What Colleges and Universities Want in New Faculty
by Kathrynn A. Adams

Summary
Although the roles and responsibilities in colleges and universities have significantly changed over the last two decades, graduate faculty and administrators have yet to embrace the reality that the present job market demands skills and experiences of new Ph.D.s that were not required twenty years ago. Graduate faculty need to be aware that to succeed, the next generation of faculty needs more than research skills and an in-depth knowledge about a narrow specialty in their field. The attitudes and goals of graduate faculty members are particularly important, since they are the mentors and advocates for the pool of future faculty. Graduate faculty, of course, are tied to a reward structure that reinforces research productivity above all other responsibilities that faculty assume at other institutions. Changes to graduate curricula will require that institutions revise and broaden their current expectations of graduate faculty from the sole focus on research productivity. The reward structure that influences the responsibilities of graduate faculty should recognize not only the contributions of a faculty's research but also their responsiveness to the career preparation needs of future faculty who are their graduate students.

Graduate programs should expand graduate study from the current singular focus on research to address the multiple responsibilities new faculty are likely to face. The structure of graduate programs could be modified to include several tracks, each equally valued and supported, that prepare students for different career paths and provide internships in business, government, or non-profit organizations. In adopting these recommendations, graduate faculty members will need to form new collaborations with faculty members in different kinds of colleges and universities and with professionals in other organizations.
This essay suggests several areas of doctoral education that need immediate attention in order that universities prepare their graduate students for successful careers in academia.

• Graduate training has not yet recognized the importance of teaching in the triumvirate of teaching, research, and service responsibilities. In response to this fact, graduate programs should provide a variety of teaching experiences for doctoral students beginning with the first semester and extending throughout students' training.
• Research remains an essential aspect of faculty work, and new Ph.D.s emerge from their graduate work highly trained in this area. Graduate programs, however, must help students to develop research programs that will meet the expectations and resources of diverse institutions.
• New faculty must negotiate their way through the maze of written and unwritten expectations that govern the unique academic life of hiring institutions. Graduate programs have a responsibility to educate students about the reality of expectations at a variety of institutions.
• While a successful job search is a goal common to all graduate students, they report feeling unprepared for this process because graduate faculty are often not well versed about the search process at hiring institutions other than research universities. Faculty who teach in graduate programs should assess their previous graduates' employment patterns and enlist the aid of alumni and faculty employed at other types of institutions to develop programs that address the needs of students entering the current academic job market.
• Academic options have expanded to include non-tenure track positions, teaching in community colleges, and electronic and corporate universities. Preparation for academic careers should recognize these forms of employment and provide alternative experiences for students interested in pursuing non-traditional academic opportunities. Graduate faculty should learn how best to mentor students for success in differing types of academic positions.
• Although the recommendations noted throughout this essay may seem impossible, Preparing Future Faculty programs (PFF), funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Science Foundation, and The Atlantic Philanthropies have been experimenting with these ideas and recommended practices since 1994. They have discovered that acting on these recommendations is practical, not complicated or costly, and that the recommended practices do work. Research universities should maintain primary responsibility for the education of graduate students, but other institutions can make valuable contributions through consulting and mentoring activities. PFF has created partnerships composed of forty-three graduate universities, each clustered with several other partner campuses. The 294 institutions collectively involved in these clusters offer multiple models of departmentally based and university-wide programs as well as cooperative programs among all types of institutions (research institutions, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities, historically black institutions, single-gender institutions, community colleges, public and private, etc.). PFF's diverse programs have been successful in addressing concerns about the preparation of doctoral students for academic positions, and graduate students are overwhelmingly enthusiastic about their experiences with PFF (Bogle, Blondin, and Miller 1997). No one model will work for all graduate universities, but for the advantage of their students, graduate programs must respond to their career goals and needs by exploring practices that better prepare them for one of the common career paths of Ph.D. recipients.