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

A. Differences PFF made on the research campus
Before summarizing the difference PFF alumni feel the program has made in two key areas of academic employment—negotiating the job market and managing the initial years in the academy—it may be useful to give a brief overview of the difference PFF made in the graduate training of alumni. Although it is important to emphasize again that distinctions among PFF programs at the various national clusters make generalizations extremely difficult, PFF alumni are, nonetheless, relatively consistent in articulating the ways that PFF has begun literally “to change the climate” on the graduate campuses, at least for those who participate in the program. As one alumna dramatically put it, graduate school “was not the intellectual community I'd expected. PFF helped to fill this void.” Riche Richardson (English, Duke) put it somewhat differently by suggesting that she began graduate school during a major “paradigm shift” to what she terms the “preprofessionalization” of graduate students. PFF, she says, “is indispensable to students who are adjusting to the changing shape of graduate education” nationally. A main component of that change is helping prospective Ph.D.s assess their career options by understanding the institutional roles and tasks they would take on or assume at different academic settings.

One of the foremost changes PFF has effected is legitimizing conversations about teaching: Some graduate faculty are realizing the importance of pedagogical issues to apprentice teachers, and it has provided graduate students with a credible forum for talking about teaching issues. Obviously, changing the perspectives of graduate faculty members is not easy. Since many of them do not think of themselves primarily as teachers, they are not always appreciative of the instructional needs of their graduate trainees. For David Karp (sociology, University of Washington), it was “tremendously exciting and rewarding to have time devoted to teaching and professionalization issues that otherwise were limited to hallway conversations.” For Wendy Crone (engineering, University of Minnesota), PFF provided invaluable pedagogical assistance by bringing her into intellectual conversations about college teaching with graduate student colleagues outside her own discipline. This mix of people and perspectives, another PFF graduate said, helped break down the isolation she felt within her own department by often being the only graduate student willing even to confess an interest in teaching. Jennifer Egert (psychology, Duke University) agreed: “PFF provided professional support that I could not get in my department, and my PFF mentor [from Guilford College] made me, for the first time, feel part of a community of teachers.”

This report, of course, is not the first to suggest that graduate students in the nation's Research I universities see their faculty mentors as not only generally unsupportive of their desire for more pedagogical training, but even antagonistic to such training, since the faculty assumption has been that they are really preparing people for research positions just like theirs. David Karp sharply summarized the attitude of many faculty in his department: “If you get a job at a liberal arts school, that's your failure rather than your success.” After the experience of PFF, however, more faculty, according to the alumni surveyed, seem to have learned a valuable lesson about student needs for better academic and professional mentoring, more organized preparation for a wider array of academic and non-academic job prospects, and generally more open conversations about faculty roles and responsibilities in different academic settings.

Although nearly all of the alumni interviewed would probably agree with Karl Oswald (psychology, Duke) that graduate school was “really not preparing people to be faculty members” as much as researchers, most felt that PFF was gradually broadening faculty recognition of alternative and more complicated career trajectories and leading them to devise programs to help students prepare for a wider variety of futures. As PFF becomes ever more institutionalized, as well as more focused at the level of individual departments and supported by their professional disciplinary associations, there is every reason to expect further engagement of graduate faculty members with PFF initiatives and interests.

Several alumni spoke about the role PFF played in making them conscious of a professional, disciplinary world beyond the research university. Meeting faculty on the cluster campuses for whom teaching and research exist in synergistic relationship was an eye-opening experience for many. David Karp learned, through PFF, that not only was there “a world of people out there who cared about teaching,” but also that “there was a world of professional sociologists beyond the research institution.” Wendy Crone learned the same lesson: “PFF taught me the value of colleagues outside my discipline; it taught me that my own academic networks needed to incorporate people outside of engineering.” Joel Foisy (mathematics, Duke) also thought it was important to his graduate education to meet regularly with people outside of the mathematics department. He reports that he has continued this extra-departmental faculty interaction at SUNY-Potsdam as a way to facilitate fresh pedagogical and professional perspectives. Carlos Morrison (communications, Howard) says PFF “gave me a wider perspective on the professoriate.”

When Wendy Crone and other alumni speak about how “phenomenal” PFF was in “giving a broader picture of higher education in this country,” they are voicing more than an appreciation of institutional diversity. Unlike a previous generation that tended to divide the academy into rigid hierarchical levels, this generation seems sensitive to interests, concerns, and challenges shared by all academics. Liberal arts and community college faculty are not people who failed to land the jobs they wanted; rather, they are professional, disciplinary colleagues whose careers led them to different academic venues. Carlos Morrison speaks for many of his PFF peers in observing how effective the program was in bringing together faculty and students who would not normally interact even though they might be, literally, just next door or across the street. These “partnerships,” Kathleen Godfrey (English, Arizona State) observes, “enrich” the entire educational experience for everyone and create a broader academic sense of “community.”

Increased sensitivity among PFF alumni to how disciplines themselves look different in various academic settings is accompanied by a growing recognition that the increasingly focused specialization in many graduate programs is poor preparation for today's job market. Many liberal arts and community colleges are demanding faculty who can teach not only broadly within their own discipline, but even in related disciplines. For some alumni, this was a difficult lesson, and it meant that some career paths would not be open unless they made a conscious effort to broaden their own intellectual and research backgrounds. George Ehrhardt (history, Duke) says that what he remembered from his PFF “visits to Guilford College was the difficulty that would be involved in integrating my own field [the history of science] into that of a small department in any meaningful way.” One of his colleagues, Ray Person (religion, Duke), says PFF made him understand that he would have to develop a broader teaching field than his graduate program required if he was going to be a credible candidate for the career path he wanted. Kathleen Godfrey says that PFF enabled her to reconceive and market herself for a disciplinary field (English education) completely differently from her doctoral specialization (in American literature). This willingness to redefine herself professionally would have been less likely had PFF not given her a broader sense of disciplinary possibilities.

Finally, several alumni spoke about the importance of PFF as a mechanism for helping to acculturate graduate students into the academy in general. Graduate students are astonishingly naive about how academic institutions really work, although not all faculty seem to recognize this and few graduate programs have taken sufficient steps to try to address it. Students enter graduate school, of course, from a variety of educational institutions, and even after ten or twelve years in higher education, they still know relatively little about faculty governance, the role of central administration, or a host of other issues concerning the “business” of academia. This is especially true for first-generation students. Such people, Carlota Ocampo (psychology, Howard) reminds us, usually “have to construct their knowledge of the academy almost in toto.” For this group, Carlota emphasizes, PFF is doubly important. Stuart Noble-Goodman (English, Duke) agrees: “I think this process of acculturation . . . is one of the most important contributions of PFF to the academy.” A Northwestern alumna put the matter this way: “I feel like I did a pretty good job [of preparing myself for an academic career], but often I had to go out and find things for myself. . . . My biggest wish would be that departments . . . and advisors would help to make programs like PFF more visible to students, so that it's not totally their responsibility” to educate themselves about the inner workings of academic life. In most instances, “graduate students don't even know where to begin.” Without this broader knowledge, of course, students have a much more difficult time assessing where they might find the best personal and professional fit within the broad terrain of higher education in this country.