One consequence of the weak academic job market is that graduate students, in increasing numbers, are delaying their graduation. We both remember times when delays were the norm in certain disciplines, but the pile up of underemployed Ph.D.'s nowadays has meant that new Ph.D.'s are finding far fewer employment opportunities than their advisers did.
The flooded market means that departments not only scoff at applications from A.B.D. candidates but hire new faculty members for entry-level, tenure-track positions with the kind of qualifications that would have provided tenure to previous generations. In our own state, a budget crisis has led to a reduction in the number of tenure-track lines at the University of Missouri, even while record undergraduate enrollment has created additional demands for qualified instructors.
That picture is gloomy, but a local bright spot has emerged in the development of the Mizzou Advantage, a program designed to enhance five interdisciplinary strengths of the university: new media, animal and human health and medicine, sustainable energy, food of the future, and technology management. Those five are areas in which the university has research strength, and are broad interdisciplinary “problems” that can attract undergraduates.
The university plans to funnel money into those five areas for senior and junior faculty positions, conferences, projects, new courses, and graduate training—all in an effort to promote research and seed large multidisciplinary grant-financed projects. In addition, the chancellor’s office has given money to support five postdoctoral fellowships to encourage our doctoral students to move on to the next step in their training as future faculty members. The first group of five fellows began their positions last August, and they have already proved to be an innovative addition to our cadre of regular faculty members.
Our objective in developing the postdoctoral fellowships has been to kill three birds with one stone: (1) five of our best Ph.D. graduates are given the opportunity to gain extensive experience in teaching, including course development, which will be invaluable to them as they seek faculty positions; (2) those five, as they move from doctoral programs into higher-level positions at our university, will not only benefit directly, but will also create openings for new Ph.D. students in their academic programs; and (3) the fellows provide an important supplement to the ranks of our regular teaching faculty in managing our burgeoning undergraduate enrollment.
We partition the fellows’ responsibilities similarly to those of regular faculty members: 40-percent teaching, 20-percent course development, and 40-percent research. The program is administered by the graduate school’s office of postdoctoral education. Fellows are mentored on course development and teaching by that office, by their home departments, and by the Mizzou Advantage educational coordinator. A traditional postdoctoral adviser guides them on research.
Each fellow has completed and signed a training plan that lists concrete ways in which the experience will advance their knowledge, skills, and career opportunities. Fellows are expected to teach two courses each semester, at least one of which should be an interdisciplinary, cross-listed course that speaks directly to one of the five areas cited in the Mizzou Advantage. The other course should help advance the fellow’s academic career, as well as serve the instructional needs of the home department. Courses created under the program may be taught in subsequent years by other instructors.
We are also using the fellows to begin developing a range of less-conventional teaching opportunities, which we hope will energize undergraduate education. One idea that has been floated would have a postdoctoral fellow teach a one-credit, interdisciplinary mini-course beginning two-thirds of the way through a semester. That is the point at which undergraduates, facing a failing grade, often drop a course, leaving them, in some cases, a credit-hour short of “full-time enrollment,” with disastrous consequences for their financial aid. Another idea is to have the fellows team-teach a course. And the fellows have discussed developing online courses that could bring our university’s strengths to wider audiences.
In this first iteration of the program, we have chosen some recent Ph.D.'s in the social sciences and humanities. A sociologist is teaching courses related to animals in health care; a communications scholar is teaching a course on the ways in which the new media package candidates for public office; an agricultural economist is looking at food systems in Africa and Missouri; a poet is teaching a course on poetry in the context of visual culture; and a philosopher is looking at decision theory and disruptive technology. In all cases, they are finding ways to teach the ideas that energized their dissertation research to broad audiences.
In the humanities and social sciences, postdoctoral training has not been the norm, outside of a few distinguished fellowship programs housed at major universities. Some graduate-student activists have decried the implication that humanists and social scientists should have to go through yet one more underappreciated, insecure, temporary position on their way to the tenure-track positions that seem to recede across the horizon even as the hordes of recent doctoral degree holders run to catch them.
But the pay rate we have developed for fellows is much more appealing than the cobbled-together adjunct teaching so often undertaken by recent Ph.D.'s. We cannot solve all of the problems of the academic world with this postdoctoral training program, but we can provide a decent income, a great line on the CV, excellent experience, and some talking points for the job interviews that we hope our trainees will receive.
The program is one small step at the University of Missouri. But we have been able to provide meaningful employment and career development for five students who finished their degree programs rather than extending their already lengthy careers as doctoral students. The positions are preparing these Ph.D.'s to be faculty members, strengthening their ability to compete for academic positions, and, once hired, enhancing their ability to quickly achieve a high level of productivity.
