From: <
mcgovern@ctc.net>
Subject: Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate
Overview of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate
Draft 2.1, August 19, 2001
Chris M. Golde & George Walker
The Nature of the Initiative American universities have been granting the
doctorate for about a century. At the end of the 20th century, we take
great pride that the world sends students to the U.S. for doctoral training.
Nevertheless, concerns about traditional doctoral education have been
widespread and sustained for the last decade. The studies and reports that
have gone before ours have prepared the ground. A common theme of many of
these reports is that Ph.D.s are often ill-prepared to function effectively
in the settings where they find themselves working, whether within the
academy or outside it. The time is ripe to propose and experiment with
enriched forms of doctoral education.
The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate is a multi-year research program
aimed at enriching and invigorating the education of doctoral students. A
fundamental premise of the initiative is to focus doctoral education on the
preparation of "stewards of the disciplines." We share the belief that
Ph.D.-holders ought to be trained to be rigorous researchers and scholars.
But we believe that it is timely for the disciplines to reflect on
improvements that would empower those attaining the doctorate to be more
effective researchers and teachers. We believe that the framework of
stewardship offers a broader conceptualization of doctoral education than
the present graduate experience typically includes. The initiative will
involve research, experiments in departments, and broad discussion and
dissemination of what is learned. Faculty and departmental leadership in
the disciplines is a crucial focus of the initiative.
The Carnegie Foundation Leadership of the Initiative The initiative is
headquartered at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in
Menlo Park, California. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching is a national and international center for research and policy
studies about teaching. With a focus on the scholarship of teaching, the
Foundation seeks to generate discussion and promulgate sustainable,
long-term changes in educational research, policy and practice. Foundation
programs are designed to foster deep, significant, lasting learning for all
students and to improve the ability of education to develop students'
understanding, skills and integrity.
George E. Walker, the Vice President for research and Dean of the
University Graduate School at Indiana University, leads this five-year
study. Walker joined the Foundation as a senior scholar in January of 2001.
He will serve in-residence part-time at the Foundation, while retaining his
duties at Indiana University. He is assisted by Chris Golde, senior scholar
at the Carnegie Foundation and researcher on doctoral education, Lee
Shulman, President of the Carnegie Foundation, as well as other senior
scholars at the Foundation.
"Steward of a Discipline" We believe that the purpose of Ph.D. training
should be the creation of "stewards of the discipline." The degree should
signal a high level of accomplishment in three facets of the discipline:
Generation, Conservation and Transformation. The Ph.D. holder should be
capable of generating new knowledge and defending knowledge claims against
challenges and criticism; of conserving the most important ideas and
findings that are a legacy of past and current work; and of transforming
knowledge that has been generated and conserved into powerful pedagogies of
engagement, understanding and application. Moreover, a steward should
understand how the discipline fits into the intellectual landscape, have a
respectful understanding of the questions and paradigms of other
disciplines, and understand how their discipline can speak to important
questions.
The formulation of stewardship is discipline-specific. What it means to
be a steward of chemistry may in some measure be different than in English
or mathematics. Similarly, the process for creating stewards may differ by
discipline. We are committed to locating this initiative in the context of
each discipline, recognizing that there will be discipline-specific lessons
as well as cross-disciplinary insights to be gained.
Major Components and Timeline Three components comprise the initiative:
* Defining stewardship in a disciplinary context. We will select five to
six disciplines for the initial focus of the study. The first phase of the
initiative will be a conceptual analysis of doctoral education.
We seek to understand the core processes of research and doctoral
education specific to each discipline. How has doctoral training been
conceptualized and delivered within the discipline? Discussions within the
discipline guided by a team from within the discipline will refine the
concept of what stewardship of that discipline entails, and how doctoral
programs might be better structured to prepare students. The first project
will be to commission essays about the desired core ingredients of an
enriched form of doctoral education, and publish them in the fall of 2002.
* Implementing programs in multiple departments. We will select five to
six departments in each of the focus disciplines to conduct "design
experiments" in doctoral education. Selected departments will commit to
designing and implementing doctoral programs that foster stewardship of the
discipline. This is a multi-year commitment undertaken as a partnership
with the Foundation, departments, universities, scholarly societies and
cooperating funding agencies.
* Studying the experiments and facilitating the broad adoption of
successful models. Throughout the initiative, we will be distilling the
results of discussions and research and sharing them with the doctoral
education and disciplinary communities. We will be closely studying the
design experiments and sharing the lessons learned in order to implement
changes more broadly. One strategy will be to convene three kinds of
seminars: campus-based for each program, cross-site for each discipline, and
program-wide for assessment and integration. A variety of products will
result from the initiative: models of experimental doctoral programs,
research and analysis of the experiments and seminars, institutional and
policy-level recommendations.
We will begin publicizing the initiative and working with disciplinary
societies in the fall of 2001. Selection of departments that will implement
design experiments will be completed by the summer of 2002.
We expect the experiments to be several years in duration with regular
assessment and reports on lessons learned.