Bill Caraher, Assistant Professor, Department of History
Teaching Thursday is on the cutting edge with our recent focus on teaching graduate students! There was a thought provoking Op-Ed piece in the New York Times Sunday on graduate education. It began with the provocative paragraph:
“Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no oe other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Taylor goes on to propose 6 solutions:
1. Restructure the curriculum along cross-disciplinary lines.
2. Abolish permanent departments and replace them with constantly evolving, problem-focused programs.
3. Increase collaboration among institutions.
4. Transform the traditional dissertation particularly in the humanities by encouraging students to experiment with alternative formats.
5. Prepare students to work in a wider range of jobs by considering real life applications of their graduate training.
6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure.
He concludes with a personal maxim: “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.”
While it is easy to imagine the reasons why these reforms do not take place within the modern university (funding concerns, competition among departments, genuine intellectual and philosophical differences between disciplines, institutional and bureaucratic impediments, et c.), this core sentiments in this short op-ed piece are shared by many in academia. But, as with many professions, students and faculty tend to be risk adverse. Graduate students often see their accomplishments over their graduate school careers as the basis for their professional careers, and graduate faculty (despite their sometimes well-meaning encouragement to students to take risks) often reinforce this idea as a way to push graduate students through the program, encourage them to complete work on time, and perform up to their potential in the classroom.
Moreover, encouraging a student to engage in cross-disciplinary research or a particularly innovative (or even revolutionary) research plan is a challenge for any graduate faculty member. After all, cross-disciplinary or non-traditional research most often puts graduate faculty in a weak position to advise because it frequently falls toward the fringes of our academic expertise, our professional training, and our disciplinary loyalties. It also requires that graduate faculty find ways to work around institutional divisions and, in many cases, find collaborators within a number of administrative silos.
Finally, and this is something that I have been thinking about a good bit lately, introducing theses and dissertations in “alternative forms” ranging from new media projects to more practical applied research in the humanities or even just slightly less tradition-bound variations on thesis/dissertation format requires that we change certain fundamental aspects of our curricula (particular in the humanities). In history, for example, the entire undergraduate curriculum is geared toward preparing students to write a major research paper in formal academic prose and with the complete scholarly apparatus (footnotes, bibliography, et c.). This capstone exercise represents the supposed culmination of these students’ work in the field of history. It forms a solid foundation (in its ideal form) for continued work in the field including the M.A. and even the Ph.D. In effect, the capstone paper is a miniature version of M.A. thesis or dissertation. Ancillary to the place of the thesis in the historical profession, it is said to develop research skills, critical thinking (although this is a vague catch-all), and writing abilities. While there is no doubt that research skills, writing ability, and the ambiguous, if crucial, “critical thinking” are crucial to success in many fields, these skills can also be successfully imparted through any number of projects, media, and programs.
The point here is, as we move toward more innovative projects, cross-disciplinary programs, and non-traditional career paths, graduate education is only the very tip of the iceberg. In fact, the real fundamental change within academia might have to occur at undergraduate level. Graduate education, with whatever vocational and professional training that it seeks to impart, builds upon a foundation established in undergraduate programs, if not even earlier. Without changing the foundation of graduate education, it’s hard to imagine a new beginning for the Detroit of higher learning.
