From the issue dated November 17, 2000
|
|
Mentors and Tormentors in Doctoral EducationBy DAVID DAMROSCHLike many ecosystems, higher education develops in fits and starts, through what evolutionary biologists call patterns of "punctuated equilibrium." A major reform sweeps through the system, then stays in place for decades or even centuries until pressures for change grow great enough to force a new round of reform. American graduate education achieved its essential modern form in the late 19th century, when the Ph.D. degree was imported from Germany. Adapted to the needs of American academic culture, the basic requirements -- and assumptions -- of the Ph.D. took root, and remain largely in place to this day. For over a century, those requirements and assumptions served so well that the Ph.D. became the dominant mode of preparation for professorial careers, even for jobs in teaching-intensive undergraduate institutions that offer little opportunity to exercise advanced research skills, still less to pass them on to students. Pressure for substantial change is mounting, however, fueled by a host of distinct but interconnected factors. These include: * The perennially high dropout rates from many Ph.D. programs and the endemically weak job market for their graduates. * A renewed attention to the specific needs of undergraduates and a corresponding decline in the unquestioned dominance of graduate education. * A rapid increase in interdisciplinary approaches to complex problems that may not be well suited to study from the perspective of a single, departmentally based subfield, which is still the norm for much graduate training. The old German system was unabashedly hierarchical. A single professor would typically rule an entire department, with a paternalistic attitude toward students that is well expressed in the common term for a dissertation's sponsor: Doktorvater, or "the doctor's father." American universities democratized that system at the level of the faculty -- lots of full professors per department -- but left the paternalism toward students largely in place. In many disciplines, graduate training is structured in a pattern of progressive isolation, from the group study in seminars, to one-on-one work with several faculty members during preparation for doctoral orals, all culminating in a long period of solitary effort on the dissertation, typically under the active guidance of a single sponsor. A kind of scholarly machismo is involved in that progression, all too well encapsulated in Henry Rosovsky's description of dissertation work in his 1990 book The University: An Owner's Manual. "Research," he wrote, "is a lonely activity, especially when the location is a library rather than a laboratory. Few experiences in our working life can be more isolating than gathering materials for a dissertation deep in the bowels of some large library. No one can help; no human voice is heard; the only constant is that very special smell of decaying books." At its best, that isolation is leavened by the growth of a close working relationship with one's sponsor, and the result can bring the student to full intellectual maturity while keeping the mentor's mind young. One enters a discipline, on this model, by becoming a successful disciple. The problem today is that less and less often do we find a one-to-one correspondence between a student's needs and a sponsor's interests and abilities. The faster a field changes, the sooner a midcareer sponsor may be at some remove from the student's perspective. Further, insofar as interdisciplinary perspectives are growing in importance, dependence on any one sponsor is increasingly problematic. Even for a student who finds a classic mentor and thrives as a disciple, it can come as a rude shock to find that hiring committees may no longer be so interested in snapping up a younger model of an older approach. That problem hit home for me several years ago, when my department was searching for a junior hire in Renaissance literature. One candidate from a major university had an extremely distinguished sponsor who was apparently intent on emphasizing his special closeness to the mentee. He closed his letter of recommendation: "This is my oedipal son." As much as we admired the sponsor, we really didn't want to hire his oedipal son. We all know horror stories about students who have been tormented by their ostensible mentors, their dissertation drafts either never read or ripped to shreds, their job searches thwarted by the sponsor's neglect, even if not by oedipal jealousy. Yet even a successful one-on-one mentorship is an increasingly mixed blessing. The century-old model will certainly continue to work for some students, particularly those who can manage to constructively separate themselves from their mentors in the course of their work. We should no longer assume, however, that the old mentor/disciple model should continue as the sole pattern for advanced graduate study. All aspects of Ph.D. training can be opened up to foster more-substantial interdisciplinary and collaborative work, enabling students to broaden their horizons beyond the boundaries of their immediate program, giving them more opportunities to work together at all stages of their study, and helping them work with a wider range of faculty members as their interests develop. Changes could be made in these areas: * Language requirements. Too often, students take a course or two in other departments almost at random, gaining only a superficial grasp of another discipline. If we want to be serious about interdisciplinary training, we should recognize that a discipline is a language and needs to be learned in a similar way. In our comparative-literature program at Columbia University, we actually changed our language requirements a few years ago to reflect that realization. Now students can opt for a coherent sequence of courses in another discipline in place of the required third foreign language. * Graduate seminars. With many graduate programs shrinking, this is an opportune time to increase team-teaching at the graduate level, directly engaging students from the start in the give-and-take of differing methods and perspectives. Students' own work, from class presentations to term papers, can also be made to include a significant collaborative aspect. By working together, students can often go further into a topic, contributing more to the class than they would with separate presentations of narrower scope. * Doctoral orals and field exams. Too often this stage of work places the student in sudden isolation, with no organized support structure. Just as dissertation seminars have found increasing popularity in recent years, departments should help students set up orals/field-study groups, and the field exams themselves can be more loosely structured, to involve more than simply pairing one student with one faculty member per topic. * The dissertation. The dissertation is likely to remain a primary means by which students demonstrate their scholarly abilities. But suppose collaborative skills are among those abilities? Rather than always having to take the form of an individual monograph, a dissertation could be thought of as a connected series of essays, some written by the student alone, others in collaboration. Collaboratively written or not, these linked essays could each have a different sponsor or pair of sponsors, thereby relieving students and faculty members alike of the increasingly implausible presumption that there's bound to be a close fit between the student's interests and those of any one professor. Taken together, those and comparable reforms can offer new scope for graduate training and more-varied and flexible forms of mentorship. It's time to punctuate the 19th-century equilibrium of our Ph.D. programs. David Damrosch is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. His most recent book is Meetings of the Mind (Princeton University Press, 2000). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B24
|
Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education