Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) Occasional Papers Online

The three most recent essays published under a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts are now available online from AAC&U:

Kathrynn A. Adams. What Colleges and Universities Want in New Faculty. 2002.
To supplement the rich personal and programmatic experience that is found in Preparing Future Faculty programs, and to highlight what colleges and universities want in new faculty, Kathrynn Adams elected to conduct a review of the research literature. Her findings reinforce the lessons learned by most PFF participants: that institutions expect the faculty they hire to be effective teachers, competent researchers, and active participants in academic life. They also expect graduate schools to prepare their students to conduct a sophisticated job search and to know the many options they have for an academic career.

James L. Applegate. Engaged Graduate Education: Seeing With New Eyes. 2002.
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 undergraduate and graduate 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, he argues, by changing "both campus and disciplinary cultures."

A. Leigh DeNeef. The Preparing Future Faculty Program: What Difference Does it Make? 2002
Regular assessment has been a feature of Preparing Future Faculty since the initiative was introduced in 1993. A great deal has been learned about good practice in the operation of PFF programs and how different participants—graduate students, graduate faculty, and faculty from partner institutions—judge the value of their experiences. Only recently, though, have these new programs produced enough alumni who have found faculty positions and have gained enough experience to assess the value of PFF in their early faculty careers. The basic premise of PFF is that these new preparation programs produce alumni who are better assistant professors that their counterparts with more traditional preparation that focuses almost exclusively on learning to do scholarly research. Until now this premise has been supported only by anecdotal evidence.