THE PREPARING FUTURE FACULTY PROGRAM: WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?
by A. Leigh DeNeef

I. Introduction
Since its inception in the early 1990s, the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program has been promoted as better preparing graduate students to assume their places in the next generation of the professoriate by exposing them to faculty roles and responsibilities in a variety of academic settings. Although the precise shape of the original seventeen “clusters” differed (clusters generally included one research university and at least one comprehensive university, a community college, a liberal arts college, and an historically black college or university), all shared a common set of general goals:

• to provide graduate students with on-site experience of faculty life at diverse academic institutions by pairing them with faculty mentors at neighboring colleges and universities and by creating specific opportunities for visitations to the cluster campuses;
• to provide forums, both on and off the research campus, at which graduate students and faculty from diverse institutions could speak candidly about professional expectations regarding, and the relationships between, faculty research, teaching, and service;
• to encourage graduate programs themselves to integrate the professional development of graduate students, including appropriately structured pedagogical training and teaching experiences, more directly into graduate education.

Early results from the PFF programs were extremely encouraging. Graduate students found PFF both enlightening and empowering, particularly as it legitimized conversations about teaching/learning issues and provided them with a clearer sense of the range of career trajectories open to them. Cluster and other “hiring” institutions felt that PFF experiences provided new Ph.D.s with important initial “seasoning” in academic life and a head start on their professional development. And several national organizations began promoting core PFF principles as instrumental in redirecting graduate education toward more realistic career prospects. Despite these positive signs, however, PFF proponents had very little hard data about the overall impact of participation in a PFF program on the early career success of new faculty.

By 1998-99, however, a sufficient number of PFF students had graduated, assumed academic positions, and gained enough experience as faculty members to allow a small national survey of alumni from selected PFF clusters to evaluate how their participation in the program affected their subsequent faculty experiences. Thus, in the summer of 1998, and again in the spring of 2001, a working group of faculty and graduate students at Duke University conducted a survey on behalf of the sponsoring organizations: the Council of Graduate Schools and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The survey was sent to 271 PFF alumni from Arizona State University, Duke University, Florida State University, Howard University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, and the University of Washington. One hundred and twenty-nine (129) graduates (48 percent) responded to the survey.

Alumni were asked to assess quantitatively a number of different features of their PFF experiences—both general assessments of the extent to which programs increased their knowledge of the academic job market process, the dimensions of faculty roles at different institutions, and practical matters of effective teaching. They were asked for more particular assessments of their PFF mentoring relationships, their visits to cluster campuses, and the PFF activities organized at their home institution. Survey participants were also invited to elaborate more qualitatively upon how they felt PFF had directly affected their choice of academic career path, their actual securing of a job, and their initial transition from graduate student to faculty member. Subsequently, twenty-five respondents participated in a follow-up phone conversation with at least one member of the working group. What follows, then, is a summary of lessons learned from the survey itself, including the narrative answers and responses from the telephone interviews.

From the outset it is necessary to admit that this survey is but a first step in overall assessment of the difference PFF has made: The numbers of PFF alumni nationally are still relatively small in relation to total numbers of Ph.D.s produced annually in the U.S. Moreover, the survey did not attempt to compare the PFF experience with a non-PFF control group or with alumni who chose non-academic careers. Since completion of the survey, however, a number of other national studies—such as Maresi Nerad and Joseph Cerny's unpublished survey of Ph.D.s ten years later, Chris Golde's At Cross Purposes, and the recent National Association of Graduate and Professional Students (NAGPS) National Doctoral Survey—have appeared. They show a strikingly similar demand among graduate students for more information about possible career trajectories, more sustained pedagogical training, and more effective faculty mentoring. The participants in these national studies might well serve as a surrogate control group for the current survey.

Comparative assessments from the qualitative sections of the survey must also be weighed carefully, since the number of alumni from individual PFF schools varies greatly, as do the particular PFF activities emphasized by the distinct clusters. The “story of PFF” thus remains the anecdotal stories of those individuals who both chose to participate in the program and were successful in securing academic employment after they graduated. Nonetheless, despite these limitations, we believe the survey offers important new evidence that PFF makes a real difference in the professional lives of beginning academics.