We write today with an urgent problem, though not a new one. It’s a problem that has attracted no small amount of attention from the faculty ranks but not nearly enough action: Graduate education in the arts and sciences is stuck, and it needs help from above — specifically from university presidents and provosts.
The troubles vexing Ph.D. programs have become so embarrassingly familiar that academics can recite them in their sleep:
- A Ph.D. takes too long.
- It’s too idiosyncratic in curriculum and advising.
- It exploits graduate students as cheap teaching labor.
- Doctoral programs are too white and, in some fields, too male.
- And perhaps most important, doctoral study is so habit-bound and hermetic that it continues to push students toward professorial jobs that are vanishing — even as it teaches them to value a faculty job above all other careers.
These same issues have persisted for more than 50 years. A generation ago, in a 2004 book, Paths to the Professoriate, the survey directors of the 2000 National Doctoral Program Survey urged faculty members to stop brainstorming about how to improve graduate education and instead “take well-considered suggestions that have already been made and turn those ideas into reality.” More than 15 years ago, in a 2006 book, Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education, David Damrosch, then chair of Columbia University’s English department, asked poignantly, “If everybody knows what needs to be done, why are so few programs doing it?”
Yet here we are in 2023, and the same question applies. Although a rapidly growing number of faculty members acknowledge the need to overhaul doctoral training, change is still hard and turtle-slow. Why is it so damned difficult to do something that so many people agree needs doing?
The usual answer is to blame professors who are still partying like it’s 1965. And yes, we academics can be blamed for a degree of willful ignorance, for hiding from some obvious realities. The era of plentiful tenure-track employments for new Ph.D.s in the 1960s proved a blip, a historical anomaly. But we treated it like a new normal, and when it ebbed away, we waited too long for a bountiful job market to come back.
What was briefly a true large-scale apprenticeship system has become, after 50 years of professorial job shortages, more like a Ponzi scheme.
Yet it’s really not the faculty’s fault, for two reasons. First, it’s hard to see something when you’re smack in the middle of it. Professors who are taxed with teaching and research responsibilities can hardly be expected to become higher-ed experts in their copious free time. We can’t expect them to add strenuous reform effort to their heavy workloads out of goodwill.
Second and more important, many faculty members are doing what they can to deal with the problem. Salutary reforms have begun at programs across the country, though they remain oases in a desert. Many more faculty members are ready to join the reform ranks, given the right leadership. A rapidly growing number of professors now acknowledge the need for change. So do many of their students.
Faculty members might look to their institution’s graduate dean for guidance. It certainly seems that the creation of a more student-centered, career-diverse, and socially engaged Ph.D. would fall under this dean’s purview. Ideally, the graduate dean would:
- Organize and lead a faculty effort to exchange the receding goal of creating professorial mini-me’s for one of helping students to apply their skills in a variety of workplaces and not just in academe.
- Marshal the career center and the alumni office to help academic departments develop internships and diverse employment opportunities.
- Ensure that graduate students’ teaching responsibilities would be sequenced and developmental, rather than just expect them to randomly teach all the introductory courses that faculty members don’t want to touch.
- Encourage enlightened admissions policies to achieve a more diverse cohort.
- Secure funding and other support to allow students to graduate faster (because the Ph.D. need not be the world’s most extended adolescence).
What an essential administrator. It’s a pity that such a dean probably doesn’t exist. That’s because most graduate deans lack the administrative power to accomplish those things. Some universities don’t even have a graduate dean; often the vice president for research also runs the graduate school. Even reform-minded graduate deans mostly lack the authority and money to facilitate change — which accelerates their burnout rate on the job.
Graduate deans simply don’t have enough power. They are dedicated and gifted craftspeople with empty toolboxes. With university budgets typically tied to the provost’s office, and graduate deans provided pocket change by comparison, authority follows the money. It leads away from the graduate dean, the only academic officer whose entire position is focused on the problems particular to graduate school.
You can see where we’re heading: to the top.
This is our appeal to presidents and provosts (or chief academic officers). You have ultimate responsibility for the institution’s administrative structure and strategies. Those of us in the graduate-school trenches really need your attention. It’s going to be hard to elevate the graduate-student experience without your understanding and action. We know how much has been on your plates lately. We’re not asking you to micromanage doctoral programs.
Here’s what we are asking: Create and empower a graduate deanship that can represent doctoral students’ interest — and with it the faculty’s interest, and thus the institution’s. In short, it’s time to give the graduate dean money and authority.
Of course, it’s not that simple. Or is it? As president or provost, you participate in a system of shared governance. Local control is a wise tradition, and doctoral training is traditionally the most extreme example of that: Most of the power to grant a Ph.D. rightly lies in the departments. It will undoubtedly prove controversial if you were to, say, demand assessment measures for doctoral programs — such as a student survey to learn the realities of their economic and intellectual lives. But such measures are key to reverse-engineering the doctorate, so that it isn’t just a degree intended to reproduce faculty members but a way to serve doctoral students and contribute expertise to every area of society.
We know that if a president loses the faculty, the loss of the president’s job may follow. Losing the other deans is also a concern, and there’s no denying that those deans may well resent the empowerment of a graduate dean whose weakness has always been a given. Creating an authentic graduate deanship with lots of carrots (and a few sticks) may not be universally applauded, especially at first.
To which we nonetheless respond: You were appointed to the highest positions of campus leadership in order to lead. Your constituents — not just the trustees — expect you to serve the university (including its graduate students) and to explain your policies persuasively.
In our 2021 book, The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education, we document the current failure of the traditional system. If the goal is to “place” graduate students into professorships, the success rate is low — and dropping. (The career outcomes of Ph.D.s for the post-pandemic years mostly aren’t available yet, but it’s fair to expect that they’ll be written in blood.) Do your trustees fully understand the extent of this problem?
If you empower your graduate dean and expand the goals of your graduate school, you can move toward full employment for those who earn your university’s most prestigious degree. (You’ll also contribute to diversity: Studies show that a socially committed doctorate is especially important to students from underrepresented communities.) Benefit the students and you allow the university to serve society. So give your graduate dean the leadership power to help the faculty change the doctorate. Allow the dean to meet the reform energy and programs from below with a guiding hand from above.
This could be a great achievement for any president and provost, and it’s not that hard. More and more faculty members want you to do it, and the disruptions caused by the pandemic will persuade even more to consider alternatives to a wobbly system.
Presidents and provosts: It’s really up to you. Centralize those values and create a graduate deanship that can challenge every department to apply them to the specifics of a discipline. Then you, the faculty, and most of all the students, can watch far-happier Ph.D.s lead more purposeful lives — with higher incomes and more reason to give back to the university that enabled rather than hampered their professional existence.
But well beyond the pecuniary benefits, we all know that higher education is taking a public-relations beating in this era. Eloquent educators speak in its defense, but we see the onslaught continue. Superb doctoral recipients who engage the world around them and demonstrate anew the social good of expert learning and discovery will help to regain public trust. As a president or provost, you can watch your institution earn that trust not through politics but policy. That’s better than speeches, don’t you think?
