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Developing a Professoriate Track
for Doctoral Programs Noel J. Stowe, Arizona State University How faculty roles are defined under the rubric of teaching, research, and service is under debate. How these three elements interact and balance depends on the career setting of the faculty member. Conversation about these roles grows ever more serious and encompassing. Examples include the following--the debate stemming from the arguments advanced in Scholarship Reconsidered (1990); the much anticipated follow-up discussion in Scholarship Assessed (1997); AHA's pamphlet "Redefining Historical Scholarship" (1993); the well-attended annual January Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards of the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE); rising advocacy for teaching, course, and service portfolios; mounting discussion over contract systems, tenure, post-tenure review, and academic freedom; continuing concern for improving undergraduate teaching and learning; short books like Good Start (1992) on how to launch careers in today's liberal arts colleges; and pressure from governing boards and legislators to expand the application of scholarship and research through faculty service in the community. Discussion about teaching, research, and service roles should be an aspect of doctoral student preparation. Yet doctoral study in history normally avoids sustained, systematic review of these roles or how they vary depending on the type of institutional setting. Students must know about these role issues if they are to enter the professoriate ready to be successful as assistant professors. How can we as a profession respond by better preparing our future faculty? What initiatives exist that identify the issues and provide guidance? I'd like first to suggest that we can respond by improving what we do within doctoral programs and second to highlight the work I did as a project director for the ASU portion of the national Preparing Future Faculty Project. Defining a Professoriate Track It's my contention that doctoral programs--in this case, in history--should incorporate a defined professoriate track. How this might be done can take a number of forms, for instance, solely within a department, in concert with a small set of programs, under the umbrella of a liberal arts and sciences college within a university, or in conjunction with the work of a graduate college. Whatever the approach, the point is that doctoral study should offer students concrete opportunities to prepare for the teaching, research, and service roles an assistant professor will have. This preparation must address the variety of higher education settings--for example: the comprehensive university, the liberal arts college, or the community college--and what difference it makes if the institution is private or public, large or small, urban or rural, church-related or not. Doctoral students need to learn what will be expected of them in a particular kind of institution. Their learning should be first hand, strongly experiential in nature, systematic, and structured. A well-defined, longer, articulated professoriate track will suit a select set of students within a doctoral program and be integral to their early semesters of doctoral work. Other students will benefit from a shorter, concentrated approach (confined to a semester as a course, organized colloquia, or set of workshops or perhaps as an intersession course), yet presented in an equally structured, highly selective thrust. Either approach must be appropriately integrated into the program so that it complements doctoral components currently in place. Such a program necessarily includes the active collegial participation of nearby faculties from those settings likely to employ graduates, that is, nearby liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities, and community colleges. This participation should be characterized as partnered arrangements actively involving colleagues from these other institutions. Such practice brings these historians to the table as colleagues strategically helpful in preparing doctoral students for the professoriate. This broader network enlarges the doctoral setting, provides multiple mentors for a candidate, and brings additional voices to the conversation about what students should expect in future demands on their research, teaching, and service. The components and outcomes from such a program will enhance and elaborate the doctoral student experience. Overall, features should enfold a cross disciplinary discussion drawing in faculty and students from other doctoral programs, include structured participation with partner institution faculty, ensure higher level (e.g., mentored) teaching experiences within a program as well as off site in partner institutions, incorporate conversations with administrators and faculty committees on the home campus and their counterparts in the partners, plan expanded experiences at professional meetings, and foster a richer discussion about the landscape of higher education and the issues confronting faculties and institutions. Challenging Traditional Models A program with an explicit professoriate component concretely addresses the possible futures of the doctoral student as a faculty member and incorporates consideration of those futures into the doctoral program for critical examination. Doctoral programs characteristically rely on traditional models and long-standing practice. Faculty draw on their experiences with their mentors, their preparation, and the requirements for their degree. Doctoral programs have a focus defined by a departmental tradition and fit within structures guided by the culture of the graduate school community, particularly the Council of Graduate Schools. This situation relies on best practices drawn from well established models. Danger lies in not adequately anticipating the professoriate career paths of the present and those in the foreseeable future. A professoriate track challenges a common thread among such doctoral programs: cloning the mentor and equipping students for similar faculty experiences rather than preparing graduates for faculty careers in other types of universities and colleges with differing opportunities, expectations, demands, and responsibilities. Socialization, therefore, into these other types of institutions comes on the job, relies on the ability and flexibility of the new assistant professor to make adjustments, and depends on the willingness of that person's new colleagues to undertake the mentoring required for success. Criticism of this model by these other institutions is sharp. What's needed is a new paradigm that incorporates new elements within the framework of doctoral study. The PFF Project In 1994, the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) project