The Preparing Future Faculty Program: What Difference Does It Make?
by A. Leigh DeNeef

ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION
The Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program was launched in 1993 to develop new models of doctoral preparation for a faculty career by including preparation for teaching and academic citizenship as well as for research. Through a series of four national competitions, grants have been awarded to forty-three doctoral producing universities and their departments to develop and implement such model programs that bring expectations for undergraduate professors into the graduate preparation of future academics. One stipulation of grants has been that the universities cannot do this work by themselves; they must form a cluster of diverse institutions so that the graduate students can have direct, personal experience with faculty life as it is lived in institutions with different missions, student bodies, and expectations for faculty. Often the students work with an assigned mentor at another institution.

Since the first of these new programs was introduced in 1994, we have done a great deal of assessment. We also know a great deal about good practice in the operations of PFF programs and about how PFF participants—graduate students, graduate faculty, and faculty from partner institutions—judge the value of their experiences (generally, very positively). But only recently 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 than 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.

We commissioned Dr. Leigh DeNeef, professor of English and associate dean of the graduate school at Duke University, and his colleagues to assess this central premise. The present essay summarizes their major findings. The results are based on questionnaire surveys of 129 individuals who completed a PFF program, received their doctorate, secured a faculty position, and agreed to complete their questionnaire. They also are based on a qualitative analysis of follow-up telephone interviews with twenty-five individuals. While the numbers are small and there was no control group, these results begin to flesh out a more systematic understanding of the outcomes of these new faculty preparation programs.