Policy
THE RESPONSIVE PH.D.: Principles
Principle One: A Graduate School For Real
The Ph.D. degree requires strong graduate schools and graduate deans with real budgets and real scope—a far stronger central administrative structure than typically exists at present. The doctoral degree most directly defines the research university as distinct from other institutions of higher learning; and national reputation, with all its consequences, depends in large measure on the perceived quality of graduate programs.
Ideally, the graduate school stands at the very center of a research university. It is where everything comes together. Graduate students imbibe the scholarly and research strategies employed by faculty while they also develop their abilities as mentors of undergraduates. Therefore the graduate school not only should be given means to govern its own programs—emphasis, its—in authentic rather than very junior partnership with the programs and colleges; the graduate school should become the intellectual center of the university.
A dramatically strengthened role for the graduate school and deanship is thus the first assumption and ultimate conclusion of the Responsive Ph.D., for without a well-designed instrument, any other recommendation will have no route to reality. And while it is clearly the case that a graduate school must find common ground with programs and colleges, it requires some of its own turf as well—a budget with a function.
Principle Two: A Cosmopolitan Doctorate
The second principle is a sibling to the first. Just as individual programs need to be connected more to each other in the shared experience of a strengthened graduate school, the doctorate in totality and in every discipline will benefit enormously by a continuing interchange with the worlds beyond academia. The doctorate needs to be opened to the world and to engage social challenges more generously. A responsive Ph.D. has implications for degree requirements, for the right administration of programs, for time to degree and the job search, and for improving the diversity of the Ph.D. cohort.
In addressing the urgent need for a more diverse doctoral population, a more socially responsive Ph.D. can serve as a worthy goad to attract a greater number of students of color. Study after study shows that minority students and faculty have a stronger desire to bring their learning into the community than their non-minority peers. To the extent that the doctorate becomes more cosmopolitan—yes, by reaching out to the schools and community colleges instead of lazily recruiting from a B.A. cohort that has already lost a huge number of extremely capable African-American, Hispanic-American, and Native-American students, but also by reconceiving the disciplines at the doctoral level with a keener eye to the many ways in which knowledge can be enacted—the appeal to students of color will be strengthened.
Learning for its own pure sake, the “truth value of things, is a key principle of academia; but when that ideal makes a virtue out of ignoring the world, the necessary and occasional autonomy of deep research becomes a highly dubious virtue. It is certainly an important traditional role of academia to critique social realities, but that idea has the danger of implying that social realities are up to others to construct. It is also the role of academia, and especially of the highest academic degree with its implication of expertise, to constitute reality.
Principle Three: Drawn From the Breadth of the Populace
For reasons of both equity and efficacy, doctoral education should capitalize upon the full human resources of its populace. This is very far from the case at present in the United States. For instance, only 7 percent of all arts-and-sciences Ph.D.s awarded by U.S. institutions in 2003 were awarded to U.S. citizens who are African American or of Hispanic origin, where 32 percent of all Americans in the likeliest age bracket for doctoral candidates (ages 25 to 40) are members of those two groups.
Clearly, an expertise gap besets the United States. The Ph.D. cohort, source of the nation’s college and university faculty, is not changing quickly enough to reflect the diversity of the nation. The next generation of college students will include dramatically more students of color, but their teachers will remain overwhelmingly white.
This expertise gap extends beyond the professoriate. It is also diminishing our national leadership in any number of professional endeavors, from determining economic policy to designing museums to inventing new pharmaceuticals. The Ph.D.s who lead the way in the world of thought and discovery are far more monochromatic than the population as a whole. In all, if diversity matters, it matters greatly at the doctoral level. Therefore, attracting, cultivating, and retaining a larger next generation of Ph.D.s of color must become still more of a priority for graduate schools.
Principle Four: An Assessed Excellence
The doctoral degree stakes a strong claim upon quality. Whatever the degree variously means, it guarantees that. And yet doctoral education, keen to interpret all phenomena expertly, almost entirely fails to interpret and evaluate itself.
To be meaningful, evaluation must occur in two places: within programs and across them—that is, at the level of the graduate school. And this assessment must have teeth, in determining such matters as university-assigned enrollments, fellowship funds, and departmental resources. But such overall assessment by the graduate school requires a bidirectional approach, whereby programs not only provide information but respond beyond the data, including when the data may be misleading.
ood assessment, then, promotes a dialogue between program, college, and graduate school. Further, assessment is not something that happens only after a program is completed, or after a cohort of students has graduated; it takes place throughout the planning and conduct of a graduate program, and should be designed into every stage. Understood rightly, assessment clarifies initial goals, seeks maximum feedback at every stage of the doctoral experience from all concerned, and evaluates outcomes unflinchingly and with expert understanding.
Read the full report, The Responsive Ph.D.: Innovations in U.S. Doctoral Education, here.