At the core of our academic culture is a monolithic model of quality that is demoralizing, divisive, and destructive. Though the diversity of American higher education is greatly admired abroad, at home academe confers the hallmark of quality just on large research universities and small, selective liberal-arts colleges. American academics believe that selective admissions, faculty research, and doctoral programs are the only characteristics that count. Faculty members and administrators absorb that belief in graduate school, and they carry it with them to the institutions where they work -- even if those institutions aren’t the ones that the belief ranks most highly.
The belief ignores the educational benefits that other institutions give their many students and society as a whole. It is also not very relevant, because it concentrates on a few institutions, places that do not enroll most students or employ most faculty members and administrators.
Perhaps the most destructive effect of the belief is the irrational way it leads us to educate future professors. Doctoral programs typically prepare their students for careers at research universities and assume they will therefore also be qualified to teach at other kinds of institutions. Instead, we should match the training of graduate students with the needs of the campuses where most of them will teach.
Doctorates have become the required degree for most faculty members at baccalaureate institutions; even at community colleges, about a third of the instructors hold a doctorate. Yet nearly all doctoral training concerns specialized learning and research and glorifies those activities as the professorial ideal. The best and the brightest graduate students receive graduate fellowships or become research assistants; they are the ones least likely to have to teach and serve as mentors for undergraduate students. Adding an elective or even a required course in teaching to the curriculum of graduate schools is not enough to counterbalance the message we are sending the students: that undergraduate teaching is less important and rewarding than research.
Requiring a teaching internship -- modeled after medicine’s clinical internship -- for the Ph.D. could provide a powerful lever for cultural change in academe. Many universities have postdoctoral positions for research -- why not a predoctoral year of teaching with the same salary level? The credits for the internship should equal the number assigned to the dissertation, to demonstrate the seriousness of the internship and to make it clear that teaching and research are of equal importance.
Others have noted the need to improve the transition between doctoral training at research universities and undergraduate teaching at other institutions. A recent study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that new Ph.D.'s often felt that their graduate training had prepared them poorly for careers at colleges and universities that focused on teaching. A new program permits recent graduates of doctoral programs at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to apply for a two-year postdoctoral teaching program at Oberlin College. Although that program and other recent efforts recognize a critical problem, they remain small, separate initiatives when what we need is systemic and sustained reform.
At least one semester of any teaching internship should be at a campus without doctoral programs, because most of the interns will spend their careers at such institutions. The institutions that host the interns would become the equivalent of teaching hospitals for graduate medical students: The institutions would pay the interns, who might replace professors on leave, and their professors who serve as mentors for the interns would be appointed clinical faculty members of the graduate programs that the interns come from. Each intern would teach two courses a term, have student advisees, sit in on the classes that their mentors teach, participate in departmental meetings and discussions about the curriculum, and attend the meetings of the faculty senate. The mentors would be responsible for evaluating the interns’ performance, both as teachers and as campus citizens able to contribute to institutional governance.
Although doctoral programs might initially resist the idea of requiring teaching internships, they would clearly benefit from the requirement. Their graduates would have an easier time finding jobs if they had experience teaching at institutions more typical of higher education in general, and if the doctoral programs had close ties with some of those institutions. The programs would share the expense of supporting their graduate students with the institutions where the internships took place; programs now forced to reduce the number of students they admit because of a lack of funds could stop or reverse those reductions. In addition, graduate programs would be able to stick to what they do best -- specialized education and research -- and leave the training in undergraduate teaching to institutions where teaching comes first.
Institutions where the interns serve would also benefit: Participation in training doctoral students would increase their prestige. The internships would enhance the importance of teaching, which is the forte of the host institutions. And they would have contacts with interns that might be advantageous in hiring new professors.
Universities with doctoral programs should require teaching internships. Institutions without doctoral programs should use their power in today’s buyer’s market for professors to speed up the development of the internships. Insisting that all candidates for faculty positions have completed internships would send a strong message about the importance of teaching.
The internships would benefit graduate students, their doctoral programs, the institutions that host the internships, and higher education as a whole. They might also convince some doctoral candidates that teaching at a community college or a baccalaureate campus has special attractions.
Requiring teaching internships in graduate school is a single, specific action that could have a substantive and systemic impact on higher education. It is a step that academe could take itself, probably without large infusions of additional funds. It could confound critics outside higher education who think we neglect undergraduates in favor of graduate programs and research. It could make our academic culture more receptive to other, systemic reforms that improve undergraduate education further. It might also foster the development of multiple models of institutional quality that are worthy of the wonderful diversity of American higher education.
Joseph C. Burke is the director of the higher-education program of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York at Albany, and a professor of higher-education policy and management at the institute.
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