the connection of our work to the creation of a society that is healthier physically, economically, and socially. We need to encourage an outward vision, seeing our work as a means to an end: a healthier society and better lives for the people that live within it.

All of this sounds very grand, but how does it translate into action? One good translation is the work that PFF programs are doing. This work addresses what Chris Golde and Timothy Dore (2001), in their survey of doctoral students, called a three-way mismatch between the traditional purposes of doctoral education, doctoral student aspirations, and reality. As faculty, we know this mismatch and are working to correct it. We know we continue to prepare students for employment in research universities when, in fact, most of the jobs are elsewhere in academia and in the private and public sectors outside of academia. Students often come to us because they want to teach, but we do very little to help them become scholars of teaching and learning. Students do not fully understand the demands that will be made upon them to earn the Ph.D. Looking at us as models, they hold very traditional aspirations for becoming faculty, showing little awareness of external opportunities for careers and the opportunity, even as academics, to connect their expertise to the needs of society.

Among other negative effects, this mismatch contributes to our inability to attract underrepresented student groups into doctoral education. The kinds of activities that attract students of color and other underrepresented groups to doctoral education include the opportunity to be scholars of teaching, to increase learning and access to higher education, find non-academic careers, and to link their work as public intellectuals to service to the common good.
Faculty members are addressing this mismatch in a variety of ways. A visit to the University of Washington's Re-Envisioning the Ph.D. Web site (www.grad.washington.edu/envision/), the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's Responsive Ph.D. site (www.woodrow.org/responsivephd), and, of course, the PFF site (www.preparing-faculty.org) provides a sense of the range of innovations aimed at better aligning graduate education with the needs of students, industry, academia, and society as a whole.

But for all of this effort, I suggest that too much of our vision is focused on where the puck is. We have an opportunity to shift the focus to preparing faculty to move to where the puck will be. This is a transition period for the Preparing Future Faculty program. We have the challenge of finding new types of funding and embedding this initiative in university infrastructures so that PFF is no longer an add-on program. As we change, I challenge us to lead a broader graduate reform effort.

We have new allies in this work. Most of us are already familiar with the Re-Envisioning the Ph.D. project at the University of Washington organized by Jody Nyquist. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation is building on that effort with its Responsive Ph.D. initiative and recently announced its first set of partner institutions. In addition, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is developing a new doctoral education reform program. To ensure collaboration and coordination, meetings are planned among the leaders of all of these efforts. However, the real effectiveness of this broad reform depends on the success of our activities as faculty mentors to prepare future colleagues for a new engaged role, to help them see their faculty role with new eyes.