launched a two-year effort to nurture fresh thinking about preparation for the professoriate. Based on a prior pilot program and considerable discussion, PFF emerged under the aegis of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The project encouraged innovative ideas and experimental work at seventeen doctoral granting Research I universities and their partner institutions with five of the seventeen receiving larger grants to take on more elaborate, ambitious programming. The project challenged traditional structures within a doctoral granting university and asked participants to rethink their goals, strategies, and frameworks for preparing the future professoriate as appropriate to their institutional settings. To capture a sense of the variations in this work across the different institutions and individual doctoral programs of PFF, the project brought members together to share ideas, critique their work, and summarize the project to that point. PFFs second iteration begins this fall as a three-year program in graduate schools on fifteen Research I campuses--ten continuing programs and five new ones.* PFF Premises It's worth noting PFF working premises. Doctoral students primarily find assistant professor positions in nondoctoral granting institutions which emphasize undergraduate education and place significant importance on teaching. Most doctoral students will continue to find that their probable career paths lie in liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities, and community colleges instead of Research I universities. Because doctoral programs prepare students to replicate the mentor's faculty role, they ill prepare them to follow these other career paths. Such programs must revise their approaches within doctoral training. While doctoral granting institutions well understand how to prepare their graduates for the research role, they are decidedly weak in anticipating the future teaching and service roles in the institutions where their graduates will establish careers. Doctoral students need accurate information about the current research, teaching, and service roles of faculty outside their own institution. They must understand the mission and character of other institutions. The discussion about undergraduate education and teaching must be enlarged. Enriched opportunities to become acquainted with new learning and teaching ideas as well as the opportunity to have broader and more responsible teaching experiences with teaching mentors must be afforded doctoral candidates. The basic issue is how to better prepare assistant professors to be successful in a variety of higher education settings. How a given university or department will respond to this challenge varies by institution. No single, uniform PFF model exists. While concerns about PFF-type issues may be similar, the responses and programming will necessarily be shaped by the disciplines and campuses involved. Individual departments will need to identify what is appropriate to their particular institutional setting. PFF at Arizona State University Arizona State University Main received one of the five larger Pew grants. As a member of the Graduate College, I served on the committee that prepared the original proposal. Other members represented potential partners from a cluster of nearby institutions: a comprehensive university, a small church-related liberal arts university, and the community college system. Following receipt of the grant, we maintained this broad-based steering committee. It continued to have faculty and administrative representation across our partner setting and faculty and student representatives from the cooperating doctoral programs. I served as project co-director (and interim graduate dean) the first year and the principal director (and associate dean) in the second year. We created a pilot program with five ASU doctoral programs (Biology, English, Music, Psychology, and the interdisciplinary program in Curriculum and Instruction) and four cooperating college and university settings (a Research I, a comprehensive university, a small church-related liberal arts university, and the community college system). History along with four other programs joined in year three and eleven more in year four (1997-98) with a total of sixty participating fellows. As we began, our project was embedded in the idea that the five cooperating doctoral discipline faculties at ASU Main provided good experiences and assessment benchmarks to ensure quality research preparation so that their graduates would continue to publish scholarly articles and monographs. We needed more consideration about the role and place of research in the variety of higher educational institutions, not simply the doctoral-granting university with its focus on research and its array of resources to support such endeavor. We needed a fresh approach to teaching preparation. We had to move beyond the TA experience to discussion about trends in undergraduate education and to structured teaching experience with faculty mentors, for instance, from nearby institutions. And we needed to talk about what service means within a department, college, or disciplinary association, particularly professional service that extends the scholarship of the discipline and applies it outside academe (e.g., public history). Our discussion took a particular tack in addressing the traditional academic triad of research, teaching, and service. We based our work on the idea that we were engaged in career preparation and not in just assisting the students in getting the first job. We were convinced that many senior faculty did not necessarily know what contemporary faculty cultures were like in liberal arts institutions, comprehensive universities, or community colleges. Much of what we were telling our students was based on hearsay or past experience (perhaps our own student experiences or having been a faculty member "there" once) . Thus the program incorporated faculty from these other institutions to talk about their careers and roles. We took our students into those settings to talk with faculty and administrators and see first hand what they were working with in the way of resources, we encouraged mentored experiences (in teaching, research, and service roles) for our students in those institutional settings, and we planned sessions where faculty and administrators in those institutions talked about trends and issues in higher education from their point of view. We promoted discussion across campuses among doctoral candidates, faculty, and administrators. We supported proposals from the PFF fellows to attend professional meetings not only to give papers but also to set up informal appointments with faculty to discuss the development of their careers paths and to visit nearby campuses. We believed that these broader-based