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When It Comes to PhD Reform, Everything Is Connected
In our new book, The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education, we make a case for student-centered, career-diverse, public-facing graduate school. But we also acknowledge the challenge of change, a challenge graduate education has not met for decades.
We offer strategies for thoughtful reform. But that requires first acknowledging the difficulties by which, for instance, programs often cling to the ideal of preparing students solely for professorships when more than half will never become professors.
One of those difficulties is well-stated by Michael Bérubé, among the most insightful commentators on U.S. higher education. The problems of graduate education, he said in 2013, form “a seamless garment of crisis” and “if you pull on any one thread, the entire thing unravels.” As a result, Bérubé said, it becomes “exceptionally difficult to discuss any one aspect of graduate education in isolation.”
Bérubé’s trenchant observation helps to explain why graduate school reform has proved so difficult. When you try to focus on any one thing, you find yourself dealing with everything.
Consider the question of student outcomes. There aren’t enough professors’ jobs for PhDs by at least half—and those are pre-COVID numbers. Many observers of graduate education are understandably concerned by two kinds of waste—years of students’ lives and the loss to society that results when we encourage talented graduates to want only academic jobs, when their abilities are of use everywhere.
An increasing number of reformers seek the more responsive and reasonable goal for the PhD of not just training future professors but also of graduating versatile expert-leaders who may contribute throughout society. They have urged graduate educators to prepare doctoral students for the multiple possibilities that they already face.
We count ourselves as members of that group. But career diversity requires more than one change in practice. Most evidently, it entails a new approach to what has been called “placement.” Traditionally, graduate programs have specialized in preparing their doctoral students for only one kind of job search: the quest for a professorship. If graduates are going to engage in various pursuits—and that’s what they have actually been doing, for many years—then we should rethink our approach to helping them look for jobs. This reorientation has spawned many thoughtful initiatives around the country, such as the University of Louisville’s PLAN program (an acronym for “Professional development, Life skills, Academic development, and Networking”). More generally, it means that graduate programs need to engage with the graduate specialists in the university offices of career services, and to alumni offices as well, for alums can offer both valuable advice and valuable opportunities, like internships.
But if we’re going to train graduate students for a more varied set of possible careers, then we should also examine how we admit them. At present, the graduate admissions process coerces all applicants to present themselves as larval professors. We demand that prospective graduate students imagine themselves as academic researchers, and that’s how we judge their applications.
The application may be just a rhetorical exercise, but it exerts a powerful shaping influence not only on applicants but also on faculty members who read the applications. If we believe that our graduate students should do all different kinds of work, why do we pretend that’s not the case when we’re admitting them?
This brief discussion could go on, but it already shows how everything is connected. A seamless garment is understandably hard to alter, but alter it we must, because it doesn’t fit our students’ lives right now—and the aftermath of the COVID pandemic will only exacerbate the situation.
The New PhD gives a historical account of how we arrived at this troubled place, including a careful examination of failed reforms of the past. But above all, it’s a guide to change, and a toolkit. We suggest how to do it: how to organize reform from the departmental level on up, and how it may also be empowered from the top—the president’s, provost’s, and dean’s office—on down.
Every graduate program will draw its own map, but one thing we all have in common is that we can’t remain where we are now.
Order The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education – published on January 19, 2021 – at the following link: https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/new-phd
Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of The Graduate Adviser column for The Chronicle of Higher Education, which inspired his book, The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It. Robert Weisbuch, formerly a professor of English, department chair, and dean at the University of Michigan, served as the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the eleventh president of Drew University. Together, Cassuto and Weisbuch are the authors of The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education.
We offer strategies for thoughtful reform. But that requires first acknowledging the difficulties by which, for instance, programs often cling to the ideal of preparing students solely for professorships when more than half will never become professors.
One of those difficulties is well-stated by Michael Bérubé, among the most insightful commentators on U.S. higher education. The problems of graduate education, he said in 2013, form “a seamless garment of crisis” and “if you pull on any one thread, the entire thing unravels.” As a result, Bérubé said, it becomes “exceptionally difficult to discuss any one aspect of graduate education in isolation.”
Bérubé’s trenchant observation helps to explain why graduate school reform has proved so difficult. When you try to focus on any one thing, you find yourself dealing with everything.
Consider the question of student outcomes. There aren’t enough professors’ jobs for PhDs by at least half—and those are pre-COVID numbers. Many observers of graduate education are understandably concerned by two kinds of waste—years of students’ lives and the loss to society that results when we encourage talented graduates to want only academic jobs, when their abilities are of use everywhere.
An increasing number of reformers seek the more responsive and reasonable goal for the PhD of not just training future professors but also of graduating versatile expert-leaders who may contribute throughout society. They have urged graduate educators to prepare doctoral students for the multiple possibilities that they already face.
We count ourselves as members of that group. But career diversity requires more than one change in practice. Most evidently, it entails a new approach to what has been called “placement.” Traditionally, graduate programs have specialized in preparing their doctoral students for only one kind of job search: the quest for a professorship. If graduates are going to engage in various pursuits—and that’s what they have actually been doing, for many years—then we should rethink our approach to helping them look for jobs. This reorientation has spawned many thoughtful initiatives around the country, such as the University of Louisville’s PLAN program (an acronym for “Professional development, Life skills, Academic development, and Networking”). More generally, it means that graduate programs need to engage with the graduate specialists in the university offices of career services, and to alumni offices as well, for alums can offer both valuable advice and valuable opportunities, like internships.
But if we’re going to train graduate students for a more varied set of possible careers, then we should also examine how we admit them. At present, the graduate admissions process coerces all applicants to present themselves as larval professors. We demand that prospective graduate students imagine themselves as academic researchers, and that’s how we judge their applications.
The application may be just a rhetorical exercise, but it exerts a powerful shaping influence not only on applicants but also on faculty members who read the applications. If we believe that our graduate students should do all different kinds of work, why do we pretend that’s not the case when we’re admitting them?
This brief discussion could go on, but it already shows how everything is connected. A seamless garment is understandably hard to alter, but alter it we must, because it doesn’t fit our students’ lives right now—and the aftermath of the COVID pandemic will only exacerbate the situation.
The New PhD gives a historical account of how we arrived at this troubled place, including a careful examination of failed reforms of the past. But above all, it’s a guide to change, and a toolkit. We suggest how to do it: how to organize reform from the departmental level on up, and how it may also be empowered from the top—the president’s, provost’s, and dean’s office—on down.
Every graduate program will draw its own map, but one thing we all have in common is that we can’t remain where we are now.
Order The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education – published on January 19, 2021 – at the following link: https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/new-phd
Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of The Graduate Adviser column for The Chronicle of Higher Education, which inspired his book, The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It. Robert Weisbuch, formerly a professor of English, department chair, and dean at the University of Michigan, served as the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the eleventh president of Drew University. Together, Cassuto and Weisbuch are the authors of The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education.
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