discussions would prepare our graduates to enter a job search with a better idea of what a given institutional setting might be like and what its opportunities are. They would be able to speak and ask questions from a more sophisticated frame of reference. A Retrospective Look: What We Were Learning In retrospect, I am convinced that we identified a set of activities and experiences that could be grouped together as a professoriate track within disciplinary programs: that is, a set of experiences that a department could take and shape into a model to use within its doctoral training. For example, we required the students to document their experiences in a journal and to develop a career portfolio. In the second year my co-director colleague developed a weekly pattern of reading and responding to the journal entries. To assist portfolio development we distributed the AAHE publication on teaching portfolios and invited an ASU faculty member who encourages his students to prepare career portfolios to participate in the PFF seminar. We believed such a portfolio would help the PFF fellows to prepare for establishing careers as assistant professors. It particularly needed to include examples drawn from their teaching. What we were outlining was professional preparation for academe and a socialization process that was arguably more structured and systematic in approach than what any of our programs were doing. It was a two-year program consisting of two semesters of a seminar held on Fridays, and a series of experiential activities that the PFF fellows individually planned with faculty and administrators in the partner clusters. This program was more than a series of quick fixes, that is, a two-hour workshop here and there, a brown bag lunch or afternoon seminar talking about how to get ready for an interview or how to prepare a placement file or how to present a paper, and more than an informal course with all of us talking about what "they" out there were doing. It was a set of activities, a structured program, that fit in and around current doctoral training in order to complement and extend its dimensions. It was cross disciplinary. Thus the program benefitted from discussing differences among disciplines related to teaching, research, and service. Because the disciplines already stressed the value of research, the PFF project chose to emphasize the conversation about teaching and service and then fold in the issue about the place of research. Debate and controversy was sharp over the value and importance of teaching. Students from the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Curriculum and Instruction were intrigued and appalled that there would be discussion among those from English, Psychology, and Biology about how the culture of their programs and disciplines ranked and devalued the importance of teaching, either in the setting of the research university or the liberal arts college. We created a centralized PFF component under the Graduate College as well as decentralized activities under the direction of the discipline programs. In addition to the advisory steering committee, we encouraged each program to establish a faculty-student PFF committee to provide programming in each unit. We taped and transcribed sessions for future years. This facet was particularly important in providing a record of the work and useful in creating reading on the topics we believed important, e.g., a conversation among deans from the cluster discussing how their types of institutions differed and were defined. Discussants brought unexpected points to the table and fresh materials. For instance, the ASU Main dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences distributed a list of questions kept by that office of what was commonly asked by assistant professor candidates being interviewed at ASU. The Liberal Arts and Social Sciences dean from the church-related university introduced the matter of faith statements and place of value-based education. A listserv enabled discussion about different campus environments, comments made by speakers, issues of higher education, and faculty roles. A particularly controversial list-discussion ensued over teaching in a church-related institution and the strictures implied if that institution required a faith statement. The list also fostered conversations about service and interviewing. The faculty member in English at Grand Canyon University (GCU) who served on our steering committee put up the list of questions prepared by the cross disciplinary faculty committee he had chaired in the search for a new Philosophy professor. Fellows learned that the small size of that faculty (seventy) meant that members from different disciplines served in numerous ways to support colleagues in other fields. In addition to our partner faculty, we brought in faculty visitors from outside Arizona, as well as administrators and consultants on university projects. We learned, for example, that the ASU Main faculty task force studying the University for the Next Century had invited Dr. Ernest Lynton, editor of the journal Metropolitan University, to campus as their consultant on service issues. We distributed his 1995 AAHE monograph on Making the Case for Professional Service (one of his five cases is on public history) to the PFF fellows and folded him into a PFF seminar. There the fellows engaged in a challenging debate about professional service as an extension of a discipline's scholarship and research. Again, we transcribed this discussion for future use. We also invited the faculty member heading up that task force to another PFF seminar to talk about the work faculty members on the task force were doing in studying the place of ASU as an urban university in the next century. This entire experience showed first the case for service as an extension and application of scholarship and research in the community and second the place of faculty service within the university on a committee studying the potential futures of the institution. The issue of service kept reappearing. In the second year of the project, the fellows learned that at GCU the faculty were devoting a significant portion of time to gathering information and writing the self-study document for the university's accreditation review in preparation for the accreditation team visit scheduled for the following year by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. The small size of GCU meant that service consumed a significant portion of a faculty members time. At ASU Main the discussion about service within a research university setting expanded parallel to the development of PFF. A university-wide task force considered the relationship of service to the university's role in community and examined the dimensions of service, particularly the application of scholarship and the increasing importance of service in reaching out to the community and rendering the university indispensable to the community. Parts of this work fed into the discussions underway in PFF. We found PFF challenged accepted thinking and what doctoral faculty might be telling students. The PFF fellows responded enthusiastically to the program (as they did in the other PFF iterations). Students hungered for knowledge about how faculty roles take divergent paths in their own disciplines, on other campuses, and in other fields. Doctoral students did not really know how a faculty member's career unfolded and wanted to talk about that. From our partner cluster we drew senior faculty as well as newly hired faculty for a series of sessions on composing careers that were designed around active learning techniques. New faculty from the partners talked with the PFF fellows about how they were charting their careers and how they had engaged the job search for their current positions. Fellows wanted to know how faculty actually carried out their teaching, research, and service responsibilities. They especially wanted to talk about the value and place of teaching in their discipline. It turned out that much of faculty work was really obscured from view, and they appreciated the opportunity for sessions with senior faculty and visitors to open up those aspects of faculty life. PFF fellows had much the same view as a student participating in a program exploring academic careers for engineering students that had preceded the PFF program at the University of Washington. The student observed that it was hard to know what it meant to be a faculty member: "they go into their offices and close the door. I guess they're doing research. I don't get to see enough of what they really do as faculty. They hide this work from us because they don't think it's important enough for us to know." At the program level, the student-faculty committees, especially in English, identified faculty from other campuses to visit and talk about composing their careers as well as their current research. A working premise of the PFF project was that the PFF visitors be from campuses where the fellows were likely to be considered for positions. PFF gave more independence to students: they heard people outside their programs talk about the landscape of higher education and about faculty roles; the PFF fellows became better informed and thought more about what they liked or did not like about particular institutional settings and the differing faculty roles. The doctoral students became comfortable talking with a variety of people: senior faculty as well as newly hired faculty from different institutions and disciplines, deans, associate deans, and vice presidents. These were the type of people they would meet on interviews. They were a group of people who would accustom them to differences across institutions and disciplines regarding faculty roles and expectations for advancement. Dr. Leigh DeNeef who has been involved in the PFF program at Duke University since 1990 observes:
The Value of the Project This project engaged us in thinking beyond the usual issues associated with ensuring high quality doctoral preparation. It was highly collaborative and stimulated excellent debate and criticism among the planning group. We explored new dimensions of activity that should be included within doctoral study at the departmental level and/or the programming of the Graduate College. We identified new aspects of student and faculty interaction. By establishing a partner network with nearby institutions we introduced a new set of colleagues to each of the doctoral programs and encouraged the idea of folding them into the project as potential mentors for the doctoral students. We began to understand the value of students having multiple mentors, each having different roles within the framework of doctoral preparation. We developed relationships in ways we had never thought about. We enlarged our concept of rigorous preparation to include a vastly different discussion on undergraduate education, teaching, and service. We provided opportunities for enhanced as well as independent teaching experiences. We expanded the discussion of the faculty research role to consider what this means on different types of campuses with other kinds of resources. We learned that we needed to encourage strong, organized participation among faculty and PFF fellows within the cooperating doctoral programs. We found an enthusiastic response from the PFF fellows who readily participated in the project and who offered numerous positive, critical suggestions for improving, developing, and enlarging the scope of PFF for future fellows. We learned that this project was a work in progress: that the model must be flexible, adaptable, and responsive to fresh ideas so that it remains open to innovation. Lastly, we identified additional substantive issues to consider in evaluating the success of a doctoral program in preparing its graduates for the professoriate. The PFF fellows viewed the project from many perspectives. In the final phase of their PFF work the fellows responded reflectively to the role that PFF played in their own doctoral experience as illustrated in the following comment:
As the PFF project began its third year at ASU and as I left the project, the following note appeared one day on the discussion list from a doctoral graduate who was in the first class of PFF fellows and who in the second year served as the doctoral student coordinator on the project. She was in midst of starting her new job as an assistant professor.
Graduates must know about the different institutional settings of academe and be familiar with contemporary issues in higher education that will influence the development of their career paths. They must understand how faculty roles vary by the type of campus. They must be able to assess whether or not they will probably have a successful experience as a colleague in a particular campus setting or department and be able to gauge the potential of a position. We must move beyond the tacit and quite passive assumption that Ph.D. programs naturally prepare future faculty as a matter of course. The preparation should be integral and not marginalized. We need innovative thinking that articulates this preparatory facet as a structured, tightly focused programmatic element. *The fifteen participating research universities are Arizona State University Main, University of Cincinnati, University of Colorado, Duke University, Florida State University, Howard University, University of Kentucky, Indiana University, Marquette University/University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska, University of New Hampshire, Northwestern University, Syracuse University, and University of Washington. |
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